ADVENTUROUS.

Taihape Daily Times, Issue 220, 13 February 1917, Page 6

ADVENTUROUS.

EXPLOEEE DISCOVERS AN ARCTIC ELDORADO. NEW YORK. Mr Christian Leden, a young Swedish explorer, commissioned by the University of Norway at Christiania, has returned to New York after three years in the Arctic, bringing a tale of a land where gold is more plentiful than it is in Alaska. As evidence of the truth of his story, he has a harpoon head hammered out of gold by the natives of a camp long since wiped out by disease. He has also many specimens of gold-bearing quartz brought to him by Eskimos who dared many dangers in order to get them. Mr Leden said he had visited a land where the ground was so full of oil that in summer the smell of it filled tlic air.

His explorations carried him over thousands of miles in the country northwest of Hudson's Bay. The gold territory was described to him by some Eskimos, who told him of a hill which had been so split that the different strata were uncovered. Here the reddish-yellow metal could be seen. Mr: Leden persuaded those journeying north to search out the place. "One very old man," he said, "told how his grandfather, the possessor of an old-fashioned big bore gun, had found a yellow metal that he had hammered out to make bullets. The natives, of course, have no idea of the value of the gold." Mi> Leden, who has also collected for the Geological Survey of Canada,, has made five trips into the unknown regions of the Far North.