IN NORTHERN MISTS.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 231, 28 March 1912, Page 4

IN NORTHERN MISTS.

Dr. Nansen's history of early Arctic exploration has made its appearance at an opportune moment, when the minds of men are filled with admiration of his countryman's brilliant exploits in the Southern Polar region. The volume bears abundant testimony, as eloquent as it is fascinating, to the daring and skill of Norse navigators in the dim and misty ages of the past. The greatest of the classical explorers in the North was Pytheas, of Massalia. A contemporary of Aristotle, he discovered the British Islands and something beyond them, which he called Thule. This latter place Dr. Nansen, on what seems to us very good .grounds, identifies with Norway, and he argues that at the time there was communication by sea between Scotland and Norway; which, if we accept it, gives a prodigious antiquity to the Norseman's command of the high seas. Pytheas seems to have voyaged as far north as the Arctic Circle, and first described the "Congealed" or Polar Sea. "No other traveller known to history," writes Dr. Nansen, "has made such far-reaching and important discoveries." The next landmark in northern exploration is the discovery of Iceland by Irish priests. These men sailed north in the eighth century, impelled not by any desire of gain or knowledge, but solely to find, loneliness. We know that when the first Norwegian | settlers went to Iceland they found Irish priests in possession. In the second half of the ninth century we reach the days of King Alfred, himself an eminent geographer, to whom the Norse Ottar or Othere told strange and singularly accurate tales of the polar seas, and the North Gape, and the Finns, and the land running oast to the White Sea, Ottar is the greatest northern explorer after Pytheas. Then came many Viking adventurers, the Norse settlement of Iceland, and the discovery and settlement of Greenland by Eric the Red 600 years before John Davis, that intrepid seaman, explored the Greenland coast right up to

north of Davis Strait, and presently the shores were dotted with Norse settlements that made a precarious living out of cattle and fish. But the great romance of Norse discovery is connected with the land called Wineland the Good, which was almost certainly the northern continental coast of America. The story as told in the Saga of Eric the Red is that some time about the year 101)0 Eric's son, Leilf the Lucky, being driven out of his course, came to a land, in the West full of wild vines and seif-sown wheat. Later chapters discuss various geographical problems of the Middle Ages. Dr. Nansen argues that the decline in the Greenland settlements did not arise from a change of climatic conditions, or Eskimo aggression, or sudden pestilence. The settlers were dependent on Norway for corn, and as Norway lost her colonising interests and ships did not appear they gradually adopted the. Eskimo mode of life, and became absorbed in the native population.