History of the United Netherlands, 1598-99 | Page 9

5th June the watch on deck saw, as they supposed, immense
flocks of white swans swimming towards the ships, and covering the
sea as far as the eye could reach. All hands came up to look at the
amazing spectacle, but the more experienced soon perceived that the
myriads of swans were simply infinite fields of ice, through which
however they were able to steer their course without much impediment,
getting into clear sea beyond about midnight, at which hour the sun was
one degree above the horizon.
Proceeding northwards two days more they were again surrounded by
ice, and, finding the "water green as grass, they believed themselves to
be near Greenland." On the 9th June they discovered an island in
latitude, according to their observation, 74 deg. 30', which seemed
about five miles long. In this neighbourhood they remained four days,
having on one occasion a "great fight which lasted four glasses" with a
polar bear, and making a desperate attempt to capture him in order to

bring him as a show to Holland. The effort not being successful, they
were obliged to take his life to save their own; but in what manner they
intended, had they secured him alive, to provide for such a passenger in
the long voyage across the North Pole to China, and thence back to
Amsterdam, did not appear. The attempt illustrated the calmness,
however, of those hardy navigators. They left the island on the 13th
June, having baptised it Bear Island in memory of their vanquished foe,
a name which was subsequently exchanged for the insipid appellation
of Cherry Island, in honour of a comfortable London merchant who
seven years afterwards sent a ship to those arctic regions.
Six days later they saw land again, took the sun, and found their
latitude 80 deg. 11'. Certainly no men had ever been within less than
ten degrees of the pole before. On the longest day of the year they
landed on this newly discovered country, which they at first fancied to
be a part of Greenland. They found its surface covered with eternal
snow, broken into mighty glaciers, jagged with precipitous ice-peaks;
and to this land of almost perpetual winter, where the mercury freezes
during ten months in the year, and where the sun remains four months
beneath the horizon, they subsequently gave the appropriate and
vernacular name of Spitzbergen. Combats with the sole denizens of
these hideous abodes, the polar bears, on the floating ice, on the water,
or on land, were constantly occurring, and were the only events to
disturb the monotony of that perpetual icy sunshine, where no night
came to relieve the almost maddening glare. They rowed up a wide
inlet on the western coast, and came upon great numbers of wild-geese
sitting on their eggs. They proved to be the same geese that were in the
habit of visiting Holland in vast flocks every summer, and it had never
before been discovered where they laid and hatched their eggs.
"Therefore," says the diarist of the expedition, "some voyagers have not
scrupled to state that the eggs grow on trees in Scotland, and that such
of the fruits of those trees as fall into the water become goslings, while
those which drop on the ground burst in pieces and come to nothing.
We now see that quite the contrary is the case," continues De Veer,
with perfect seriousness, "nor is it to be wondered at, for nobody has
ever been until now where those birds lay their eggs. No man, so far as
known, ever reached the latitude of eighty degrees before. This land
was hitherto unknown."

The scientific results of this ever-memorable voyage might be deemed
sufficiently meagre were the fact that the eggs of wild geese did not
grow on trees its only recorded discovery. But the investigations made
into the dread mysteries of the north, and the actual problems solved,
were many, while the simplicity of the narrator marks the infantine
character of the epoch in regard to natural history. When so illustrious a
mind as Grotius was inclined to believe in a race of arctic men whose
heads grew beneath their shoulders; the ingenuous mariner of
Amsterdam may be forgiven for his earnestness in combating the
popular theory concerning goslings.
On the 23rd June they went ashore again, and occupied themselves, as
well as the constant attacks of the bears would permit, in observing the
variation of the needle, which they ascertained to be sixteen degrees.
On the same day, the ice closing around in almost infinite masses, they
made haste to extricate themselves from the land and bore southwards
again, making Bear Island once more on the 1st July. Here Cornelius
Ryp parted company with Heemskerk and Barendz, having announced
his intention to sail northward