Page:Physical Geography of the Sea and its Meteorology.djvu/275

Rh the pole all around to the parallel of 75°, as it was in early fall when De Haven being near that parallel in Wellington Channel, found his vessel fast bound with the fetters of the frost-king. Wherefore we may suppose that these theorists would admit the whole to be frozen by December. So that, according to the anti-polynian view, we have, measuring from the pole as a centre, a disc of ice more than five thousand miles in circumference, and extending quite down to the shores of arctic America and Asia. Such is the aspect presented by the polar sea without an open water in winter; now, on the 2nd of December—the moment before this remarkable drift commenced—was the entire sheet of ice with which we have supposed the Arctic Ocean to be covered, put in motion, or was that only put in motion which drifted out? By the hypothesis there is no open water in all the circumference of this sea into which the ice might drift. We therefore may well ask the anti-polynians again, How did this drift commence? for commence it did; its movement was out of that sea, and from the pole towards the equator, and so it continued to move for six months at the average rate of 5½miles a day But whence—on what parallel—did it commence? Was the whole disc in motion from the shores of Siberia over across by way of the north pole towards Wellington Channel? If one part of this disc be put in motion, either the whole must be, or there must be somewhere, a split or a rent in it, with open water between. If, during the winter and spring—the coldest period—the edge of this ice-disc nearest Wellington Channel be carried by the currents a thousand miles towards the south, the edge along the Russian shores on the opposite side must have been drifted towards the north a thousand miles also, and so leave an open water behind. Now we simply know there was no such drifting up from the Siberian shores, and the case is put simply to show that in any case the northerly edge of the drifting ice must have come from open water; for if we deny the existence of an open water in that direction, then we must go back and admit that at the beginning of the drift there was ice all the way from Wellington Channel to the North Pole, and thence all the way from the North Pole to the nearest land beyond, which is supposed to be the Siberian shores of the Old World. But, on the other hand, we must also admit the fact—for the Advance, the Rescue, the Fox, and the Resolute are witnesses of it—that a tongue of this ice 1000 miles long was in each of these winters thrust out of the polar basin down through Baffin's Bay into Davis' Straits. These ships came