Page:The ocean and its wonders.djvu/197

 After skinning the old one they gashed its body, and the dogs fed upon it ravenously. The little one they cached for themselves against their return.

This little fight quite knocked up Hans the Esquimaux, Morton therefore advanced alone, in the hope of being able to get beyond a huge cape that lay before him. On reaching it, the grand sight of an apparently boundless ocean of open water met his eye. Only “four or five small pieces” of ice were seen on the glancing waves of this hitherto unknown sea. “Viewed from the cliffs,” writes Dr. Kane, “and taking thirty-six miles as the mean radius open to reliable survey, this sea had a justly-estimated extent of more than 4000 square miles.”

Here, then, in all probability, is the great Arctic Ocean that has been supposed to exist in a perpetually fluid state round the pole, encircled by a ring of ice that has hitherto presented an impenetrable barrier to all the adventurers of ancient and modern times. There were several facts connected with this discovery that go far to prove that this ocean is perpetually open.

Further south, where Dr. Kane’s brig lay in ice that seemed never to melt, there were few signs of animal life—only a seal or two now and then; but here, on the margin of this far northern sea, were myriads of water-fowl of various kinds.

“The Brent goose,” writes the Doctor, “had not