Thirty-five years ago I made a voyage to the Arctic Seas in what Chaucer calls

Too Long; Didn't Read

Thirty-five years ago I made a voyage to the Arctic Seas in what Chaucer calls   A little bote No bigger than a mannë’s thought; it was a Phantom Ship that made some voyages to different parts of the world which were recorded in early numbers of Charles Dickens’s “Household Words.”  As preface to Richard Hakluyt’s records of the first endeavour of our bold Elizabethan mariners to find North-West Passage to the East, let me repeat here that old voyage of mine from No. 55 of “Household Words,” dated the 12th of April, 1851: The Phantom is fitted out for Arctic exploration, with instructions to find her way, by the north-west, to Behring Straits, and take the South Pole on her passage home.  Just now we steer due north, and yonder is the coast of Norway.  From that coast parted Hugh Willoughby, three hundred years ago; the first of our countrymen who wrought an ice-bound highway to Cathay.  Two years afterwards his ships were found, in the haven of Arzina, in Lapland, by some Russian fishermen; near and about them Willoughby and his companions—seventy dead men.  The ships were freighted with their frozen crews, and sailed for England; but, “being unstaunch, as it is supposed, by their two years’ wintering in Lapland, sunk, by the way, with their dead, and them also that brought them.”