trangers had
fallen into human hands. The philosopher was a little tenacious of
his opinion; but what is argument in the face of facts? Here was the
pumpkin, and there were the blue waters! The captain now quite frankly
declared that he had great doubts whether there was any such place as
Leaphigh at all; and as the ship had a capital position for such an
object, he bluntly, though privately proposed to me, that we should
throw all the monikins overboard, project the entire polar basin on
his chart as being entirely free from islands, and then go a-sealing. I
rejected the propositions, firstly, as premature; secondly, as inhuman;
thirdly, as inhospitable; fourthly, as inconvenient; and lastly, as
impracticable.

There might have arisen a disagreeable controversy between us on this
point; for Mr. Poke had begun to warm, and to swear that one good seal,
of the true quality of fur, was worth a hundred monkeys; when most
happily the panther at the masthead cried out that two of the largest
mountains, to the southward of us, were separating, and that he could
discern a passage into another basin. Hereupon Captain Poke concentrated
his oaths, which he caused to explode like a bomb, and instantly made
sail again in the proper direction. By three o'clock, P.M., we had run
the gauntlet of the bergs a second time, and were at least a degree
nearer the pole, in the basin just alluded to.

The mountains had now entirely disappeared in the southern board; but
the sea was covered, far as the eye could reach, with field-ice. Noah
stood on, without apprehension; for the water had been smooth ever since
we entered the first opening, the wind not having rake enough to
knock up a swell. When about a mile from the margin of the frozen and
seemingly interminable plain, the ship was brought to the wind, and
hove-to.

Ever since the vessel left the docks, there had been six sets of spars
of a form so singular, lying among the booms, that they had often been
the subject of conversation between the mates and myself, neither of
the former being able to tell their uses. These sticks were of no great
length, some fifteen feet at the most, of sound English oak. Two or
three pairs were alike, for they were in pairs, each pair having one of
the sides of a shape resembling different parts of the ship's bottom,
with the exception that they were chiefly concave, while the bottom of a
vessel is mainly convex. At one extremity each pair was firmly conn