Enterprise, with two companions at the point of death, himself gaunt,
hollow-eyed, feeding on pounded bones, raked from the dunghill; the
arrival of Dr. Richardson and the brave sailor; their awful story of the
cannibal Michel;--we revert to these things with a shudder. But we must
continue on our route. The current still flows westward, bearing now
large quantities of driftwood out of the Mackenzie River. At the name of
Sir Alexander Mackenzie, also, we might pause, and talk over the bold
achievements of another Arctic hero; but we pass on, by a rugged and
inhospitable coast, unfit for vessels of large draught--pass the broad
mouth of the Youcon, pass Point Barrow, Icy Cape, and are in Behring
Strait. Had we passed on, we should have found the Russian Arctic coast
line, traced out by a series of Russian explorers; of whom the most
illustrious--Baron Von Wrangell--states, that beyond a certain distance
to the northward there is always found what he calls the _Polynja_ (open
water). This is the fact adduced by those who adhere to the old fancy
that there is a sea about the Pole itself quite free from ice.

We pass through Behring Straits. Behring, a Dane by birth, but in the
Russian service, died here in 1741, upon the scene of his discovery. He
and his crew, victims of scurvy, were unable to manage their vessel in a
storm; and it was at length wrecked on a barren island, there, where
"want, nakedness, cold, sickness, impatience, and despair, were their
daily guests," Behring, his lieutenant, and the master died.

Now we must put a girdle round the world, and do it with the speed of
Ariel. Here we are already in the heats of the equator. We can do no
more than remark, that if air and water are heated at the equator, and
frozen at the poles, there will be equilibrium destroyed, and constant
currents caused. And so it happens, so we get the prevailing winds, and
all the currents of the ocean. Of these, some of the uses, but by no
means all, are obvious. We urge our "Phantom" fleetly to the southern
pole. Here, over the other hemisphere of the earth, there shines another
hemisphere of heaven. The stars are changed; the southern cross, the
Magellanic clouds, the "coal-sack" in the milky way, attract our notice.
Now we are in the southern latitude that corresponds to England in the
north; nay, at a greater distance from the Pole, we find Kerguelen's
Land, emphatically called "The Isle of Desolation." Icebergs