t he thought was refined politeness and amiability:

"If I were not a Frenchman I should like to be an Englishman."

"And if I were not an Englishman," answered Hatteras, "I should like
to be an Englishman."

That answer revealed the character of the man. It was a great grief
to him that Englishmen had not the monopoly of geographical
discoveries, and were, in fact, rather behind other nations in that
field.

Christopher Columbus, the discoverer of America, was a Genoese; Vasco
da Gama, a Portuguese, discovered India; another Portuguese,
Fernando de Andrada, China; and a third, Magellan, the Terra del Fuego.
Canada was discovered by Jacques Cartier, a Frenchman; Labrador,
Brazil, the Cape of Good Hope, the Azores, Madeira, Newfoundland,
Guinea, Congo, Mexico, Cape Blanco, Greenland, Iceland, the South
Seas, California, Japan, Cambodia, Peru, Kamtchatka, the Philippines,
Spitzbergen, Cape Horn, Behring's Straits, Tasmania, New Zealand,
New Brittany, New Holland, Louisiana, Jean Mayen Island, were
discovered by Icelanders, Scandinavians, French, Russians,
Portuguese, Danes, Spaniards, Genoese, and Dutch, but not one by an
Englishman. Captain Hatteras could not reconcile himself to the fact
that Englishmen were excluded from the glorious list of navigators
who made the great discoveries of the 15th and 16th centuries.

Hatteras consoled himself a little when he turned to more modern times.
Then Englishmen had the best of it with Sturt, Burke, Wills, King,
and Grey in Australia; with Palliser in America; with Cyril Graham,
Wadington, and Cummingham in India; with Burton, Speke, Grant, and
Livingstone in Africa.

But for a man like Hatteras this was not enough; from his point of
view these bold travellers were _improvers_ rather than _inventors_;
and he was determined to do something better, and he would have
invented a country if he could, only to have the honour of discovering
it. Now he had noticed that, although Englishmen did not form a
majority amongst ancient discoverers, and that he had to go back to
Cook in 1774 to obtain New Caledonia and the Sandwich Isles, where
the unfortunate captain perished in 1778, yet there existed,
nevertheless, a corner of the globe where they seemed to have united
all their efforts. This corner was precisely the boreal lands and
seas of North America. The list of Polar discoveries may be thus
written:

Nova Zembla, discovered by Willoughby, in 1553; Weigatz Island, by
Barrough,