f words, medium height, well-knit
muscular limbs, indicated a man ready for any experience. Any one who
saw him would have called him bold, and any one who heard him would
have called him coldly passionate; he was a man who would never
retreat, and who would risk the lives of others as coldly as his own.
One would hence think twice before following him in his expeditions.

John Hatteras had a great deal of English pride, and it was he who
once made this haughty reply to a Frenchman.

The Frenchman said with what he considered politeness, and even
kindness,--

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

"If I were not an Englishman, I should like to be an Englishman!"

That retort points the nature of the man.

He would have liked to reserve for his fellow-countrymen the monopoly
of geographical discovery; but much to his chagrin, during previous
centuries, they had done but little in the way of discovery.

America was discovered by the Genoese, Christopher Columbus; the East
Indies by the Portuguese, Vasco de Gama; China by the Portuguese,
Fernao d'Andrada; Terra del Fuego by the Portuguese, Magellan; Canada
by the Frenchman, Jacques Cartier; the islands of Sumatra, Java, etc.,
Labrador, Brazil, the Cape of Good Hope, the Azores, Madeira,
Newfoundland, Guinea, Congo, Mexico, White Cape, Greenland, Iceland,
the South Pacific Ocean, California, Japan, Cambodia, Peru,
Kamschatka, the Philippine Islands, Spitzbergen, Cape Horn, Behring
Strait, New Zealand, Van Diemen's Land, New Britain, New Holland, the
Louisiana, Island of Jan-Mayen, by Icelanders, Scandinavians,
Frenchmen, Russians, Portuguese, Danes, Spaniards, Genoese, and
Dutchmen; but no Englishmen figured among them, and it was a constant
source of grief to Hatteras to see his fellow-countrymen excluded from
the glorious band of sailors who made the great discoveries of the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Hatteras consoled himself somewhat when he considered modern times:
the English took their revenge with Stuart, McDougall Stuart, Burke,
Wells, King, Gray, in Australia; with Palliser in America; with
Havnoan in Syria; with Cyril Graham, Waddington, Cunningham, in India;
and with Barth, Burton, Speke, Grant, and Livingstone in Africa.

But this was not enough; for Hatteras these men were rather finishers
than discoverers; something better was to be done, so he invented a
country in order to have the honor of discovering it.

Now