got in present acceptation, was one of the enlightened of
his age. A man who moved an equal in a court of Elizabethan manners was
not untouched by the glorious ideals of the Renaissance.

Yet it was the unswerving will of a Columbus, a Vasco da Gama or a
Magellan which created the devotion to geographical discovery, per se,
and made practicable the concept of a spherical earth. The world was
opened in imaginative entirety, and it now remained for the geographer
to fill in the details brought home by the navigator.

It was long before Thule the wondrous ice-land of the North yielded her
first secrets, and longer ere the Terra Australis of Finne was laid bare
to the prying eyes of Science.

Early Arctic navigation opened the bounds of the unknown in a haphazard
and fortuitous fashion. Sealers and whalers in the hope of rich booty
ventured far afield, and, ranging among the mysterious floes or riding
out fierce gales off an ice-girt coast, brought back strange tales to
a curious world. Crudely embellished, contradictory, yet alluring they
were; but the demand for truth came surely to the rescue. Thus, it was
often the whaler who forsook his trade to explore for mere exploration's
sake. Baffin was one of those who opened the gates to the North.

Then, too, the commercial spirit of the generations who sought a North
West Passage was responsible for the incursions of many adventurers into
the new world of the ice.

Strangely enough, the South was first attacked in the true scientific
spirit by Captain Cook and later by Bellingshausen. Sealing and whaling
ventures followed in their train.

At last the era had come for the expedition, planned, administered,
equipped and carried out with a definite objective. It is characteristic
of the race of men that the first design should have centred on the
Pole--the top of the earth, the focus of longitude, the magic goal, to
reach which no physical sacrifice was too great. The heroism of Parry
is a type of that adamant persistence which has made the history of the
conquest of the Poles a volume in which disaster and death have played
a large part. It followed on years of polar experience, it resulted from
an exact knowledge of geographical and climatic conditions, a fearless
anticipation, expert information on the details of transport--and the
fortune of the brave--that Peary and Amundsen had their reward in the
present generation.

Meanwhile, in the wake of the pioneers of new la