drifts to
land and is killed in the northernmost part of Norway, his skin is
not enumerated by Othere among the products of Finmark. It thus
appears to have become known in Europe first after the Norwegians'
discovery of Iceland and Greenland, and was at first considered an
extraordinary rarity. A Norwegian of importance, who had emigrated
to Iceland, and there succeeded in getting hold of a female bear
with two young, sent them in 880 to the King of Norway, and got in
return a small vessel laden with wood. This animal had not then been
seen in Norway before. The old sagas of the north are said to relate
further that the priest Isleif, in order to be nominated bishop of
Iceland, in the year 1056 presented a white bear to Kejsar Henrik.
In the year 1064 the King of Denmark gave in exchange for a white
bear from Greenland a well-equipped, full rigged, trading vessel, a
considerable sum of money, and a valuable gold ring.[71]

[Illustration: POLAR BEARS. After Olaus Magnus (1555). ]

Marco Polo also says in his account of the country of the
peace-loving nomad Tatar tribes living in the north, that there are
to be found there white bears most of them twenty hands long, large
black foxes, wild asses (reindeer), and a little animal called
"rondes," from which we get the sable fur.[72] As the Polar bear is
only to be found on the coast of the Arctic Ocean, these statements
prove that in the thirteenth century the northernmost part of Asia
was inhabited or at least visited by hunters. Olaus Magnus even
describes the bear's mode of life not incorrectly, with the addition
that it was customary to present their skins to the altars of
cathedrals and parish churches in order that the feet of the priest
might not freeze during mass.[73] The Polar bear however first
became more generally known in Western Europe by the Arctic voyages
of the English and Dutch, and its price has now sunk so much that
its skin, which was once considered an article of extraordinary
value, is now, in adjusting accounts between the owners of a vessel
and the walrus-hunters, reckoned at from twenty-five to fifty
Scandinavian crowns (say twenty-eight to fifty-six shillings).

In 1609 Stephen Bennet, during his seventh voyage to Bear Island,
captured two young Polar bears, which were brought to England and
kept at Paris Garden (Purchas, iii. p. 562). Now such animals are
very frequently brought to Norway in order to be sent from thence to
the zoological gar