6, stated among other things that he himself had once been
in 81 deg., but that he heard that other whalers had been in 83 deg.
and had seen land over the ice. He had seen the east coast of
Greenland (Spitzbergen) only once in 75 deg. N.L. (Herrn von
Tschitschagoff Russisch-kaiserliehen Admirals _Reise nach dem
Eissmeer_, St. Petersburg, 1793, p. 83). Dutch shipmasters too,
who in the beginning of the seventeenth century penetrated north
of Spitzbergen to 82 deg., said that they had thence seen land towards
the north (Muller, _Geschiedenis der Noordsche Compagnie_. p. 180). ]

[Footnote 154: Witsen states, p. 43, that he had conversed with a
Dutch seaman, Benedictus Klerk, who had formerly served on board a
whaler, and afterwards been a prisoner in Corea. He had asserted
that in whales that were killed on the coast of that country he had
found Dutch harpoons. The Dutch then carried on whale-fishing only
in the north part of the Atlantic. The _find_ thus shows that whales
can swim from one ocean to the other. As we know that these colossal
inhabitants of the Polar Sea do not swim from one ice-ocean to the
other across the equator, this observation must be considered very
important, especially at a time when the question whether Asia and
America are connected across the Pole was yet unsettled. Witsen also
enumerates, at p. 900, several occasions on which stone harpoons were
found in the skins of whales caught in the North Atlantic. These
harpoons, however, may as well be derived from the wild races,
unacquainted with iron, at Davis\ Strait, as from tribes living
on the north part of the Pacific. At Kamschatka, too, long before
whale-fishing by Europeans began in Behring's Sea, harpoons marked
with Latin letters were found in whales (Steller, _Beschreibung von
dem Lande Kamtschatka_, Frankfurt und Leipzig, 1774, p. 102). ]

[Footnote 155: The account of Wood's voyage was printed in London in
1694 by Smith and Walford, printers to the Royal Society (according
to a statement by Barrington, _The possibility of approaching the
North Pole asserted_, 2nd Edition, London, 1818, p. 34). I have only
had an opportunity of seeing extracts from the account of this
voyage in _Harris_ and others. ]

[Footnote 156: Barrington published a number of papers on this
question, which are collected in the work whose title is given
above, of which there were two editions. ]

[Footnote 157: At several places in his _Mittheilungen_, 1855-79. ]