Through The First Antarctic Night 18981899 Frederick Albert Cook by Frederick Albert Cook instant download after payment.

For three hundred years explorers have been active in pushing aside the realms of the unknown towards the north pole; but the equally interesting south pole has, during all this time, been almost wholly neglected. There have been expeditions to the far south, but compared to arctic ventures they have been so few and their work within the polar circle has been so little that the results have been largely forgotten. It is not because valuable results have not been obtained in the antarctic, but because the popular interest in the arctic has completely overshadowed the reports of the antipodes. The search for the North west and the North east passages, which commerce demanded to reach the trade of the Orient during the seventeenth and the early part of the eighteenth centuries, fixed the public eye persistently northward. This extended effort to find an easy path to the wealth of Asia was fruitless, but it was followed by a whale fishery, a sealing industry, and a fur trade, which has proven a priceless boon to mankind. As a result of these two periods of trade exploration, we have now entered upon a third stage, a period of scientific research which will not, and should not, end until the entire area is outlined in the growing annals of exact knowledge. 

The antarctic has a history somewhat similar, but it is almost forgotten. Until 1772 the south frigid zone was pictured by fiction writers in flowery phraseology. They placed here a fertile country, projecting far northward into the Atlantic and the Pacific. This land was supposed to be inhabited by a curious race of people who possessed a super abundance of gold, precious stones, and other material wealth. To learn the truth of this new “land of promise” Capt. James Cook was sent out in 1772. Cook, with a thoroughness which characterised all his efforts, circumnavigated the globe close enough to the antarctic circle to convince the world that if land of large extent existed around the south pole it must be far…