foundland born on board on May 1, and thus barely a year old, but big, strong, and courageous. The three sailors were Dalmatians; good, well-behaved, stout-hearted men, but with a constitutional reminiscence of the sunny South that somewhat lessened their capabilities of endurance.

The experiences of the sledging party were, in the main, those with which all readers of Arctic travel are familiar; the same danger, fatigue, wretchedness and discomfort; but in addition to their rations, they obtained throughout a plentiful supply of fresh meat: during a great part of their journey they lived almost entirely on bear-flesh; and though opinions may differ differ very much as to the niceness or nastiness of bearsome Arctic travellers having pronounced it delicious, whilst Payer considers that it is a diet hardly fit even for devils on 'the fast days of the infernal regions,' there is only one opinion amongst practical men as to its great value as an antiscorbutic. As a change, some birds were also obtained; and a gull flying temptingly overhead drew Sumbu away to his death; he broke his traces and went off after the feathered siren, but never returned; he either perished in the snow or fell a victim to some hungry bear. Rum was served out regularly; and on one occasion, Klotz, one of the Tyrolese, feeling unwell, cured himself by swallowing his ration at a gulp. The opinion of Payer, as well as of the commander, Weyprecht, and of the doctor, was decided, that a moderate allowance of grog was beneficial, and to some extent antiscorbutic; and this is, we believe, the unanimous verdict of all officers of Arctic experience.

On April 7, the party passed over the low land of Becker Island and saw Austria Sound still stretching away towards the north. If they could have forgotten how helplessly the Tegetthoff' had drifted towards Franz Josef Land, that Sound would have seemed the true road to the Pole; that beyond them lay open water was certain, both from the dark hue of the sky, and the continual flight, backwards and forwards, of vast numbers of birds; the stretch of land to the north is more doubtful, but eastward it must be considerable. As they went on, they passed on their right hand the sea front of glaciers, which they named after Professor Dove of Berlin; glaciers of a size so enormous as to speak necessarily of a wide-spreading country beyond, and to lead to the supposition that what is now marked as Wilczek Land is of vast extent.

On April 9 they reached Cape Schrötter, in latitude 81° 37′, and there determined to divide; three of the men, with the 'big sledge, were to remain; Payer, Orel a midshipman, Klotz,

Zaninovich a Dalmatian seaman, and the two dogs were to go on with a light sledge which had hitherto been carried on the other. This sledge with its load was estimated at 4 cwt., and the two dogs drew it over level snow with ease. M'Clintock, the greatest and most experienced authority in sledge-travelling, estimates 200 lbs. as a full dragging load for a man, and 100 lbs. for a dog; but none of his dogs would seem to have been anything like the equal in size or strength of either Jubinal or Torossy. It is to these two splendid animals, their endurance and courage, that Payer unhesitatingly and decidedly attributes what success the sledging party obtained; not to their own endurance, for they had scarcely started when Klotz broke down, and had to be sent back; and Orel, before they returned, was helplessly snowblind: but notwithstanding all difficulties, they did get as far as 82° 5' N. It had been a question with them whether they could reach the parallel of 82°, and having passed it, they turned back. At their farthest north the sea was open, studded with icebergs, but almost clear of ice-floes; an enthusiast or a Morton would immediately have pronounced in favour of an Open Polar Sea,' but Payer more carefully writes thus:

Open water there was, of considerable extent and in very 'high latitudes; of this there could be no question. But what 'was its character? From the height on which we stood we 'could survey its extent. No open sea was there, but a Polynia" surrounded by old ice, within which lay masses of 'younger ice. This open space of water had arisen from the action of the long prevalent E.N.E. winds.'

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But far beyond this position, 60 or 70 miles to the north, were seen mountain ranges, and land extending east and west, which received the respective names of Petermann and King Oscar Land. The mountainous extremity on the west of Petermann Land, which was called Cape Vienna, was estimated to lie on the 83rd parallel, the northernmost land yet known with the exception of Aldrich's Cape Columbia, which is in 83° 7', and has not been merely seen, but passed round and surveyed. It is, however, likely enough that Petermann Land extends much farther to the north, and in that case, the only possibility of rivalry as to latitude, on the American side, rests with Beaumont's Cape Britannia and the coast-line behind it.

When Payer with the small sledge rejoined the party which had been left at Cape Schrötter, it was curious to observe how a few days, without active employment and without discipline, had demoralised the members of it, the two Tyrolese and two

Dalmatian sea men; black with oil-smoke, wasted with diarrhoea, they crept listlessly out of the tent to meet their companions. Yet they had not broken out in any way; they had not wasted their provisions; they had simply sat still and moped, till they had reduced themselves to such a state that they were ready to lie down and die. Haller, as their chief, had been instructed to make the best of his way to the ship if the advanced party had not returned at the end of fifteen days: on now asking him which way he would have gone, he pointed, not due south, as the ship lay, but up Rawlinson Sound, or about N.E. The disordered state to which he had brought himself had wiped out all idea of the variation of the compass.

The task of return was thus very serious. Klotz was disabled with ulcerated feet; the three others were much enfeebled; the three who had been out with the dog-sledge were worn; all were suffering, more or less, from snow-blindness; and the advancing season rendered the ice very insecure. As they proceeded they found the congealed snow lying on beds of water, into which they broke, and through which they waded with difficulty; and on April 19, in latitude 80° 36', near the middle of the Sound, they were confronted by an open sea: they had no boat; their provisions were running short; the iceberg on which they had established a depôt was floating away to the southward; and the ship was fifty-five miles distant: their position seemed desperate.

There was scant time for deliberation: only one way of escape suggested itself-a sharp turn to the eastern land, and a march to the southward over the glacier. This they accomplished in the teeth of a violent storm of wind and snow; as they got on to solid earth, after an exhausting struggle of seven hours, they pitched their tent to rest, but they were wet through, they had nothing to eat, and hunger, cold, and moisture forbade sleep. On the morning of the 20th, after a starvation breakfast, and with the storm still raging, they resumed their march; it was evening before they arrived at a depôt where they had buried a quantity of boiled beef and a bear's carcase. The consumption of flesh at that supper is put at 3 lbs. per man; not a bad meal for Europeans, southern Europeans more especially, although a mere trifle to what has been reported of the Eskimos. The storm had somewhat abated; they went on stronger and bolder, and arrived at Cape Frankfort; the open water had drawn back to the west, and continuous ice seemed before them, stretching away towards the ship. Two days later, though not without ever-present alarm as to the persistence of the ice, they reached another

depôt, 25 miles distant from the ship, and got on board on the morning of April 24.

They had been absent from the ship twenty-nine days, and had made good a distance of 135 miles, out and home; but covering in the double journey, as actually measured on the track laid down on their chart, a distance of about 360 miles, being an average of 12.4 miles a day, which, including all stoppages and detentions, is exceptionally large, and speaks, without further evidence, of a journey free from any serious embarrassment; and the fact that the two dogs, as already mentioned, dragged the small sledge, a weight of 400 lbs., at a good rate, or as fast as the men could walk; and on another occasion, during a short trip undertaken just after the longer one, dragged this sledge and a load of 300 lbs. with ease, through a forced march of twenty-two miles, whilst it convinced Payer that 'a sledge with a strong team of dogs must be the best form beyond comparison of sledge-travelling,' is to us equally convincing that the ice and snow travelled over were, on the whole, smoother than what has fallen to the lot of most sledging parties.

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By the beginning of May it was determined to abandon the ship: the most cheerful preparation for so doing was 'plundering' her; the stores that could not be carried away were freely used, and the Tegetthoff' was for the few remaining days transformed into an abode of Epicureans.' But the work was grave in the extreme; the little they could carry with them, in what was certain to be a most toilsome and probably a most dangerous journey, had to be apportioned with the utmost care; the barest necessaries only could be allowed; and with the scantiest of equipments, and dragging three boats, the crew left the ship on May 20, 1874. One of their number, the engineer, had died, and been buried on Wilczek Island; two more, the carpenter and a seaman, were sick; all told, including the officers, there were twenty-one men and the two dogs to drag the sledges and boats. The ice was very rough, very unsound, was constantly in motion, and, unfortunately for the adventurers, was for the most part drifting back to the north. Day after day their utmost exertions barely made good over the ice one mile, sometimes not more than half-amile; the sledges sank deep into the snow, those on which were the boats stuck fast; then they had to be unloaded, the whole force to be mustered, and the obstacles overcome with a one, two, three, haul! Even under more favourable circumstances, half their strength was scarcely able to move a sledge or a boat, and every bit of the road was passed over three times

heavily laden and twice empty. The weather was, in Arctic language, hot and sultry, that is to say, from 21° to 27° F.; the sky was overcast; the perspiration streamed from their faces; their clothes were saturated with moisture from within and without, and they naturally had very limited change.

The detailed account of this sledging experience must be looked for in the pages of Lieutenant Payer's narrative; it has, and, as we have said, it has more especially at the present time, a great and pertinent interest; it is the account of sledging, with weights necessarily great, over rough ice, with a crew, not indeed chosen with sufficient care in the first instance, and weakened by two Arctic winters and two almost polar nights, but supported by abundance of fresh meat, flesh of bear or seal, and by the ever-present hope and signs of a speedy break-up of the ice. None the less, the ice did not break up, but drifted backward, and on June 6, after 18 days of most severe work, they were only five miles from the ship. Lieutenant Weyprecht took advantage of this retrograde movement, as the road was smooth and well trodden, to send on board and bring on another boat; the ice was evidently breaking up, and the party was full of life and animation. On the 18th of June they were able to launch their boats, and though they had to haul them up again on the next day, the first getting them afloat seemed the herald of better things to come. Water and ice alternated and made the work very severe, but very hopeful; and at length, after many most vexatious and tantalising disappointments, and northerly drifts, and drenching rains, they bade a final adieu to the ice-fields on August 14; they could not carry the dogs with them; they would not abandon them; they therefore shot them, a last sacrifice to the grim king of the North. After that, every thing went well with them; they ran past the depôt at The Three 'Coffins,' and after a fair-weather voyage of ten days, were picked up by a Russian fishing schooner, which they forthwith chartered to carry them to Wardö. They arrived there on September 3, and their safety and success were telegraphed to their homes, and at once made known all over Europe.

And yet the word 'success,' as applied to their expedition, has, after all, a very doubtful meaning. That the 'Tegetthoff' passed two winters in the ice, and that the crew, having abandoned their ship, got home in safety, after exploring some 200 miles of coast till then unknown, is what was really done; but the existence of the land was known presumptively before, and the expedition was fitted out with the object of attempting the north-east passage. Bearing this in mind, when we see that