It is a heroic tate, in which love of adventure and zeal for science have combated with and conquered the horrors of an Arctic winter, the six months' darkness in silence and desolation, the excessive cold, and the dangers of starvation.

It is impossible here to go into any of the details which rendered the tale of Arctic voyages one of the most stirring in human history.

All we are concerned with here is the amount of new knowledge brought back by successive expeditions within the Arctic Circle.
This region of the earth's surface is distinguished by a number of large islands in the eastern hemisphere, most of which were discovered at an early date.

We have seen how the Norsemen landed and settled upon Greenland as early as the tenth century.

Burrough sighted Nova Zembla in 1556; in one of the voyages in search of the north-east passage, though the very name (Russian for Newfoundland) implies that it had previously been sighted and named by Russian seamen.