CHAPTER XXII.
Wilkes's Exploring Expedition.
Perhaps my young readers have wondered over the same fact that used to puzzle me when a boy.

While the civilized world was interested, as it has been for hundreds of years, in trying to reach the Pole, and the nations were constantly sending expeditions to search for it, to be followed by others to hunt for the expeditions and then by others to look up those that were hunting for the others and so on, all these efforts were confined to the North Pole.

Everybody seemed to have forgotten that there is also a South Pole, which is not a mile further from the equator than the North Pole.
Of course there was good reason for all this.

There is a great deal of land in the north, while the unbroken ocean seas stretch away from the South Pole for hundreds and thousands of miles in every direction and the prodigious masses and mountains of ice make it impossible to get anywhere near it.

Our daring explorers are continually edging further north, and doubtless within a few years the Pole will be reached, but there appears no prospect of the South Pole being seen for many a year to come.
[Illustration: CAPTAIN CHARLES WILKES.] Lieutenant Charles Wilkes was born in 1798 and died in 1877.