"Spitzbergen" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... being accordingly directed to be equipped for this purpose, I had the honour of being appointed to the command of it; and my commission for his majesty's ship the Hecla, which was intended to carry us to Spitzbergen, was dated the ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... this continent. Both of those adventures were set forth by the Muscovy Company in search of a northeast passage to the Indies; and, while they failed in their main purpose, they added important facts concerning the coasts of Spitzbergen and of Nova Zembla to the existing stock of geographical knowledge, and yielded practical results in that they extended England's ...
— Henry Hudson - A Brief Statement Of His Aims And His Achievements • Thomas A. Janvier
... interest for geologists and geographers. You know that geologists find traces of extraordinary variations of temperature on the surface of the earth. England was at one time tropical, at another time glacial. Far away north, in Spitzbergen, evidence of the luxuriant vegetation of past ages has been found; and the explanation of these great climatic changes has long been a puzzle. Does not the secular variation in excentricity of the earth's orbit, ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... purple: the varnish of the holly and ivy is more glossy; and berries of a brighter red peep through foliage of a brighter green. But during the greater part of the seventeenth century, this paradise was as little known to the civilised world as Spitzbergen or Greenland. If ever it was mentioned, it was mentioned as a horrible desert, a chaos of bogs, thickets, and precipices, where the she wolf still littered, and where some half naked savages, who could not speak a word of English, made themselves ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 3 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... life nowadays are those whose hearts have been turned to stone. (Picks up something from the table and gets up.) Ah, just look here! Here is a fine specimen of petrifaction. It is a fragment of palm leaf of some kind, found impressed in a bit of rock from Spitzbergen. I sent it you myself, so I know it. That is what you have to be like to withstand arctic storms!—it will take to harm. But your brother—well, his life had been like that of the original palm tree, with the air sighing through its branches; the change of climate was too sudden ...
— Three Dramas - The Editor—The Bankrupt—The King • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... me by the latter.[V-6] The Taxodium, which everywhere abounds in the miocene formations in Europe, has been specifically identified, first by Goeppert, then by Heer, with our common cypress of the Southern States. It has been found fossil in Spitzbergen, Greenland, and Alaska—in the latter country along with the remains of another form, distinguishable, but very like the common species; and this has been identified by Lesquereux in the miocene of the Rocky Mountains. So there is one species of tree which has come down essentially ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... is an orphan whose uncle, Captain Young, has disappeared on a voyage to the Spitzbergen area, well to the north of Britain. Some of the Captain's friends charter a Norwegian vessel to go in search of him, and, much to the disgust of the ship's doctor, who thinks boys are nothing but a nuisance, ...
— Steve Young • George Manville Fenn
... intentionally wounded any living thing; and if negatively good, at least my career has no stain of positive evil upon it. I am one of those concerning whom Richter said, 'There are souls for whom life has no summer. These should enjoy the advantages of the inhabitants of Spitzbergen, where, through the winter's day, the stars shine clear as through the winter's night.' I have neither summer nor polar stars, but I wait for that long night wherein I shall ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... himself there runs a shudder through the nether empire, where new emissaries are trained with new tactics, to hoodwink and handcuff him," who can doubt that the long dynasty of Eblis will instantly terminate, when every pulpit in Christendom, from the frozen shores of Spitzbergen to the green dells of Owhyhee, from the shining spires of Europe to the rocky battlements that front the Pacific, shall be filled with meek and holy men of ripe scholarship and resistless eloquence, whose scientific erudition keeps pace with their evangelical piety, and whose irreproachable lives ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... of sand extending as far as Newfoundland, it there turns abruptly to the east, and with diminished speed and increased width, rolls onward towards the coast of Europe. Before long it divides into two great branches—the northern and southern. The former extends as far as Spitzbergen; the latter, sweeping along by the Madeira and Canary Islands, returns to the equator, completing ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... Tierra del Fuego and within the Andes, that where the rock was covered during the greater part of the year with snow, it was shivered in a very extraordinary manner into small angular fragments. Scoresby [1] has observed the same fact in Spitzbergen. The case appears to me rather obscure: for that part of the mountain which is protected by a mantle of snow, must be less subject to repeated and great changes of temperature than any other part. ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... and other pictures, are not less highly esteemed by English than by French connoisseurs. Born about 1820, she is twenty years younger than her husband, whom, in 1845, she accompanied in his excursion to Spitzbergen; an excursion which opened with, by way of prologue, a rapid tour through Belgium, Holland, Sweden, and Norway. Of the tour and the excursion she has published a brilliant narrative, which it is impossible to ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... carried general cargo to all parts of the world; there was another that brought sugar and rum from the West Indies; and a fourth, that from its square build and breadth of beam must be a whaler returned from Spitzbergen. He thought of their long voyages, and of the life without root or tie that was passed on board them—was he to go back to that life again? It depended on Elizabeth; and ...
— The Pilot and his Wife • Jonas Lie
... nothing in all the field of vision to remind them of the vegetable world from which they had passed as if by magic. As Lewis remarked, they seemed to have been suddenly transported to within the Arctic circle, and got lost among the ice-mountains of Spitzbergen or Nova Zembla. ...
— Rivers of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... landing stage I found Dr. Brende in despair. Headquarters could not raise Robins. They had relayed the message to Wrangel and Spitzbergen Islands—but the stations there reported similarly. Dr. Brende's laboratory did ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... course equally open to us; but there are two which especially commend themselves to our preference. One is the direct northerly route to the Pole, which will take us to the eastward of Iceland, straight to the island of Jan Mayen, and thence, between Greenland and Spitzbergen, into an icy sea which has been but little explored. And the other is the usual route taken by nearly all the great Arctic explorers, namely, up Davis Strait, through Baffin's Bay, and thence, by way of Smith Sound and Kennedy Channel, into the open Polar Sea, if such should actually exist. ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... and a better rule couldn't be. It so be as you take heed to it keerful, you can't be cut off from the world. So Pierre an' me, in due time, found our way back to the ship, which was stationed in the Spitzbergen Sea.' ...
— The Captain's Bunk - A Story for Boys • M. B. Manwell
... sober, scientific delineations, by those who know. In old Harris's collection of voyages there are some plates of whales extracted from a Dutch book of voyages, A. D. , entitled A Whaling Voyage to Spitzbergen in the ship Jonas in the Whale, Peter Peterson of Friesland, master. In one of those plates the whales, like great rafts of logs, are represented lying among ice-isles, with white bears running over their ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... the Court of Appeal that the farther north you go the larger are people's feet. Surprise has been expressed at the comparatively small number of Metropolitan policemen who hail from Spitzbergen. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, June 9, 1920 • Various
... interesting article in McClure's Magazine for March about Andree and his expedition. The finding of the carrier-pigeon is described. It seems that the captain of the sealer Aiken, which was cruising near Spitzbergen, saw this bird in the rigging of his boat. It was very tired, had its head under its wing, and was fast asleep. The captain shot the bird, and it fell into the sea. He did not think anything more of the matter until he happened to remember hearing about the pigeons Andree had taken with him. ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 2, No. 11, March 17, 1898 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... and it's a splendid place,' said the reindeer. 'You can run and jump about where you like on those big glittering plains. The Snow Queen has her summer tent there, but her permanent castle is up at the North Pole, on the island which is called Spitzbergen!' ...
— Stories from Hans Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... taken an affectionate leave of his wife, and stood looking after her, on the deck of the vessel to which he had been appointed mate, and which had been fitted up for the whale-fishery near Spitzbergen, by a merchant of the name of Jeremiah Oxladmkof, of Mesen, a town in the province of Jesovia, in the government of Archangel. She sailed in 1743 on her first voyage. We can conceive how lonely the home of ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 433 - Volume 17, New Series, April 17, 1852 • Various
... what is now N.Y. harbour, Sept. 3, 1609. John Fiske says: "In all that he attempted he failed, and yet he achieved great results that were not contemplated in his schemes. He started two immense industries, the Spitzbergen whale fisheries and the Hudson Bay fur trade; and he brought the Dutch to Manhattan Island. No realization of his dreams could have approached the astonishing reality which would have greeted him could he have looked through the coming centuries and caught a glimpse ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous
... is presented: a fine portrait of him, with clipped red locks, in blue array, smiling, wearing the rose of briny breezes, a telescope under his left arm, his right forefinger on a map, a view of Spitzbergen through a cabin-window: for John had notions about the north-west passage, he had spent a winter in the ice, and if an amateur, was not ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Seynam East and by North, 160 leagues, being in latitude 72 degrees. Then we plyed to the Northward the 15, 16 and 17 day. [Footnote: In Purchas, III., p. 462, Thomas Edge, a captain in the service of the Muscovy Company, endeavoured to show that this land was Spitzbergen. This being proved incorrect, others have supposed that the land Willoughby saw was Gooseland. or Novaya Zemlya. Nordenskiold supposes it to be Kolgujev Island. This, he says, would make its latitude two degrees less than stated, but such errors are not impossible in the ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, • Richard Hakluyt
... currents or floods as the moving cause. Here, as elsewhere, Agassiz recognized at once the comprehensive scope of the phenomena. The whole history reconstructed itself in his mind, to the time when a sheet of ice clothed the land, reaching the Atlantic sea-board, as it now does the coast of Spitzbergen and ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... In Spitzbergen, within twelve degrees of the pole, where now a dwarf willow and a few herbaceous plants form the only vegetation, and the ground is most of the time covered with snow and ice, there were growing, in Miocene ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... were completed by the summer of 1896, and on June 7th the party embarked at Gothenburg with all necessaries on board, arriving at Spitzbergen on June 21st. Andree, who was to be accompanied on his aerial voyage by two companions, M. Nils Strindberg and Dr. Ekholm, spent some time in selecting a spot that would seem suitable for their momentous start, and this was finally found on Dane's ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... the Narwhal, Buck and Curly joined two other dogs. One of them was a big, snow-white fellow from Spitzbergen who had been brought away by a whaling captain, and who had later accompanied a Geological Survey into the Barrens. He was friendly, in a treacherous sort of way, smiling into one's face the while he meditated some underhand trick, as, for instance, when he stole from Buck's food at the first ...
— The Call of the Wild • Jack London
... can be established with Struve's system, and the magnificent amplitude of 105 deg. will be given to the conjoined African and European arcs. Meantime, the French have undertaken the remeasurement of Bouguer's Peruvian arc, and a corresponding Russo-Swedish[910] enterprise is progressing in Spitzbergen; so that abundant materials will ere long be provided for fresh investigations of the shape and size of our planet. The smallness of the outstanding uncertainty can be judged of by comparing J. B. Listing's[911] with General Clarke's[912] results, published in the same year (1878). ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... it looked easy enough to catch one or two of them with a butterfly net. Strange that creatures so gentle and seemingly so delicately organized should choose to live in the regions about the North Pole! Why should they prefer Labrador and Greenland, Iceland and Spitzbergen, to more southern countries? Why? Well, possibly for no worse a reason than this, that these are the lands of their fathers. Other birds, it may be, have grown discouraged, and one after another ceased to come back to their native shores as the rigors of the climate have increased; but these ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... the Bahamas, months ago, to judge by those barnacles, had that tall ship gone down? How long had that scrap of wreck gone wandering down the Gulf Stream, from Newfoundland into the Mid-Atlantic, and hitherward on its homeless voyage toward the Spitzbergen shore? And who were all those living men who "went down to Hades, even many stalwart souls of heroes," to give no sign until the sea shall render up her dead? And every one of them had a father and mother—a wife, perhaps, ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley |
