Perhaps first of all I wished to visit the South Pole—not an unreasonable ambition it would seem for one backed by ten generations of sea captains and ocean faring—but one that I found not altogether easy to gratify. For one thing, there was no Antarctic expedition forming at the time; and then, my notions in the matter were not popular.

From boyhood it had been my dream that about the earth’s southern axis, shut in by a precipitous wall of ice, there lay a great undiscovered world. Not a bleak desolation of storm-swept peaks and glaciers, but a fair, fruitful land, warmed and nourished from beneath by the great central heat brought nearer to the surface there through terrestrial oblation, or, as my geography had put it, the “flattening of the poles.”

I had held to this fancy for a long time on the basis of theory only, and, perhaps, the added premise that nature would not allow so vast a tract as the Antarctic Continent to lie desolate. But, curiously enough, about the time I arrived in New York I met with what seemed to me undoubted bits of evidence in the reports of some recent polar observations.

Borchgrevink, a Norwegian explorer, returning with a poorly fitted Antarctic expedition, reported, among other things, a warm current off Victoria Land, at a point below the 71st parallel, and flowing approximately from the direction of the pole!^[1]

Nansen, another Norwegian, in the Arctic Polar Sea, had been astonished to find that the water at a great depth, instead of being colder than at the surface as he had expected, was warmer! He had also found that as he progressed northward from 80° the thermometer had been inclined to rise rather than to fall. To be sure, when he arrived at a point within a little more than two hundred miles of the earth’s axis, he had found only a continuance of ice—a frozen sea which undoubtedly extended to the pole itself; but this frigidity I attributed to the fact that it was a sea into which, from the zone of fierce cold below, were constantly forced huge ice-floes. These, as I conceived, would maintain the condition of cold in the Arctics by shutting out the under warmth, through which, however, they would be gradually melted—to be discharged in those great Arctic currents which Nansen and other explorers had observed. The lack of thickness in the ice forming about the pole had also been noted with some surprise. This too, I claimed, was due to the warm earth beneath it which, while it could not much affect the general climate, when some three miles of very chilly water and several feet of substantial ice lay between, did serve as a provision of nature to prevent the northern sea from becoming one mighty solidified mass.

Now, ice-floes could not be forced inland, as would have to be the case in the Antarctics where there was admittedly a continent instead of a sea. Around this continent, it was said, there lay a precipitous frozen wall which no man had ever scaled. What lay beyond, no man of our world had ever seen. But in my fancy I saw those ramparts of eternal ice receding inward to a pleasant land, as the snow-capped Sierras slope to the verdant plains of California. A pleasant land—a fair circular world—temperate in its outer zone, becoming even tropic at the center, and extending no less than a thousand miles from rim to rim. There, I believed, unknown to the world without, a great and perhaps enlightened race lived and toiled—loved and died.