At the time, I devoted three days to the studious digesting of all this beer, beef, and bread, during which many profound thoughts were incidentally suggested to me, capable of a transcendental and Platonic application; and, furthermore, I compiled supplementary tables of my own, touching the probable quantity of stock-fish, etc., consumed by every Low Dutch harpooneer in that ancient Greenland and
Spitzbergen whale fishery.
D., entitled A Whaling Voyage to
Spitzbergen in the ship Jonas in the Whale, Peter Peterson of Friesland, master.
After leaving the Gulf of Florida, we went in the direction of
Spitzbergen. But before entering the Gulf of Mexico, about 45@ of N.
The Snow Queen has her summer-tent there; but her fixed abode is high up towards the North Pole, on the Island called
Spitzbergen."
Nor could I pass unnoticed the suggestion of the bleak shores of Lapland, Siberia,
Spitzbergen, Nova Zembla, Iceland, Greenland, with "the vast sweep of the Arctic Zone, and those forlorn regions of dreary space,--that reservoir of frost and snow, where firm fields of ice, the accumulation of centuries of winters, glazed in Alpine heights above heights, surround the pole, and concentre the multiplied rigours of extreme cold." Of these death-white realms I formed an idea of my own: shadowy, like all the half-comprehended notions that float dim through children's brains, but strangely impressive.
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.
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.
Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers who sail the seas about
Spitzbergen [an island 12 degrees south of the North Pole--ed.] and the eastern Arctic, all point to a radical change in climate conditions, and hitherto unheard-of high temperatures.
A whaling ship with its sails down in
Spitzbergen, surrounded by several whales lying dead in the sea
Ground-based measurements of AOD at Ny-Alesund,
Spitzbergen (Norway, 78.95[degrees]N), report lower values of AOD in summer (~0.05; Herber et al.
Spitzbergen - islands in the Svalbard archipelago to the east of northern Greenland; belonging to Norway