"Spitzbergen" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the magnetic needle) has not at all changed, or, at any rate, not in any appreciable degree, during a whole century, at any particular point on the Earth's surface,* as, for instance, the western part of the Antilles, or Spitzbergen. ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... meeting on the ice between Cook and Whitney gave us the impression of another Nansen and Jackson at Spitzbergen. Whitney had welcomed Cook warmly, had witnessed his troubles at Etah, and his departure by komatik, and had taken charge of his instruments and records to carry South with him when he came home. But his ship was delayed and delayed, and when Peary in the Roosevelt passed ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... saloons and cabins for tourists to Greenland and Spitzbergen, the Endurance is a very different ship to-day. Her cabins are being turned into store-rooms and officers and crew will sleep in odd corners, for two years' provisions have ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 29, 1914 • Various
... entered the fine bay of 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 of what the voyager now beholds ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous
... and ere to-morrow our path would be blocked up. America is the land of invention; and here we were, on the dreary shore, in the dusky twilight—a situation which requires the aid of philosophy. We were something in the predicament of the Russian sailors in Spitzbergen, we wanted light to guide us on the "blaze," without which we could not keep it; but beyond the gleam of a patent congreve, our means extended not. One of our company, however, a native of the country, took the matter easy. Some birch trees were growing near, ...
— Sketches And Tales Illustrative Of Life In The Backwoods Of New Brunswick • Mrs. F. Beavan
... sense of hearing, and are much delighted with music. A gentleman, in his account of a voyage to Spitzbergen, mentions that the captain of the ship's son, who was fond of playing on the violin, never failed to have a numerous auditory when in the seas frequented by these animals; and he has seen them follow the ship for miles when any ...
— A Hundred Anecdotes of Animals • Percy J. Billinghurst
... had just 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 Alexis ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 433 - Volume 17, New Series, April 17, 1852 • Various
... poor father and mother at Urk! They came back to find their old home gone. Unable to get into it, they swam out to sea, never stopping till they reached Spitzbergen. ...
— Dutch Fairy Tales for Young Folks • William Elliot Griffis
... about me, wondering that the body of the vessel and her masts and rigging should not be sheathed with ice; but if ever the structure had been glazed in her time, when she lay hard and fast far to the north of Spitzbergen, for all one could tell, nothing was now frozen; there was not so much as an icicle anywhere visible about her. The decks were dry, and on my kicking a coil of rope that was near my feet the stuff did not crackle, as one could have expected, as ...
— The Honour of the Flag • W. Clark Russell
... 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] ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... of 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 ...
— The Call of the Wild • Jack London
... England, and tried to pass between Greenland and Spitzbergen and sail across the north pole into the Pacific. Failing in this attempt, he made a second voyage, during which he tried to pass between Spitzbergen and Nova Zembla. This voyage also was unsuccessful, and Hudson returned to England. He had found no ...
— Discoverers and Explorers • Edward R. Shaw
... political 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 ...
— Three Dramas - The Editor—The Bankrupt—The King • Bjornstjerne M. Bjornson
... time a diligent searching of the sticks reveals new planets. The orbit of a planet is the distance the stick goes round in going round. Astronomy is intensely interesting; it should be done at night, in a high tower in Spitzbergen. This is to avoid the astronomy being interrupted. A really good astronomer can tell when a comet is coming too near him by the warning buzz of ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock
... a coast line of 3000 miles at the proper season and with proper care; and its vast peninsula lies straight between the British Islands and our own North West. So there is nothing absurd in expecting people to come to Labrador to-morrow when they are going to Spitzbergen, far north of the Arctic Circle to-day. Of course, Spitzbergen enjoys an invincible advantage at present, as its wild life is being carefully preserved. But once Labrador is put under conservation the odds will be reversed. And I what ...
— Draft of a Plan for Beginning Animal Sanctuaries in Labrador • William Wood
... distance, thirty times greater than that which exists between the Sun and our world, Neptune receives nine hundred times less light and heat than ourselves; i.e., Spitzbergen and the polar regions of our globe are furnaces compared with what must be the Neptunian temperature. Absolutely invisible to the unaided eye, this world presents in the telescope the aspect of a star of the eighth magnitude. ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... 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 ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, • Richard Hakluyt
... Crenella laevigata, Crenella nigra, and others, some of them first brought by Captain Sir E. Parry from the coast of Melville Island, latitude 76 degrees north. These were all identified in 1863 by Dr. Torell, who had just returned from a survey of the seas around Spitzbergen, where he had collected no less than 150 species of mollusca, living chiefly on a bottom of fine mud derived from the moraines of melting glaciers which there protrude into the sea. He informed me that the ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... nowhere in this interview, at least so I thought. Kennedy cut it short, especially as he noted the evident restlessness of Mrs. Lovelace. However, he had gained his point. Whether or not the duke was in New York or Washington or Spitzbergen, he now felt sure that Miss Lovelace knew of, and perhaps something about, Madame de Nevers. In some way the dead woman had communicated with her and Miss Lovelace had been the woman whom the hotel clerk ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve
... would be rather surprised, and we are all convinced now that geography is by no means an exact science. The little girl and her father studied it all out. There was big, unwieldy Oregon. There were British America and Russian America. There were Nova Zembla and Spitzbergen, and though there were dreams of an open Polar Sea, no one was disturbing it. We had a great American Desert, and some wild lands the other side of the Rocky Mountains. An intrepid young explorer, John ...
— A Little Girl in Old New York • Amanda Millie Douglas |
