1. The eagerness of human nature for gain and material prosperity is so great, that we are wont to estimate the value of all undertakings by the standard of utility; and too often it is forgotten, that each generation is destined to fulfil the task of acquiring and collecting the knowledge which is to benefit only a later generation. If, then, the Polar question be valueless for our material interests, is it therefore valueless for science? and assuming that it is for the present worthless as far as gain and wealth are concerned, must it continue so for all time? Not that we are entitled, even from this narrower point of view, to deny the usefulness of Polar exploration, as Cook seems to have done when he said, “Never from those regions will any advantage accrue to our race;” but rather bear in mind what Sir James Ross tells us: “The profit which accrued to England, in each year after the voyage (1818) of my uncle (Sir John Ross) in North Baffin’s Bay, from those rediscovered parts of the Arctic seas, was more than enough to defray all the expenses of the voyages of discovery undertaken from 1818 to 1838.” Scoresby with his single ship made a million thalers by the capture of whales, and the Americans had for many years a clear profit of eight million dollars from the fisheries of the frozen seas of Behring’s Straits. There were also, it is true, very considerable losses; for, in 1830, nineteen English ships engaged in the whale fishery were “beset” in the ice of Melville Bay, and nearly all destroyed; in 1871, twenty-six American ships were crushed to pieces in Behring’s Straits, and as many as seventy-three Dutch vessels sank in one year in the seventeenth century from the pressure of the ice.
2. We do not, however, mean to assert, that the progress of Polar discovery is always followed by a corresponding increase in the capture of fish in the Arctic seas. On the contrary, the take of oil-yielding animals is steadily decreasing, and even if an open sea should be discovered in 82° N.L., in which whales should be found in as great abundance as ice-floes unhappily are, the whaler with his poor equipment would never be able to follow them thither. The fur countries, once as productive as the mines of Peru, are incapable of further extension; even the treasures of mammoths’ tusks have become rare, and in order to bring thirty tons of lignite from the north-east of Greenland, a ship must expend seventy tons of sound coal in the transit, besides passing the winter there. That the teas of China, the silks of Japan, the spices of the Moluccas will never descend to us from the ice-fields has long been settled. No one at the present day thinks any longer of the commercial value of the North-West and North-East passages. Modes of escape from the perils and caprices of the ice have grown out of the endeavour to discover routes of commerce, which lay beyond the reach of the cannon of the Spaniards at the time when they aspired to the monopoly of the trade of the world. The reward of 25,000 gulden, offered by the Dutch government for the discovery of a North-East passage, and that of £20,000 by the English parliament for the North-West passage, have never been paid, because never claimed, nor are they, in the least degree, likely to be claimed.[12]