" Other navigators have not
been so fortunate; and the annual loss of whaling vessels in the polar
seas is considerable, the Dutch having had as many as seventy-three sail
of ships wrecked in one season. Between the years 1669 and 1778, both
inclusive, or a period of one hundred and seven years, they sent to the
Greenland fishery fourteen thousand one hundred and sixty-seven ships,
of which five hundred and sixty-one, or about four in the hundred, were
lost.
Every one will remember the intense and mournful interest occasioned by
the loss of the President steamer which left New York in the year 1841
to cross the Atlantic, but perished in the passage, without leaving a
survivor to tell the story of her fate. It has been deemed highly
probable that this vessel got entangled in the ice, and was destroyed by
collision with its masses; for during that year, in the month of April,
the Great Western steamer encountered a field extending upwards of a
hundred miles in one direction, surrounded with an immense number of
floes and bergs, and had great difficulty in effecting its passage by
this floating continent in safety.
Pages:
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89