travels, as related, are without a parallel in all the world's
history, passed away, and I was left alone with the dead.

And now, after having paid the last sad rites to this strange man
from the Lofoden Islands, and the still farther "Northward Ho!",
the courageous explorer of frozen regions, who in his declining
years (after he had passed the four-score mark) had sought an
asylum of restful peace in sun-favored California, I will
undertake to make public his story.

But, first of all, let me indulge in one or two reflections:

Generation follows generation, and the traditions from the misty
past are handed down from sire to son, but for some strange
reason interest in the ice-locked unknown does not abate with the
receding years, either in the minds of the ignorant or the
tutored.

With each new generation a restless impulse stirs the hearts of
men to capture the veiled citadel of the Arctic, the circle of
silence, the land of glaciers, cold wastes of waters and winds
that are strangely warm. Increasing interest is manifested in the
mountainous icebergs, and marvelous speculations are indulged in
concerning the earth's center of gravity, the cradle of the
tides, where the whales have their nurseries, where the magnetic
needle goes mad, where the Aurora Borealis illumines the night,
and where brave and courageous spirits of every generation dare
to venture and explore, defying the dangers of the "Farthest
North."