Excerpt from The Open Polar Sea: A Narrative of a Voyage of Discovery Towards the North Pole, in the Schooner "United States" The design of this book may be briefly explained. I have attempted little more than a personal narra tive, endeavoring to select from my abundant notes such scenes and incidents of adventure as seemed to me best calculated to bring before the mind of the reader, not merely the history of our voyage, but a general View of the Arctic regions, - its scenery and its life, with a cursory glance at those physical forces which, in their results, give characteristic ex pression to that remote quarter of the world. A day of months, followed by a night of months, where the mean annual temperature rises but little above zero, must necessarily clothe the air and the land scape with a sentiment difficult to appreciate, or, I might perhaps say, feel, without actual observation. I shall be abundantly rewarded if I have succeeded in impressing upon the reader's mind, with any de gree of vividness, the wonders and the grandeur of Nature as unfolded to us under the Arctic sky. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.