Abstract
“INASMUCH as industrie and diligence are two principall steps to atchieve great enterprises, and negligence and idlenesse are enemies to the same; we would have you in this charge committed unto you, to embrace the one, and to avoide the other.” Such were the instructions of the Muscovy Company to Thomas Edge, the commander of its third expeditionto Spitsbergen, in 1610. By these same steps to success Sir Martin Conway has collected the widely-scattered materials of Spitsbergen history, and by wis selection and with high literary skill has wrought them into an addition to Arctic literature of unusual interest. The volume tells us in greater detail than has ever before been possible the history of Spits-bergen from its discovery by Barents in 1596, to the beginning of its scientific exploration by the expedition of Sven Loven in 1837. It is, on its own lines, an ideal geographical monograph, from its bibliographic thoroughness, its sound literary judgment, and its evidence of exhaustive research in British and Continental libraries. It contains much of interest to naturalists, with its fresh information regarding the early whale fishery in the Greenland seas.
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G., J. The Early History of Spitsbergen 1 . Nature 74, 381 (1906). https://doi.org/10.1038/074381a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/074381a0