LIES EXPLORER'S LAUNCH.

Hastings Standard, Volume XIII, Issue 4310, 13 November 1909, Page 4 (Supplement)

LIES EXPLORER'S LAUNCH.

SOME STRANGE TALES THAT HAVE HOAXED THE WORLD.

From the very earliest times explorers have been prone to imagine that they have seen things they have not seen, been to placed where they have not been- ... , , . * t " Travellers' tales in fact have become proverbial. _ Especially has this been tlie case m connection vith-explorations carried out by Americans in the Arctic and Antarctic regions. For example, Elisha Ivane. a 1 liiladelphia doctor, who in 1358 claimed to have got nearer to the North I ole tfian anybody had up till then succeeded in doinf, came back with a wonderful stoiy of an " open Polar sea'' stretching northward as far as the eye could reaC h ( He read a paper on his '•startling discoverv ' J before tlit* AOeographical Society, and so eonvin.ed was the scientific world of the truth of his assertion that an "" Open Sea ot Kane'" was forthwith inserted :n ail tlie Q iap», where it remained up till comparatively recently. It is known now, of course, that Dr. K«" e « as, to put i t mildlv, mistaken. The Nortii 1 olar Ocean, so far from being "" open sea. is perpetually frozen, and must m the nature of things have been so from time immemorial. rnv FOUND THE ANTARCTIC CONTINENT. Kane "discovered" a non-existent sea near the North Pole. Wilkes. _nn-c-ther Yankee explorer, "discovered a won-xistsnt land near the SouthPoe. This. with consummate an'hic. lie named alter himself. . . , It was not merely a stray l-lancl either, but the long-sought-tor Antarctic Continent that he claimed to found. He mapped it- bays and charted its promontories, giving names to each. Yet all the while these had no existence, save _in his own J yr . er^ il imagination, for our Captain ... c , March 4th, 1904, sailed right over the spot where Wilkes Land was suppose lo l>o i A travellers* tale" winch mused the greatest excitement m f ranee- towards the end of the eighteenth cen titry was that coined by the feieur c.e | Kerguelen, who claimed to have chs- j covered "a very large continent to the , south of the islands ol St.. 1 aul and j Amsterdam, in the Indian Ocean. He | pictured the-e new lands as abounding i in " wood, minerals, diamonds, ruuie.-, , and other precious stoue>. a!!(l | " promising all the crops ot the mother j ISLE OF DESOLATION. j It is difficult to recognise, m tins j glowing description, the big. I,alT ® n j island now known as kergue.eu Land, « otherwise the Isle ot Desolation. A more uninviting it uou.d be im possible to imagine, for it is bitterly cold, enveloped in almost continuous j focr and is both uninhabited and uninhabitable. The explanation lies in the , fact that the Sieur Iverguelen did not ■ set foot upon the island until long ; afterwards j but contented lnni.se] i , describing it as his imagination painted . it. However .his island, such as it was, , did have a real, concrete _ existence, , which is more than can be said of iuan> - others alleged "to have been " discovered j in these same regions about this time \ or stmit aivrrwartN. Tlius were- r the Aurora Islands, reported by the , captain ot a ship of that name as hav- . ing been sighted by him in 1762, 1 thirtv-tive leagues to the east ot the | Falkland*." and for the re-discovery j of which expeditions continued to be j fitted out for many years afterwards, j They are now known to be non-exist- { ent. and have been removed from the j Admiralty charts, a fate which has also j befallen, but more recently, Dougherty Island and the Nimrod Islands. NOT ONLY POLES DISCOVERED. It is not in the realms of the ice Itlng alcne, however, that t has been allowed to run riot in this fashion. Practically alt new countries, when in course of being opened up, have teen the scene of fictitious " discoveries of a more or less remarkable nature. It was in Florida, for instance, that Police de Leon placed the Fountain of Perpetual Youth; and the mythical El Dorado—the '"Golden City "—has been located by various explorers in Mexico, in Venezuela, in Guiana, and in several other more or less out-of-the-way corners of the globe. For centuries, prior to the summer of 1881. strange tales had filtered through to Europe concerning the existence, in the far interior of Central Asia, of a mighty city, such :i- was not equalled anywhere else on earth, either as regards size, or population, or ! magnificence, or wealth . Men called it M» tv the Mysterious," for few that reached there ever came bade. According to one authority it possessed a population of five millions, and was incircled by a wall measuring j 185 miles in circumference. Yet when j O'Donovan. who was the first Euro- i

pean to visit it, arrived there in the year above mentioned, lie found it to consist of a wretched collection of tumbledown hovels, inhabit d by a few thousand rapped nomads. In 1880, again, a report wis spread abroad by an imaginative reporter of the existence of an enormous fresh water sea, larger than Lake Superior, which was supposed to occupy a considerable portion of the interior of Labrador. Such was the curiosity aroused that, in obedience to popular clamour, an expedition was fitted out in 18-34. which surveyed the lake and reduced it to its real proportions. Even then, however, the newspaper responsible for the canard pers : sted for a lonp time in asserting that only a small bay of the -prodigious sea of their imagination had been reached. LABRADOR'S LEGEND. In the same way arose the legend of the Grand Falls of Labrador, which were said to be mightier than Niagara, and more majestic, their height Wiiisi jriven as 2.000 feet. As a matter of fact the Hamilton River, upon which they are situated, does drop over 1,000 feet from the central plateau to the sea, but it is by a succession of cataracts extending over many miles, and not in one leap, as the early explorers would have had ins believe* Seventy or eighty years ngn Australia was specially prolific in "tall" yarns of this kind. The far interior was at that time wholly unknown and people were ready to believe almost anything concerning it. When, therefore, early in 1831, an escaped convict named George Clarke returned unexpectedly to ciril'sation. after several years sojourn amongst the aborigines" with a i story of a marvellous fresh-water sea. I and of a mighty river, which he ehri.s- ! tened tli• - '* Kindur,*" flowing out of I it towards the noith. his story was accepted without demur. A strong expedition was forthwith ftrganised. with the then Surveyor- I General, Major Sir Thomas Mitchell. in charge of it. and with Clarke as guide. It did good work in opening up an immense tract of hitherto unexplored country, but, of course, it found neither fhe " sea *' nor the " river " that Clarke alleged to exist. Once, too, it nearly perished from thirst, and two of the members were speared to death by hostile blacks.

A CITY OF GOLD. Nevertheless, the Government pardoned Clarke, and rewarded liim, and this caused others to follow in his footsteps. Most of these, however, had never really been in the interior at all, and so the various expeditions they led almost invariably came to grief. But this did not deter others from taking all sorts of mad risks. One man named Bassick claimed to know of the existence of a city of gold, and induced a number of misguided people to trek into the wilderness with liini. It is presumed that they ajl perished miserably. At all events, they were never heard of again. Another individual turned up at Sydney one day with two half-caste children, whom he asserted to be princesses belonging to a tribe of " white blackfellows " living beyond the great NeverNever Land. He was well received, collected about £"300 towards the expense of an expedition, and then bolted.