Publisher's Synopsis
IT is now nearly four hundred years since the brave discoverer, Magellan, first sailed around the world. Yet, till comparatively recent times, three years were necessary to complete the circuit. To-day, some Phineas Fogg can put a girdle round the earth in less than eighty days, and messages are flashed to us from China and Ceylon in less than eighty seconds. The old-time spirit of adventure amid unknown scenes, which thrilled the traveler of former years, has, therefore, well-nigh disappeared. Of all the surface of our globe, the Polar Seas alone still bid defiance to the approach of man; though every year the ultimate capitulation of those ice-bound areas, lit by the aurora, becomes less remote.
