UNDER THE NORTHERN LIGHTS.* " To take a vessel from

Southampton to San Francisco in a single summer by way of Behring's Straits,—that," says Mr. MacGahan, "is the grand feat which any true seaman would give his right hand to accomplish;" and that Captain Allen Young tried to do with the Pandora,' in the trip which the author of Campaigning on the Oxus shared, and, has described. Captain Allen Young did not succeed in making the North-West passage; the arm of ice which has opposed its grim, silent, inflexible opposition to every previous effort, put out its terrible strength in Peel Strait, and warned him off the realm which, again and again importuned by human suppliants, will have none of them.

The story of the 'Pandora's' cruise—of what she did not do, and what she did, of the first news of the Arctic Expedition brought by her—is too recent to require resort to Mr. MaeGehan's book for information about it, and the attraction of the work does not depend on its story. It consists ha the author's fresh and charming manner of conveying his own impressions, in his keen intelligence and picturesque mind. When Mr. MacGahan de- scribed his journey fromSt. Petersburg to the banks of the Oxus, and his lonely ride to Khiva through the desert, he had entire novelty to offer to his readers, new scenes, new people, varieties of human beings, and conditions of human life which we knew nothing at all about. The matter of the book would have carried it over the manner, had the latter been ever so defective. The traveller's achievement was of greater moment than the author's style, to all but those readers whose tastes are so inveterately literary that the style is always the chief consideration with them. By his Campaigning on the Oxus, however, Mr. MacGahan appealed to and satisfied all classes of readers. The book was worthy of the adventure.

Under the _Northern Lights has no such claims, as the author reminds us in his preface, in which he says, There have been about two hundred and fifty books written on the Arctic regions," and professes to give us nothing more than "a few pictures of the pleasant side of Arctic life,—pictures hastily_ sketched, on a voyage that was remarkable only for its dash and rapidity." We are grateful for these pictures, which are vivid, striking, and original, but we do not take the mild view of their scope which Mr. MacGahan prescribes. There is an experience in Peel Strait which is a very pretty peril as it stands, and a sample of the author's forcible and impressive style. In those unknown, unexplored waters all the dangers peculiar to the ocean gathered

• Under the Northern Liyhts. By J. A. Macanhan. London: Sampson Low and M.

round the 'Pandora' on a certain night. Enveloped in fog, the voyagers had no light of moon or stars to guide them, no lighthouse was on the desolate coast between which and the ice-pack they were steering, to show them the way ; no pilot was there to aid. them. The chapter called "A Night in Peel Strait" is a striking and en- grossing one, especially when it deals with the failure of the com- pass in the vicinity of the Pole :—

" In, this night of tempest and darkness, in these wild, desolate regions, even the mysterious spirit that rules the magnet is bewildered and confused; it can tell us nothing. It wavers, and trembles, and hesi- tates, like a guide who has lost his way. But see there is one direction in which it points when set free on a universal pivot, with startled, trembling, excited finger. It is downward, straight down! What fearful thing is this ? Go where you will on the surface of the earth, everywhere you find this ghostly finger pointing silently, sternly, persistently, here to this wild region, like the finger of Fate. Now that we have obeyed its mysterious bidding, now that we have followed its strange guidance here, it points downwards, to the bottom of the sea! What is the mysterious treasure hidden here in the earth, that this spirit-finger has been pointing at for centuries, without being understood of man ? Whatever it be, we can follow it no farther, we must trust to something else. But what? The wind? Yes ; the wind, that scarcely remains the same for an hour at a. time. 'We are steering by a weathercock, but it is the only thing left to guide

us, and we must follow it or let the ship drift We cannot even drop anchor, and thus stop the ship until the fog clears away, or until -daylight comes. The water is too deep, and there is no other way of stopping her. She will move in some direction, whether we will or no. -Gradually the day breaks, and leaves hanging about us the grey curtain -of fog which lined the night. A fog is worse than darkness alone, if the sky be not overcast. So long as the stars can be seen the sailor has a guide, but a fog hides alike the sun, stars, and land. Nothing can be seen, and the mariner is helpless. Daylight, therefore, brings little -change in our position At length, towards ten o'clock, the sun gets the better of the mist, and breaks through now and then, showing us its watery image. Then the fog lifts in heavy masses, like a curtain, and suddenly reveals, close on our port beam, the barren, rocky coast. In the space of half-an-hour a wonderful change is wrought. The sun shines out bright and warm, and we seem to have emerged into another world."

• On the succeeding day they came upon the object of their search in Peel Strait, on the shore of North Somerset,—the cairn built by Ross and McClintock, when they came down the coast on foot from the north, in 1849, in the hopes of finding some traces of the Franklin Expedition. They built the cairn at the point where they were obliged to turn back for want of provisions, and in a chink between the stones, Captain Allen Young found the tin tube which Captain Ross placed there twenty-eight years before. "I think," says Mr. MacGahan, "nothing impresses one more for- cibly with the utter loneliness of these regions than the finding of -such a document. A scrap of paper placed here in a promi- nent position in order to be found, yet which has remained here all these years, just as it was loosely placed in this heap of stones by a hand long since turned to dust." The record, which was intended for Sir John Franklin, is a curious revelation of the chances of Arctic navigation. Ross was then actually within 200 miles of the spot where only the year before the crews of the 'Erebus' and ' Terror ' had abandoned their ships. "Even then," adds Mr. MacGahan, there may have' been some of the survivors dragging out a miserable existence on. King William's Island, whom be might have reached, had he but known or suspected they were there."

The author makes a noteworthy remark in connection with this document :—" As a curious example of the discipline maintained by Ross on this expedition, I may mention that Sir Leopold McClintock never saw this record, nor knew what it contained, although he was with Ross at the time it was written and placed here. And this, although they had been travelling together for weeks." We see nothing to admire in this example of " and neither, we suspect, does Mr. MacGahan. It strikes us as being simply stupid and nonhuman, worthy to be bracketed with the old story of the " discipline " which allowed a King of Spain to be burned, because the official proper for the function of "putting out" his Majesty did not happen to be on duty.

With admirable spirit and picturesqueness, Mr. MacGahan tells the whole story of the dashing trip of the 'Pandora,' which, if a failure, was at least a brilliant one. He makes his readers share the excitement of the race out of Peel Strait, with the remorseless ice in full and fell pursuit, and the terrible danger of being caught in it, or BS the Arctic seamen say, "beset," after long suspense and alternations of hope, which only Captain Young did not share. It was a great disappointment when the 'Pandora' was stopped, and turned back, for her officers expected to be at San Francisco in six weeks, and had arranged what they were to have for dinner- at the leading restaurant when they should go ashore. But just as they sighted La Roquette Island, they recognised in the whitish glare stretching along the sky the dreaded ice-blink," the

thermometer went down, specks appeared on the horizon, and the raw, cold air chilled them like damp sheets. The end came thus :

'Rapidly the island of La Roquette rises out of the water, as though coming up from a prolonged plunge, and rapidly the white specks thicken behind it, until they present an unbroken, serried line, extend- ing from shore to shore,—the soldiers of the Ice Queen, arrayed in her own white uniform, drawn up in battle-array to oppose our further advance. At four o'clock we are off La Roquette Island, between it and the coast of North Somerset ; we stop steaming, and the ' Pandora ' drifts slowly up towards the ice, against which she lazily flings herself at full length, as though determined to take a rest after her long

run Just away to the south-east we can see a tremendous wall of rock, the continuation of the coast of North Somerset, through which a deep gap is cloven, whose high, perpendicular walls form a mighty gateway. This is the entrance to Ballot's Straits, now only ten miles distant. But, alas! these ten miles are ten miles of solid pack-ice, through which no ship can penetrate. From Bellot's Straits across to the Western coast it is the same,—a solid plain of ice, extending from shore to shore. We climb to the topsail-yard, then to the dizzy fore- erosstrees, hoping to catch a glimpse of open water. It is without avail. Vainly we search with eager eyes for some dark streak across the distant horizon-line that would tell us of water ; vainly we sweep the plain with our glasses ; the dull, white floor reaches without a break to the yellow, golden sky. Although we were not yet sure of it, we had come to the ond of our voyage. We waited here for three days, but we never succeeded in making another foot."

An impressive portion of Mr. MacGahan's narrative ie that in which he dwells, with, extreme sensitiveness and, an, almost affrighted solemnity, upon the effect which the dreadful silence, the stony-hearted solitude of the Arctic regions, produce upon the mind and spirits :—

"So lonely 'twas, that God Himself Scarce seemed there to be,"

are lines which come to one's memory, as one reads what the author says of the well-named Land of Desolation :—

ei The immensity of these regions, their dreariness, their silent immobility, that appears like the stillness of the grave, have a strangely depressing effect. They weigh upon the mind, and boar it down like some fearful incubus Nature never smiles here. Her voices are hushed, her face is cold. A strange, dreadful mystery, which appals in the first impression, which is succeeded by something for more terrible,—a feeling I have tried without success to seize and analyse. It is as though you gradually began to perceive a sinister meaning, a darker signification, in this lonely, silent world. You begin to feel that it is endowed with a sullen kind of life,—a sombre intelligence that you vainly try to comprehend. You feel that something terrible has happened here, or is going to happen."

The utter insignificance of human life amid these awful wastes presses terribly upon the mind open to such impressions, and the influence of the scene is equally potent with those who, perhaps, do not analyse it. Mr. MacGahan believes that the prevalence of scurvy in Arctic ships is to be attributed to depression of spirits almost as much as to lack of proper food. The effects of it were unmistakable on such of the ' Pandora's ' men as were most im- pressionable and superstitions. They grew despondent, and went about their work in a half-hearted way, as though afraid to touch anything. The petty officers grew over-cautious and timid. One of them, a most exemplary man in England, suddenly took to drink ; and another went to bed, and remained there until we were far on our way home." Both these men, the author adds, would inevitably have died, had the e Pandora ' wintered in the Arctic ; and all on board, even the most buoyant—among which number we fancy he was included — were affected by this mysterious influence.

The life on board the ' Pandora ' was a pleasant one, judging from Mr. MacGahan's lively sketches of it ; and his earlier chapters, those which describe the coast of Greenland, Disco, the incidents of the voyage before they lost sight of life and passed into the Arctic stillness, are very interesting and amusing. An important and novel feature in the book is an account of Captain Allen Young's sledge journeys, made in search of the relics of Sir John Franklin, when Captain Young went out with McClintock as navigating officer, having resigned the command of his own ship to accept that position. This is a very remarkable narrative. Mr. MacGahan gives us a description of the Eskimo which places them in a more interesting light than any writer has done since Captain Hall—who, however, could not write—and he introduces us to an Eskimo dog, named King, who is second only to Cerf Vola.