stefansson-wrangel-09-24-002-001

1923

1.

THE ADVENTURE OF WRANGELL ISLAND.
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Some think of the days of real adventure as belonging
to the morning of the world when our stone age ancestors
first set thir feet upon the landbridge that joined France
to Britain; others might select the period of the
Phoenician sea rovers scouting our coasts in search of tin
or the Vikings descending from the north and to harass the
coasts as far as the Golden Horn. But to most of us such
a phrase as "The Age of Romance" calls up pictures of Marco
Polo trudging overland to Cathay, Columbus at the prow of a
Spanish galleon, Da Gama rounding the Cape of Good Hope,
Raleigh spreading his mantle before a queen and sailing
away to Roanoke. Some extend the romantic period down to
the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with Cook
making a road for us to Australia, Vancouver giving us a
grip on the Pacific coast of North America and many another
farsighted adsventurer trying to convince a lackadaisical
government of the wisdom of keeping under our flag the
distant dominions to which we had won legal right either by
discovery or colonizing enterprise - barely succeeding with
New Zealand, failing with Hawaii and New Guinea.

To many the last light of Elizabethan romance flickered
out when, with the cornerstone of empire laid, Rhodes