But enough of Mr. Leigh Hunt and his simple neophyte.—If any one should be bold enough to purchase this Poetic Romance,' and so much more patient, than ourselves, as to get beyond the first book, and so much more fortunate as to find a meaning, we entreat him to make us acquainted with his success; we shall then return to the task which we now abandon in despair, and endeavour to make all due amends to Mr. Keats and to our readers.

ART. VIII.-Greenland, the adjacent Seas, and the North-West Passage to the Pacific Ocean; illustrated in a Voyage to Davis's Strait during the Summer of 1817. By Bernard O'Reilly, Esq. 4to. 1818.

IF

we feel disposed to exercise a more than usual degree of cri tical severity on the volume before us, it is not so much for the mere gratification of breaking a butter-fly on a wheel,' as of exposing one of the most barefaced attempts at imposition which has occurred to us in the whole course of our literary labours.

Our first impression on taking up the volume was, that, as the subject of the Arctic regions had become one of the fashionable topics of the day, (which we may fairly take to ourselves the credit of introducing,) some hanger-on of Paternoster-row had contrived, with the help of Egede, Fabricius, and the interminable Cyclopedia of Dr. Rees, to hash up a fictitious voyage to Davis's Strait, in order to gratify the eager appetite of the public, and at the same time to put money in his purse.' Recollecting, however, that the log-book of the ship Thomas, of Hull, in which this voyage is stated to have been made, was within our reach, we turned to it, and found that Bernard O'Reilly, Esq. was not, as we suspected, a phantom conjured up for the occasion, but that there actually was a person of this name, in the capacity of surgeon, on board that ship -for, in consequence of the Act for Encouraging the Whale Fishery,' it is deemed imperative on every whaler to have a person so rated. As he, fortunately, is seldom called on but to assist in filling the blubber casks, and making the plum-pudding on Sundays, the owners are not particularly nice in their choice of the doctor, who is generally an apothecary's apprentice just escaped from his indentures. We do not mean to say, however, that there are not exceptions; indeed we happen to know that very respectable and meritorious characters have sometimes been induced by necessity to accept the situation. We would mention, as an instance, Mr. John Laing, whose sensible and unpretending narrative of a Voyage to Spitzbergen,' in a small duodecimo, forms an admirable contrast to the pompous and frothy quarto of Bernard O'Reilly, Esq.

But, in ascertaining the name of Bernard O'Reilly, to be

that

that of the person who filled the capacity of surgeon on board the Thomas, of Hull, we have also ascertained, what is much more to the purpose, that the very small portion of his Greenland,' which is not absolute nonsense, is either fiction or downright falsehood. This grave charge we shall substantiate without much waste of our own or the reader's time.

As it is not always quite so easy to detect false facts in physics, as false principles in the abstract sciences, the former may sometimes pass for truths, and thus become as pernicious as the latter. There is little danger, however, on the present occasion. The glaring folly which pervades every page of Mr. O'Reilly's book forms a sufficient guarantee against its mischievous tendency. We find, however, in the very threshold, a premeditated misrepresentation with regard to the latitude, on which are made to depend some extraordinary discoveries, which the author could not have ventured to broach without exceeding the usual limits of a whale-fishing voyage to Davis's Strait.

He sets out by accusing the masters and the mates of Greenland ships, of falsifying their logs and journals-and for what?-for the interest of the government, of their employers, and of themselves. The interest of government (so gross is his ignorance) is the 'additional revenue to be recorded on the collector's book:' the poor man, it seems, being unable to distinguish between revenue and bounty, the latter of which is paid by the government to the shipowner, while nothing whatever is received in the shape of the former. He, generous and disinterested to a fault, having embarked for the sake of science, disdained to trust for support to documents placed in custom-houses,' or to the uncertain information which might be 'coaxed from the master of a whale-ship.'-He submitted to be cooped up with uninformed, unsociable beings, 'to study nature,' and 'to keep a journal adapted to all the scientific objects he had in view:'-Yet with all this and much more empty boasting, did this prodigy of disinterested science' write to Hull, to procure a copy of the master's journal, and to learn the highest latitude which the ship had reached! which, by a good observation of the master, was, on the 19th July, 75° 17'. This latitude, however, would not admit of his fabrications; he asserts, therefore, that many days elapsed before the sailing of the Thomas from that latitude, occasionally shifting her station; that on one such occasion, the termination of the Linnæan islands came distinctly in view, the open sea lying beyond, when the latitude, no observation being taken, was most probably about the 77th degree;' that 'the state of the atmosphere permitted a prospect of a degree at least farther to the northward, where the continental ice was evidently interminable:' every word of which we shall prove to be false. We happen to have examined the jour

VOL. XIX. NO. XXXVII.

nals

nals of many of the Davis Strait's, ships for the year 1817, for a different purpose than that of convicting Bernard O'Reilly, Esq. of misrepresentation, and among others, that of the Thomas; and in it we find that, instead of many days having elapsed before she sailed from that latitude,' (75° 17') she stood to the southward the very next day, (July 20th) on the noon of which she was, by observation, in lat. 75° 10' N., and from that moment continued down the strait on her homeward-bound passage!—Nor shall his calumny against the master and mate of the Thomas of having falsified their journals avail him. The masters and mates of the other vessels in company must also have falsified their journals, and, by a singular coincidence, have all falsified them in the same places. The Andrew Marvel was in company with the Thomas, and the latitude marked in her log on the 18th is, by observation, 75° 19' N. The Royal George too was in company with her, and her log, on the same day, marks the latitude, also by observation, as 75° 24'.-The Ingria, the Majestic, the Eclipse, and many other vessels, to the amount of eighteen, were in sight from the 17th to the 20th July, and there is not ten miles difference of latitude between any two of them. So much for falsehood and calumny.

It requires some talent to carry on a successful imposture. The Linnaan islands, a very appropriate name it must be allowed, which Mr. O'Reilly' presumed (as he says) to give them in honour of the prince of Natural Historians,' are stated in one part of the text, to run in a curve bending westward and northward, from the Greenland side across Davis's Strait,' and in another, ' to stretch across the Strait east and west, as far as the power of vision can ascertain,' (p. 94;) but, in a thing resembling a tailor's measure, or a proctor's bill, by its length, and which is humorously called a chart, the whole of these islands are unluckily placed north and south; and instead of stretching westward across the Strait, by the same unaccountable mishap, they are laid down a full degree to the eastward of any part of the west coast of Greenland! Again: 'from my chart, which was made with the utmost accuracy, the number of these islands is eighty:'-the blots upon the thing we have mentioned, and which, we suppose, are meant to represent islands, amount to about sixty.

These Linnæan islands' perform a very conspicuous part in Bernard O'Reilly's volume. By the power of vision' he sees behind them very distinctly, an open sea,' and beyond that an 'interminable icy continent.' But on reading a little farther, we find that the sea and the continent have changed places!

In the view of the extensive chain of islands (to which I have presumed to give the name of the Linnean Isles), which stretch across the

straits

straits east and west, very nearly in a circular curve, as far as the power of vision can ascertain, there lies an immense continent of ice, rising towards the Pole, and towards the islands before mentioned, descending like the regular declivity of the land mentioned by Bruce in the approach to the sources of the Nile. In this descent innumerable chan nels are visible, eaten away by the snow which is dissolved annually under the presence of the sun. In some places it out-tops the islands, but leans upon them all; and it is probably owing to this very chain of islands presenting an impenetrable barrier, that the descent of larger portions of the icy continent have not before now carried their chilling aspect into southern climates.'-pp. 94, 95.

Thus, instead of an open sea beyond these islands, it would now appear, that this interminable continent,' the source of all the icebergs that float to the southward, abuts on them and out-tops them, (like the overhanging eaves of a thatched roof,) rising towards the North Pole, as the summit of the ridge!

We cannot be sufficiently thankful to these eighty buttresses, which Bernard O'Reilly has discovered, for preventing a southerly visitation of this icy continent with its 'chilling aspect.' Its presence, however, would not seem to offer any very great annoyance to the neighbouring inhabitants of Greenland. It is not here, as in other parts of the world, that frost, snow, and elevation of surface, occasion cold; on the contrary they are the sources of heat. Of this we cannot doubt, being assured that the elevated lands produce in themselves such an absorption of solar heat, during the summer months, as to make the atmosphere insupportably sultry;' (Introduction, p. 13.); that the heat of the sun reflected from the snow and ice, and also from the face of the rock, is intolerable;' and that when knee-deep in snow, the head and body are involved in a burning atmosphere.' (p. 191.)

This extraordinary development of heat from ice and snow (which, by the way, is noted, in what he calls a journal, from 33° to 40° of Fahrenheit in the mouth of July) might be expected to produce some extraordinary effect on the vegetation of Greenlandand so it does about Disco, near the icy continent;' for there 'the accumulation of heat is so great that all vegetable life is rapidly evolved,' (p. 271); on the southern part of Greenland, however, in about 60° of lat., the thermal influence ceases, and with it all appearance of vegetation. The ship Thomas, it is true, was never within sight of any land on this part of the coast; but that is nothing-Bernard O'Reilly's 'power of vision' enables him, like the witches in Macbeth, to see beyond the ignorant present.'-Indeed we are perfectly astonished at the unremitting attention which he appears to have bestowed on this picturesque country. Not a single day passes in which the cirrhus, the cirrhostratus, the agglomerated cumulostratus, cirrhocumulus, and the nimbus are not detected in playing

their gambols, perpetually intermingling with each other, dancing through the misty atmosphere, and producing over the more misty pages of his quarto, as numerous and as various transmutations as may be seen in the tube of a kaleidoscope; all this he has pilfered, and converted into nousense, from Forster's Systematic Arrangement of the Clouds.' With respect to the country itself, he gravely assures us that it is a grievous mistake to suppose it took its name from any thing green about it. The origin is totally different, and is plainly discoverable in the language of the natives. It is called Succanunga,' the Land of the Sun; but, lest we should not do justice to our author's learned and interesting speculation,' as he calls it, we present our readers with the passage entire.

• A classical reader, familiar with the works of Greek and Roman writers, will recollect that an epithet for the noon-day Apollo, when clad in Latin form, is Grynæus. Grynæus Apollo forms an adulatory invocation in the prayer of Eneas, who was at once a priest and prince according to the Phrygian mythological system. General Vallancy, who bestowed much and very extraordinary labour on the subject of antiquities, particularly those referable to eastern origin, has fixed on the word Grian, of Irish or Celtic signification, as it may be received, being epithetically expressive of the strongest power of the sun, which is synonymous among all ancient nations with the Apollo of Grecian mythology. To avoid, therefore, invidious reference as to intercourse with the Greenlanders, it may be fairly admitted, that the synonyme, by whatever voyager to these parts communicated, is justly explained by the above terms: let us view them in connexion: Succanuk-the Sun. Succanunga-Greenland. Grian-Apollo, or the Sun. Grianland-Land of the Sun. The Land of the Sun, or Sunny-land, as familiarly may be said, corresponds with the simple appellation which the natives give their country. The adventurers who came in aftertimes to seek the same shores, not probably understanding the meaning of the term, yet spelling the word as they could from hearing it often repeated, were inclined to write Grianland in their mode Groënland, which sounds very nearly alike, but in the language of Denmark has no reference to the original. -pp. 14, 15.

There is a trifling mistake in this interesting speculation;' but it is rather favourable to the view of the subject as taken by Bernard O'Reilly, Esquire. With submission to his superior knowledge, we take leave to observe, that Grynæus is not exactly' an epithet for the noon-day Apollo,' but rather of a grove sacred to Apollo.

His tibi Grynæi nemoris dicatur origo:

Ne quis sit lucus, quo se plus jactet Apollo. Now as the ancients had a way of naming things by the rule of contraries,' as 'lucus a non lucendo,' an instance in point, nothing is more probable than that Æneas conferred the name of Grynaanland, or laud of groves, on this delightful country, because he

could