Excerpt from To Greenland and the Pole: A Story of Adventure in the Arctic Regions Prefaces, like dentists, are sometimes necessary evils, and we have to bear with them, putting the best face on the matter that we possibly can. Now, in this preface I want only to tell you that, though in some parts sadness and grief creep into the pages of this book - towards the end, for this was inevitable - ou the whole, you will find little else save joy and jollity throughout. Nansen, the brave Arctic explorer-whom may God bring back from his daring venture - you will have no difficulty in recognizing as the prototype of my chief hero Reynolds. Rudland Syme is a Greenland surgeon sketched from life; Sigurd was also a real live sailor, and may be so still, for aught I know; while as for honest Joe the mate, he was a shipmate of my own during my first Arctic cruise, and a hearty happy-go-lucky fellow he was. We roughed it together years and years ago, in and on the Sea of Ice, in a way few are called upon to do nowadays. Let me say, further, that the description of the ice and ice adventures are mostly taken from journals of my own. But I must acknowledge my indebtedness to the First Crossing of Greenland (nansen), published by Messrs. Longmans, Green, Co., for my ideas on skilobning or snow-shoe travelling as carried out in Norway. I have not followed Nansen's route across the inland ice, however, for being a month earlier in the season I have taken my people farther north, and brought them out at Disko Bay. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.