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10
WRECK AND ESCAPE
and to awake in our minds the deepest sym¬
pathy for those who find a home, and too often
a grave, in the mighty deep. The first ac¬
count is selected from the narratives of the
seventeenth century. It is narrated in the
words of the chief sufferer, a man altogether
worthy of credit; and whose object in brav¬
ing the dangers of polar seas, was neither the
love of adventure, nor the hope of gain, but
rather, as is believed, the desire of carrying
the knowledge of divine truth into these in¬
hospitable regions, where the rigour of the
icy winter is scarcely relaxed during the
brief season in which the summer sun thaws
into stinted life and scanty vegetation, the
hardy herbage on which the rein-deer finds
subsistence.
WRECK AND ESCAPE OF DR. JOHNSON, 164a
The following painfully interesting narra¬
tive of the perils and disasters attending a po¬
lar voyage, is from the pen of the principal
sufferer, Dr. William Johnson, one of the
chaplains of Charles II. He embarked at
Harwich, on the 29th of September, 1648, on