1829.] Plan of Crowland Abbey.-Speculations on Literary Pleasures. 209 NEVER having met with a ground plan of the remains of Crowland Abbey, and thinking that such would not be unacceptable for publication in your invaluable Periodical, I am induced to send you the inclosed plan (Plate II.) from my own measurements, which, though taken in the year 1816, will strictly apply to the building in its present state. It is unnecessary to compile any historical account of the Abbey in this place, because your readers will find every interesting particular satisfactorily elucidated, and highly-finished engravings given, in the 4th vol. of Mr. Britton's beautiful and valuable work, the "Architectural Antiquities of Great Britain;" also in Holditch's "History of Crowland Abbey," a very ingenious production. I will, therefore, merely give such references to the ground-plan as will make it intelligible: viz. 1. west entrance to the nave; 2. west porch leading under the tower; 3. north entrance; 4. 4. 4. 4. supporters of the tower; 5. nave, now in ruins and roofless; 6. south aisle of the nave, also in ruins; 7. ancient door-way (walled up) which formerly led to the cloisters; 8. stone screen, which anciently separated the nave from the choir; 9. north aisle of the nave, now used as the parish church, being separated from the nave by having the arches between the pillars filled up to the top, this was done after the Reformation, when the nave was no longer serviceable; 10. the present chancel; 11. ancient and beautiful screen; 12. door-way under the window, now walled up; 13. altar; 14. vestry; 15. font; 16. ancient baptistery, in an arched recess, the roof of which is groined similarly to that represented by the minutely-dotted lines; 17. steps leading to a modern schoolroom, over the vestry; 18. 18. the only remaining supporters of the great central tower. Of the other pillars, and of the transept, choir, cloisters, and Abbey buildings, no traces now remain. Yours, &c. C. R. upon the point, Mr. Urban, some of your readers may almost say, of enveloping our last communication, and of deranging that small degree of luminousness which may, perchance, occasionally shine forth to animate our subjects. But, as we never willingly neglect the hints of a judicious though silent monitor, we trust we have not altogether done so in the present in stance. A speculator upon happiness and its sources, of nearly a century ago, premises, "It may probably be feared that the same should befal me which has many monkish writers, who, having much retired from the world, having much leisure and few books, did spin out every subject into wandering mazes and airy speculations, which, destitute of a well-manured soil, ran into all the exuberancy of leaves and fruitless sprigs." We trust that similar symptoms of the kind here spoken of, have not often oppressed the reader in these our vagrant attempts to illustrate some of the pleasures which lurk amid the recesses of Parnassus. But we promised in our last to exchange Metaphysics for Physics, and the transition from the one to the other will by no means, it is probable, incur the regret of many of your readers. And on the other hand, when we look around, Mr. Urban, upon the complex variety of those cominunications which form a sort of staple in the works of many of your periodical brethren, we are tempted to think that, were the tone often somewhat more serious, and the matter, more intrinsically in unison with that style of thought and of taste in which a wellcultivated mind likes to indulge, a better feeling, both of mind and moral temperament, might sometimes be engendered. At once the guides and the mirror of the sentiments of the age, of public and prevailing opinion, the periodical press have it in their power alike to reform, or to implant, a vitiated taste. Lord Byron, Sir, is once reported to have uttered the heterodox and certainly most ungallant sentiment, (for which the fair sex are becomingly obliged to him,) that, "give a woman a few baubles and trinkets, and she is contented." Really, Sir, the bill of fare served up by some of our contemporary 210 Speculations on Literary Pleasures. caterers, would almost argue them to be converts to this doctrine as it regards their MALE readers. The hot spicery and stimulants often employed in concocting trifles which can feed the mind with no solid ideas, may sometimes engender an over-excitement, like the soups manufactured at a farfained shop in Cornhill stimulate the palate, which rejects the more substantial garniture of the shambles. But this excitement is apt to pall quickly on the imagination, and the traces left on the mind are assuredly neither those of moral expansion, or of intellectual growth, or, it may be said, of pleasure. A beautiful apologue, or a well-drawn satire of point and character, often calls into play our most powerfully excited feelings, while the writer frequently attains an ulterior object; but it would be difficult to elicit either much fine writing, much wit, or much character, save that of buffoonery, from the published pieces of some of your periodical contemporaries. It will be admitted, however, that Experimental Philosophy in our age has, throughout its varied departments, abundantly its patrons and its talented professors. Chemistry, Mechanics, Geometry, and its sister sciences, which all have analogy to Physics, were scarcely ever, perhaps, at any former period, prosecuted with more ardour or with more success. Geography and Navigation may especially be said to be favourite pursuits in the scientific learning of the age, and to have engaged a considerable share of the thoughts and energies of the public talent. Astronomical science, so far as the true figure and motion of the earth is concerned, together with the magnetic inclination of the needle, has been a subject of revived debate and curiosity, and has again created an interest among practical men, of high and national importance. Captain Parry, however, Sir, has returned from his third voyage of discovery, and still we are left to speculate in all the conjectures of original uncertainty, on the true position of the poles of the earth, and the mysterious cause of their attractive influence on the needle. And here, Sir, while on this subject, it must be said, that the thanks of science and its votaries are abundantly due to the enterprise and perseverance of this intrepid officer, whose [March, zeal in the cause of scientific discovery The present writer was always among the number of those, (and there were numbers who by no means augured that success from these expeditions which others predicted,) who thought, that Captain Parry was to accomplish much more than all his predecessors for the last two centuries had done. The difficulties of forcing a passage (for the process of sailing, or rather of making progress in these latitudes, is conducted pretty much in the same manner as our winter inland navigation by an ice-boat,) from the North-west extremity of Baffin's Bay to Beering's Straits, from repeated failures, where almost every thing joined to promote success, may reasonably be pronounced almost insurmountable. Every circumstance almost combined to stimulate the ardour of Captain Parry and his crew: the united eyes of their countrymen, and, indeed, of scientific Europe, fixed upon this expedition; the glory of being the first to plant the British flag on the Earth's axis; the consciousness of bequeathing an imperishable name to posterity as ranking among the first of discoverers; these, and other considerations, may be sup 1829.] Parry's Discoveries in the North Polar Seas. posed to have perpetuated an ardour, even amidst the snows and ice with which they were constantly surrounded. The three voyages of Captain Parry, however, Mr. Urban, have left the great question concerning a Northwest passage to the Pacific Ocean, and the causes of the polarity of the magnetic needle, almost as mysterious as ever. For the last two centuries and upwards the curious regards at once of our own country and of Europe have been directed, at long intervals it is true, to the accomplishment of the great objects which the expeditions of Captain Parry had in view. From the days of Willoughby, Hudson, and Baffin, in the reign of Elizabeth, to those of Cook and Phipps in the eighteenth century, little of moment was achieved. Commodore Phipps was assailed by the same insuperable obstacles which had baffled all former voyagers; that is, his ships, in certain latitudes, were hemmed in by fields of impenetrable ice. Barrington, eminent among others, has written popularly, and doubtless convincingly, to many who are fond of bold theoretic views, " Upon the possibility of approaching the North Pole." But his theories, however finely imagined, have been contradicted by facts, which must eternally take precedence of theory,-facts substantiated by the individual testimony of every navigator who has adventured into those regions. The public mind, however, at the period when the ships under Captain Ross were put in commission at the Admiralty, was flushed with the hope of ultimate success. Ross, however, effected nothing, and the observations which he made, connected with the phenomena of Physics in the Arctic regions, were nothing beyond those of every day occurrence among the Greenland whalers, scientific some of whom may almost be pronounced to be, since they number among them a Scoresby. Discovery, so far as any important question of science is involved connected with the pole's axis, remained, however, in the same state as in the days of Cook and Phipps. From the known talents and enterprise of Parry much was expected, and curiosity was again, for a considerable time, kept on the tip-toe of expectation. But thinking men have, at length, begun to 211 consider the matter, so far as the North-east and North-west passages are concerned, as finally set at rest. Much, Sir, has at various times been built upon the fact of currents setting in through Beering's Straits; and the deposits of drift wood, the produce of tropical climates and a southern ocean, stranded upon the shores of Kamtschatka, have, together with another fact of European harpoons being found sticking in whales, (as seen by Hendrick Hamel on the coast of Corea, and again by Henry Busch on that of Kamtschatka,) been thought to prove that an egress exists either to the Westward through Baffin's Bay, or to the North-eastward of the Asiatic continent. But so many unknown phenomena connected with physiology and the theory of the tides may concur in producing these effects, that it would perhaps be unsafe to assume this as the single basis of an hypothesis. That the unwearied efforts of Captain Parry and his gallant crew should have succeeded so far in sailing to the North-westward of the American continent as to explore the Copper-Mine River of Hearne, was certainly an event encouraging to the little band of intrepid adventurers by whose exerttions it was achieved. But although, at the termination of his first voyage, he expresses himself perfectly convinced of the existence of a Northwest passage, yet successive and uniform failures tended to show him the absolute impracticability of accomplishing its discovery. On his first voyage, which was unquestionably his most successful one, after exploring the seas in vain in the neighbourhood of Melville Island, and, in his own words, having "traced the ice the whole way from the longitude of 114° to that of 90°, without discovering any opening to encourage a hope of penetrating it," he may be said almost to have proved its futility. "We cannot," says the intelligent naturalist who attended the expedition performed under the auspices of the Emperor Alexander by Captain Kotzebue,"attach any belief to an open North polar sea." That field-ice is not formed in the ocean, or, in other words, that the existence of those close, compact, impenetrable wedges, which have obstructed the further progress of all our navigators in certain latitudes, indicates the existence of 212 Cook & Weddell's Discoveries in the South Polar Seas. [March, land in no very remote vicinity, is one of those points for the support of which the evidence is something equivocal. It has been the opinion of experienced navigators, that field ice is not readily formed in a deep sea. Those amazing floating masses or ice bergs, which uniformly are found about the 65th or 66th degree of the latitudes of both hemispheres, are probably detached from the rocky and projecting headlands of islands in the vicinity of the poles; but yet, the firm floorings of ice, which have been uniformly found by the ships of our discoverers, to extend in every direction for many a league as far as the eye could reach, would, in truth, appear to be formed from the sole effects of atmospherical cold upon the surface of the great ocean basin, irrespective of any other local accelerating circumstance. Reasoning from a variety of circumstances, this would appear to be the case; but it must be owned that there are, on the other hand, circumstances which appear to militate against the hypothesis, although certainly not in the Northern Hemisphere.-It is ascertained upon the suffrage of all navigators who have explored those latitudes, that the Antarctic seas of the same degree South, are much colder, than those in a corresponding latitude of the Northern Hemisphere; yet, upon the same suffrage, these scas are certainly much freer from ice. Bur ney, Phipps, Scoresby, Ross, Parry, and others, have uniformly found their vessels hemmed in with ice after advancing beyond the 74th or 75th degree of North latitude, whereas it has been ascertained that, in the same degrees South, a comparatively open sea prevails, studded with the occasional appearance of an ice-island or an iceberg. Captain Cook penetrated to 71o, a point of southern latitude much further than any former navigator had succeeded in accomplishing, and these seas, at the period of his visiting them, were certainly blocked up with the ice, insomuch that his ships were sometimes in an extremely perilous state; it even occurred in vast quantities in latitudes so low as 55° and 56°. But the enterprise of more recent times has elicited some further facts connected with the Antarctic ocean. Weddell, a trader only in furs, but a navigator with whose name enter prise must long be associated, has actually sailed to 74" 15" of south latitude, an approach to the Antarctic pole which before had scarcely entered into the calculations even of modern discoverers. So far were his ships from being arrested by the ice in this high Southern latitude-so far from having to grapple, in latitudes far within the Antarctic circle, with the formidable obstacles which have invariably impeded the ships of our Northern adventurers, that the reverse, indeed, was the fact. "In the latitude of 74° 15" south," says Weddell, (" which according to the received opinion of former navigators, that the Southern hemisphere is proportionably colder by 10'degrees of latitude than the Northern, would be equal to 84o 15′′ north,) I found a sea PERFECTLY CLEAR OF ICE." Weddell reasons from this fact to support a corollary, that field or packed ice is not generated in the ocean, remote from land. But it will be remembered, on the other hand, that in this high latitude Weddell found also a comparatively mild atmosphere, so that this circumstance alone, (extraordinary as it appears, and dependant upon physical causes utterly unknown,) might account for the absence of ice. In the latitude of 61° 30′′, about 100 miles from land," he says, "I was beset in heavy packed ice;" and the very extraordinary cir cumstance that Weddell and his fellowvoyagers sailed through a track of the Antarctic ocean of a thousand miles in extent, thickly strewed with ice-bergs and ice islands, and afterwards emerged into Antarctic seas, where navigation was almost as uninterrupted as in the temperate zones, is a problem yet to be accounted for by some future hypothesis. The fact, indeed, might be almost doubted, were it not authenticated on the testimony of two respectable navigators, (Weddell and Brisbane,) whose veracity there seems no reason to question. The hypothesis, then, by which Weddell endeavours to account for it, by assuming that this ice was formed from neighbouring islands, will scarcely be admitted by those who examine this subject. He supposes that the immense accumulation of ice, in the shape of field ice, packed ice, ice islands, and ice-bergs, through an extent of a thousand miles and upwards, which beset them in their pro 1829.] Weddell's Discoveries in the Antarctic Ocean. gress soon after attaining the latitude of 60o, proceeded entirely from the vicinity of land; but this may appear, to some, only assuming, on the supposititious basis of probability, one fact to account for another. All the land seen either by Weddell or Cook, (the two navigators who have penetrated furthest towards the south pole,) beyond 58, is that of the Sandwich islands, the South Shetlands, and South Orkneys, inconsiderable is lands, scarcely, it is to be presumed, competent to form and detach from their shores, the immense aggregation of ice for many hundreds of leagues met with in those seas, even supposing that all these lands resemble those seen by Weddell, which he describes as "without soil, reared in columns of impenetrable rock, inclosing and producing large masses of ice, even in the low latitude of 60o 45"" a Weddell, like Cook, speaks of “ range of land extending southerly, to the 73d degree." As he did not see this land, however, but merely conjectures its existence, his opinion, though demanding respect, of land being generative of all the ice which he saw, is still but hypothesis, and nothing more; which endeavours to solve the phenomenon of an open south sea beyond the latitude of 74o. But the demonstration of the fact of there being an OPEN SEA in these high southerly latitudes, is a most material point ascertained. With the ardour of discovery, which this fact is well calculated to produce, Weddell proceeds to add, "if there be no more land to the southward, the Antarctic polar sea may be found less icy than is imagined, and a clear field of discovery, even to the south pole, may therefore be anticipated." Assuming that this is much more than possible, why may not the experiment be tried? The scheme is, surely, not Utopian, even if it prove, in the result, as impracticable as men have already began to consider any further attempts to reach the north pole; since, in latitude 740 15", Weddell has proved the existence of an open polar sea, It is more than to be presumed; since Cook, who penetrated these latitudes in 1775, beyond the 71st degree, says, that all the land that he saw in his progress, was not sufficient to have formed one hundredth part of the ice which he encountered in his passage. 213 from the circumstance of being as little incumbered with ice in sailing, as though navigating in the Mediterra nean. Captain Parry, than whom no man has ever deserved better of his countrymen, performed all that could be expected from an intrepid officer of enterprise and talent, combined with an ardour for the promotion of science: he explored Lancaster Sound, and, having at length discovered an inlet where none was previously supposed to exist, arrived at Winter Harbour on Melville Island; here, however, all his exertions terminate, and, upon his own report, seem likely to terminate. But here is a man, Mr. Urban, who with two frail barks, the smallest scarcely in burden superior to a Thames lighter, has actually performed a voyage, more bold and enterprising, if not more perilous, than any which has distinguished the annals of navigation since the days of Columbus*. It would be a circumstance much to be regretted, if the extraordinary fact of the existence of an open sea to the south, (for upon this point, Sir, there seems no more reason for questioning Weddell's authority, than in questioning that of Captain Parry as to the fact of the North-West Maguetic Pole, a point in geography, which seems to run directly counter to all the pre-established principles of this science,) should not be made the basis of further discovery. In the voyages of Captain Parry, several of those phenomena connected with science were observed, which, on his known character, and that of the eminent scientific men who were associated with him, we receive as established facts. The existence of a North-west magnetic pole, remote from the position of the earth's axis, is a phenomenon connected with our globe, however, which academicians never dreamed of; and St. Pierre or Buffou would have felt puzzled had this enigmatical truth been opposed to their calculations. Upon other phenomena connected *Cook remarks, on the navigation of these latitudes: "The risque in exploring these icy and unknown seas is very great; so much so, that I do not think any man will sail to more southern latitudes than I have done. Consequently, the lands which lie about the Antarctic Pole," (for he still favoured this theory,)" must remain undiscovered." |