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That the sale of the 3rd of December should take place in the Auction Mart might appear strange. As a rule, only furniture, instruments, pictures, and objects of art were sold there. But for this curious departure from the ordinary practice in the sale of land a precedent was discoverable, as already a portion of our planet had changed hands under the hammer.
A few years before, at San Francisco, in California, an island in the Pacific Ocean, Spencer Island, had been sold to the rich W. W. Kolderup, when he outbid J. R. Taskinar, of Stockton.[1] Spencer Island was habitable; it was only a few degrees from the Californian coast; it had forests, watercourses, a fertile soil, and fields and prairies fit for cultivation; it was not an indefinite region, covered perhaps with sea and perpetual ice, which probably no one would ever occupy. For Spencer Island four hundred thousand dollars had been paid; for the polar territories it was not to be expected that anything like that amount would be forthcoming.