Democratic Sentinel, Volume 9, Number 47, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 December 1885 — UNITED STATES TERRITORY. [ARTICLE]

UNITED STATES TERRITORY.

The Array of Foreign Possessions Which Are Ours by Bight of Discovery. From the Detroit Free Press. Thousands upon thousands of the square miles of territory dominated by the Lion and Bear are entirely uninhabitable, including as they do most of the north polar regions of both hemispheres and arid deserts and steppes in other dimes. The United {states is nearly the equal of either empire in the extent of habitable area over which the spangled banner floats. And she, too, has great, almost limitless, areas of ice-covered continents and islands which are never counted as part bf her landed possessions, and yet which she may quite as justly be credited with as Russia or England, with certain of their uninhabitable possessions in frozen zones. Eew geographies show on their maps these foreign possessions of the United States, and a brief reference to them is likely to surprise the citizen who has been unaccustomed to contemplate the possessions of the American Union as hedged in by the bounds of her States and Territories. But she can really make quite an array of foreign possessions, which are j hers by the divine right of discovery, i which has given to most of the powers J of the earth their foreign dependencies. ; The voyages of Kane and subsequent American explorer's thus gave the United States the whole northwestern portion of Greenland as far as discovered, and Grinnell Land on the opposite shore of Smith Sound. The famous statisticans, Behm and Wagner, give the area of the Greenland stretch of ice and glacier, known as Lincoln and Grant Land (from 78 degrees to 83 degrees'* as 192,700 kilometers, and of Grinnell Land at 5,650. Wrangel Land has 66,100 kilometers. There are no estimates even of the area of the various islands north of Siberia discovered by the Jeannette, and it is doubtful if they do not belong to the New Siberian group, classed for many years as belonging to Russia. The great American exploring expedition of 1840 discovered most of the vast ice-hedged coast of the Antarctic Continent, which has been roughly estimated to extend over 2,000,000 square miles. Some of the lands discovered by Commodore Wilkes have thus been estimated, the figures being in kilometers: Graham’s Land, 100,000; Alexandra, 30,000; Wilkes, 165,000; Enderby, 28,000. The following islands and groups in Polynesia belong to the United States: Barber, Palmyra, Prospect, Fanning, Christmas, Starbuck, Penrhyn, SwauPitt, McKean, Hull, and Enderby. The United States also owns the Bay of Pago Pago in the Samoan islands. There are no obtainable statistics of any of these “foreign possessions,” and the ordinary American citizen is quite content to think of the Union as embracing only the sweep of land from ocean to oceau and lakes to gulf, not even counting in frozen Alaska, and the girdle of Aleutian islands that span the Pacific Ocean. If other countries were hut granted by ge ographers their equally “important” possessions, popular knowledge of re-' spective areas would ba greatly increased.