Arctic current brings masses of ice from the Spitzbergen seas, at seasons completely filling up the fiords, harbours, and indentations on the south coast of Greenland, and often in a pack extending for 100 miles southward of Cape Farewell. A whole fleet of whale ships were, in June, 1777, beset in lat. 76° north, and nearly in the meridian of Spitzbergen, and were drifted southward by the current, until one by one they were crushed. The last and only surviving ship arrived in October, in latitude 61°, in Davis' Straits, and the crew escaped to the land near Cape Farewell, 116 in number, out of 450 men, who only a few short months before were looking forward to a happy return to their homes.
Late in the summer, the weather mild and the nights short, and with steam-power at command, we had no occasion for much anxiety about this ice, but determined to push direct for Frederickshaab, and with a fair wind we steered to pass within sight of Cape Farewell. On the night of the 13th July, we were becalmed, and on the following day we steamed slowly to the north-westward, amidst countless numbers of sea-birds. At daylight the coast of Greenland showed out in all its wild magnificence. Cape Farewell bore north 45° east, distant twenty-five miles; but from the peculiar formation of the adjacent land the actual cape is difficult to distinguish. Hitherto we had not seen the Spitzbergen ice; and we hoped that we might follow the coast round to Frederickshaab without obstruction; but in the course of the forenoon a sudden fall in the temperature of the sea, with a haziness in the atmosphere to the northward, indicated our approach to ice. Straggling and water-washed pieces were soon met with, and in the evening the distant murmur of the sea, as it broke upon the edge of ice-floes, warned us of our being near to a pack.
We made but little progress during the two following days, the winds being from the northward, and a dense ice-fog rolling down from the pack. On the 17th, Frederickshaab bearing N. 28° E., distant fifty miles, we determined upon endeavouring to push through the pack; and after being at times completely beset, and with a constant thick fog, we escaped into the inshore water, with a few slight rubs, having been carried by the drifting body of ice nearly thirty miles northward of our port. We sounded upon the Tallert bank; and on the fog lifting, the great glacier of Frederickshaab was revealed to us, and we bore away for the harbour, which we reached on the 19th. We had a little difficulty at first in making out the entrance to Frederickshaab; but a native kyack coming out to meet us, we were soon escorted in by a fleet of these small canoes.
We found the natives busily breaking up the wreck of an abandoned timber ship, which had drifted to their harbour, with a few of the lower tiers of cargo still in her; and another wreck was said to be lying upon the Tallert bank—the same wreck, it is said, which Prince Napoleon had boarded on his homeward passage in the Atlantic the previous year, and had left a record on her to prove the currents round Cape Farewell.
The Danish authorities, ever ready to assist vessels entering the Greenland ports, supplied us with everything in their power, and after purchas-
