one hundred and
fifty to two hundred feet above the sea, judging from the height
of the Griper's masts when near it.

The vegetation was tolerably luxuriant in some places upon the low
land which borders the sea, consisting principally of the
dwarf-willow, sorrel, saxifrage, and poppy, with a few roots of
scurvy-grass. There was still a great deal of snow remaining even
on the lower parts of the land, on which were numerous ponds of
water; on one of these, a pair of young red-throated divers, which
could not rise, were killed; and two flocks of geese, one of them
consisting of not less than sixty or seventy, were seen by Mr.
Hooper, who described them as being very tame, running along the
beach before our people, without rising, for a considerable
distance. Some glaucous gulls and plovers were killed, and we met
with several tracks of bears, deers, wolves, foxes, and mice. The
coxswain of the boat found upon the beach part of the bone of a
whale, which had been cut at one end by a sharp instrument like an
axe, with a quantity of chips lying about it, affording undoubted
proof of this part of the coast having been visited at no distant
period by Esquimaux; it is more than probable, indeed, that they
may inhabit the shores of this inlet, which time would not now
permit us to examine. More than sixty icebergs of very large
dimensions were in sight from the top of the hill, together with a
number of extensive floes to the northeast and southeast, at the
distance of four or five leagues from the land.

While occupied in attending to the soundings, soon after noon, our
astonishment may readily be conceived on seeing from the masthead
a ship, and soon after two others, in the offing, which were soon
ascertained to be whalers, standing in towards the land. They
afterward bore up to the northward along the edge of the ice which
intervened between us, and we lost sight of them at night. It was
now evident that this coast, which had hitherto been considered by
the whalers as wholly inaccessible in so high a latitude, had
become a fishing station, like that on the opposite or Greenland
shore; and the circumstance of our meeting so few whales in Sir
James Lancaster's Sound this season was at once accounted for by
supposing, what, indeed, we afterward found to be the case, that
the fishing-ships had been there before us, and had, for a time,
scared them from that ground.

It was so squally on the morning of the 5th that we coul