begin with, but farther
north it became so narrow that we could often see the coast when we
put about at the edge of the ice. At this time we passed many unknown
islands and groups of islands. There was evidently plenty of occupation
here, for any one who could spare the time, in making a chart of the
coast. Our voyage had another aim, and all that we could do was to
make a few occasional measurements of the same nature as Nordenskioeld
had made before us.

On August 25th I noted in my diary that in the afternoon we had seven
islands in sight. They were higher than those we had seen before,
and consisted of precipitous hills. There were also small glaciers
or snow-fields, and the rock formation showed clear traces of erosion
by ice or snow, this being especially the case on the largest island,
where there were even small valleys, partially filled with snow.

This is the record of August 26th: "Many new islands in various
directions. There are here," the diary continues, "any number of
unknown islands, so many that one's head gets confused in trying to
keep account of them all. In the morning we passed a very rocky one,
and beyond it I saw two others. After them land or islands farther
to the north and still more to the northeast. We had to go out of our
course in the afternoon, because we dared not pass between two large
islands on account of possible shoals. The islands were round in form,
like those we had seen farther back, but were of a good height. Now
we held east again, with four biggish islands and two islets in the
offing. On our other side we presently had a line of flat islands
with steep shores. The channel was far from safe here. In the evening
we suddenly noticed large stones standing up above the water among
some ice-floes close on our port bow, and on our starboard beam was a
shoal with stranded ice-floes. We sounded, but found over 21 fathoms
of water."

I think this will suffice to give an idea of the nature of this
coast. Its belt of skerries, though it certainly cannot be classed
with the Norwegian one, is yet of the kind that it would be difficult
to find except off glacier-formed coasts. This tends to strengthen
the opinion I had formed of there having been a glacial period in the
earlier history of this part of the world also. Of the coast itself,
we unfortunately saw too little at any distance from which we could
get an accurate idea of its formation and nature. We could not keep
near land, p