expectations, and conclusions of so
many cautious governments, merchants eager for gain, and learned
cosmographers, from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and
which even to the geographer and man of science of the present has
been a _mare incognitum_ down to the most recent date. It is just
this sea that formed the turning-point of all the foregoing
north-east voyages, from Burrough's to Wood's and Vlamingh's, and it
may therefore not be out of place here, before I proceed further
with the sketch of our journey, to give some account of its
surroundings and hydrography.

If attention be not fixed on the little new-discovered island,
"Ensamheten," the Kara Sea is open to the north-east. It is bounded on
the west by Novaya Zemlya and Vaygats Island; on the east by the Taimur
peninsula, the land between the Pjaesina and the Yenisej and Yalmal; and
on the south by the northernmost portion of European Russia, Beli
Ostrov, and the large estuaries of the Obi and the Yenisej. The coast
between Cape Chelyuskin and the Yenisej consists of low rocky heights,
formed of crystalline schists, gneiss, and eruptive rocks, from the
Yenisej to beyond the most southerly part of the Kara Sea, of the Gyda
and Yalmal _tundras_ beds of sand of equal fineness, and at Vaygats
Island and the southern part of Novaya Zemlya (to 73 deg. N.L.) of limestone
and beds of schist[88] which slope towards the sea with a steep
escarpment three to fifteen metres high, but form, besides, the
substratum of a level plain, full of small collections of water which is
quite free of snow in summer. North of 73 deg. again the west coast of the
Kara Sea is occupied by mountains, which near Matotschkin are very high,
and distributed in a confused mass of isolated peaks, but farther north
become lower and take the form of a plateau.

Where the mountains begin, some few or only very inconsiderable
collections of ice are to be seen, and the very mountain tops are in
summer free of snow. Farther north glaciers commence, which increase
towards the north in number and size, till they finally form a
continuous inland-ice which, like those of Greenland and
Spitzbergen, with its enormous ice-sheet, levels mountains and
valleys, and converts the interior of the land into a wilderness of
ice, and forms one of the fields for the formation of icebergs or
glacier-iceblocks, which play so great a _role_ in sketches of
voyages in the Polar seas. I have not myself visited the