"And now, having proven this much, I shall return to Boston, repair the schooner, get a small steamer, and come back as early next spring as I can. The schooner I will leave at Port Foulke; and, remaining there only long enough to see the machinery set in motion for starting the hunt, collecting the Esquimaux, and establishing the discipline of the colony, I will seek Cape Isabella, and thence steam northward by the route already designated. If I cannot reach the open sea in one season, I may the next; in any event, I shall always have at Port Foulke a productive source of food and furs, and a vessel to carry them to Cape Isabella, upon which I may fall back; and if I need dogs, they will be reared at the colony in any numbers that may be required. Besides, if in this exploration I should be deficient in means, and the expedition should be hereafter left entirely to its own resources, a sufficient profit may be made out of the colony in oils, furs, walrus ivory, eider down, etc., to pay at least a very considerable proportion of the wages of the employés, beside subsisting them. The whole region around Port Foulke is teeming with animal life, and one good hunter could feed twenty mouths. Both my winter and summer experience proves the correctness of this opinion. The sea abounds in walrus, seal, narwhal, and white whale; the land in reindeer and foxes; the islands and the cliffs, in summer, swarm with birds; and the ice is the roaming-ground of the bears."
Thus much for the future; let me now come back to the present.
Inglefield has very correctly exhibited the expansion of Smith Sound, as I have had most excellent opportunity for observing, both in my passage over, and from Cape Isabella. He has placed some of the capes too far north, and his local attraction, probably, has caused a slight error in the axis of the Sound. His Victoria Head is the eastern cape of my Bache Island, and his Cape Albert is the eastern cape of Henry Island.
CAPE ISABELLA.
The view up the Sound from Cape Isabella was truly magnificent. The dark, wall-sided coast, rendered more dark in appearance by the contrast with the immense cloak of whiteness that lay above it, was relieved by numerous glaciers, which pour through the valleys to the sea. The mer de glace is of great extent, and, rising much more rapidly and being more broken, gives a picturesque effect not belonging to the Greenland side, and adds much to the grandeur of its appearance. The mountains are lofty, and are everywhere uniformly covered with ice and snow; and the glacier streams which descend to the sea convey the impression almost as if there had once been a vast lake on the mountain-top, from which the overflowing waters, pouring down every valley, had been suddenly congealed.
Off Cape Sabine there are two islands, which I name Brevoort and Stalknecht; and another, midway between them and Wade Point, which I name Leconte. A deep inlet running parallel with the Cadogen Inlet of Captain Inglefield, fringed all around with glaciers set into the dark rocks like brilliants into a groundwork of jet, opens between Wade Point and Cape Isabella. I leave the naming of it until I see whether Inglefield has not a bay set down there, as I have not with me the official map of his explorations.
Cape Isabella is a ragged mass of Plutonic rock, and looks as if it had been turned out of Nature's laboratory unfinished and pushed up from the sea while it was yet hot, to crack and crumble to pieces in the cold air. Its surface is barren to the last degree; immense chasms or cañons cross it in all directions, in which there was not the remotest trace of vegetation,—great yawning depths with jagged beds and crumbling sides,—sunless as the Cimerian caverns of Avernus.
A "DIAMOND OF THE DESERT."
As I clambered over crag after crag, I thought that I had not in the summer-time anywhere lit upon a place so devoid of life; but, as if to compensate for this barrenness, or through some freak of Nature, a charming cup-like valley nestled among the forbidding hills, and upon it I stumbled suddenly. Balboa could hardly have been more surprised when he climbed the hills of Darien and first saw the Pacific Ocean. It was truly a "Diamond of the Desert," and the little hermitage in the wilderness of Engadi was not a more pleasing sight to the Knight of the Couchant Leopard than was this to me.
The few hardy plants which I had found in all other localities had failed to find a lodgment upon the craggy slopes of this rough cape, and the rocks stood up in naked barrenness, without the little fringe of vegetation which usually girdles them elsewhere; but down into this valley the seeds of life had been wafted; the grass and moss clothed it with green; and the poppies and buttercups sprinkled it over with leaves of gold. In its centre reposed a little sparkling lake, like a diamond in an emerald setting—a little "charmed sea," truly,