d when we halted it was upon some green-clothed cape near a
stream of water from the ice-fields above. Our sportsmen would clamber
up the cliffs and come back laden with little auks; great generous fires
of turf, that cost nothing but the toil of gathering, blazed merrily;
and our happy oarsmen, after a long day's work, made easy by the promise
ahead, would stretch themselves in the sunshine and dream happily away
till called to the morning wash and prayers. We enjoyed it the more, for
we all of us knew that it could not last.

This coast must have been a favorite region at one time with the
natives,--a sort of Esquimaux Eden. We seldom encamped without finding
the ruins of their habitations, for the most part overgrown with
lichens, and exhibiting every mark of antiquity. One of these, in
latitude 76 deg. 20', was once, no doubt, an extensive village. Cairns for
the safe deposit of meat stood in long lines, six or eight in a group;
and the huts, built of large rocks, faced each other, as if disposed on
a street or avenue.

The same reasoning which deduces the subsidence of the coast from the
actual base of the Temple of Serapis, proves that the depression of the
Greenland coast, which I had detected as far north as Upernavik, is also
going on up here. Some of these huts were washed by the sea or torn away
by the ice that had descended with the tides. The turf, too, a
representative of very ancient growth, was cut off even with the water's
edge, giving sections two feet thick. I had not noticed before such
unmistakable evidence of the depression of this coast: its converse
elevation I had observed to the north of Wostenholme Sound. The axis of
oscillation must be somewhere in the neighborhood of latitude 77 deg.

We reached Cape York on the 21st, after a tortuous but romantic travel
through a misty atmosphere. Here the land-leads ceased, with the
exception of some small and scarcely practicable openings near the
shore, which were evidently owing to the wind that prevailed for the
time. Everything bore proof of the late development of the season. The
red snow was a fortnight behind its time. A fast floe extended with
numerous tongues far out to the south and east. The only question was
between a new rest, for the shore-ices to open, or a desertion of the
coast and a trial of the open water to the west.

[They had at this time but thirty-six pounds of food per man
and fuel enough to last them three weeks.]