ELISHA KENT KANE. 113 



mass with stones and moss. We afterward found that the 

 Esquimaux had hunted around this inlet; but the cache, 

 which we had thus secured as our own resort in case of 

 emergency, escaped detection. No one having yet visited 

 this coast, I landed on the most prominent western headland 

 of a group of small islands, the Littleton Islands of Ingle- 

 field, and erected there a flagstaff and beacon; near this 

 beacon, according to preconcerted arrangement, we deposited 

 official despatches and our private letters of farewell. My 

 first design in entering the pack was to force a passage to the 

 north; but, after reaching latitude 78 45' N., we found the 

 ice hugging the American shore, and extending in a drifting 

 mass completely across the channel. This ice gradually bore 

 down upon us, and we were forced to seek the comparatively 

 open spaces of the Greenland coast. Still, we should have 

 inevitably been beset and swept to the south, but for a small 

 landlocked bay under whose cliffs we found a temporary asylum. 

 We named it Refuge Inlet : it carries fifty fathoms of water 

 within a biscuit-toss of its northern headland, and, but for a 

 glacier which occupies its inner curve, would prove an eligible 

 winter harbor. 



"We were detained in this helpless situation three valuable 

 days, the pack outside hardly admitting the passage of a boat. 

 But, on the 13th, fearing lest the rapidly-advancing cold might 

 prevent our penetrating farther, we warped out into the drift, 

 and fastened to a grounded berg. That the Department may 

 correctly apprehend our subsequent movements, it is necessary 

 to describe some features peculiar to our position. The coast 

 trended to the N.N.E. It was metarnorphic in structure, 

 rising in abrupt precipitous cliffs of basaltic greenstone from 

 eight hundred to twelve hundred feet in perpendicular height. 

 The shore at the base of this wall was invested by a per- 

 manent belt of ice, measuring from three to forty yards in 

 H 10* 



