266 cook's voyage to april, 



therefore, to be considered as nothing more than stu- 

 pendous rocks, of a whitish or grey cast, where they 

 have been exposed to the weather; but, when broken, 

 they appeared to be of a blueish-grey colour, like 

 that universal sort which were found at Kerguelen's 

 Land. The rocky shores are a continued mass of 

 this ; and the little coves in the Sound have breaches 

 composed of fragments of it, with a few other peb- 

 bles. All these coves are furnished with a great 

 quantity of fallen wood lying in them, which is car- 

 ried in by the tide ; and with rills of fresh water, 

 sufficient for the use of a ship, which seem to be 

 supplied entirely from the rains and fogs that hover 

 about the tops of the hills. For few springs can be 

 expected in so rocky a country, and the fresh water 

 found farther up the Sound most probably arose from 

 the melting of the snow ; there being no room to 

 suspect that any large river falls into the Sound, 

 either from strangers coming down it, or from any 

 other circumstance. The water of these rills is per- 

 fectly clear, and dissolves soap easily. 



The weather, during our stay, corresponded pretty 

 nearly with that which we had experienced off the 

 coast. That is, when the wind was any where be- 

 tween north and west, the weather was fine and clear; 

 but if to the southward of west, hazy with rain. The 

 climate, as far as we had any experience of it, is in- 

 finitely milder than that on the east coast of Ame- 

 rica, under the same parallel of latitude. The mer- 

 cury in the thermometer never, even in the night, 

 fell lower than 42 ; and very often, in the day, it 

 rose to 60. No such thing as frost was perceived in 

 any of the low ground ; on the contrary, vegetation 

 had made a considerable progress ; for I met with 

 grass that was already above a foot long. 



The trees which chiefly compose the woods, are 

 the Canadian pine, white cypress, cypressus thyoides, 

 the wild pine, with two or three other sorts of pine 

 less common. The first two make up almost two 



