4 INTRODUCTION. Chap.I. 



doubt that he might have reached the shore, had 

 he but a justifiable motive for navigating an un- 

 known sea at so late a season of the year." This 

 account was fully confirmed by intelligence received 

 at Copenhagen from Iceland in the year 1816, that 

 the ice had broken loose from the opposite coast of 

 Greenland, and floated away to the southward, after 

 surrounding the shores of Iceland, and filling all 

 the bays and creeks of that island ; and that this 

 afflicting visitation was repeated in 1817 — circum- 

 stances hitherto unknown to the oldest inhabitant. 



About the same time, the whale ships that fre- 

 quented the fishery in Davis's Straits, and the Hud- 

 son's Bay traders, experienced an unusual number 

 of icebergs and large floes of ice drifting to the 

 southward down the straits and along the coast of 

 Labrador, and past Newfoundland ; yet as to a cer- 

 tain extent those masses of ice were of frequent oc- 

 currence in these quarters, and occasionally met 

 with in the Atlantic, it was those from the eastward 

 that attracted particular notice. 



Whatever the cause may have been for the dis- 

 ruption of this immense barrier of ice from the 

 eastern coast of Greenland, whether by its own 

 weight after centuries of accumulation, or from the 

 partial disruption of the coast itself, the fact is un- 

 questionable ; and the notoriety of it given in the 

 several journals of Europe, and more especially in 

 those of England, corroborated by various private 



