90 Our North Land. 



evening, the time being occupied in putting up the four buildings 

 required for the work of the station, in making a triangulation 

 survey of the harbour, and by inland excursions from which we 

 learned something of the character of the country. We had so much 

 bad weather that but little progress was made in the latter. On 

 Tuesday, and again on Thursday, I went inland with the Expedition 

 geologist, some seven or eight miles each day, but we saw little of 

 interest except native villages or Eskimo settlements of three or 

 four huts each, in the shelter of the deep gulches which abound 

 everywhere on the coast. There is no way to get inland except on 

 foot, and the walking is exceedingly bad. It is a continual climbing 

 up and down over hills of barren gneiss rocks, very sharp and un- 

 even, and across ravines in which running streams have to be forded 

 by jumping from rock to rock, an operation frequently attended by 

 the accident of slipping into the cold water. The coast is every- 

 where very much broken, exceedingly uneven, severely barren, and 

 cut into innumerable islands and headlands by gulches, inlets, bays, 

 coves, etc., into which the tidal wave comes and goes at the rate of 

 from five to eight miles an hour according to location. So much is 

 this the case that an attempt to follow any one direction inland will 

 be frustrated before half a mile is travelled by a gulch, perhaps 

 over a hundred feet deep, or a winding arm of the sea, with steep 

 precipitous rocky shores, so that a decided change in the direction 

 will have to be made. There is often considerable danger attending 

 this travel on foot among the rocks. In attempting to descend the 

 cliffs to the bottom of one of these gulches one is often compelled to 

 return by precipices which forbid further progress ; and in the 

 effort to make another course it is quite possible to lose one's way 

 and become, as it were, a prisoner in the rocks, so that the traveller 

 is required to be on the look-out constantly. 



The " American-man " is an absolute necessity to the traveller 

 among the rock-hills of the north, as also to the fishermen and 

 others who navigate the coasts. It may be that all do not under- 

 stand the meaning of this term. An " American-man " is simply a 

 few boulders piled one upon the other on some hill-top, so as to 

 attract the eye and serve as a guide. There is such a sameness in 



