GREENLAND BY THE POLAR SEA 



have often described ; on the other Peary Land, which I knew 

 from Independence Fjord, but which here, towards the ice- 

 bound ocean, had quite another winter character than it has in 

 its eastern regions during the same season. The land was every- 

 where covered with snow, with glaciers on all tops, and every 

 hope of rinding hunting-ground, corresponding in conditions to 

 Poppy Valley on Adam Biering Land, was torn up by the root. 



By the foot of Thule Mountain we had found the remains of 

 very old musk-ox bones on some small grassy slopes ; but they 

 crumbled with age and gave us no encouragement to try our 

 fortune across the surrounding coastland. 



Lockwood, who gave this fjord its name, passed so far out 

 at sea because of the travelling conditions that he got no survey 

 of de Long Fjord, which he viewed as a single great fjord 

 cleaving its way in between the mountains of Peary Land. 

 Later on, Robert Peary passed by almost the same route, and, 

 as also his observations gave no details of the fjord complex, 

 the theory has arisen that de Long Fjord probably continued 

 so far inland that it, as a huge channel, combined itself with 

 the assumed Peary Channel approximately midway between 

 Nordenskjold Fjord and Independence Fjord. After the whole 

 of the big Peary Channel had been reduced to a myth, partly 

 by the first, partly by the second Thule Expedition, there was 

 still the possibility that de Long Fjord — at any rate in contra- 

 distinction to the quite small Nordenskjold Fjord — might pene- 

 trate so deeply as to create around its head a stretch of country 

 of the same kind as that which in 1912 I had found by the head 

 of Independence Fjord. If this were the case, the distance 

 from here to Poppy Valley in Adam Biering Land, so prolific 

 in game, was so short that with advantage one might have 

 founded a station for rest and recreation, which would have 

 been of especial benefit to the botanist. 



These reasons had, on the 31st of May, led to the division 

 of the expedition — a division which in itself did not seem very 

 risky, as we knew that, in any case, it would be possible to save 

 oneself by a comparatively speedy journey on good ice down 

 to the neighbourhood of Cape Morris Jesup, where the 

 154 



