346 APPENDIX. No. XVI. 



No. XVI. 



REPORT ON PETERMANN GLACIER. 

 BY RICHARD W. COPPINGEE, M.D., 



Staff Surgeon Royal Navy. 



THE party under the command of Lieutenant Fulford, to 

 which I was attached, started from Thank God Harbour on 

 May 22, 1876, and on the second journey rounded Cape 

 Tyson and entered the fiord. On leaving Cape Tyson and 

 Offley Island, which were considered to mark the north- 

 east side of the mouth of the fiord, we saw some miles before 

 us an abrupt, precipitous wall of ice, extending in an ir- 

 regularly wavy but unbroken line from shore to shore. 

 When we had got about ten miles S.S.E. of Offley Island, the 

 young floe on which we had been travelling terminated, and 

 was connected through the intervention of a hummock hedge 

 with an old glassy-hummocked floe, over which we proceeded 

 until we reached the margin of the heavy ice above mentioned. 

 There at eleven and a half miles S.S.E. of Offley Island, 

 and about 1,000 yards from the high precipitous cliffs which 

 form the north-east shore of the fiord, we made our second 

 camp. The old floe on which we camped was rigidly con- 

 nected with the heavy ice ; in some places the precipitous 

 and cleanly- fractured face of the latter meeting the old floe 

 at a sharp right angle. On examining the surface of the 

 heavy ice, we found it to be totally different in character from 

 that of a floe. It was of glassy smoothness, and so slippery 



