42 THE SUB -GLACIAL STREAM. 



Here are generally swarms of Entomostraca and other marine 

 animals, which attract flights of gulls, which are ever noisily fight- 

 ing for their food in the vicinity of such places. 



We lived for the greater portion of a whole summer at Jakohshavn, 

 a little Danish post, 69° 13' n., close to which is the great Jakohshavn 

 ice-fjord, which annually pours an immense quantity of icebergs into 

 Disco Bay. In early times this inlet was quite open for boats ; and 

 Nunatak (a word meaning a " land surrounded by ice ") was once an 

 Eskimo settlement. There is (or was in 1867 ) an old man (Manyus) 

 living at Jakohshavn whose grandfather was horn there. The Tessi- 

 usak, an inlet of Jakohshavn ice-fjord, could then be entered by 

 boats. Now-a-days Jakohshavn ice-fjord is so choked up by bergs 

 that it is impossible to go up in boats, and such a thing is never 

 thought of. The Tessiusak must be reached by a laboriousjourney 

 over land ; and Nunatak is now only an island surrounded by the in- 

 land ice, at a distance — a place where no man lives, or has, in the 

 memory of any one now living, reached. Both along its shore and 

 that of the main fjord are numerous remains of dwellings long unin- 

 habitable, owing to it being now impossible to gain access to them by 

 sea. The inland ice is now encroaching on the land. At one time it 

 seems to have covered many portions of the country now bare. 

 In a few places glaciers have disappeared. I believe that this has 

 been mainly owing to the inlet having got shoaled by the deposit of 

 glacier-clay through the rivers already described. I have little 

 doubt that — Graah's dictum 1 to the contrary, notwithstanding — a 

 great inlet once stretched across Greenland not far from this place, 

 as represented on the old maps, but that it has also now got choked 

 up with consolidated bergs. In former times the natives used to 

 describe pieces of timber drifting out of this inlet, and even tell of 

 people coming across ; and stories yet linger among them of the 

 former occurrence of such proofs of the openness of the inlet. 2 



1 ' Reise til Ostkysten af Gronland,' 1832, and translated by Macdougall, 1837. 



2 " There is another bay which I could not investigate to its bottom on account 

 of the immense masses of ice that were setting out, and which is called by the 

 natives Ikak and Ikarsek {Sound). It runs between Karsarsuk and Kingatok, 

 and its length is from Karsarsuk to its end about 15 German miles ; it is situated 

 in 72 D 48', and the sea, at its entrance, is covered by numerous islands. All the 

 natives living in this neighbourhood assured me unanimously that there had been 

 a passage formerly to the other side of the land. They told me also that they 

 were afraid that, with heavy north-easterly gales, the ice would go off again, and 

 that the people from the other side, whom they describe as barbarians, would 

 come over and kill them. They stated that, from time to time, carcasses of 

 whales, which had been killed on the other side, pieces of wood, and fragments of 

 utensils, were to be seen driving out of this bay." — Giesecke in Appendix to 

 Scoresby's ' Journal of a Voyage to the Northern Whalefishery,' p. 468. Owing to 

 an erroneous note and reference obtained at secondhand, I made it appear, in the 



