Discover II of the Malaspina Glacier. 71 



explorations, to some of the conclusions reached in this connec- 

 tion, as will appear in the chapter devoted to geology and glaciers. 

 x\ description of the St. Elias region in the Pacific Coast Pilot 

 supplements the paper in the coast survey report for 1875. This 

 is an exhaustive compilation from all available sources of infor- 

 mation interesting to navigators. It contains, besides, a valuable 

 summary of what was knoAvn at the time of its publication con- 

 cerning the history and physical features of the country to which 

 it relates. In this publication the true character of the Malaspina 

 glacier was first recorded and its name proposed. The descrip- 

 tion is as follows : 



" At Point Manby and eastward to the Kwik river the shore was bor- 

 dered by trees, apparently willows and alders, with a somewhat denser 

 belt a little farther back. Behind this rises a blnff or bank of high laiidj 

 as described by various navigators. About the vicinity of Tebienkoif 's 

 Nearer Point the trees cease, but begin again near the river. The bluff or 

 table-land behind rises higher than the river valley and completely hides 

 it from the southward, and is in summer bare of vegetation (except a feAV 

 rare patches on its face) and apparently is composed of glacial debris, much 

 of which is of a reddish color. In May, 1874, when observed by the U. S. 

 Coast Survey party of that year, the extensive flattened top of this table- 

 land or plateau was covered with a smooth and even sheet of pure white 

 snow. In the latter part of June, 1880, however, this snow had melted, 

 and for the first time the real and most extraordinary character of this 

 plateau was revealed. Within the beach and extending in a northwesterly 

 direction to the valley behind it, at the foot of the St. Elias Alps an unde- 

 termined distance, this plateau, or a large part of it, is one great field of 

 buried ice. Almost everywhere nothing is visible but bowlders, dirt and 

 gravel ; but at the time mentioned, back of the bight between Point 

 Manby and Nearer Point, for a space of several square miles the coverlid 

 of dirt had fallen in, owing to the melting of the ice beneath, and revealed 

 a surface of broken pinnacles of ice, each crowned by a patch of dirt, stand- 

 ing close to one another like a forest of prisms, these decreasing in height 

 from the summit of the plateau gradually in a sort of semicircular sweep 

 toward the beach, near which, however, the dirt and debris again predom- 

 inate, forming a sort of terminal moraine to this immense, buried, immov- 

 able glacier, for it is nothing else. Trains of large bowlders were visible 

 here and there, and the general trend of the glacier seemed to be north- 

 west and southeast. 



" Between Disenchantment bay and the foot of Mount St. Elias, on the 

 flanks of the Alps, seventeen glaciers were counted, of which about ten 

 were behind this plateau, but none are of very large size, and the sum 

 total of them all seemed far too little to supply the waste of the plateau if 

 it were to possess motion. The lower ends of these small glaciers come 



