HISTORY OF THE SEA. 



was taken from the tent to the sledge. He was conveyed back 

 to the brig, and from the 14th to the 20th lay hovering between 

 life and death. Short as the expedition was, however, several 

 remarkable discoveries were made. "Tennyson's Monument" 

 was the name given to a solitary column of greenstone, four 

 hundred and eighty feet high, rising from a pedestal two hun- 

 dred and eighty feet high,— both as sharply finished as if they 

 had been cast for the Place Vendome. But the most wonderful 

 feature was the Great Glacier of Humboldt, — an ice-ocean of 

 boundless dimensions, in which a complete substitution had been 

 effected of ice for water. "Imagine," Kane writes, " the centre 

 of the continent of Greenland occupied through nearly its whole 

 extent by a deep unbroken sea of ice that gathers perennial 

 increase from the water-shed of vast snow-covered mountains 

 and all the precipitations of the atmosphere upon its own sur- 

 face. Imagine this moving onward like a great glacial river, 

 seeking outlets at every fiord and valley, rolling icy cataracts 

 into the Atlantic and Greenland seas, and, having at last 

 reached the northern limit of the land that has borne it up, 

 pouring out a mighty frozen torrent into unknown Arctic 

 space. . . . Here was a plastic, moving, semi-solid mass-, oblite- 

 rating life, swallowing rocks and islands, and ploughing its way 

 with irresistible march through the crust of an investing sea." 



Other sledge-parties were from time to time sent out. One 

 of six men left the brig on the 3d of June, keeping to the north 

 and reaching Humboldt Glacier on the 15th. Four returned to 

 the ship on the 27th, one of them entirely blind. Hans Christian 

 and William Morton kept on, and finally, in north latitude 81° 

 22', sighted open water, — an open Polar sea. To the cape at 

 which the land terminated Morton gave the name of Cape Con- 

 stitution. A lofty peak on the opposite side of the channel, but 

 a little farther to the north, and the most remote northern land 

 known upon our globe, was named Mount Edward Parry, from 

 the great pioneer of Arctic travel. 



