206 
WILLIAM SCOKESBY, THE YOUisGER. 
In 1819 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edin- 
burgh. The greater part of the same year was spent in superin- 
tending the building of the " Baffin," a vessel designed by a Liverpool 
firm for his use in the whale lishery, and esteemed at the time one of 
the finest in the service. While sailing in her, Mr. Scoresby made 
observations of " singular appearances presented by the coast line 
and also by fleets of ships and masses of ice, under circumstances of 
remarkable atmospheric reflections and refractions." One of these, 
new to the world, was the ice-blink, a peculiar reflection, or rather 
various reflections, in the heavens, revealing the existence, and to a 
large extent the character, of the ice-fields on the surface of the sea. 
Scoresby the father, and Scoresby the son, suggested to the 
Board of Trade, in the year 1821, a thorough search and exploration 
of the coasts on the south and east of Spitzbergen, for the discovery 
of some more abundant fishing station, and the greater safety and 
prosperity of the whale fishery in general, but nothing came of it. 
The government of the day, with the usual inability of goveinments 
to avail themselves of real opportunities for usefulness, allowed the 
chance to go by, with a final intimation " that the Admiralty had no 
authority to dispose of his Majesty's property to private ships." 
In 1829 the fiither died, having for six years before his death 
given up all connection with a seafaring life. 
Undiscouraged by ofiicial neglect, Mr. Scoresby now prepared 
for work on his own account. The wdiales, which had previously left 
Jan Mayen, now fled from Spitzbergen, and had to be followed to the 
East Coast of Greenland. Of this coast little was known, except what 
had been discovered by Hudson 200 years before (1607), and it was 
very imperfectly and erroneously laid down in the maps. lie deter- 
mined upon an exploration which should not only trace the route of the 
whales, but also serve his purpose of making scientific, geographic, 
and hydrographic enquiries. In the course of these investigations he 
discovered that the charts then existing were wrong in the 75th 
parallel by about 7^ and that the charts published for the use of 
whale fishers were erroneous by 820 miles of longitude, or nearly 14°. 
lie was also greatly interested in the fate of the ancient colonists who 
had settled eight centuries before on the unfrequented east coast, and 
