ISS Mr Scoresby's Excursion to Jan Mayen's Island. 
icebergs differed in appearance from any thing of the kind I 
had before seen. They appeared rough on the surface, were of 
a greenish-grey colour, and presented altogether the appearance 
of immense cataracts, which seemed as if, when in the act of 
tumbling from the summit of the mountainous coast, they had 
been suddenly arrested in their progress, and congealed on the 
spot by the power of an intense frost. Like cataracts, their 
prominent colour was variegated by snow-white patches resem- 
bling foam ; they seemed to follow in a great measure the fi- 
gure of the rockvS over which they lay, and were marked with 
curvilinear stria, running from the summit to the foot of the 
icebergs. As in cataracts, also, the jetty points of the most pro- 
minent rocks were here and there seen peeping through their 
surfaces. 
I left my ship (the Esk) at three quarters past 1 in the 
morning, accompanied by Captains Bennet and Jackson, whose 
ships were close by us at the time, and landed at half-past 2, 
on a beach covered with coarse greenish-black sand, whereon 
there was a considerable surf. This was the first place from 
North-east Cape, four leagues distant, where the coast seemed, 
at a distance, to be at all accessible. Great-wood-bay, of the 
Dutch, was immediately on our left (to the westward), separated 
by a rocky islet ; on our right. South-east Cape was at the dis- 
tance of five miles. The beach was sandy through an extent of 
two or three miles in length, and about a furlong in breadth. 
It was strewed throughout with logs of drift wood, some of 
which seemed to be tolerably good timber, others were much 
bruised, and a little worm-eaten. One log I observed had been 
squared, and was marked with the letter G. 
I had not advanced many paces before I observed signs of a vol- 
cano. The sand (iron-sand ) was coarse, black, or reddish-brown, 
mixed with greenish-coloured crystals of augite. The opaque parl!s 
of this sand were very ponderous and strongly magnetic. Wheji 
separated by the magnet, they strikingly resembled cannon gun- 
powder, both in colour and in the form of the grains. The beach, 
after a few feet of rise, produced by a vast bed of this sand, which 
was thrown up apparently by the waves, continued level to the 
margin of the cliff, which was in this place at the distance of 
about a quarter of a mile, but seemed only occasionally to have 
