ENGLISH BAY. 
299 
to be found, with the exception perhaps of Magdalena 
Bay, along the whole west coast of Spitzbergen; indeed 
it is almost the only one where you are not liable to 
have the ice set in upon you at a moment’s notice. Ice 
Sound, Bell Sound, Horn Sound—the other harbours 
along the west coast—are all liable to be beset by drift- 
ice during the course of a single night, even though no 
vestige of it may have been in sight four-and-twenty 
hours before; and many a good ship has been inextri¬ 
cably imprisoned in the very harbour to which she 
had fled for refuge. This bay is completely landlocked, 
being protected on its open side by Prince Charles’s 
Foreland, a long island lying parallel with the main¬ 
land. Down towards either horn run two ranges of 
schistose rocks about 1,500 feet high, their sides almost 
precipitous, and the topmost ridge as sharp as a knife, 
and jagged as a saw; the intervening space is entirely 
filled up by an enormous glacier, wdiich—descending 
with one continuous incline from the head of a valley 
on the right, and sweeping like a torrent round the roots 
of an isolated clump of hills in the centre—rolls at last 
into the sea. The length of the glacial river from the 
spot where it apparently first originated, could not have 
