IX.] 
LJACHOFFS ISLAND. 
415 
The animal life was among the scantiest I had seen during my 
many travels in the Polar Seas. A few seals were visible. Of 
birds we saw some terns and gulls, and even far out at sea 
a pretty large number of phalaropes-—the most common kind of 
bird on the coast of the Asiatic Polar Sea, at least in autumn. 
Stolbovoj Island was, especially on the north side, high with 
precipitous shore-cliffs which afforded splendid breeding-places 
for looms, black guillemots and gulls. At all such cliffs there 
breed on Spitzbergen millions of sea fowl, which are met with 
out on the surrounding sea in great flocks searching for their 
food. Here not a single loom was seen, and even the number of 
the gulls was small, which indeed in some degree was to be 
accounted for by the late season of the year,‘but also by the 
circumstance that no colony of birds had settled on the rocky 
shores of the island. 
The sea bottom consisted at certain places of hard packed 
sand, or rather, as I shall endeavour to show farther on, of 
frozen sand, from which the trawl net brought up no animals. 
At other places there was found a clay, exceedingly rich in 
Idothea entomon and Sabinei and an extraordinary mass of 
bryozoa, resembling collections of the eggs of mollusca. 
It was not until the 30th of August that we were off the west 
side of Ljachoff’s Island, on which I intended to land. The 
north coast, and, as it appeared the day after, the east coast was 
clear of ice, but the winds recently prevailing had heaped a 
mass of rotten ice on the west coast. The sea besides was so 
shallow here, that already at a distance 15' from land we had 
a depth of only eight metres. The ice heaped against the west 
coast of the island did not indeed form any very serious obstacle 
to the advance of the Vega, hut in case we had attempted to 
land there it might have been inconvenient enough, when the 
considerable distance between the vessel and the land was to 
he traversed in a boat or the steam launch, and it might even, 
if a sudden frost had occurred, have become a fetter, which would 
