Greenland is a high and rocky country, always covered with ice and snow (except on the sea side, and in the bays or inlets) which never thaws nor melts away. You may judge of the height by the prospect they yield at more than twenty Norway miles distance from the shore. The whole coast is surrounded with a vast number of large and small islands. There are a great many inlets and large rivers to be met with, among which the principal is called Baal’s River, in 64°, and has been navigated eighteen or twenty Norway miles up the country; where the first Danish lodge was settled in the year 1721. In all sea charts you will find laid down Frobisher’s Strait and Baer Sound which they pretend, form two large islands, adjacent to the main land; which I think are not to be found, at least not upon the coast of Greenland; for I could not meet with any thing like it in the voyage I undertook in the year 1723 Southward, going upon discoveries; though I went as far as to 60° that way: but at present the newer charts lay them down, the Northern strait in 63°, and the Southern in 62°. Some of the ancients, whom Thormoder follows in his Greenland History, place them between 61° and 60°. So that the charts differ mightily in this particular. Besides this, there is not a word or a syllable mentioned in our ancient records of Greenland of the aforesaid two straits and large islands: they only inform us, that after the old Norwegians and Icelanders had began to settle colonies on the East side of Greenland, over against Iceland, they continued to spread themselves all along the shore and in the bays, as far as Baal’s River, where they stopped, and where we find many ruins of the old Norwegian edifices. And whereas I myself have lately met with so many stone buildings, so far to the South, I think my conclusion is good, that the land upon which these houses stand is no particular island, but contiguous to the main. It is therefore very reasonable to believe, that whereas the ancients took notice of, and so accurately described, all those bays and islands that were inhabited, they would not have passed by in silence these two large islands upon which such stately buildings were erected. And for this reason I have hereto joined a new map or delineation of Greenland, to show the contiguity of the East and West Greenland, agreeably to other new charts of Thormoder and others, which I follow, as far as I find them not contradictory to the description of the ancients and to my own experience. CHAP. II. _First Settlement of Greenland, with some Thoughts on the Extinction of the Norwegian Colonies; and whether on the East Side no Remainders may be found of the old Norwegians: also, whether the same Tract of Land cannot be recovered._