The inhospitable nature of this frozen climate has prevented Spitzbergen from being properly explored. The best charts that have been published are extremely defective, and its larger divisions are but imperfectly defined. It could nowise interest the reader to peruse a dry catalogue of headlands or straits; and a few general observations may suffice to exhaust all that is interesting in its appearance. The general aspect of this gloomy and sterile country, affords a scene truly picturesque and sombre. The shores are rugged, bold and terrific, being in many places formed by lofty, black, inaccessible rocks, some of which taper to exceedingly high points, and are altogether bare, and almost destitute of vegetation. The entire face of the country exhibits a wild, dreary landscape, of amazingly high[9] sharp-pointed mountains, some of which rear their summits above the clouds, and are capped with strata of snow, probably coeval with the creation of the world. [9] The altitude of one near the Black Point, south end, was found, by the megameter, to be 1503 yards. Phipps’ _Voyages_, p. 87. “So Zembla’s rocks (the beauteous work of frost,) Rise white in air, and glitter o’er the coast: Pale suns, unfelt, at distance roll away, And on th’ impassive ice the lightnings play; Eternal snows, the growing mass supply, Till the bright mountains prop th’ incumbent sky; As Atlas fix’d each hoary pile appears, The gather’d winter of a thousand years.” The mountains of Spitzbergen have been observed, by voyagers, to decline in altitude towards the east; neither are the eastern mountains so black, steep, or naked, as those more to the west. This curious phenomenon is considered by some naturalists as a general law of nature. The mountains here are totally composed of one entire and single mass of granite. The only fissures discovered in their vast extent, are formed by the intensity of the frost rending them assunder. They burst with a noise like thunder, and often huge fragments are torn from the summits, and rolled with great impetuosity to the base. The glaciers are the most astonishing of all the natural phenomena of this county. It would only convey a faint representation of their size and magnificence, to say, that they far surpassed those of Switzerland. Travellers who have been in both countries, declare there is no comparison between them. Perhaps the most proper method to form a just conception of their magnitude, is by considering the size of the icebergs, which, as previously stated, are fragments of them. One of these masses, according to Phipps, has been found grounded in twenty-four fathoms water, while it towered above the surface to the height of fifty feet. Almost every valley can boast of its glacier, some of which vie with the mountains in height. They are occasionally hollow, and immense cascades of water are precipitated from them.