On the whole of the earth’s surface there is probably no more desolate and uninviting country than Greenland. Extending for a distance of over 1400 miles from north to south, and of some 900 miles from east to west at its broadest point, almost the whole of it is covered with a permanent ice-cap, which probably attains in places a depth of 3000 feet, and on which it is absolutely impossible for a human being to sustain life for long. Some small portions of the coast are inhabited by tribes of Eskimos and by settlers, while here and there traces remain of its early Norse discoverers, many of them probably Christians, as Holm, in 1880, found ruins of four stone churches in the Julianshaab district. These settlements are confined to small areas on the western coast; the eastern coast, with the exception of a small tract between Cape Bismarck and Cape Farewell, whither a few Eskimos migrated from the Parry Islands, is entirely uninhabited. This coast, indeed, protected as it is by an almost impassable barrier of ice and shrouded by perpetual fog, has never been very thoroughly explored, in spite of the persistent efforts of generations of daring travellers. During the earlier days of Arctic exploration, Hudson, the Dane Daniell, Gale Hamke, Han Egede and his son, Olsen Wallör, and other whalers mapped out small sections of the coast, but their discoveries did not amount to very much. In 1822, however, Captain William Scoresby, jun., one of the most famous of Scottish whalers, visited the coast, and, in the intervals of fishing, succeeded in charting and sketching it from Hudson’s Cape Hold-with-Hope to Gale Hamke Bay, making at the same time a number of valuable astronomical and trigonometrical observations. Captain Edward Sabine, while engaged on his great pendulum work of 1823, visited Pendulum Island with Captain Clavering, who explored much of the coast in the neighbourhood, the field which he thus opened up being later developed by Koldewey, with whose voyage in the _Germania_ we have already dealt. Among others who have contributed to our still scanty knowledge of this desolate land are Blosseville, Wandell, Graah, Giesecke, Rink, Dalager, Jensen, Steenstrup, Knutsen, Knudsen, Eberlin, Garde, Ryder, Drygalski, and Nathorst, thanks to whose efforts much of the east coast has been mapped out.