I think that this is the most dreary spot in all Iceland. It is as lonesome and forbidding as the uninhabited and bleak coast of _Jan Mayen_ four hundred miles to the north. A few rods from the shore there is a small lagoon and on the far side a few small houses, three I believe. The people live by fishing for there is scarcely enough grass for the few sheep and four cows that graze at the margin of the bird-infested lagoon. The cliffs and mountains that tower above the lagoon must be beautiful in sunshine, but it is otherwise in storm, and fog and Arctic storms prevail most of the time. In a torrent of rain and with the wind blowing as only the unrestricted winds of the Polar Ocean can blow, five of us ventured to lower a boat and row ashore to beach it where we had observed that the _Faroese_ had done the same the previous night. The entire beach is littered with drift wood consisting of bits of bark, branches and heavy timber. All of the material that I examined proved to be larch. A few trees bore the marks of the axe, but most of them had been torn up by the roots in some great river freshet and had been swept out to sea, probably from the great rivers of Siberia, the Lena, Obi, Kolyma and Yenisei. As I write I have before me a thick piece of bark from a Siberian larch that I picked up on this shore. What a voyage it has made! Whence came it and how long was its unlogged voyage? It is not in imagination that we scan its record. Though not in figures stating latitudes and longitudes and not in characters of ink, yet its great Polar voyage is clearly revealed to him who knows the currents of the north, the prevailing winds and the drift of the ice floes. This bit of bark passed out to sea during the spring floods that make such havoc in the Siberian forests; it became embedded in the ice, as did Nansen’s _Fram_. Slowly it drifted with the pack, now backwards under the pressure of the wind, now lifted in a great pressure ridge as two opposing packs met; now under the influence of wind and current it made progress and, again like the _Fram_, was liberated from the ice west of Spitzbergen and drifted southward to find lodgement on this bleak cape. Fifty miles away, on _Rauðagnúpa_, Red-Peak, in 1905 was picked up the Bryant-Melville cask, which had been placed on the pack ice north of Point Barrow in 1899. The elapsed time from the placing of this cask on the ice by Captain D. N. Tilton of the American whaler, _Alexander_, to the date of its discovery by the Icelandic farmer, Vigfus Benidiktsson, was five years, eight months and fourteen days. We have not the space in which to discuss the Great Polar Current but we can assert that this piece of larch bark, yes, and the thousands of larch trees, that come to land on the north coast of Iceland and in Driftwood Bay in _Jan Mayen_, have journeyed over or near the North Pole. The wood is a boon to the Icelanders as it is used for fuel and in the construction of their houses.