We have scarcely ever visited a coast on which so little of animal life occurs. For days together, only one or two seals, a single sea-horse, and now and then a flock of ducks, were seen. I have already mentioned, however, as an exception to this scarcity of animals, the numberless kittiwakes which were flying about the remarkable spout of water; and we were one day visited, at the place where the _Fury_ was left, by hundreds of white whales sporting about in the shoal water close to the beach. No black whales were ever seen on this coast. Two reindeer were observed by the gentlemen who extended their walks inland; but this was the only summer in which we did not procure a single pound of venison. Indeed, the whole of our supplies obtained in this way during the voyage, including fish, flesh, and fowl, did not exceed twenty pounds per man. During the time that we were made fast upon this coast, in which situation alone observations on current can be satisfactorily made, it is certain that the ice was setting to the southward, and sometimes at a rapid rate, full seven days out of every ten on an average. Had I now witnessed this for the first time in these seas, I should probably have concluded that there was a constant southerly set at this season; but the experience we had before obtained of that superficial current which every breeze of wind creates in a sea encumbered with ice, coupled with the fact that while this set was noticed we had an almost continual prevalence of northerly winds, inclines me to believe that it was to be attributed—chiefly at least—to this circumstance, especially as, on one or two occasions, with rather a light breeze from the southward, the ice did set slowly in the opposite direction. It is not by a few unconnected observations that a question of this kind is to be settled, as the facts noticed during our detention near the west end of Melville Island in 1820 will abundantly testify; every light air of wind producing, in half an hour’s time, an extraordinary change of current setting at an incredible rate along the land.