In the neighbourhood of their winter quarters the glaciers and mountains were well explored, and an attempt was made to measure an arc of the meridian, which proved to be rather rough work among such surroundings. The snowstorms were particularly pitiless and heavy, and the travelling decidedly bad. The thaw began about the middle of May, and there was more sledging through pools than usual, so that they did not want variety in their occupations. On the 14th of July boating became practicable, and a voyage was made to the Eskimo village found by Clavering in 1823, on the island named after him, but the village proved to be deserted and the huts in ruins—an unwelcome discovery, for, as M'Clintock says in reference to it: "It is not less strange than sad to find that a peaceable and once numerous tribe, inhabiting a coast-line of at least seven degrees of latitude, has died out, or has almost died out, whilst at the same time we find, by the diminution of the glaciers and increase of animal life, that the terrible severity of the climate has undergone considerable modification. We feel this saddening interest with greater force when we reflect that the distance of Clavering's village from the coast of Scotland is under one thousand miles. They were our nearest neighbours of the New World." [Illustration: THE REGION ROUND MOUNT PETERMANN] A little north of the seventy-third parallel Koldewey discovered on his way home the magnificent Franz Josef Fiord. Here the grandest scenery in Greenland is to be found along its deep branches winding among the mountains, one of which, Mount Petermann, is over eleven thousand feet high. As the _Germania_ entered this remarkable inlet, which extends inland for some five degrees of longitude, a fleet of icebergs were sailing out of it with the current; the farther she advanced the warmer seemed the temperature of the air and surface water, and the wilder and more impressive became the grouping of the mighty cliffs and peaks with their lofty waterfalls and raging torrents and deep glacier-filled ravines. It was the great geographical discovery of the expedition.