[Illustration: PLATE I.—GODHAVN HARBOUR, DISCO ISLAND, JULY 10, 1875.—p. 11. The Danish settlements on the coast of Greenland are divided into two Inspectorates—a northern and a southern. Godhavn is the head-quarters of the northern. The view is from the rocks above the little village of Leively, looking down on the harbour that gives the district its name. The Lyngemarken cliffs beyond are a fine sample of the southern shores of Disco. A few houses of Danish officials, some storehouses, a church, a school-house, and the huts of the Eskimo make the village. A pair of Eskimo women—unmarried, as may be seen by their red top-knots—are busy with their laundry work at a pool amongst the glaciated rocks of the foreground.] Melville Bay lay before us; its dreaded ice once passed, the Expedition might safely count on at least entering Smith’s Sound. Our leader determined to take a direct course, and force a way through the “middle pack.” For hours not a speck of ice was to be seen. Our ice quarter-masters, whose experience was drawn from many a whaling voyage made much earlier in the season, warned us not to be too hopeful; to every enquiry they shook their heads and answered, “Wait a bit and ye’ll see ice enou’.” And so we did, but it was worn and soft, crumbling at every touch, and with broad lanes of water leading through it in every direction. What it would be if blown together by wind is another question, but, as we found it, the dreaded middle pack was simply despicable. Every one was in the highest spirits. The failure of a bear-hunt did not much disappoint us. Were there not plenty of bears in the Far North? Side by side, or one or other leading, the ships passed full speed between the flat floes, from one placid pool to another, every rope and spar reflected on the water in a complete inverted ship. We would not have believed that mere sea could supply such a thoroughly mirror-like surface. Here too we have our first experience of what sunlight on ice could be. Pink and metallic, green, pale yellow, and violet, the ice lay, far as the eye could reach, like fields of mother-of-pearl. Many of us sat up till the last ice was out of sight, and in the morning we were well in the “North Water.”