Anyone who looks back through the logs of the old explorers and whalers in Baffin’s Sea, will be struck with the fact that Melville Bay used to be looked upon as a sort of very formidable “Pons Asinorum” at the outset of every voyage. The navigator who had sailed northward safely enough between the Baffin sea-pack and the long stream of ice that flows round the coast of Greenland, often found himself checked by ice, or baffled by wind, when he passed Upernivik and sighted the “Devil’s Thumb;” or, if he passed into the grasp of the Bay, he would be paralysed by calms, and the toil of slowly hauling his ship along the land-ice not unfrequently ended in a hasty dock-cutting to avoid a nip, a lost season, or perhaps a fatal crush. In old times the loss of whaling ships in Melville Bay was almost of annual occurrence; but the introduction of steam as a motive power has robbed the Bay of its terrors. Whaling disasters are perhaps as common as ever, but that is only because the fleets of steam-ships which now annually enter the northern ice are compelled to follow the whale into seas even more dangerous than Melville Bay. Here and at many subsequent points of our voyage, where we had forcible evidence of the value of steam in ice-navigation, we learned to appreciate the work done by the old sailing expeditions. Much that was easy to us would have been impossible to them; and often as we advanced in a perfect calm, or steamed head-to-wind through narrow leads between wheeling fields of ice, we wondered at the distances safely navigated by such ships as the “Hecla” and “Griper,” or “Enterprise” and “Investigator,” along shores exposed to as heavy Polar ice as any our vessels encountered. A few Eskimo still inhabit the Greenland shores north of Melville Bay, cut off from all intercourse with their kind by one hundred miles of glacier; these, the Arctic Highlanders of Sir John Ross, amongst whom Kane and Hayes wintered, are undergoing steady diminution. They appear to have fallen back on the southern parts of their territory, and are making their last stand in the neighbourhood of Cape York. Our dog-driver Hans there communicated with his wife’s kindred, and through him we learnt that the tribe was now reduced to eighty souls. The object of our visit was to pick up Hans’s brother-in-law, but he was absent on a hunting excursion. Leaving them to wonder what brought white men northwards, we continued our course, trying to keep warm a hope that yet another human community, Norse, or at least Eskimo, might possibly be found beyond the threshold of the unknown regions we were so fast approaching. With calm weather and warm sun, giving us a temperature of 40° on deck, we steamed northwards with the utmost possible economy of fuel. A fleet of large icebergs lay along the coast north of Cape York. One time two hundred and thirty were in sight, many of them islands of glacier a thousand feet thick, and looking too large to have come from the adjacent coast.