Horn Sound affords tolerable anchorage; within Bell Sound are several anchoring places and some rivers, and in Ice Sound, at Green Harbour, is good anchorage near the bank, in ten to eight fathoms’ water, or less. In several other places, when not encumbered with ice, there is pretty good refuge for ships. On the north and east sides of Spitzbergen are several harbours, some of them very safe and commodious, but they are not so often free from ice as those westward, and, therefore, have seldom been visited. Though the whale-fishers in the present age generally see the level of Spitzbergen every voyage, yet not many of them visit the shores. My father has been several times on shore in different parts. My own landing, for the first time in an Arctic country, was on Charles’s Island, or Fair Forehead, at the north-west point. The number of birds seen on the precipices and rocks adjoining the sea was immense, and the noise which they made on our approach was quite deafening. The weather was calm and clear when I went on shore, but suddenly, a thick fog and breeze of wind commencing, obliged us to put off with haste, and subjected us to great anxiety before we reached the ship. In the summer of 1818, I was several times on shore on the main, and landed once in the same season on the north side of King’s Bay. Being near the land, on the evening of the 23rd of July, the weather beautifully clear, and all our sails becalmed by the hills, excepting the top-gallant sails, in which we had constantly a gentle breeze, I left the ship in charge of an officer, with orders to stand no nearer than into thirty fathoms’ water, and with two boats and fourteen men rowed to the shore. We arrived at the beach about half-past seven, P.M., and landed on a track of low flat ground, extending about six miles north and south, and two or three east and west. This table-land lies so low that it would be overflown by the sea, were it not for a natural embankment of shingle thrown up by the sea.