After some unavoidable delays (always occurring when any body sets out anywhere and some other body is to go with him), we finally got all our traps in the oomiak. The photographers were aboard with their cameras, baths, and plates; the artists with their sketch-books, stools, and pencils; the surveyors with their sextants, barometers, compasses, and tape-lines; the hunters with their weapons, game-bags, and ammunition; the steward with his cooking fixtures, and substantial eatables and drinkables; “the Arctic Six” were at their stations; and “All aboard!” was the signal to shove off. The fair oarswomen dipped their paddles, rising with the act, and coming down with a good solid thud upon the thwart when the paddles took the water. The light boat shot away from the ship over the unruffled waters of the silvery-surfaced fiord; and at last we were off. The day could not have been better chosen. The sky was cloudless; and the great mountains, by which we were on every side surrounded, climbed up into a pearly atmosphere, and their crests of ice and snow blended softly with the pure and lovely air. Every body was in the best possible spirits; every thing was novel, from the boat and its strange crew to the strange shore past which we were gliding, and which presented sometimes cliffs of immense height, and sometimes slopes of green, above which the atmosphere quivered in the sun’s warm rays. I could but contrast my situation with that of a few days before, when I was sweltering in the summer heat of New York. The atmosphere was soft like that of budding spring, though close to the Arctic Circle, and within the region lighted by the midnight sun. The scenery was everywhere grand and inspiring. The shores, though destitute of human life, were yet rich in historical association. As we passed along, it was hard to realize that voices were not calling to us from the shore; and where miles of rich meadow-land stretched before us, girdling the cliffs with green, the fancy, now catching the lowing of cattle and the bleating of sheep, would sometimes detect the shouts of herdsmen; while again we seemed to hear, “By distance mellowed, o’er the water’s sweep,” the “song and oar” of some gay inhabitant of the fiord, descendant of that brave band of men who, under the leadership of sturdy Eric, had on these sloping plains, beneath the ice-crowned hills and within the rampart of the ice-girt isles, sought an asylum from their enemies. But if the fancy discovered those evidences of life, as it recalled the people who once were happy here in this peaceful, pastoral scene, the eye failed to detect any such tokens whatever. An occasional seal, that put up its half-human head to peer at us, or a sparrow or butterfly, that hovered about us when we neared the shore, or now and then a flock of water-fowl, were the only living things we saw.