Besides the Motzfeldt family, there are about forty other inhabitants, all natives, who live in the usual native huts, that are scarcely distinguishable in the general waste of rock. I found that an American had been at Kraksimeut before, and that Motzfeldt preserved the most lively recollection of the “Americana,” who had taught him the little English he knew, and instructed him to sing “Yank Doodle” and “Hail Columby,” which he repeated for us with variations not originally made and provided. This American was Colonel Shaffner, who some years ago, after the first failure of the Atlantic Cable, interested himself to establish a line by way of the Faröe Islands, Iceland, Greenland, and Labrador; and it was a pity that his scheme was impossible of success. You would think so at least if you heard Peter Motzfeldt praise him; and I doubt not that he well deserved it all, for there have been few more spirited enterprises set on foot this many a day. I say it was impossible of success; not that the cable might not be laid and the shore-end secured, but it would be simply absurd to think of keeping it in a sea where icebergs ground in two or three hundred fathoms water. On board the steamship _Panther_ there was a man, common enough in point of rank, but the like of which never was seen before with respect to qualities. He was the _mate_. Why he was ever put there in that capacity, unless it was to “try our virtue by affliction,” I can not imagine. He would beat a “reformer” any day for wrong-headedness, or a discontented donkey for obstinacy. As if these qualities were not enough, he was afflicted with the curiosity of a magpie. But the particular direction of his curiosity was aquatic. He was great on finding bottom. Upon one occasion he tried to find it by dropping overboard a gun; on another he got into a kayak and shoved off from the ship’s side, to find himself very quickly head downward, with the boat fast to his heels; and he would have been as certain of drowning as if he had undertaken to swim with his feet fast to a bladder, had his head not struck bottom, where luckily there was a lot of sea-weed, which he grasped and drew himself out among the shells and slime; there he got a footing, and, the water being shoal, he came right side up, with a great deal of water and very little breath in him. Had his disposition to find the bottom with the top of his head terminated there, it would have been well; but unhappily his weakness extended to the _Panther’s_ keel. If there was the remotest chance of putting her on the rocks at any time, he was sure to make the effort. And he was, moreover, very sly. He always waited until the captain was down below or had gone ashore, before he gave his mind to it. At Kraksimeut, he waited until the captain was well enveloped in a cloud of smoke, in the house of Peter Motzfeldt, before he tried the depth of the water in the harbor. Slacking up a rope, or neglecting to put out one, it matters not which, he let