expedition left Greenland—according to Hauk—in spring, according to the companion text in summer. We may suppose therefore that the start was made not later than the beginning of May. No prolonged stay was made anywhere until Straumsfjord was reached. Even therefore if we reject all the distances recorded, and assume a rate of sailing as low as one tylft a day, (75 miles, or little over three knots), it is manifest that wherever we place Straumsfjord the explorers would have arrived there before the end of the nesting-season. And though they stayed in this place for the winter, when they suffered from great scarcity, no mention is made of egg-collecting till the following spring, after the first record of the discovery, immediately upon their arrival in Straumsfjord. Next, although the statement ‘a man’s feet could hardly come down between the eggs’ is at first sight startling, it is an easy task to find parallel passages among the later records of exploration in or about these latitudes. For example, Charles Leigh (in _Hakluyt’s Voyages_) says of the Islands of Birds in the Gulf of St. Lawrence that they ‘are sandy red, but with the multitude of birds upon them they looke white. The birds sit there as thicke as stones lie in a paved street.’ The same locality is described in language almost equally striking by Jacques Cartier: ‘These Islands are as full of birds as a field is of grass, which nest within these islands.’ If Dr. Nansen objects that the islands here alluded to are not quite so far south as Nova Scotia, where he denies the existence of large breeding-places, we may refer him to Nicholas Denys, who writes of an island off this coast which has been identified with Sambro Island, near Halifax: ‘I was once there with a boat, at the time when the birds make their nests. We found so great an abundance of all the kinds I have named that all my crew and myself, having cut clubs for ourselves, killed so great a number, as well of young as of their fathers and mothers, which were very sluggish in rising from their nests, that we were unable to carry them all away. And aside from these the number of those which were spared and which rose into the air made a cloud so thick that the rays of the sun could scarcely penetrate through it.’ Or again take Champlain (islands near Cape Sable, Nova Scotia): ‘Thence we went to Cormorant island, a league distant, so called from the infinite number of cormorants found there, of whose eggs we collected a cask full.... At the two other islands there is such an abundance of birds of different sorts, that one could not imagine it, if he had not seen them.’