The difficulties in transporting the boat among the hummocks, and the very light load which either the men or dogs can carry over the broken ice, as shown by this day's experience, convince me that the boat and cargo can hardly be transported to the west coast at one journey; and I have therefore concluded to leave the boat here for the present, at least until the track is further explored, and set out with the two dog-sledges and a foot party dragging the other sledge, laden with such stores as they can carry, for a depot on Grinnell Land. I can at any time send the party back for the boat; and if it should turn out that the boat cannot be got across the Sound, then I shall, in any event, have a depot of supplies for my explorations over the ice with the dog-sledges, before the thaw of June and July shall have put an end to that species of traveling. [Sidenote: STORM-STAYED.] The track before me looks unpromising enough. After the party was housed, I climbed up to a considerable eminence, and have had the melancholy satisfaction of looking out over the ugliest scene that my eye has ever chanced to rest upon. There was nothing inviting in it. Except a few miles of what has evidently, up to a very late period of the fall, been open water, which has frozen suddenly, there is not a rod of smooth ice in sight. The whole Sound appears to have been filled with ice of the most massive description, which, broken up into a moving "pack" in the summer, has come down upon this Greenland coast with the southerly setting current, and has piled up all over the sea in a confused jumble. I know what it is from having crossed it in 1854; and if it is as bad now as then (and it appears to be much worse) there is every prospect of a severe tussle. April 7th. Did anybody ever see such capricious weather as this of Smith Sound? It is the torment of my life and the enemy of my plans. I can never depend upon it. It is the veriest flirt that ever owned Dame Nature for a mother. [Sidenote: THE COOKS IN DIFFICULTY.]