Considering its high northern latitude of 75°, the climate of Bear Island is uncommonly mild. According to the reports of some Norwegian walrus-hunters, who remained there from 1824 to 1826, the cold was so moderate during the first winter that, until the middle of November, the snow which fell in the night melted during the daytime. It rained at Christmas, and seventy walruses were killed during Christmas week by the light of the moon and that of the Aurora. Even in February the weather was so mild that the men were able to work in the open air under the same latitude as Melville Island, where mercury is a solid body during five months of the year. The cold did not become intense before March, and attained its maximum in April, when the sea froze fast round the island, and the white bears appeared which had been absent during the whole winter. The second winter was more severe than the first, but even then the sea remained open until the middle of November--evidently in consequence of the prevailing south-westerly winds. The greater part of Bear Island is a desolate plateau raised about 100 or 200 feet above the sea. Along its western shores rises a group of three mountains, supposed to be about 200 feet high, and towards the south it terminates in a solitary hill to which the first discoverers gave the appropriate name of Mount Misery. At the northern foot of this terrace-shaped elevation the plateau is considerably depressed, and forms a kind of oasis, where grass (_Poa pratensis_), enlivened with violet cardamines and white polygonums and saxifragas, grows to half a yard in height. The general character of the small island is, however, a monotony of stone and morass, with here and there a patch of snow, while the coasts have been worn by the action of the waves into a variety of fantastic shapes, bordered in some parts by a flat narrow strand, the favorite resort of the walrus, and in others affording convenient breeding-places to hosts of sea-birds. In Coal Bay, four parallel seams of coal, about equidistant from each other, are visible on the vertical rock-walls, but they are too thin to be of any practical use. [Illustration: 75. A GLIMPSE OF JAN MEYEN’S ISLAND.]