A miserable little vehicle it was; long, slender, and weighing scarcely anything. But it was every where very firmly closed up, except an opening in which the rower seated himself, drawing the skin tightly around his waist. One would suppose that such a craft must upset and be swamped; but nothing of the sort occurs. It darts like an arrow over the crest of the wave, disappears, reappears, now in the eddies, now between the icebergs. Man and boat are one; a marine entity; an artificial fish. But how inferior is this artificial fish to the true one! He has not the floating bladder, which enables the fish to make itself lighter or heavier as the occasion may demand. Still more, the man has not the vigorous motion, the lively contraction and expansion of the spine to communicate such power to the strokes of the tail, nor has he the oil which, being so much lighter than water, will always ride above the waves. What the man best imitates is the fin, but even that only imperfectly. The man's fins, his oars, are not attached to his body, but, moved by his long arms, are weak compared to the fin, and, moreover, soon fatigue the rower. What is it that makes amends for so much of inferiority in the means of the man? His terrible energy, his vivid reason which, from beneath that fixed and melancholy countenance, flashes out from time to time, invents, resolves, and finds an instant remedy for all the deficiences which, in this floating skin, momentarily threaten him with death. Frequently our rower is stopped by a mass of ice which peremptorily refuses him a passage. Then comes a new expedient, the parts are changed on the instant. Hitherto the canoe has carried the man; now the man carries the canoe. He takes it on his shoulder and traverses the icy portage till he comes again to open water, the ice crackling beneath him as he crosses it. Occasionally icebergs, floating, and terrible mountains, are so close that they leave between them only a narrow passage which our man passes through at the risk of being in an instant crushed, flattened between them. Those icy walls now widen, now contract, the space between them; they may, at any moment, come together with a force that would crush a seventy-four, to say nothing about our poor Greenlander in his poor skin canoe. Such a fate did, in fact, once occur to a tall ship; she was cut in two, flattened, crushed; by the coming together of two icebergs.