Landing at half past six P.M., and leaving Mr. Bird to bury the provisions, Lieutenant Foster and myself walked without delay to the eastward, and, on ascending the point, found that there was, as we had supposed, an indentation in the coast on the other side. We now began to conceive the most flattering hopes of discovering something like a harbour for the ship, and pushed on with all possible haste to examine the place farther; but, after three hours walking, were much mortified, on arriving at its head, to find that it was nothing but an open bay, entirely exposed to the inroads of all the northern ice, and therefore quite unfit for the ship. We returned to the boat greatly disappointed, and reached the Hecla at 1.30 A.M. on the 7th. I do not remember to have ever experienced in these regions such a continuance of beautiful weather as we now had, during more than three weeks that we had been on the northern coast of Spitzbergen. Day after day we had a clear and cloudless sky, scarcely any wind, and, with the exception of a few days previous to the 23d of May, a warm temperature in the shade, and quite a scorching sun. On the 3d of June we had a shower of rain, and on the 6th it rained pretty hard for two or three hours. After the 1st of June we could procure abundance of excellent water upon the ice, and by the end of the first week the floe-pieces were looking blue with it in some parts, and the snow had everywhere become too soft to bear a man's weight. On the 7th, the ship, still closely beset, had drifted much more to the eastward, being within a mile of the spot where the provisions had been deposited the preceding evening. There was now no other ice between us and the land except the floe to which we had been so long attached; and round this we were occasionally obliged to warp, whenever a little slackening of the ice permitted, in order to prevent our getting too near the rocks. In this situation of suspense and anxiety we still remained until the evening of the 8th, when a breeze at length springing up from the southward began to open out the ice from the point near which we lay. As soon as the channel was three or four hundred yards wide, we warped into the clear water, and, making sail, rounded the point in safety, having no soundings with twenty fathoms, at one third of a mile from a small rocky islet lying off it. In the mean time the wind had been driving the ice so fast off the land as to form for us a clear communication with the open water before seen to the eastward; and thus we were at length liberated from our confinement, after a close and tedious "besetment" of twenty-four days.