Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 11.djvu/178

Rh which grows to a height of 70 feet, native of Guiana, where, inland, it exists in great abundance. The Indian name of the tree is Sipiri or Bibiru, and from its bark and fruits is obtained the febrifuge principle Bibirine (see ). Greenheart wood is of a dark green colour, sap wood and heart wood being so much alike that they can with difficulty be distinguished from each other. The heart wood is one of the most durable of all timbers, and its value is greatly enhanced by the fact that it is proof against the ravages of many marine borers which rapidly destroy piles and other submarine structures of most other kinds of wood available for such purposes. In the Kelvingrove Museum, Glasgow, there are two pieces of planking from a wreck submerged during eighteen years on the west coast of Scotland. The one specimen—greenheart—is merely slightly pitted on the surface, the body of the wood being perfectly sound and untouched; while the other—teak—is almost entirely eaten away. Greenheart, tested either by transverse or by tensile strain, is one of the strongest of all woods, and it is also exceedingly dense, its specific gravity being about 1150. It is one of the few woods included in the first class of Lloyd's Register for shipbuilding purposes, and it is extensively used for keelsons, beams, engine-bearers, and planking, &c., as well as in the general engineering arts, but its excessive weight unfits it for many purposes for which its other properties would render it eminently suitable.  GREENLAND, or, is the name applied to a large continental island, the greater portion of which lies within the Arctic Circle, and all of which is arctic in character (see vol. i., Plate X.). It is entirely unconnected with any portion of Europe or America, though in the extreme north only separated from the latter by the narrow strait which lies between it and the outlying portion of America known as Grinnell Land. From Europe it is divided by the North and Greenland Seas,—the Faroe Isles, Jan Mayen Island, Iceland, and part of Shetland being the only lands between it and Norway. Denmark Strait is the sea between it and Iceland, and it is more than probable that Spitzbergen is the only great group of islands lying to the east of its northern portion. On the west, Davis Strait and Baffin's Bay separate it from the opposite shore. The latter sea narrows to the north into the gulf generally known as Smith Sound, though, in reality, Kane Sea, Kennedy Channel, Hall Basin, and Robeson Channel are the names which have been successively applied in the progress of exploration to the northern continuations of the sound so named more than two hundred years ago by William Baffin. The exact northern termination of Greenland is not known, the country never having been doubled on the north; but we know enough from the explorations of Markham, Beaumont, and other officers of Nares's expedition, to lead to the conclusion that the ice-encumbered Polar Ocean circles around the headlands of the broken country which forms its supposed limits in about 83° N. lat.

From Cape Farewell, or Kangersuak,—an island lying about 18 miles from Pamiagdluk, the most southern Danish post on the west,—to Cape Britannia, is about 1380 miles; and the greatest breadth of Greenland is about 77° 30′ N. lat.—690 miles from the one coast to the other. The shore-line is fully 3400 miles long; but so little is the country known with accuracy, and so broken is it by fjords and coast-lying islands, that any accurate estimate of its area is impossible. Thus Dr Rink, who has been connected with the government in various capacities for upwards of thirty years, esti mates its area at 512,000 square miles. This estimate allows 192,000 square miles for what has been called the outskirts—or islands uncovered by ice—with their fjords, and 320,000 for the interior, believed to be almost entirely covered by a glacier ice-cap.

On the east coast, Cape Bismarck, in 76° 47′ N. lat., marks

the limits of exploration; though as early as 1670 Lambert is said to have sighted land several degrees further north. From Cape Bismarck south to Cape Farewell (59° 35′ N. lat.) the coast is very imperfectly known, whole stretches being entirely uncharted, even in the rudest fashion. This arises from the Spitzbergen ice-stream continually pouring down that shore, rendering it possible to approach within sight of it only on rare occasions, and to land still more rarely. Yet, from the explorations of Hall and Lindenow in early times, and those in this century by Scoresby, Graah, the German expedition, and Mourier (1879), we know its general features. These are—high beetling cliffs, great glaciers creeping down to the sea, and deep inlets, like Scoresby Sound and Franz Josef Fjord, penetrating the land for distances which cannot as yet be definitely stated. A number of islands also are dotted over the chart here; but there are few “ice fjords,” the slope of the inland ice being evidently chiefly towards the west coast. The west coast is of much the same character,—only, on this side, the fjords with which it is intersected have been nearly all followed to their heads. Many of them stretch several miles into the interior, and the greater number are ended by glacier prolongations of the “inland ice,” which discharge icebergs; these are known as “ice fjords.” The Greenland fjords, like those of Norway, British Columbia, and other countries with a western exposure, bear every mark of having been at one time the beds of glaciers, when the climate and physical geography of the country were different from what they are at present. The country cannot be said to be mountainous, yet heights of from 3000 to 4000 feet are common, and the aspect which the coast presents is that of high cliffs,—black when steep, white where the snow can lie; snow for eight or nine months in the year on even the lower lands; icebergs and broken floe-ice floating off the coast; an “ice-foot” attached to the shore early in the spring; and glaciers peeping down through the valleys between the cliffs and fjelds. There are one or two still higher points, such as Petermann's Peak—near the shores of Franz Josef Fjord on the east coast (11,000 feet), Payer's Peak, Sukkertoppen, and tho familiar Sanderson's Hope. With the exception of Disco, there are no large islands; but the bays, fjords, straits, and peninsulas of this extremely broken coast are so numerous that it is needless mentioning them by name.

The Interior Ice-covering.—The Danes divide Greenland into two physical divisions—the “outskirts” and the “inland ice.” The first comprises the coast-lying land, the latter the interior. If we ascend any considerable eminence on the west coast, and look eastward, we do not find mountains and valleys as in most other countries, but only one huge, seemingly endless, expanse of glacier ice gradually rising towards the east, until the view is bounded by a white horizon. If we cross the coast-lying land, which varies in breadth from a few miles to twenty, or in a few cases much more, we come to this “inland ice,” generally in the form of a glacier offshoot of it which has crept down into a fjord, or is making its way to the sea in one of the mossy valleys lying between two high cliffs, noisy with mollemokes or with the weird scream of cormorants, which at various sheltered places have colonies in these “skarvefjelde.” In the former case the glacier usually presents a steep wall facing the sea, from which great fragments of ice are continually breaking off, or the icebergs being detached by the force of the sea; then it is “sermik soak”—the “great ice wall”—of the Eskimo. In the latter case, it presents a slope on which the explorer