Page:Life with the Esquimaux - 1864 - Volume 2.djvu/276

Rh companion, being well experienced in all the coast from Karmowong, a place on the north side of Hudson's Straits, to Resolution Island, and all about Frobisher Bay, said that this great glacier extended far, far below where we then were, and also continued on north-west a great way, reaching over also nearly to Hudson's Straits. From the information I had previously gained, and the data furnished me by my Innuit companion, I estimated the Grinnell glacier to be fully 100 miles long. At various points on the north side of Frobisher Bay, between Bear Sound and the Countess of Warwick's Sound, I made observations by sextant, by which I determined that over fifty miles of the glacier was in view from and south-east of the President's Seat. A few miles above that point the glacier recedes from the coast, and is lost to view by the Everett chain of mountains; and, as Sharkey said, the ou-u-e-too (ice that never melts) extends on wes-se-too-ad-loo (far, very far off). He added that there were places along the coast below what I called the President's Seat where this great glacier discharges itself into the sea, some of it large icebergs.

From the sea of ice down to the point where the abutting glacier arrested my advance with sledge and dogs, the ice-river or arm of the glacier was quite uniform in its rounding up, presenting the appearance—though in a frozen state—of a mighty rushing torrent. The height of the discharging face of the glacier was 100 feet above the sea. Without doubt, the best time of the year to travel over glacier mountains is just before the snows have begun to melt. The winter snows are then well impacted on the glacier surface, and all the dangerous cracks and water-ditches are filled up. Storms and gales do good work with snow-flakes once within their fingers. Grinnell Glacier, a limited portion of which was visited, would, in three and a