Page:The cruise of the Corwin.djvu/128

 Bay takes its name from H.M.S. Plover, which passed the winter of 1848-49 here while on a cruise in search of Franklin. It is a glacial fiord, which in the height of its walls is more Yosemite-like than any I have yet seen in Siberia. In the afternoon Dr. Rosse and I set out across the ice to the cliffs. We found a great many seal holes and cracks of a dangerous kind, and a good deal of water on top of the ice that made the walking very sloppy. There were dog-sled tracks trending up and down the inlet. The ice is broken along the shore by the rise and fall of the tides, but we made out to cross on some large cakes wedged together. Just before we reached the edge of rocks, in scanning the ruinous, crumbling face of the cliffs that here are between two and three thousand feet high, I noticed an outstanding buttress harder and more compact in cleavage than the rest, and very obviously grooved, polished, and scratched by the main vanished glacier that once filled all the fiord. Up to this point we climbed, and found several other spots of the old glacial surface not yet weathered off. This is the first I have seen of this kind of glacial traces. On the thirteenth the whaler Thomas Pope