Identifier: 5thedlettersfrom00duffuoft (find matches)
Title: Letters from high latitudes : being some account of a voyage, in 1856, in the schooner yacht "Foam", to Iceland, Jan Mayen, and Spitzbergen
Year: 1867 (1860s)
Authors: Dufferin and Ava, Frederick Temple Blackwood, Marquis of, 1826-1902
Subjects: Iceland -- Description and travel Spitsbergen Island (Norway)
Publisher: London, Murray
Contributing Library: Robarts - University of Toronto
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

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asI walked from one huge bole to another, I could not helpwondering in what primeval forest each had grown, whatchance had originally cast them on the waters, and pilotedthem to this desert shore. Mingled with this fringe of un-hewn timber that lined the beach—lay—waifs and strays ofa more sinister kind ; pieces of broken spars, an oar, a boatsflag-staff, and a few shattered fragments of some long-lostvessels planking. Here and there, too, we would come uponskulls of walrus, ribs and shoulder-blades of bears,—broughtpossibly by the ice in winter. Turning again from the sea,we resumed our search for deer; but two or three hoursmore very stiff walking produced no better luck. Suddenlya cry from Fitz, who had wandered a little to the right,brought us helter-skelter to the spot where he was standing.But it was not a stag he had called us to come and look upon.Half imbedded in the black moss at his feet, there lay a greydeal coffin falling almost to pieces with age ; the lid was gone
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198 LE TTERS FROM HIGH LA TITUDES. (XI. —blown oft probably by the wind—and within were stretchedthe bleaching bones of a human skeleton. A rude cross atthe head of the grave still stood partially upright, and a halfobliterated Dutch inscription preserved a record of the deadmans name and age. VANDER SCHELLING .... COMMAN .... JACOB MOOR ....OB 2 JUNE 1758 ^T 44. It was evidently some poor whaler of the last century towhom his companions had given the only burial possible inthis frost-hardened earth, which even the summer sun has noforce to penetrate beyond a couple of inches, and which willnot afford to man the shallowest grave. A bleak resting-place for that hundred years slum.ber, I thought, as I gazedon the dead mariners remains 1— I was snowed over with snow.And beaten with rains,And drenched with the dews;Dead have I long been,— —muraiured the A^ala to Odin in Nifelheim,—and whispersof a similar import seemed to rise up from the lidless coffinbefore us. It was no bro

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