. Letters from high latitudes : being some account of a voyage in 1856 in the schonner yacht "Foam" to Iceland . lf im-bedded in the black moss at his feet, there lay a grey dealcoffin falling almost to pieces with age ; the lid was gone—blown off 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 SCHELLIXG COMMAN .... JACOB MOOR ....OB 2 JUNE 1758 yET 44. It was evidently some poor whaler of the
. Letters from high latitudes : being some account of a voyage in 1856 in the schonner yacht "Foam" to Iceland . lf im-bedded in the black moss at his feet, there lay a grey dealcoffin falling almost to pieces with age ; the lid was gone—blown off 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 SCHELLIXG COMMAN .... JACOB MOOR ....OB 2 JUNE 1758 yET 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 slumber, I thought, as I gazedon the dead mariners remains !— I was snowed over with snow,And beaten with rains,And drenched with the dews ;Dead have I long been,— —murmured the Vala to Odin in Nifelheim,—and whispers MM ^ti. XI.] THE UNBURIED DEAD 193 of a similar import to rise up from the lidless coffinbefore us. It was no brother mortal that lay at our feet,softly folded in the embraces of Mother Earth/ but apoor scarecrow, gibbeted for ages on this bare rock, like adead Prometheus ; the vulture, frost, gnawing for ever onhis bleaching relics, and yet eternally preserving them ! On another part of the coast we found two other corpsesyet more scantily sepulchred, without so much as a cross tomark their resting-place. Even in the palmy days of thewhale-fisheries, it was the practice of the Dutch and Englishsailors to leave the wooden coffins in which they had placedtheir comrades remains, exposed upon the shore ; and Ihave been told by an eye-witness, that in Magdalena Baythere are to be seen, even to this day, the bodies of menwho died upwards of 250 years ago, in such complete pre-se
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