The frost is unconstant in our country, but it is not so in Spitzbergen. In the month of April at seventy-one degrees, it was so cold that we could hardly keep warmth within us. They say that in this month as also in May, the hardest frosts happen every year.

All the rigging, by reason of its being wet, is covered over with ice, and stiff.

They do not send their ships so soon as they did a few years ago, and yet they come time enough there, for if they arrive too early, there is nothing for them to do, because the ice is not yet dissipated, and therefore but few ivhales to be seen.

In the two first summer months of Spitzbergen, their teeth chatter in their heads commonly, and the appetite is greater than in any other countreys.

The sun sets no more after the third day of May, and we were about seventy-one degrees, when we could see as well by night as by day. I cannot say much of constancy of the weather in these two first months, for it changed daily; they say also, if the moon appears cloudy and misty, with a streaky sky, that then there commonly follows a storm. Whether the moon doth prognosticate such storms, I cannot tell, because we have observed, that after we have seen the moon, in a clear sky, the air has grown foggy, which happeneth often, chiefly if the wind changes.