On the morning of the 7th a black whale came up close to the Hecla, being the first we had seen since the 22d of August the preceding year, about the longitude of 913/4 deg.  W.; it therefore acquired among us the distinctive appellation of the whale.  Since leaving Winter Harbour we had also, on two or three occasions, seen a solitary seal.  The wind continued fresh from the east and E.N.E. in the morning, and the loose ice came close in upon us, but the main body remained stationary at the distance of nearly half a mile.

In the afternoon a man from each mess was sent on shore to pick sorrel, which was here remarkably fine and large, as well as more acid than any we had lately met with.  The shelter from the northerly winds afforded by the high land on this part of the coast, together with its southern aspect, renders the vegetation here immediately next the sea much more luxuriant than in most parts of Melville Island which we visited, and a considerable addition was made to our collection of plants.

The easterly breeze died away in the course of the day, and at three P.M. was succeeded by a light air from the opposite quarter; and as this freshened up a little, the loose ice began to drift into our bight, and that on the eastern side of the point to drive off.  It became expedient, therefore, immediately to shift the ship round the point, where she was made fast in four fathoms abaft and seventeen feet forward, close alongside the usual ledge of submarine ice, which touched her about seven feet under water, and which, having few of the heavy masses aground upon it, would probably have allowed her to be pushed over it had a heavy pressure occurred from without.  It was the more necessary to moor the ship in some such situation, as we found from six to seven fathoms water by dropping the hand-lead down close to her bow and quarter on the outer side.

Several heavy pieces of floes drove close past us, not less than ten or fifteen feet in thickness, but they were fortunately stopped by a point of land without coming in upon us.  At eleven o’clock, however, a mass of this kind, being about half an acre in extent, drove in, and gave the ship a considerable “nip” between it and the land ice, and then grazed past her to the westward.  I now directed the rudder to be unhung, and the ship to be swung with her head to the eastward, so that the bow, being the strongest part, might receive the first and heaviest pressure.

The ice did not disturb us again till five A.M. on the 8th, when another floe-piece came in and gave the ship a heavy rub, and then went past, after which it continued slack about us for several hours.  Everything was so quiet at nine o’clock as to induce me to venture up the hill abreast of us, in order to have a view of the newly-discovered land to the southwest, which, indeed, I had seen indistinctly and much refracted from the Hecla’s deck in the morning.  This land, which extends beyond the 117th degree of west longitude, and is the most western yet discovered in the Polar Sea to the northward of the American Continent, was honoured with the name of BANKS’S LAND, out of respect to the late venerable and worthy president of the Royal Society.