HORRORS OF THE "JE ANNETTE" EXPEDITION 331 



At the end of May the log was headed "one hundred and ninety 

 miles northwest of Herald Island." Thus after nine months of 

 floating to and fro in the pack-ice she was less than two hundred 

 miles distant from the spot where she had been locked in an icy 

 prison in September, 1879. 



Summer was upon her again and strong hopes were now en- 

 tertained of breaking loose. A fall of rain on the first of June 

 and a rise in the thermometer to 37 degrees gave vitality to their 

 hopes, and they looked eagerly forward to a quick escape. Yet the 

 summer proved inclement, fogs, snows and gales being almost the 

 daily entry in the ship's log. From the crow's nest, at the end of 

 the month, the ship was seen to occupy the center of an island of 

 ice, which was surrounded by a lane of open water a mile distant. 

 But the ice around her continued thick, and during the months t of 

 July and August her position remained unchanged, while every 

 effort to liberate the screw proved unsuccessful. DeLong's journal 

 for August 1 7th contained the following entry: 



"Our glorious summer is passing away; it is painful beyond 

 expression to go round the ice in the morning and see no change 

 since the night before, and to look the last thing at night at the 

 same thing you saw in the morning. . . . High as our tem- 

 perature is (34 degrees), foggy weather a daily occurrence, yet 

 here we are hard and fast, with ponds here and there two or three 

 feet deep, with an occasional hole through to the sea. Does the ice 

 never find an outlet? It has no regular set in any direction north, 

 south, east or west, as far as I can judge, but slowly surges in 

 obedience to wind pressure, and grinds back again to an equilibrium 

 when the pressure ceases. Are there no tides in this ocean ? . . . 

 Full moon or new moon, last quarter or first quarter, the ice is as 

 immovable as a rock. . . . It is hard to believe that an im- 

 penetrable barrier exists clear up to the Pole, and yet as far as we 

 have gone, we have not seen one speck of land north of Herald 

 Island." 



