276 NO SOUNDINGS WITH 400 FATHOMS. [May, 



tent we found the weather perfectly mild. Since our last 

 visit the snow had nearly disappeared, and revealed five 

 circles of stones, marking probably the resting-places of 

 Esquimaux, but very old : they could never have occurred 

 there by any freak of Nature. Our place of encampment 

 was also a strange accumulation of fossiliferous rounded 

 rocks. This position afforded us the first opportunity of 

 determining the rates of our chronometers, which appear 

 to have behaved well ; one being my own, well tried for 

 twenty-three years, I knew the value of, but the other 

 belonged to Government. 



At seven P.M. we moved forward against a cold, bleak, 

 north-west breeze, and about midnight fell upon our out- 

 ward track, and lunched at one of our former stations, 

 near the seal-hole. Such an opportunity was too valu- 

 able to lose, and I here tried for soundings in the seal- 

 hole with a two-pound lump of lead, and the cottons 

 (to which I have already alluded) : four reels rapidly va- 

 nished, but no bottom, with four hundred fathoms in the 

 strait. The current was found to set very strong to the 

 west (true). 



About six A.M. on the 23rd we pitched about two 

 miles in advance of one of our late bivouacks. The sun 

 again lent his cheering rays, but, " after recent expo- 

 sures," attended by unmistakable appearances of thaw in 

 the strait, not unattended by the drawback that it might 

 break up the pack before we reached Cape Disraeli, I 

 possibly was not so grateful for his presence as I might 

 have felt at any other period. Breaking up " the pack" 

 and breaking up " the floe" are so widely distinct, that I 

 think some explanation is needed ; in few words, there- 



