1853.] REMARKS ON PACK ICE. 277 



fore, the floe is a homogeneous frozen mass, of possibly 

 miles in extent, averaging from three feet to three feet 

 six inches, or four feet, in thickness ; it is tough, elastic, 

 not easily upset, and impermeable to the sea; but the 

 pack, being but a collection of bits of floe, or bay ice, 

 broken into pieces of every size and in every imaginable 

 idea of confusion, at one place two feet, at another twenty 

 or thirty, and only cemented by casual freezing, tumbles 

 asunder by its own inequality of weight, rending the 

 heavier from the lighter by any slight access of tempera- 

 ture, or still more vigorously by cracking and letting the 

 warmer sea at this period never below 29 '5 flow in 

 between the joinings. Such a body of ice is at all times 

 suspicious ; we look upon it in the light of sedition in 

 the camp, and calculate pretty correctly that the spring 

 will relieve us of such rubbish when we can cut through 

 the simple three-feet ice and persuade it to float out of 

 our way. 



On the 25th, being then near to the entrance of the 

 southern lead from Cape Disraeli, I moved towards the 

 eastern peninsula, in order to erect a beacon, directing 

 the ' Dauntless' to pitch on our old outward track, near 

 the pack, and await my regaining. Our tent was pitched 

 about a mile from the shore, at the verge of the rough 

 ice, from whence we walked to the shore, ascending the 

 crest of a very remarkable little peninsula, forming a 

 deep bay within it to the southward -. from hence I saw 

 down the throat of this strait, nearly due south, but it 

 was too hazy to obtain any satisfactory clue. Construct- 

 ing a substantial rocky pile, of five feet base by eight 

 feet four inches in height, we returned to our tent, re- 



