260 VESSELS SEEN ON ICE IN 1852. 



would not be hampered by icebergs, inasmuch as they 

 are not seen within Lancaster Sound, although they may 

 be found at its mouth ; that vessels frozen in, and re- 

 maining so at the commencement of spring, would be 

 surrounded by the floe or tabular field-ice; and that 

 its line of floatation, if it broke away and passed to the 

 southward, would not support vessels more than eighteen 

 inches above the sea-level. 



But the temperature of the sea between the mouth of 

 Lancaster Sound and the Great Bank of Newfoundland 

 being always much above the freezing-point, and varying 

 between 50 and 60 southerly of Cape Farewell, it is 

 next to impossible in such a drift, over seventeen hun- 

 dred miles as the crow flies, that any ice in which those 

 vessels might be sealed in 74 N. could by any reasoning 

 withstand the thaws, as well as sea washing, over such 

 an interval. 



But if we assume the vessels to have been driven out 

 of the Sound and frozen in the pack, then, if circum- 

 stances for the winter froze them in contact with a berg, 

 undoubtedly the berg would have discarded them early 

 in the spring, and permitted them to float freely; or 

 if attached, most undoubtedly would, by the customary 

 thaw, have placed them so frequently under water at 

 the periodical rolling as the under surface thawed, as to 

 leave no traces of vessels after they had once been ex- 

 posed to such an immersion. 



