356 FIRST GRINNELL EXPEDITION. 



ebbed, and our little vessels were carried back, as resist- 

 lessly as before, through Barrow's Straits, into Lancaster 

 Sound. All this while the immense fields of hummock- 

 ice were moving 1 , and the vessels were in hourly danger 

 of being crushed and destroyed. At length, while drift- 

 ing through Barrow's Straits, the congealed mass, as if 

 crushed together by the opposite shores, became more 

 compact, and the Advance was elevated almost seven 

 feet by the stern, and keeled two feet eight inches, star- 

 board. In this position she remained, with very little 

 alteration, for five consecutive mouths ; for, soon after 

 entering Baffin's Bay in the midst of the winter, the ice 

 became frozen in one immense tract, covering millions 

 of acres. 



Thus frozen in, sometimes more than a hundred miles 

 from land, they drifted slowly along the south-west coast 

 of Baffin's Bay, a distance of more than a thousand miles 

 from Wellington Channel. For eleven weeks that 

 dreary night continued, and during that time the disc of 

 the sun was never seen above the horizon. Yet nature 

 was not wholly forbidding in aspect. Sometimes the 

 aurora borealis would flash up still further northward ; 

 and sometimes mock suns and mock moons would appear, 

 in varied beauty, in the starry sky. Brilliant, too, were 

 the northern constellations ; and when the real moon 

 was at its full, it made its stately circuit in the heavens 

 without descending below the horizon, and lighle.l up 

 the vast piles of ice with a pale lustre, almost as vivid 

 as the morning twilights of more genial skies. 



Around the vessels the crews built a wall of ice ; and 

 in ice huts they stowed away their cordage and stores, to 

 make room for exercise on the decks. They organized a 

 theatrical company, and amused themselves and the offi- 

 cers with comedy well performed. Behind the pieces of 

 auininock each actor learned his part ; and by means of 



