HEGEMANN'S DRIFT 271 



a day they went in with the tide and out with the tide, the 

 ice too bad for the boats and never promising enough 

 for a dash to the land. Having become thoroughly 

 acquainted with this portion of the coast with its bold 

 range of hills, its deep bays, its inlets, headlands, and 

 islands, a storm came on which cleared them out of the 

 eddy and drove them further south. Three weeks after 

 that the floe had become so diminished by the lashing 

 of the surge that it was hardly a hundred yards across, 

 and large fragments were slipping off every hour. 



They had been on it for two hundred days and 

 drifted eleven hundred miles when, on the 7th of May, 

 water-lanes opening shorewards, they took to the boats 

 and ventured among the masses of ice, making for the 

 south. At first they had their difficulties in being 

 compelled to haul up on the floes to pass the night or 

 wait for a favourable wind, which meant severe work in 

 unloading and reloading. Once during their painful 

 progress of more than a month they were kept on a 

 floe for six days by gales and snow-showers. Finally, 

 after a long desperate effort, they reached Illuilek 

 Island, and thence proceeded close inshore among rocks 

 and ice to Frederiksdal, a couple of hours' walk from 

 the southernmost point of the Greenland mainland, 

 Cape Farewell being part of an island twenty-eight 

 miles further to the south-east. On the 21st of June, 

 eight days afterwards, they were at Julianehaab, whence 

 they sailed to be landed at Copenhagen on the 1st of 

 September, just ten days before the G-ermama steamed 

 into Bremen. Thus the expedition, by its two divisions, 

 ice-borne and ship-borne, had skirted nearly all that 

 was then known of the east coast from end to end. 



