134 LETTERS FROM HIGH LATITUDES. [VIII. 



water recommenced. As this operation was likely to require 

 some time, directly breakfast was over, (it was now about 

 eleven o'clock a.m.,) and after a vain attempt had been 

 made to take a photograph of the mountain, which the mist 

 was again beginning to envelope, I turned in to take a nap, 

 which I rather needed, — fully expecting that by the time I 

 awoke we should be beginning to get pretty clear of the 

 pack. On coming on deck, however, four hours later, 

 although we had reached away a considerable distance from 

 the land, and had even passed the spot, where, the day 

 before, the sea was almost free, — the floes seemed closer 

 than ever ; and, what was worse, from the mast-head not a 

 vestige of open water was to be discovered. On every side, 

 as far as the eye could reach, there stretched over the sea 

 one cold white canopy of ice. 



The prospect of being beset, in so slightly built a craft, 

 was — to say the least — unpleasant ; it looked very much as 

 if fresh packs were driving down upon us from the very 

 direction in which we were trying to push out, yet it had 

 become a matter of doubt which course it would be best to 

 steer. To remain stationary was out of the question ; the 

 pace at which the fields drift is sometimes very rapid, 1 and 

 the first nip would settle the poor little schooner's business 

 for ever. At the same time, it was quite possible that any 

 progress we succeeded in making, instead of tending towards 

 her liberation, might perhaps be only getting her deeper 



1 Dr. Scoresby states that the invariable tendency of fields of ice is to 

 drift south-westward, and that the strange effects produced by their 

 occasional rapid motions, is one of the most striking objects the Polar 

 Seas present, and certainly the most terrific. They frequently acquire a 

 rotary motion, whereby their circumference attains a velocity of several 

 miles an hour ; and it is scarcely possible to conceive the consequences 

 produced by a body, exceeding ten thousand million tons in weight, 

 coming in contact with another under such circumstances. The strongest 

 ship is but an insignificant impediment between two fields in motion. 

 Numbers of.whale vessels have thus been destroyed ; some have been 

 thrown upon the ice ; some have had their hulls completely torn open, 

 or divided in two, and others have been overrun by the ice, and buried 

 beneath its heaped fragments. 



