SOUNDINGS. 45 



openings as offered themselves, and making more 

 sail on the ship, we succeeded in reaching a hole 

 of water; beyond this however there was no 

 outlet, and the ship was necessarily hove-to. At 

 daylight, the wind having veered to the south- 

 west, we bore up, and ran between the detached 

 ice as near as we could, though not without 

 many violent shocks that made the whole frame- 

 work of the ship tremble. 



We continued all that day laboriously boring 

 our way through heavy streams of ice, or vainly 

 endeavouring to weather the larger masses, un- 

 der the disadvantage of a dense fog : but the 

 ship at length received so many blows, and the 

 ice closed so fast while we were continually 

 drifting to leeward, that it would have been rash 

 to have continued any longer the unequal and 

 profitless contest. I therefore made fast, with 

 an ice-anchor, to an adjoining floe, and, having 

 furled the sails, employed the men in making a 

 few necessary reparations. Soundings were ob- 

 tained with one hundred and twenty seven fathoms 

 of line, when the bottom was found to consist of 

 green mud, the current then setting N. W. by W., 

 one mile an hour. Some observations for the dip 

 made on the ice, out of the sphere of the ship's 

 attraction, gave 85° 54'. At daybreak of the 

 11th, not the slighest alteration was perceptible, 

 except indeed that the north and west horizons 



