158 ARCTIC VOYAGES. Chap. V r I. 



water is the circumstance which most decidedly begins to 

 put a stop to the navigation of these seas, and warns the 

 seaman that his season of active operations is nearly at an 

 end. It is indeed scarcely possible to conceive the degree 

 of hindrance occasioned by this impediment, trifling as it 

 always appears before it is encountered. When the sheet 

 has acquired a thickness of about half an inch, and is of 

 considerable extent, a ship is liable to be stopped by it 

 unless favoured by a strong and free wind ; and even when 

 still retaining her way through the water, at the rate of a 

 mile an hour, her course is not always under the control of 

 the helmsman, though assisted by the nicest attention to the 

 action of the sails, but depends upon some accidental in- 

 crease or decrease in the thickness of the sheet of ice, with 

 which one bow or the other comes in contact. Nor is it 

 possible in this situation for the boats to render their usual 

 assistance, by running out lines or otherwise ; for having 

 once entered the young ice, they can only be propelled 

 slowly through it by digging the oars and boat-hooks into 

 it, at the same time breaking it across the bows, and by 

 rolling the boat from side to side. After continuing this 

 laborious work for some time with little good effect, and 

 considerable damage to the planks and oars, a boat is often 

 obliged to return the same way that she came, backing out 

 in the canal thus formed to no purpose. A ship in this 

 helpless state, her sails in vain expanded to a favourable 

 breeze, her ordinary resources failing, and suddenly arrested 

 in her course upon the element through which she has been 

 accustomed to move without restraint, has often reminded 

 me of Gulliver tied down by the feeble hands of Lilli- 

 putians ; nor are the struggles she makes to effect a release, 

 and the apparent insignificance of the means by which her 

 efforts are opposed, the least just or the least vexatious part 

 of the resemblance." — pp. 116, 117. 



The expediency of fixing upon some eligible 



