112 GREAT PRESSURE OF THE ICE. 



ever, always diverted by the scent of the track 

 of the seamen upon the ice, or by the rubbish 

 that had been thrown upon the floes, which the 

 keenness of their scent enabled them to detect 

 at a considerable distance, and it was rare, when 

 Ave moved from a place, that it was not speedily 

 visited by one of these animals. 



During the period of our detention in the ice 

 we found that with westerly or southerly winds, 

 and occasionally upon the change of the tide, 

 the fields of ice would sustain such a pressure 

 that their points would yield and be crumbled 

 to atoms; the bay ice would slide upon, and 

 form a layer over the field that was in contact 

 with it ; immense hummocks would be overset, 

 and sometimes forced under water; and in other 

 parts, again, fragments would be piled up 

 thirty or forty feet in height. As nothing made 

 of wood can withstand these pressures, a vessel, 

 if caught, must either be crushed, or rise and 

 allow the ice to advance until it meets an op- 

 ponent as unyielding as itself. Fortunately, the 

 wedge-like form of a vessel is favourable to her 

 rising, and the outline of the fields is generally 

 so irregular that some points of it are nearly 

 certain to receive the strain before it presses 

 much upon the vessel ; the squeezes are, how- 

 ever, occasionally very dangerous. On the even- 



