chap, xxi WIJDE BAY 289 



mained open, then drift ice was encountered, which became 

 more and more thick until progress was difficult. A wooden 

 ship might have progressed much farther, nosing her way 

 between the floes and pressing against them, when necessary, 

 to open a passage. Such manoeuvres would have sent the 

 Expres to the bottom in half a minute. 



The difficulty of the passage of Heley Sound lies in this, 

 that the tide ebbs and flows through it, with a speed of from 

 eight to ten knots, so that the water eddies and boils about 

 the rocky islands, and through the narrow places of the gut. 

 For our little boat these would have been difficulties enough, 

 but when the water was covered with floating masses of ice, 

 each hundreds of tons in weight, which the current would 

 have twirled about and furiously banged one against another, 

 the obstacle became insuperable. At slack water we might 

 perhaps have run through, even as it was, but we could 

 not approach the mouth of the straits save after traversing 

 twenty miles of ice-encumbered sea, down a narrow channel 

 between land and ice-pack, whilst at any moment the 

 pack might have set upon the land, and crushed us without 

 warning. 



We returned, therefore, to the cape and ran down the 

 east margin of the pack, closely following its edge and 

 searching for a lead. But the ice-sheet was solid, and 

 stretched, practically unbroken, away to the remotest dis- 

 tance. On one side of us was the calm sea with the great 

 bergs floating in it, on the other the white ice-sheet, broad, 

 blue-edged, cracked here and there, and sometimes broken 

 into long high ridges of piled blue and white masses, where 

 two floes had been driven together and "screwed" their 

 tortured edges up into a splintered chaos. Snow lay thickly 

 on the ice-sheet and masked the old ice-heaps ; only the 

 ridges recently formed preserved the sharpness and colour 

 of their component fragments. At one place, three walruses 



