THE ARCTIC DISASTERS 263 



this — imagine it if you can — was the singularly terrible sound 

 of planks and timbers and beams buckling and cracking under 

 pressure. On September 7th, the pack drove the bark Roman 

 against another grounded floe and stove her sides, but relaxed 

 its pressure momentarily — an old trick of the pack — so that 

 the luckless vessel went down like a rock and the crew barely 

 succeeded in scrambling to safety. Next day it crushed the 

 bark Awashonks, and pushed her up on the ice instead of sink- 

 ing her. 



Of the thirty-two vessels that had been in sight of one another 

 when the ice enclosed the bight between Point Belcher and 

 Icy Cape, three were now hopeless wrecks. What had become 

 of the seven that had been out of sight from the first, no one 

 knew. And still the pack was driving south upon the land. 



By this time the danger that threatened every remaining 

 vessel of the fleet was enough to alarm the stoutest whaleman 

 of them all, for they lay in a strip of open water, which was 

 closed at each end and too narrow to work a ship. Not only 

 that, but it was growing narrower every hour, with the grounded 

 floes on one side, and on the other the pack ice. 



There were twelve hundred souls — men, women, and chil- 

 dren — in the imperiled fleet. The captains, meeting in grave 

 council, sent three whale-boats and their crews, under the com- 

 mand of Captain Frazer of the ship Florida, to learn if any of the 

 vessels were safely outside the ice and so in a position to rescue 

 any of the twelve hundred. The boats went more than seventy 

 miles down the lane of clear water and over the ice, but the 

 messages that they brought back were not, as a whole, com- 

 pletely reassuring: the seven missing vessels had escaped from 

 the ice by so narrow a margin that several of them had left 

 their anchors, and six of the seven captains would promise 

 only to wait "as long as they could." But from the seventh 

 he brought a message that for unequivocal determination 

 will be remembered when every man of the fleet is in his grave. 



''Tell them," said Captain Dowden of the Progress, ''I will 

 wait for them as long as I have an anchor left or a spar 

 to carry sail." 



