THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 613 



ually till forty miles farther on we had four hundred and ninety- 

 six. How we interpreted all the signs is seen from a part of a 

 diary entry for April 25th: "Land is probably ahead, for so it 

 seems to all of us from the signs, but that very fact keeps the 

 ice from moving and we find no open water for sealing and so 

 can get no dog feed by that way. I haven't the time to record all 

 the facts and reasons now but shall do so if we get seals and thus 

 some spare time." 



We were now in an area of the sort I had always expected to 

 find some time, although this was our first experience. This was 

 one of the sea deserts I have already described. It may have 

 been because of land to the northwest, as we thought, or only the 

 result of winds and currents, that we had here an area where the 

 ice was evidently under restraint as firm as the stresses were heavy. 

 I have seldom seen such evidence of pressure and never far from 

 land. The ice was on the average the heaviest I have ever seen 

 and there is no doubt that seventy-five per cent, of it was many 

 years old. But even ice averaging in thickness twenty and thirty 

 feet had been crushed up into ridges which, although not huge as 

 compared to the miniature mountains that may be built out of six 

 and eight-foot ice near land, were still far bigger than any pres- 

 sure ridges we had seen made out of old ice far at sea. The men 

 thought some of them were a hundred feet high. We never meas- 

 ured them but it is safe to say that they were over fifty. 



This ocean ice had not been moving much for months, if not 

 years. While we were out on it we had severe and various gales, 

 but these never caused a movement of more than a few miles, no 

 more movement, indeed, than might have been caused had we been 

 near the center of an enclosed sea where the lands ahead were as 

 far away as the ones behind. For even where there is no open 

 water for the ice to drift into, the cake that you are on may in a 

 gale edge nearer and nearer to land by the crumpling of the ice 

 between it and shore. 



In summer there had not been much open water here and seals 

 are found in numbers in winter only under such ice as represents 

 the water of the preceding season. As I have emphasized else- 

 where, these sea deserts do not have any necessary relation to lati- 

 tude. Heavy ice and absence of seals are merely evidence of the 

 area being an eddy caused by lands or winds or whatnot. 



I was a little concerned, not knowing the size of this area, as 

 to how soon we could get across it. But what concerned me more 

 was the illness of two out of the four of us, Noice and Knight. 



