BLOCKING UP or THE HANSA. 101 



feet high, composed of fragments and mighty blocks, and 

 the highest jagged point of which looked in the distance 

 like the finger of an outspread hand; then somewhat 

 farther on stood the already mentioned " Brandenburg 

 Gate," two pieces of ice standing near each other like a 

 gateway fifteen feet thick and twenty high ; and lastly, 

 between some neighbouring floes, the " Devil's Thumb." 

 We managed to skate on the rough ice, and in fine 

 weather we strengthened our constitution by gymnas- 

 tic games. The men, for example, amused themselves 

 thoroughly with ball-play ; which in twenty-seven degrees 

 of cold and brig^ht sunshine covered their foreheads with 

 beads of perspiration. You should have seen our 

 carpenter, how light-footed he ran with his fur cap over 

 his ears, his groat thick jacket, and coarse heavy boots ! 



Towards the end of September, the necessity of winter- 

 ing on the floating ice off" the coast, with or without 

 the ship, was decided upon ; and the serious question 

 forced itself upon us, as to what chances we had to 

 count upon in our favour, or how to prepare against the 

 possibility which lay before us that with the ship, though 

 possibly under many dangers, we might drift south- 

 wards, and in February emerge from the ice not far 

 from Iceland. Certainly, the experience of many former 

 Greenland captains, who had got on to the ice on the 

 Greenland coast, told us that their vessels had gone to 

 the bottom, and the men had been sometimes lost, and 

 sometimes saved in the boats, after frightful difficulties 

 and dangers, by reaching an Esquimaux settlement on 

 the south-west coast. In Lindeman's "Arctic Fishery" 

 (p. 37), for example, it is related that this happened 

 in the year 1777 to several ships; amongst others, 



