$2 A VOYAGE. OF DISCOVERY 
every direction ; the open sea may be seen indeed 
to the eastward, but between us and it there are se- 
veral miles of close-packed ice, and to the northward 
and westward, there is nothing to be seen as far as 
the eye can penetrate, but one continued body of 
The average thickness of that around us, is from 
four to five feet, and the extent of the pieces seldom 
exceed forty or fifty feet; and, generally speaking, 
they are smaller than that.. We find on many of 
them pieces of quartz and granite, and occasionally 
heaps of sand and gravel, which I think renders it 
probable that this ice has been formed amongst the 
archipelago of islands that. lie to the northward and 
westward of us. There are several icebergs situated 
here and there. amongst this pack, but they are in 
general of a small szie. ‘The delay occasioned by 
the ice, for these two days, has afforded us an op- 
portunity of making a considerable number of observ- 
ations*; some of which must have been omitted had 
the ship been at sea ; and others were performed with 
greater certainty on the ice than they could have been 
on board : I allude, in the first instance, to the mag- 
etic observations, and, in the second place, to the 
facility with which we were enabled to take lunar 
distances. As both these objects then are deemed of 
_considerable importance (the latter in particular being 
80, on account of its affording us an opportunity of 
judging of the going of the chronometers), we have 
* Our latitude to-day by meridian altitude was 63° 59’ 29” N. 
‘and longitude by mean of several lunar distances 61° 12’ 15” W. 
and by chronometers 61° 26’ 10’ W. The variation was found to 
be 61° 15’ westerly, and the GP or inclination of the magnetic 
needle, 84. 
