250 THE PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY OF THE SEA. 



479. On the first of April De Haven measured tlie ice, and 

 Tiiickness of a win- found it seven feet two inches thick. It was formed 

 ter's ice. probablj mostly of rain and river water, which, like 



our own littoral waters (§ 426), protect the Salter and heavier waters 

 below from the cold, for De Haven invariably found the temper- 

 ature of the water under the ice 28°, which is the temperature 



for 242 days, during which time she was drifted to the southward 1194: miles, which 

 gives an average rate of five miles a day. 



" This drift — the drift of the Resolute, of the Advance, and Rescue, each upward 

 of a thousand miles — appears to indicate that a similar drift takes place every year. 

 They show the existence of a polynia, and indicate that the open sea is to be sought 

 for at no great distance from Kennedy's Channel on the one hand, and Maury's on 

 the other. This conclusion is reached by a process of reasoning of this sort : 



"When each one of these vessels was released from her cold fetters, there was 

 doubtless behind her, and between her place of release and her place of original im- 

 prisonment, an uninterrupted reach of a thousand miles covered with ice ; which ice, 

 during the fall, the winter, and early spring, drifted out of the Arctic Ocean. Now 

 we have the choice of two suppositions, and of only two, in explanation of this phe- 

 nomenon, and they are : Either that the great body of all the winter-formed ice of 

 the Arctic Ocean must have drifted in an unbroken mass over toward Baffin's Bay ; 

 for these vessels were brought out upon a tongue of ice thrust through that bay down 

 into Davis' Straits ; or that this tongue must have been separated from the main 

 mass, leaving behind that from which it had been severed. 



"By the latter supposition all the known facts of the case may be reconciled ; by 

 the former, not one. 



" If we suppose this drifting field of ice to be formed upon the very verge of an open 

 sea, and to drift to the south as fast as it is formed, then the whole phenomenon be- 

 comes one of easy solution. At any rate, we are now possessed of a physical fact 

 which probably would have returned Captain Crozier and his companions to us all 

 safe and sound had they been aware of its existence ; and that fact is in this oft- 

 occurring, if not regular and annual, southward drift of ice from the Arctic Ocean 

 down through Baffin's Bay into Davis' Strait. Captain Franklin, being ignorant of 

 it, placed his vessels out of its reach on the south, Avhere he was frozen in and died, 

 and where Captain Crozier, his successor, remained imprisoned for eighteen months, 

 and then abandoned his ships; their drift in the mean time, and for obvious reasons, 

 b ing almost, if not quite insensible, except as influenced by the summer thaw and 

 '' winter wedgings." Now if those vessels, with their scurvy-riddled, frostworn, and 

 disabled crews, could have been placed farther to the north, as in Barrow's Strait, or 

 in the fairway of any of those channels connecting with it from the northward and 

 westward, or with Baffin's Bay, the probabilities are that this regularly-recurring 

 winter drift would have brought them down safely into milder climates, and into the 

 glad waters of the Atlantic Ocean, as it did those four other vessels. 



"The frequent, if not the regular annual occurrence of this drift down through 

 Baffin's Bay is a fact which will be considered by all future arctic explorers as one 

 of great importance, for it affords the means of escaping from the Arctic Ocean in 

 the severest winter." — Transactions of the Am. Geo. Sodetij, 18G0. 



