THE SALTS OF THE SEA. 251 



479. ThicJcness of a idnter's ice. — On the first of April De 

 Haven measured the ice, and found it seven feet two inches 

 thick. It was formed probably mostly of rain and river water, 

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



Ocean, and that, too, not far from the entrance into it of some of the channels 

 which connect it with Baffin's Bay on the polar side of 75°. The Fox was 

 attempting to pass from Melville Bay over to Lancaster Sound.in August, 1857, 

 Avhen, on the ISth day of that month she fell in with ice, in which she was 

 finally frozen up, and remained so 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 Eesolute, of the Advance, and Eescue, each up- 

 wards of a tliousand 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 greater 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 c-old fetters, there was 

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

 imprisonment, 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 expla- 

 nation of this phenomenon, 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 towards 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 fiom 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 tlie very verge of 

 an open sea, and to drift to the south as fast as it is formed, then the whole phe- 

 nomenon becomes 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, 

 where 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, being almost, if not quite in- 

 sensible, except as influenced by the summer thaw and ' winter wedgings.' 

 Now if those vessels, with tlieir scurvy-riddled, frost-worn and disabled crews, 

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

 way of any of those cliannels connecting with it fiom the northward and west- 

 ward, or with Baffin's Bay, the probabilities are that this regularly occm'ring 



