1875 BESET IN ROBESON CHANNEL. 123 



outside it was more open, and with the calm weather 

 gave promise of letting us get round the Cape. 

 Accordingly I pushed off and ran three miles into the 

 pack. At 3 p.m. we could advance no farther, and 

 instead of returning to the shelter of Lincoln Bay, I 

 waited in a large pool of water in the hope of its 

 shortly opening towards the north. In this I was dis- 

 appointed, for at 4 p.m., with just sufficient warning 

 to enable me to pick out the softest looking place near 

 us, the ice completely encircled the ship, and she be- 

 came hopelessly beset in a very heavy pack, consisting 

 of floes of eighty feet in thickness and from one to 

 four miles in diameter. The intervals between the 

 floes were filled with broken-up ice of all sizes, from 

 the solid hummocks which, grinding past the ship's 

 side, endangered the quarter boats, to the smaller pieces 

 which the nipping together of the heavy floes had 

 rounded, like boulders or pebbles in a rapid stream. 

 Fortunately for us, intermixed with the pack was a 

 vast amount of sludge-ice formed during the last 

 snowfall. 



Since meeting the ice off Cape Sabine I had noticed 

 a gradual but considerable change taking place in the 

 nature of the floes as we advanced north. The heaviest 

 that we first encountered were not more than eight or 

 ten feet in thickness. Off Cape Frazer were a few still 

 older pieces, estimated at the time as being twenty 

 feet thick, but evidently that was far short of the 

 correct measurement. It was now certain that we 

 were nearing a sea where the ice was of a com- 

 pletely different description to that of Baffin's Bay or 

 Lancaster Sound, and that we were indeed approaching 



