1876 POLAR ICE. 243 



thirty feet in height and extending to a hundred yards 

 in width. Here and there, however, the rough parts 

 continued for a mile or more in the same direction. 

 The surface of the floe was above our line of sight 

 when standing on a narrow ridge of young ice, which 

 itself was about half a foot above the level of the 

 water. The height of this old floe above water may 

 therefore be taken at about eight feet ; gaining its 

 surface we found it covered with slippery ice-knolls of 

 a dark blue colour from twenty to one hundred feet in 

 diameter, and rising from ten to twenty feet above the 

 general- level of the drifted snow which covered the 

 floe. These knolls generally lay in disconnected ranges 

 and were evidently the remains of heavy lines of hum- 

 mocks pressed up years ago, when the floe was in 

 course of formation, and since melted down into their 

 present rounded form by repeated summer thaws. 

 We congratulated ourselves that if a succession of 

 such floes were met with in the contemplated journey 

 to the northward the travelling would not be very bad. 



' Between the shore hummocks and the floes out- 

 side we found a crack in the ice, parallel with the coast- 

 line and eight feet broad, recently frozen over. When 

 we returned on board we learnt that some of the 

 crew when wandering about the ice the previous 

 Sunday, found this crack recently formed, and that one 

 of the men in trying to jump across had fallen into the 

 unfrozen water.' 



On the return of Captain Markham from his 

 northern journey over the pack later in the season, he 

 reported as follows concerning the age of the Polar 

 floes. 



