Appendix. 585 



into a sort of bay or inlet, that further progress was difficult, and 

 the ship was held off until a more southerly and less obstructed 

 harbour was reached, and not while yet in the Strait, as one might 

 infer from Lieutenant Gordon's statement. Again, he says that in 

 making in for the land the ship's propeller was broken, but that the 

 harbour was reached with the stumps. Only one blade of the screw 

 was broken, so that the steamer was readily taken in with the other ; 

 and, I may add, that the break was wholly due to inexperience. 

 Captain Sopp had left the bridge, and gone below for a minute, and 

 just as the vessel was passing through a stretch of heavy ice, and 

 entering the open water, Lieutenant Gordon ordered her a-port, and 

 signalled for increased power. The result was that her bow, coming 

 rapidly round, brought her stern and propeller against the ice in 

 such a manner as to produce a horizontal strain on the weakest part 

 of the blade, and it broke off. If the ship had not been brought 

 about until clear of the ice, the accident would not have happened, 

 and Captain Sopp regarded the whole matter as inexcusable. Had 

 he been on the bridge at the time the mishap would not have taken 

 place. 



In speaking of the Arctic ice met with in the neighbourhood of 

 Nottingham Island, Lieutenant Gordon says : — "Viewed from the top 

 of a hill on Nottingham Island the sea in every direction was one vast 

 ice field, and to the southward, between South-east Point and Cape 

 Digges, we saw four vessels fast. This ice was altogether of a 

 different type to what we had hitherto met with. Some of it was 

 over forty feet thick of solid blue ice, not field-ice, which had been 

 thickened by the piling of pan on pan, but a solid sheet of ice, which 

 had evidently been frozen just as we saw it. Much of it was twenty 

 feet thick, and for the general average of all the field we passed 

 through coming: into harbour I estimate that the thickness would 

 have been upwards of fifteen feet. The question as to the origin of 

 this ice and whether it will be frequently met with in the west end 

 of the Strait is an important one ; for in such ice, when closely 

 packed, a vessel even of the build and power of the Neptune was 

 perfectly helpless. I do not consider that it is possible for ice to 

 form in Fox channel to a greater thickness than ten feet in a single 



