Bocks and Debris on the Ice. 195 



the beginning, cold weather comes on ; the waters become cokl, and, growing colder 

 as winter advances, ice forms; the tides all the time never forgetting their regu- 

 lar order of flood and ebb. As the spring-tides come on, during their ebb, in many 

 shallow i)arts of Hudson's Bay, sheets of ice rest ni)on rocks, stones, shells, and 

 weeds. These sheets of ice, as they lie, send down showers upon th(^ idready 

 moist bottom, all of which conglaciate at once into a solid mass by the piercing, 

 pinching cold of the north. Kocks and stones, shells and weed, sheets of ice, 

 and what was txickling water become one solid body. The tide now floods and 

 lifts the floe, having on its nether surface a ponderous load of earthy matter. 

 Before another ebb, King Cold has succeeded in adding several inches of ice under- 

 neath the structure of rocks, stones, land, shells, and weeds, which are now com- 

 pletely enveloped in crystal. Ebb and flood succeed each other, and as often add 

 a stone or other foreign matter, and then another stratum of ice to the floe or 

 smaller pieces of ice that during certain intervals are afloat or aground. 



I will now proceed to give some proof of all this I have stated. Three winters 

 I have spent in the northern regions, two of them in the locality of Frobisher Bay. 

 Many times have I seen in the springs succeeding these winters, stones, sand, 

 shells, and weeds on the top of bay-ice, or such ice as had been formed on shallow 

 waters. As warm weather advanced and the ice wasted away, more and more 

 of these substances would appear. My attention was more particularly directed 

 to this subject during my search on my voyage of 18G0-'G2 for one of the relics of 

 Frobisher in the Countess of Warwick's Sound, on the north side of Frobisher 

 Bay. The natives had told me where one of their people had thrown an anvil, 

 some five years before, from a rock by the bold shore of Oo-pung-ne-wing Island into 

 the sea. They were quite sure I could find this relic on the disruption and drift- 

 ing away of the ice in the summer, providing 1 would be at the above-named 

 island at some low spring-tide. Corresponding to their advice, I visited the 

 island in the summer of 1862, and at low tide the rock bottom all about the place 

 indicated from whence the anvil had been thrown, was just above water; but no 

 anvil could be found ; indeed, not a loose stone was thereabout. The shore-i(;e 

 had licked up everything movable, not leaving even so valuable a relic as the 

 one sought, three centuries old. The manner in which this relic was lost to the 

 world any one can judge on reading what I have now written. The shore-ice 

 having enveloped the anvil in its crystal walls during the winter season, on its 

 being free from land in the succeeding summer, drifted away with what would 

 have been to me a valuable treasure. Had that piece of shore-ice been seen by 



