te* 



WHALING AND BEAR-HUNTING 261 



below, and though accustomed to the ordinary shock of 

 ramming ice, I knew at once, by the long rise of our bows 

 and the roll to port and starboard that we were in a fix. 

 Perhaps a small diagram may help to explain so here you 

 see two floes meeting, bright sunshine, blue sky overhead, 

 and rippling blue water where there are open pools in the 

 ice a scene of perfect summer peace. The two floes, each 

 weighing millions of tons, are very wide; they are slowly 

 moving towards each other ; they nearly meet ; and we 

 mistakenly try to get between them before they close, and 

 run our stem and 

 half our keel on to 



A, the submerged 

 ice-foot of the floe 



B. The floe C is 

 coming towards us 

 in the direction of 



B well, to cut it ^ 

 short, if the floes C 

 C and B meet, with 

 the Fonix between 

 them, our party, 

 thirty all told, have 

 our little house 

 squeezed, and when the floe opens our home goes 

 down and we get on to the floe till we are rescued 

 by some relief expedition, or we flicker out. But for 

 having lots to do I personally would have felt the 

 necessity of a pipe or a dram but as it was the writer 

 and two men and a boat had their hands full, getting out 

 an ice-anchor and wire-rope astern to D to kedge her 

 off. The said hawser burst and the artist showed the sea- 

 men the bend for a wire-rope, in a hurry or at any time. 

 Boy Scouts know it. Hamilton stood by at the wheel and 

 Svendsen and men shifted the cargo aft to take the weight 

 off the bow. An ice-tongue of floe C touched at D and 

 gave us breathing-space and by-and-by we kedged her off 

 astern, just in time to avoid a squeeze, and got through 

 between the floes. One might write a chapter about our 



