CHAPTER XXXV 



AFTER several weeks' trying to get through the ice 

 we failed to get ashore, owing to there being twenty 

 to sixty miles of fixed land ice, and now have worked 

 our way back eastward through three hundred miles of pack 

 and floe ice. By luck we might have found part of the coast 

 free of ice, or only a few miles of it, but apparently, instead 

 of this drifting south and giving some rain to the British 

 Isles, southerly and easterly winds have held back the South 

 Polar ice-drift. Eight to ten miles off the coast of Shannon 

 Island, on the north-east of Greenland, was as far west as we 

 could press ; other navigators have taken almost the same 

 course and have found as little as only fifteen miles of ice 

 to shove through between Norway and Greenland. 



Yesterday we got the open sea and swell and now, as I 

 write, we have come in contact with ice from north of Spitz- 

 bergen, and the ice from Siberia coming round north and 

 south of Spitzbergen, and it is so plentiful that we are 

 obliged to go north-east to find an opening easterly. 



All afternoon we have been trying to find an opening and 

 till six or seven could not see a way through, and ice coming 

 from north jammed us considerably, but it was light pack, 

 not more than four or five deep, so our ship, little as it is, 

 was able to hold her own. You could by its thin and flat 

 appearance at once distinguish the Spitzbergen ice from 

 older, heavier polar ice, which we just left to the west. 



Now, at seven in the evening, we have struggled through, 

 and are leaving all Arctic ice behind. The pieces get smaller 

 and smaller as we approach the open sea, till at the sea-edge 

 there is only a margin of, say, a mile or so, studded with small 

 pieces a few feet wide, and then again there is a further 

 margin still smaller, remnants that were once hummocks 

 or even parts of some iceberg. Then even these faint 

 sentinels of the Arctic fade away behind us in a pale line, 

 287 



