JUNE 22 TO AUGUST 15, iSgs 641 



them, and succeeded, with great difficulty, in saving the things. 

 At the same time there was a violent disturbance in the water 

 around the vessel. She turned round with the floe, so that she 

 rapidly came to head W. \ S., instead of N.E. All hands 

 were busy getting back into the ship all the things which had 

 been placed upon the floes, and this was successfully accom- 

 plished, although it was no trifling labor, and not without danger 

 to the boats, owing to the strong breeze and the violent working 

 of the floes and blocks of ice. The floe with the ruins of the 

 forge was slowly bearing away in the same direction as the great 

 hummock, and served for some time as a kind of beacon for us. 

 Indeed, in the distance it looked like one, crowned as it was on 

 its summit with a dark skull-cap, a huge iron kettle, which lay 

 there bottom upward. The kettle was originally bought by 

 Trontheim, and came on board at Khabarova, together with the 

 dogs. He had used it on the trip through Siberia for cooking 

 the food for the dogs. We used to keep blubber and other dogs' 

 food in it. In the course of its long service the rust had eaten 

 holes in the bottom, and it was therefore cashiered, and thrown 

 away upon the pressure-ridge close to the smithy. It now served, 

 as I have said, as a beacon, and is perhaps to-day drifting about 

 in the Polar Sea in that capacity — unless it has been found and 

 taken possession of by some Eskimo housewife on the east coast 

 of Greenland. 



As the sun and mild weather brought their influence to bear 

 upon the surface of the ice and the snow, the vessel rose daily 

 J.igher and higher above the ice, so that by July 23d we had 

 three and a half planks of the greenheart ice-hide clear on the 

 port side and ten planks to starboard. In the evening of August 

 8th our floe cracked on the port, and the/^Vc?/// altered her list from 

 7° to port to 1.5° starboard side, with respectively four and two 

 planks of the ice-hide clear, and eleven bow-irons clear forward. 



I feared that the small floe in which we were now embedded 

 might drift off down the channel if the ice slackened an)' more, 

 and I therefore ordered the mate to moor the vessel to the main 

 flow, where many of our things were stored. The order, how- 

 ever, was not quickly enough executed, and when I came on 

 II.-41 



