xlvi WORST JOURNEY IN THE WORLD 
came a change, and on the 11th, amidst intense excitement, 
the ice was breaking up fast. The next day the relief ships 
were but four miles away. On the 14th a shout of “The 
ships are coming, sir!” brought out all the men racing to 
the slopes above Arrival Bay. Scott wrote: 
“The ice was breaking up right across the Strait, and 
with a rapidity which we had not thought possible. No 
sooner was one great floe borne away than a dark streak 
cut its way into the solid sheet that remained, and carved 
out another, to feed the broad stream of pack which was 
hurrying away to the north-west. 
‘‘T have never witnessed a more impressive sight; the 
sun was low behind us, the surface of the ice-sheet in front 
was intensely white, and in contrast the distant sea and its 
leads looked almost black. The wind had fallen to a calm, 
and not a sound disturbed the stillness about us. 
“Yet in the midst of this peaceful silence was an awful 
unseen agency rending that great ice-sheet as though it had 
been naught but the thinnest paper. We knew well by this 
time the nature of our prison bars; we had not plodded 
again and again over those long dreary miles of snow with- 
out realizing the formidable strength of the great barrier 
which held us bound; we knew that the heaviest battle- 
ship would have shattered itself ineffectually against it, and 
we had seen a million-ton iceberg brought to rest at its 
edge. For weeks we had been struggling with this mighty 
obstacle .. . but now without a word, without an effort on 
our part, it was all melting away, and we knew that in an 
hour or two not a vestige of it would be left, and that the 
open sea would be lapping on the black rocks of Hut 
Pot? 
Almost more dramatic was the grounding of the Dis- 
covery off the shoal at Hut Point owing to the rise of a 
blizzard immediately after her release from the ice. Hour 
after hour she lay pounding on the shore, and when it 
seemed most certain that she had been freed only to be 
destroyed, and when all hope was nearly gone, the wind 
lulled, and the waters of the Sound, driven out by the force 
1 Scott, The Voyage of the Discovery, vol. ii. pp. 347-348. 
