ARCTIC SLEDGE-TRAVELLING, 295 
high, carrying the lading about a foot above the ice. An average- 
sized sledge is three feet wide and ten feet long, and is drawn by 
seven men. It is constructed with only just so much strength as is 
absolutely necessary, since every pound of weight saved in wood and 
iron enables so much more provisions to be carried. All our sledges 
have been drawn by the seamen, and the labour of doing so is most 
excessive. 
The first sledge expedition in the search for Franklin was led by 
Sir James Ross in person. By very great efforts a distance out and 
home of 500 statute miles was accomplished in forty days; but out 
of the twelve picked men by whom the two sledges were drawn, five 
were completely knocked up, and every man required a considerable 
time under medical care to recruit his strength, after this lengthened 
period of intense labour, constant exposure, and insufficient food. 
Throughout this paper the distances will be in English statute 
miles, as being most generally understood. 
It is necessary to apprehend clearly the nature of the surface over 
which our sledges have to travel. 
People unacquainted with the subject commonly fall into one or 
other extreme, and suppose that we either skate over glassy ice or 
walk on snow-shoes over snow of any conceivable depth. 
Salt-water ice is not so smooth as to be slippery ; to skate upon it 
is very possible, though very fatiguing. But hardly is the sea frozen 
over, when the snow falls, and remains upon it all the winter. When 
it first falls the snow is soft, and perhaps a foot or fifteen inches 
deep; but it is blown about by every wind, until having become like 
the finest sand, and hardened under a severe temperature, it consoli- 
dates into a covering of a few inches in depth, and becomes so com- 
pact that the sledge-runner does not sink more than an inch or so: 
its specific gravity is then about half that of water. 
This expanse of snow is rarely smooth: its surface is broken into 
ridges or furrows by every strong wind. These ridges are the 
“Sastrugi” of Admiral Wrangell; and although the inequalities are 
seldom more than a foot hich, they add greatly to the labour of tra- 
velling, especially when obliged to cross them at right angles. 
As the spring season advances the old winter snow becomes 
softened, fresh snow falls, and sledging is made more laborious still. 
At length the thaw arrives; the snow becomes a sludgy mixture, 
with wet snow on top and water beneath, through which men and 
sledges sink down to the ice below. It is now almost impossible to 
get along at all; but in a few days the snow dissolves, and we make 
fair progress again over the now flooded ice. 
