ICE FIELDS, 53 
the motion of the water soon disperses them, and the ships 
imprisoned by them find a free passage. But a day of calm is still 
sufficient to unite the dispersed masses, which oscillate and grind 
against each other with a strange noise, which sailors compare to 
the yelping of young dogs. 
When aship is shut up in oneof these floating ice-fields, inexplicable 
changes sometimes occur amid their vast incoherent aggregations. 
Vessels which appear to their crew immovable are found in a few hours 
to have completely reversed their positions. Two ships shut in at a 
short distance from each other were driven many leagues asunder 
without being able to perceive any change in the surrounding ice. 
At other times ships are drawn along with the floating ice-fields, just as 
the white bears are who make long voyages at sea upon these monster 
vehicles. In 1777 the Dutch vessel the Wilhelmina was carried 
along with some other whaling ships from 80° north back to 62°, in 
sight of the Iceland coast. During this terrible journey the ships 
were broken up one after the other. More than 200 persons 
perished, and the remainder at last reached land with difficulty. 
Lieutenant De Haven, navigating in search of Sir John Franklin, 
was caught in the ice in the middle of the channel in Wellington 
Strait. During the nine months which he remained in captivity, he 
drifted nearly 1,300 miles towards the south ; and the ship Resolute, 
abandoned by Captain Kellet in an ice-field of immense extent, was 
drifted towards the south with this vast mass to a much greater 
distance. 
Some curious speculations are hazarded by Dr. Maury, arising 
out of some investigations of his upon the winds and currents, some 
facts seeming to indicate the existence of a climate, mild by com- 
parison, within the Antarctic Circle. These indications are a low 
barometer, a high degree of aérial rarefaction, and strong winds from 
the north. “The winds,” he says, “were the first to whisper of 
this strange state of things, and to intimate to us that the Antarctic 
climates are in winter very unlike the Arctic for rigour and severity.” 
The result of an immense mass of observation on the polar and 
equatorial winds reveals a marked difference in atmospherical move- 
ments north, as compared with the same movements south, of the 
Equator; the equatorial winds of the northern hemisphere being only 
in excess between the tenth and thirteenth parallels, while those of 
the southern hemisphere are dominant over a zone of 45°, or from 
° south to 10° north. 
“The fact that the influence of the polar indraught upon the 
winds should extend from the Antarctic to the parallel of 40° south, 
