OF A NORTH-WEST PASSAGE. 



33 



most unfavourable. We did not fail to take advantage of this alteration, ^gnst 

 and, standing under all sail to the westward, soon made Southampton 

 Island. At midnight we had deepened the water to one hundred and five 

 fathoms. 



After an unobstructed run of between thirty and forty miles, we were Sun. 5. 

 again stopped, and obliged to make fast, on the morning of the 5th, the 

 ice becoming gradually closer, and occurring in heavy and extensive floes. 

 After divine service had been performed, we again made sail, being in 

 lat. 65° 22' 50", and longitude, by chronometers, 81° 24'. By dint of a 

 good deal of " boring," and after receiving a number of very violent 

 blows, we succeeded in forcing our way about ten miles nearer the land, 

 which appearing not to be continuous in one part, I concluded we were 

 near the eastern entrance of the Frozen Strait. But the haze or fog-bank 

 which, in these regions, even on days apparently the clearest, often gives 

 a distorted appearance to objects at the distance of four or five leagues, 

 prevented our making it out distinctly. As it was now impracticable to 

 make any further progress, we were under the necessity of submitting 

 to that suspense which the increasing interest of our situation naturally 

 excited. 



Some of the floes in this neighbourhood measured at least half a mile 

 each way, being the largest, except one or two, that we had yet met with. 

 They were all covered with innumerable " hummocks," between which 

 were pools of water, some fresh, and others communicating with the sea 

 below. Though we subsequently witnessed the formation of one kind of 

 " hummocky" floes, by means of the doubling occasioned by pressure, these 

 were evidently produced in a different way. From their appearance it 

 would seem that they are formed of numerous detached masses of ice, left 

 floating on the sea at the setting in of the winter's frost; which, facilitating 

 the production of a new sheet, are enclosed and, as it were, soldered to- 

 gether by it ; thus, increasing to several feet in thickness in the course of 

 the winter, and receiving a covering of snow upon its upper surface, it 

 becomes one firm and compact body. The height of the hummocks, which 

 were here five or six feet above the general level of the floe, depends, of 

 course, on the size of the masses remaining undissolved at the close of the 

 summer; and, in most parts of Baffin's Bay, where, I believe, little or none 

 of the former year's ice would be found at the setting in of the frost, the 

 floes are level and regular, like those which we know to be produced 



