OF A NORTH-WEST PASSAGE. 



117 



encountered. When the sheet has acquired a thickness of about half an inch, J ® ^ ' 

 and is of considerable extent, a ship is liable to be stopped by it unless fa- '^w 

 voured by a strong and free wind ; and even when still retaining her way 

 through the water, at the rate of a mile an hour, her course is not always 

 under the control of the helmsman, though assisted by the nicest attention 

 to the action of the sails, but depends on some accidental increase or 

 decrease in the thickness of the sheet of ice, with which one bow or the 

 other comes in contact. Nor is it possible in this situation for the boats to 

 render their usual assistance, by running out lines or otherwise ; for having 

 once entered the young ice, they can only be propelled slowly through it 

 by digging the oars and boat-hooks into it, at the same time breaking it 

 across the bows, and by rolling the boat from side to side. After continuing 

 this laborious work for some time with little good effect, and" considerable 

 damage to the planks and oars, a boat is often obliged to return the same 

 way that she came, backing out in the canal thus formed to no purpose. A 

 ship in this helpless state, her sails in vain expanded to a favourable breeze, 

 her ordinary resources failing, and suddenly arrested in her course upon 

 the element through which she has been accustomed to move without re- 

 straint, has often reminded me of Gulliver tied down by the feeble hands of 

 Lilliputians ; nor are the struggles she makes to effect a release, and the 

 apparent insignificance of the means by which her efforts are opposed, the 

 least just or the least vexatious part of the resemblance. 



When to the ordinary difficulties which the navigation of the Polar Seas 

 presents were superadded the disadvantages of a temperature at or near 

 zero, its necessary concomitant the young ice, and twelve hours of darkness 

 daily, it was impossible any longer to entertain a doubt of the expediency 

 of immediately placing the ships in the best security that could be found 

 for them during the winter, rather than run the risk of being permanently 

 detached from the land, by an endeavour to regain the continent. Captain 

 Lyon being of the same opinion with myself, we proceeded on our return 

 to the beach to sound the north-eastern part of the bay, by making holes 

 in the ice which was now strong enough to bear us. We were in hopes of 

 receiving effectual shelter from the numerous grounded masses, but could 

 only find births within one of them in five to six fathoms water. We 

 now for the first time walked on board the ships ; and before night had 

 them moved into their places, by sawing a canal for two or three hundred 

 yards through the ice. The average thickness of the new floe was already 



