310 



SECOND VOYAGE FOR THE DISCOVERY 



1822. necessar y to light a fire in the warming stove, by which an inconceivable 



August. » a ii-i 



^-v->o degree of dryness, warmth, and healthy ventilation was produced in the 

 course of two or three hours. Several white whales were playing about the 

 ships, and a number of sillocks from four to eight inches in length, observed 

 near the small pieces of drift-ice. It appeared to us a remarkable coinci- 

 dence that the last time we had met with sillocks, which was in the entrance 

 to the Duke of York's Bay, white whales seemed to be hemming them in 

 upon the shores in shallow water, 

 Frid. 23. The ice coming in upon us soon closed the open space through which we 

 had been sailing ; and at half-past two A.M. on the 23d, a partial clearing of 

 the weather discovered to us the islands at the distance of a mile and a 

 half to the N.W.b.W. The wind veering to the N.N.E. in the course of the 

 afternoon, the weather became more clear ; but the breeze freshening at 

 night brought the whole body of external drift-ice upon us with considerable 

 pressure. 



Sun. 2,5. On the 25th the wind having at length backed to the W.N.W., the prospect 

 began to brighten ; the ice in the fair-way of the Strait soon acquiring motion 

 to the eastward, and that near the ships shortly after beginning to drive, 

 though more slowly, in the same direction. Half an hour after noon, as soon 

 as there appeared the least chance of making any progress we made sail and 

 prepared for moving the Fury. On heaving upon the hawsers, however, in 

 order to cast the ship's head towards a lane of water not two hundred yards 

 distant, we found her so compactly " soldered," as the sailors aptly call it, 

 between the masses of ice by the late pressure from without, that all our 

 power was insufficient to move her head a single degree of the compass. 

 Captain Lyon having suggested the mode of pulling us out by making sail on 

 the Hecla, which the ice had entirely left, it was tried without effect, the 

 masses having so effectually overlaid each other by the pressure as, with the 

 assistance of a slight degree of frost, to form one body almost as compact as 

 a solid floe. No better success attended an attempt to detach one piece 

 after another, beginning from the outside, by the Hecla's dragging upon them 

 under all sail, for the ship was brought up without the masses separating. 

 One only method and that a slow and laborious one remained, which was to 

 employ all hands from both ships with handspikes, axes, and saws, to detach 

 and force off one or two masses at a time. This plan at length effected our 

 release ; and at nine P.M., after eight hours' incessant labour bestowed upon 

 an obstacle apparently so trifling, we got into clear water and stretched to 



