CHAPTER X 



IN THE ICE 



FROM Unalaska, into which port yve put 

 to have the captain's leg attended to, the 

 brig stood northwesterly for the spring 

 whaling on the bowhead and right whale 

 grounds off the Siberian coast. We were a 

 week's sail from the Fox Islands when we en- 

 countered our first ice. It appeared in small 

 chunks floating down from the north. The 

 blocks became more numerous until they dap- 

 pled the sea. They grew in size. Strings and 

 floes appeared. Then we brought up against a 

 great ice field stretching to the north as far as 

 the eye could see. It was all floe ice broken 

 into hummocks and pressure ridges and pinna- 

 cles, with level spaces between. There were no 

 towering 'bergs such as are launched into the sea 

 from the glaciers on the Greenland coast and 



