♦FROZEN IN. 



595 



tain Inglefield had penetrated in August, 1852, in the Isabel, — 

 to reach, if possible, the supposed northerly open sea, where he 

 hoped to find traces of the missing navigators. He sailed from 

 New York on the 30th of May, 1853, touched at Fiskernaes, in 

 Greenland, on the 1st of July, where he engaged the services 

 of Hans Cristian, a native Esquimaux of nineteen years. 

 Through ice and fog the vessel forced her way, and on the 7th 

 of August doubled Cape Alexander, a promontory opposite 

 another named Cape Isabella, — the two being the headlands 

 of Smith's Strait, and styled by Dr. Kane the Arctic Pillars 

 of Hercules. 



The vessel closed with the ice again the next day, and was 

 forced into a landlocked cove. Every effort to force her through 

 the floes was tried, without success, and, after undergoing the 

 most appalling treatment from the wind, waves, and ice com- 

 bined, the brig was warped into winter quarters, in Rensselaer 

 Bay, on the 22d of August, and was frozen in on September 10. 

 There she lies to this hour, — "to her a long resting-place 

 indeed," writes Kane; " for the same ice is around her still." 

 This was in latitude 78° 37' N., — the most northerly winter 

 quarters ever taken by Christians, except in Spitzbergen, which 

 has the advantage of an insular climate. An observatory was 

 erected, a thermal register kept hourly, and magnetic observa- 

 tions recorded. Parties were sent out to establish provision- 

 depots to the north, to facilitate researches in the spring. 

 Three depots or "caches" were made, the most distant being 

 in latitude 79° 12' : in this they deposited six hundred and 

 seventy pounds of pemmican and forty of meat-biscuit. These 

 operations were arrested by darkness in November, and the 

 crew prepared to spend one hundred and forty days without the 

 light of the sun. The first number of the Arctic newspaper, 

 <<The Ice-Blink," appeared on the 21st. The thermometer 

 fell to 67° below zero. Chloroform froze, and chloric ether 

 became solid. The air had a perceptible pungency upon 



