WRANGELL. 



241 



fissures, which we passed with some trouble by the aid of the boards which we 

 had brought with us. At last the fissures became so numerous and so wide 

 that it was hard to say whether the sea beneath us was really still covered by 

 a connected coat of ice, or only by a number of detached floating fragments, 

 having everywhere two or more feet of water between them. A single gust 

 of wind would have been sufiicient to drive these fragments against each other, 

 and being already thoroughly saturated with water, they would have sunk in 

 a few minutes, leaving nothing but sea on the spot where we were standing. 

 It was manifestly useless to attempt going farther ; we hastened to rejoin our 

 companions, and to seek with them a place of greater security. Our most 

 northern latitude was 71° 43' at a distance of 215 versts in a straight line from 

 the lesser Baranow rock." After rejoining his companions, and while still on 

 the frozen sea, so thick a snow-storm came on that those in the hindmost 

 sledge could not see the leading ones. Unable either to pitch their tent or to 

 light a fire, they were exposed during the night to the whole fury of the storm, 

 with a temperatere of +7°, without tea or soup, and with nothing to quench 

 their thirst or satisfy their hunger but a few mouthfuls of snow, a little rye 

 biscuit, and a half-spoilt fish. On April 28 they arrived at Nishne-Kolymsk, 

 after an absence of thirty-six days, during which they had travelled above 800 

 miles with the same dogs, men and animals having equally suffered from cold, 

 hunger, and fatigue. 



Neither discomfort, however, nor danger prevented Wrangell from under- 

 taking a third excursion in the following springo He had great difiiculty in 

 procuring the necessary dogs, a disease which raged among them during the 

 winter having carried off more than four-fifths of these useful animalSo At 

 length his wants were supplied by the people of the Indigirka, where the sick- 

 ness had not extended, and on March 14, 1822, he again set out for the borders 

 of the Polar Sea. During this expedition a large extent of coast was accu- 

 rately surveyed by Wrangell, who sent out his worthy assistant Matiuschkin, 

 with two companions, in an unloaded sledge, to see if any farther advance 

 could be made to the north. Having accomplished ten versts, Matiuschkin 

 was stopped by the breaking up of the ice. Enormous masses, raised by the 

 waves into an almost vertical position, were driven against each other with a 

 dreadful crash, and pressed downward by the force of the billows to re-appear 

 again on the surface covered with the torn-up green mud which here forms the 

 bottom of the sea. It would tire the reader were I to relate all the miseries of 

 their return voyage ; suffice it to say that, worn out with hunger and fatigue, 

 they reached Nishne-Kolymsk on May 5, after an absence of fifty-seven days. 

 Such sufferings and perils might have excused all further attempts to discover 

 the supposed land in the Polar Sea, but nothing daunted by his repeated fail- 

 ures, Wrangell determined on a fourth expedition in 1823, on which he resolved 

 to start from a more easterly point. On reaching the coast, the obstacles were 

 found still greater than on his previous visits to that fearful sea. The weather 

 was tempestuous, the ice thin and broken. It was necessary at times to cross 

 wide lanes of water on pieces of ice ; at times the thin ice bent beneath the 

 weight of the sledges, which were then saved only by the sagacity of the ^ogs, 



16 ' 



