122 
HUMMOCKING. 
by a fearful experience, seek protecting bights among 
the floes or cut harbors in the ice. For us, the word 
delay did not enter into our commander's thouD^hts. 
We had not purchased caution by disaster ; and it 
was essential to success that we should make the 
most of this Godsend, a "slant" from the southeast. 
We pushed on ; but the Rescue, less fortunate than 
ourselves, could not follow. She was jammed in be- 
tween two closing surfaces. We were looking out 
for a temporary niche in which to secure ourselves, 
when we were challenged to the bear hunt I have 
spoken of a few pages back. 
Upon regaining the deck with Mr. Lovell's prize, we 
were struck with the indications of a brooding wind 
outside. The ice was closing in every direction ; and 
our master, Mr. Murdaugh, had no alternative but to 
tie up and await events. The Rescue did the same, 
some three hundred yards to the southward. 
By five A.M., a projecting edge of the outside floe 
came into contact with our own, at a point midway 
between the two vessels. This assailing floe was three 
feet eight inches thick, perhaps a mile in diameter, 
and moving at a rate of a knot an hour. Its weight 
was some two or three millions of tons. So irresistible 
was its momentum, that, as it impinged against the 
solid margin of the land ice, there was no recoil, no in- 
terruption to its progress. The elastic material cor- 
rugated before the enormous pressure ; then cracked, 
then crumbled, and at last rose, the lesser over the 
greater, sliding up in great inclined planes : and these, 
again, breaking by their weight and their continued 
impulse, toppled over in long lines of fragmentary ice. 
This imposing process of dynamics is called 
" Hummocking." Its most striking feature was its 
