HUMMMOCKS BREAK UP. 
177 
enormous hummocks. These hummocks are totally 
unlike any thing we saw in Baffin's Bay. They seem 
to have been so disintegrated by the conflicting forces 
that raised them as to have lost altogether the char- 
acter of tables. If hogshead upon hogshead of crush- 
ed sugar had been emptied out at random, two or three 
in one pile, and two or three ship loads in another, and 
the summits of these irregular heaps were covered over 
with a succession of layers of snow, and the heaps 
themselves multiplied in number indefinitely, and 
crowded together in a disordered phalanx, they would 
look a good deal like the hummock field some twen- 
ty yards south of us. These fearful masses are all an- 
chored, solid hills, rising thirty feet above the level 
from a bottom twenty-two feet below it. 
" Our situation might be regarded as an ugly one in 
some states of the wind, but for the solid main floe to 
the north of us. This projected from the cliff, which 
served as an abutment for it ; and, after forming a sort 
of cape outside of our position, extended with a horse- 
shoe sweep to the northward and eastward, as far as 
the eye could reach, following the trend of the shore. 
It formed, of course, a reliable breakwater. Commo- 
dore Austin's vessels were made fast to it some dis^ 
tance to the north and east of us. 
" The barometer had given us, in the early morning 
of the 4th, 29*90, since when it rose steadily till the 
5th, at 6 A.M., when it stood at 30-38. For the next 
twenty-four hours it fluctuated between '33 and '37 ; 
but at 6 A.M. of the 6th, it again began to rise ; by 
midnight, it had reached 30-44; and before ten o'clock 
P.M. of the 7th, it was at the unwonted height of 
30-68. At 2 P.M. the wind had changed from S.S.E. 
to N.N.E., and went on increasing to a gale. 
M 
