WELLINGTON CHANNEL. 
215 
3° above zero. A bit of ice, which I took into my 
mouth to suck, fastened on to my tongue and carried 
away the skin. When we open the cabin hatch now, 
a cloud of steam, visible only as the two currents meet, 
gives evidence of the Arctic condensation. 
"Afar off, skipping from hummock to hummock, I 
saw a black fox. Poor desolate devil! what did he, 
so far from his recorded home, seven miles from even 
the naked snow-hills of this dreary wilderness ? In 
the night-time I heard him bark. They set a trap for 
him ; but I secretly placed a bigger bait outside, with- 
out a snare-loop or trigger. In the morning it was 
gone, and the dead-fall had fallen upon no fox. How 
the poor, hungry thing must have enjoyed his supper ! 
half the guts, the spleen, and the pluck of my seal. 
" Lovell raised a swing ; cold work, but good exer- 
cise. He rigged it from the main studding-sail boom. 
Murdaugh and Carter are building a snow-house. The 
doctor is hard at work patching up materials for an 
overland communication with the English squadron 
— an enterprise fast becoming desperate. Yet, drift- 
ing as we are to unknown regions north, it is of vast 
importance that others should know of our position and 
prospects." 
Our position, however, at the end of September, 
thanks to the rapidly-increasing cold, gave promise of 
a certain degree of security and rest. The Advance 
had been driven, by the superior momentum of the 
floes that pressed us on one side, some two hundred 
and fifty feet into the mass of less resisting floes on 
the other ; the Rescue meanwhile remaining station- 
ary ; and the two vessels were fixed for a time on two 
adjacent sides of a rectangle, and close to each other. 
The unseen and varying energies of the ice movements 
