234 THE CHANNEL AND THE SOUND. 
of sweeping snow were so unbroken that its filaments 
seemed woven into a mysterious tissue. Objects fifty 
yards off were invisible : no one could leave the ves- 
sels." 
The month of November found us oscillating- still 
with the winds and currents in the neighborhood of 
Beechy Island. Helpless as we were among the float- 
ing masses, we began to look upon the floe that car- 
ried us as a protecting barrier against the approaches 
of others less friendly ; and as the month advanced, 
and the chances increased of our passing into the 
sound, our apprehensions of being frozen up in the 
heart of the ice-pack gave place to the opposite fear 
of a continuous drift. We had seen enough, and en- 
countered enough of the angry strife among the ice- 
floes in the channel, to assure us of disaster if we 
should be forced to mingle in the sterner conflicts of 
the older ice-fields of the sound. Yet, as the new 
fields continued forming about us, thickening gradu- 
ally from inches to feet, and locking together the floes 
in one great amorphous expanse, we retained a hope 
to the last that our island floe, thickening like the rest, 
and piling its wall of hummocks around us, would 
continue to ward us from attack, till the all-pervading 
frost had made it a stationary part of the great winter 
covering of the Arctic Sea. It encountered almost 
daily immense hummocks, some of them impinging 
against us while we were apparently at rest; some, ap- 
parently motionless, receiving the impact from us. At 
such times our floe would be deflected at an angle 
from its normal course, or would rotate slowly round 
its centre, and pass on — not, however, always in the 
same direction ; sometimes nearing the western shore, 
sometimes closing in upon the beach of "the Graves 
