400 
ROLLING ICE. 
tached to a triangular fragment of 14 "by 22 paces. 
This berg-like fragment, reduced as it was, continued 
its close adhesion. Its buoyancy was so great, that it 
acted like a camel, retaining the brig's stern high in 
the air, her bows thrown down toward the water. We 
are so at this moment, 10 P.M." 
All hands were in the mean time actively at work. 
The floe had been to us terra firma so long that we 
had applied it to all the purposes of land. Clothes 
and clothes' lines, sledges, preserved meats, kindling 
wood and planking, were now all bundled on board. 
The artificial horizon, which had stood for eight 
months upon a little ice-pedestal, was barely saved ; 
and I had to work hard to get one of my few remain- 
ing thermometers from a neighboring hummock. 
The cause of this sudden disruption — I mean the 
immediate cause, for the summer influences had pre- 
pared the floe for disintegration— was evidently the 
sea-swell setting from the southeast. This swell had 
given us minor manifestations of its existence as far 
back as the 1st of June. Whether it was increased 
without, or our floe made more accessible to it by the 
drifting away of other and protecting floes, I can not 
say. This, however, was clear, that the great undula- 
tions propagated by wave action caused our disruption. 
The proof of this I shall not forget. 
Standing on our little deck, and looking out on the 
floe, we had the strange spectacle of an undulating so- 
lidity, a propagated wave borne in swell-like ridges, 
as if our ice was a carpet shaken by Titans. I can 
not convey the eflect of this sublime spectacle. The 
ice, broken into polyhedric masses, gave at a few hund- 
red yards no indications to the eye of the lines of sep- 
aration ; besides which, the infiltration of salt water 
