300 SIEGE OF THE SOUTH POLE 
our having their holds so stowed as to form a solid mass 
throughout.” 
As soon as the gale had subsided the first care was to 
capture another great fragment of the floe and make it 
fast between the two crippled ships, while all hands set 
to work to get the ruins of the ponderous rudders un- 
shipped and hauled up on deck. The carpenters and 
armourers were at work almost without intermission for 
two days making good the damage to the rudder of the 
Erebus, and constructing an entirely new rudder for the 
Terror to keep in reserve while the spare rudder carried 
on board was fitted to the ship. By the evening of Janu- 
ary 24th the repairs were complete and full sail was made 
on both ships, but without making any progress through 
the pack which was now drifting bodily northward at the 
rate of about half a mile per hour. After all the efforts 
of the officers and men, all the buffetings of the ships, 
they were again in almost the same position which they 
had gained three weeks before. 
On January 26th the pack loosened and a northerly 
gale enabled the ships at last to move more rapidly than 
the great icebergs that had so long convoyed them in 
their drift. Next day the ships unmoored from the floe 
and resumed their individual struggle with the ice, but 
when at last an observation of the sun was possible on 
the 28th, they were found only to have reached 67° 39' S. 
on the meridian of 136° W. After forcing their way 
through more than 800 miles of pack-ice the Erebus and 
Terror were thus only half a degree, or 30 miles farther 
south than Cook had been on the same meridian without 
entering the pack at all. This is only an example of the 
uncertainties of polar exploration in ignorance of the 
laws of ice-drift or the causes which make one season 
