BOKING. 
101 
one moment we were closed in by ice three feet thick, 
with a worn-down herg fifty feet deep on our beam ; 
our bows buried in hummocky masses, and our stern- 
post cloggfed with frozen sludge : in ten minutes open 
lanes were radiating from us in every direction, cracks 
becoming rivers, and puddles lakes : warping ahead 
for five minutes, every thing around us was ice again. 
But changes were going on. The sky had become 
lowering, the gulls had left us, and the barometer had 
fallen eight tenths since the day before. 
Late on the afternoon of the 28th, after another long 
day of unprofitable warping, the wind shifted to the 
eastward. The floes opened still wider, something 
like water was visible to the north and east, and at 9h. 
30m. P.M. we “ cast off,” set our main-sail, and, with 
feelings of joyous relief, began to bore the ice. This 
wind soon freshened to a southeaster, and we dashed 
along to the northeast in a sea studded with icebergs. 
Broken floes running out into “ streams” were on all 
sides of us ; but, only too glad to be once more free, we 
bored through them for the inshore circuit of Melville 
Bay. 
After a little while the horizon thickened ; and al- 
though our wind, surrounded as we were by ice, could 
hardly be called a gale, heavy undulations began to 
set in, making an uncomfortable sea, rendered danger- 
ous indeed by the swashing ice and a growing fog. 
The ice, too, after a little while, was no longer the 
rotten, half-thawed material of the middle pack, but 
heavy floes eight or ten feet of solid thickness, which 
seemed to stand out from the shore. 
Presently we found ourselves, urged by wind and 
sea, on a lee ridge of undulating fragments. There 
was no help for it : with grinding crash we entered its 
