PARTIAL OPENING. 
189 
just six days before, with feelings as sombre as the 
landscape itself. 
The sound of our vessel crunching her way through 
the new ice is not easy to be described. It was not 
like the grinding of the old formed ice, nor was it the 
slushy scraping of sludge. We may all of us remem- 
ber, in the skating frolics of early days, the peculiar 
reverberating outcry of a pebble, as we tossed it from 
us along the edges of an old mill-dam, and heard it 
dying away in echoes almost musical. Imagine such 
a tone as this, combined with the whir of rapid mo- 
tion, and the rasping noise of close-grained sugar. I 
was listening to the sound in my little den, after a 
sorrowful day, close upon zero, trying to warm up my 
stiffened limbs. Presently it grew less, then increas- 
ed, then stopped, then went on again, but jerking and 
irregular ; and then it waned, and waned, and waned 
away to silence. 
Down came the captain : “ Doctor, the ice has 
caught us : we are frozen up.” On went my furs at 
once. As I reached the deck, the wind was there, 
blowing stiff, and the sails were filled and puffing with 
it. It was not yet dark enough to hide the smooth 
surface of ice that filled up the horizon, holding the 
American expedition in search of Sir John Franklin 
imbedded in its centre. There we were, literally fro- 
zen tight in the mid-channel of Wellington’s Straits. 
September 15. The change of tide, or, rather, those 
diurnal changes in the movement of the ice which 
seem to be indirectly connected with it, gave us a lit- 
tle while before noon a partial opening in the solid ice 
around us. We made by hard work about a mile, and 
were then more fast than ever. The ice along side 
will now bear a man : the wind, however, is hauling 
