ICE COMMOTION. 
281 
the wind blowing a fresh breeze, weather misty, ther- 
mometer at — 23°.” 
The night brought no further change ; but toward 
morning the cracks, that formed before this a sort of 
net- work all about the vessel, began to open. The 
cause was not apparent : the wind had lulled, and we 
saw no movement of the floes. We had again the 
same voices of complaint from the ship, but they were 
much feebler than yesterday ; and in about an hour 
the ice broke up all round her, leaving an open space 
of about a foot to port, indented with the mould of her 
form. The brig was loose once more at the sides ; but 
she remained suspended by the bows and stern from 
hummocks built up like trestles, and canted forward 
still five feet and a quarter out of level. Every thing 
else was fairly afloat: even the India-rubber boat, 
which during our troubles had found a resting-place 
on a sound projection of the floe close by us, had to 
be taken in. 
This, I may say, was a fearful position ; but the 
thermometer, at a mean of - 23° and — 24°, soon 
brought back the solid character of our floating raft. 
In less than two days every thing about us was as 
firmly fixed as ever. But the whole topography of the 
ice was changed, and its new configuration attested 
the violence of the elements it had been exposed to. 
Nothing can be conceived more completely embodying 
inhospitable desolation. F rom mast-head the eye trav- 
eled wearily over a broad champaigne of undulating 
ice, crowned at its ridges with broken masses, like 
breakers frozen as they rolled toward the beach. Be- 
yond these, you lost by degrees the distinctions of sur- 
face. It was a great plain, blotched by dark, jagged 
shadows, and relieved only here and there by a hill 
