372 
DRIFT. 
“ May 27. The land is very near to the eye ; hut in 
these regions we have learned to distrust ocular meas- 
urements of distance. Though we see every wrinkle, 
even to the crows’ feet, on the cheeks of Mount Ra- 
leigh, I remember last year, on the west coast of Green- 
land, we saw almost under our nose land that was 
thirty-five miles off. A party from the Rescue meas- 
ured a base upon the ice to-day, and attempted trig- 
onometrical measurements with sextant angles. They 
make Cape Walsingham seven miles distant, and the 
height of the peak at the cape fifteen hundred feet. 
Our observation places us in latitude 66° 42' 40"; our 
longitude by time sights, at 5h. 43m. P.M., was 60° 
54'. According to the Admiralty chart, this plants us 
high and dry among the mountains of Cape Walsing- 
ham. 
“It is evident that our rate of drift has increased. 
The northwest winds carried us forward eight miles 
a day while near the strait — a speed only equaled in 
a few of the early days of our escape from Lancaster 
Sound. What has become of all the ice that used to 
be intervening between us and the shore ? At one 
time we had a distance of ninety miles : we are now 
close upon the coast. What has become of it ? If it 
moves at the same rate as we do, why have we no 
squeezing and commotion at this narrow strait ? Can 
it be that the ice to the westward of us has been more 
or less fixed to the land floe, and that we have been 
drifting down in a race-cdurse, as it were, an ice-river 
whose banks were this same shore ice ? Or is it, as 
Murdaugh suggests, that the in-shore currents, more 
rapid, have carried down the in-shore ice before us, 
thus widening the pathway for us ? It is certainly 
very puzzling to find ourselves, at the narrowest 
