OF A NORTH-WEST PASSAGE. 
79 
bly since they grounded, or else must have been forced up into their pre- 1 819. 
sent situations by an enormous pressure from without ; as some of those 
now aground in four or five fathoms would have drawn at least ten, if set 
afloat again*'. 
At four P.M., the weather being quite calm, the ships were towed in- 
shore by the boats, and made fast in the places selected for them. Our 
parties from the shore returned with a white hare, several fine ptarmigans, 
a few snow-buntings, some skulls of the musk-ox, and several rein-deers’ 
horns ; but they were not fortunate enough to meet with either of the two 
latter animals. The island is here, as in the other parts on which we had 
landed, principally composed of sandstone, of which some spherical nodules, 
one of them as large as a nine-pounder shot, were brought on board. Several 
lumps of coal, which was here more abundant than we had yet found it, 
were also picked up, and were found to burn with a clear lively flame, 
like cannel coal, but without splitting and crackling in the same manner. 
Impatient and anxious as we were to make the most of the short remainder Thurs. 9 
of the present season, our mortification will easily be imagined at perceiving, 
on the morning of the 9th, not only that the ice was as close as ever to the 
westward, but that the floes in our immediate neighbourhood were sensibly 
approaching the shore. As there was no chance, therefore, of our being en- 
abled to move, I sent a party on shore at day-light to collect what coal they 
could find, and in the course of the day nearly two-thirds of a bushel, being 
about equal to the Hecla’s daily expenditure, was brought on board. Our 
sportsmen, who were out for several hours, could only procure us a hare, 
and a few ducks. 
The wind was light from the southward and westward, with foggy weather, 
which was afterwards succeeded by snow, and the ice continued gradually to 
close on the shore till at length a floe came in contact with our berg, but with 
so little violence as to produce no sensible effect upon it. The loose and heavy 
pieces of ice found their way in, and surrounded the Hecla on all sides, but 
produced no pressure from which any danger was to be apprehended. Con- 
* For want of some more appropriate name by which these masses of ice might be dis- 
tinguished, we were always in the habit of calling them bergs, which indeed they exactly 
resemble, though comparatively of small dimensions, and evidently formed in a very 
different manner from those enormous ice-islands, which are met with in Baffin’s Bay, but 
of which we saw none to the westward of Barrow’s Strait. 
