OF A NORTH-WEST PASSAGE. 
235 
into the bight where we lay; at ten P.M. it took a sudden turn, all the loose 1820 . 
ice near us running past the ship out of the bight, and the floes outside 
beginning to set to the eastward, and towards the land withal. We, therefore, 
hauled the ship still more into the bight formed by the point, getting her into 
four fathoms abaft and six forward, and abreast a part of the beach where there 
was not quite so much heavy ice within us, to endanger the ship being 
crushed. This was done from a belief that, if the floes came in, the ship 
must inevitably be “ nipped,” and in this case it was better to be lying in 
six fathoms than nine ; besides, the masses of ice now inside of us, not 
being so large as the rest, might possibly be forced up on the shore before 
the ship, instead of offering so great a resistance as to expose her to all the 
force of the squeeze. On the whole of this steep coast, wherever we 
approached the shore, we found a thick stratum of blue and solid ice, firmly 
embedded in the beach, at the depth of from six to ten feet under the surface 
of the water. This ice has probably been the lower part of heavy masses 
forced aground by the pressure of the floes from without, and still adhering 
to the viscous mud of which the beach is composed, after the upper part has, 
in course of time, dissolved. Captain Sabine suggested, that the under- 
ground ice found in cold countries, and to which I have before alluded, might 
thus have been deposited. The land gains upon the sea, as it is called, in 
process of time, as it has certainly done here, from the situation in which we 
found drift-wood and the skeletons of whales : the ice which fixes itself upon 
the beach is annually covered over in part by alluvial deposit, and thus may 
a connected stratum of it be buried for ages several feet below the surface of 
the earth. From the tops of the hills in this part of Melville Island a conti- 
nuous line of this sub-marine ice could be distinctly traced for miles along 
the coast. 
In running along the shore this evening, we had noticed near the sea what 
at a distance had every appearance of a high wall artificially built, and which 
was the resort of numerous birds. Captain Sabine, being desirous to examine 
it, as well as to procure some specimens of the birds, set out, as soon as we 
anchored, for that purpose, accompanied by his servant and Serj eant Martin. 
The wall proved to be composed of sand-stone in horizontal strata from 
twenty to thirty feet in height, which had been left standing, so as to exhibit 
its present artificial appearance, by the decomposition of the rock and earth 
about it. Large flocks of glaucous gulls had chosen this as a secure retreat 
from the foxes, and every other enemy but man ; and when our people first 
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