SOUTHWARDS. 
325 
Up to the evening of the day on which we quitted 
English Bay, the weather had been most beautiful; 
calm, sunshiny, dry, and pleasant. Within a few hours 
of our getting under weigh, a great change had taken 
place, and by midnight it had become as foggy and 
disagreeable as ever. The sea was pretty clear. During 
the few days we had been on shore, the northerly 
current had brushed away the great angular field of 
ice which had lain off the shore, in a north-west direc¬ 
tion ; so that instead of being obliged to run up very 
nearly to the 80th parallel—in order to round it—we 
were enabled to sail to the westward at once. During 
the course of the night, we came upon one or two wan¬ 
dering patches of drift ice, but so loosely packed that 
we had no difficulty in pushing through them. About 
four o’clock in the morning, a long line of close ice was 
reported right a-head, stretching south—as far as the 
eye could reach. We had come about eighty miles 
since leaving Spitzbergen. The usual boundary of the 
Greenland ice in summer, runs—according to Scoresby 
—along the second parallel of west longitude. This we 
had already crossed ; so that it was to be presumed the 
barricade we saw before us was a frontier of the fixed 
