42 
PASSAGE OF THE MIDDLE PACK. 
and involving themselves in a labyrinth of floes. It 
was thus the Advance was caught in her second sea¬ 
son, under Captain De Haven; while the Prince Albert, 
leaving us, worked a successful passage to the west. 
So too the North Star, in 1849, was carried to the 
northward, and hopelessly entangled there. Indeed, it 
is the common story of the disasters and delays that 
we read of in the navigation of these regions. 
Now I felt sure, from the known openness of the 
season of 1852 and the probable mildness of the fol¬ 
lowing winter, that we could scarcely hope to make 
use of the land ice for tracking, or to avail ourselves 
of leads along its margin by canvas. And this opinion 
was confirmed by the broken and rotten appearance 
of the floes during our coastwise drift at the Duck 
Islands. I therefore deserted the inside track of the 
whalers, and stood to the westward, until we made the 
first streams of the middle pack; and then, skirting 
the pack to the northward, headed in slowly for the 
middle portion of the bay above Sabine Islands. My 
object was to double, as it were, the loose and drifting 
ice that had stood in my way, and, reaching Cape 
York, as nearly as might be, trust for the remainder 
of my passage to warping and tracking by the heavy 
floes. We succeeded, not without some laborious 
boring and serious risks of entanglement among the 
broken icefields. But we managed, in every instance, 
to combat this last form of difficulty by attaching our 
vessel to large icebergs, which enabled us to hold our 
own, however swiftly the surface floes were pressing 
