248 
HIS JOURNEY. 
and. that the diminished distance from land to land 
would make his transit more easy. But he managed 
to effect the object by a less circuitous route than I had 
anticipated; for, although he made but fifteen miles on 
the 20th, he emerged the next day from the heavy ice, 
and made at least fifty. On this day his meridian ob¬ 
servation gave the latitude of 79° 8' G", and from a 
large berg he sighted many points of the coast. 
On the 22d, he encounterc a wall of hummocks, 
exceeding twenty feet in height, and extending in a 
long line to the northeast. 
After vain attempts to force them, becoming em¬ 
barrassed in fragmentary ice, worn, to use his own 
words, into “deep pits and valleys,” he was obliged to 
camp, surrounded by masses of the wildest character, 
some of them thirty feet in height. 
The next three days were spent in struggles through 
this broken plain; fogs sometimes embarrassed them, 
but at intervals land could be seen to the northwest. 
On the 27tli, they reached the north side of the bay, 
passing over but few miles of new and unbroken floe. 
The excessively broken and rugged character of this 
ice they had encountered must be due to the discharges 
from the Great Glacier of Humboldt, which arrest the 
floes and make them liable to excessive disruption 
under the influence of winds and currents. 
Dr. Hayes told me, that in many places they could 
not have advanced a step but for the dogs. Deep 
cavities filled with snow intervened between lines of 
ice-barricades, making their travel as slow and tedious 
