TIDES-MOUNT PARRY. 
299 
served floating— they were not more than half a dozen 
—were standing with the wind to the southward, while 
the shore-current or tide was driving north. 
His journal of Monday, 26tli, says, “As far as I could 
see, the open passages were fifteen miles or more wide, 
with sometimes mashed ice separating them. But it is 
all small ice, and I think it either drives out to the 
open space to the north, or rots and sinks,* as I could 
see none ahead to the far north.” C49) 
The coast after passing the cape, he thought, must 
trend to the eastward, as he could at no time when 
below it see any land beyond. But the west coast still 
opened to the north: he traced it for about fifty miles. 
The day was very clear, and he was able to follow the 
range of mountains which crowns it much farther. 
They were very high, rounded at their summits, not 
peaked like those immediately abreast of him; though, 
as he remarked, this apparent change of their character 
might be referred to distance, for their undulations lost 
themselves like a wedge in the northern horizon. 
His highest station of outlook at the point where his 
progress was arrested he supposed to be about three 
hundred feet above the sea. From this point, some six 
degrees to the west of north, he remarked in the 
farthest distance a peak truncated at its top like the 
cliffs of Magdalena Bay. It was bare at its summit, 
but striated vertically with protruding ridges. Our 
* As I quote his owu words, I do not think it advisable to comment 
upon his view. Ice never sinks in a liquid of the same density as that 
in which it formed. 
