THE ARGUMENT. 
311 
“July 8, Saturday.—Penny saw water to tlie south¬ 
ward in Barrow’s Straits as early as June; and by the 
1st of July the leads were within a mile of his harbor 
in Wellington Channel. Dr. Sutherland says he could 
have cut his way out by the 15th. Austin was not 
liberated till the 10th of August; but the water had 
worked up to within three miles and a half of him as 
early as the 1st, having advanced twenty miles in the 
preceding month. If, now, we might assume that the 
ice between us and the nearest water would give way 
as rapidly as it did in these two cases,—an assumption, 
by-the-way, which the difference of the localities is all 
against,—the mouth of our harbor should be reached 
in fifty days, or by the last day of August; and after 
that, several days or perhaps weeks must go by before 
the inside ice yields around our brig. 
“I know by experience how soon the ice breaks up 
after it once begins to go, and I hardly think that it 
can continue advancing so slowly much longer. In¬ 
deed, I look for it to open, if it opens at all, about the 
beginning of September at farthest, somewhere near 
the date of Sir James Ross’s liberation at Leopold. 
But then I have to remember that I am much farther 
to the north than my predecessors, and that by the 
28th of last August I had already, after twenty days 
of unremitting labor, forced the brig nearly forty miles 
through the pack, and that the pack began to close on 
us only six days later, and that on the 7th of Septem¬ 
ber we were fairly frozen in. Yet last summer was a 
