330 
ICE-BARRIER. 
level of the other field. We held ourselves ready for 
the spring as she began to rise. 
It was a time of almost unbroken excitement; jet I 
am not surprised, as I turn over the notes of my 
meagre diary, to find how little of stirring incident it 
records. The story of one day’s strife with the ice-floes 
might almost serve for those which followed it: I 
remember that we were four times nipped before we 
succeeded in releasing ourselves, and that we were glad 
to haul upon the floes as often as a dozen times a day. 
We attempted to drag forward on the occasional fields; 
but we had to give it up, for it strained the boat so 
much that she was barely sea-worthy: it kept one man 
busy the last six days baling her out. 
On the 31st, at the distance of ten miles from Cape 
Parry, we came to a dead halt. A solid mass lay 
directly across our path, extending onward to our 
farthest horizon. There were bergs in sight to the 
westward, and by walking for some four miles over 
the moving floe in that direction, McGary and myself 
succeeded in reaching one. We climbed it to the height 
of a hundred and twenty feet, and, looking out from it 
with my excellent spy-glass to the south and west, we 
saw that all within a radius of thirty miles was a mo¬ 
tionless, unbroken, and impenetrable sea. 
I had not counted on this. Captain Inglefield found 
open water two years before at this very point. I 
myself met no ice here only seven days later in 1853. 
Yet it was plain, that from Cape Combermere on the 
west side, and an unnamed bay immediately to the 
