BREAK-UP OF THE FLOE. 
20 o 
At first our own floe also was driven before the wind; 
but in a little while it encountered the stationary ice 
at the foot of the very rock itself. On the instant the 
wildest imaginable ruin rose around us. The men 
sprang mechanically each one to his station, bearing 
back the boats and stores; but I gave up for the mo¬ 
ment all hope of our escape. It was not a nip, such as 
is familiar to Arctic navigators; but the whole platform, 
where we stood and for hundreds of yards on every 
side of us, crumbled and crushed and piled and tossed 
itself madly under the pressure. I do not believe that 
of our little body of men, all of them disciplined in 
trials, able to measure danger while combating it,—I 
do not believe there is one who this day can explain 
how or why—hardly when, in fact—we found ourselves 
afloat. We only know that in the midst of a clamor 
utterly indescribable, through Avhich the braying of a 
thousand trumpets could no more have been heard 
than the voice of a man, we were shaken and raised 
and whirled and let down again in a swelling waste of 
broken hummocks, and, as the men grasped their boat¬ 
hooks in the stillness that followed, the boats eddied 
away in a tumultuous skreed of ice and snow and 
water. 
We were borne along in this manner as long as 
the unbroken remnant of the in-sliore floe continued 
revolving,—utterly powerless, and catching a glimpse 
every now and then of the brazen headland that looked 
down on us through the snowy sky. At last the floe 
brought up against the rocks, the looser fragments that 
