THICKNESS OF TIIE ICE. 
317 
with ice, and at so short a distance from it. We now 
no longer saw any birds in the 4 holes’ of water, as 
we had done farther south. From a hummock forty 
feet above the level of the sea, and with a very clear 
and transparent atmosphere, nothing but ice, with a 
few small patches of water, could be discerned in any 
direction. The floes were larger to-day, and the ice, 
upon the whole, of heavier dimensions than any we had 
yet met with. The general thickness of the floes, 
however, did not exceed nine or ten feet, which is not 
more than the usual thickness of those in Baffin’s Bay 
and Hudson’s Strait; while it is a great deal less than 
the ordinary dimensions of the ice about Melville 
Peninsula, and not half the thickness of that towards 
the western extremity of Melville Island, though these 
places lie from eight to twenty degrees south of our 
present latitude. 
* # * # * 
“ Our way still lay over small loose masses, to which 
we were now so accustomed as scarcely to expect any 
other ; for it was evident enough we were not improv¬ 
ing in this respect as we advanced northwards. At 
half-past nine we came to a very difficult crossing 
among the loose ice, which, however, we were encou¬ 
raged to attempt by seeing a floe of some magnitude 
beyond it. We had to convey the sledges and 
