312 
GREENLAND VOYAGE. 
a speaking trumpet, from the companion to the 
windlass. It may be sufficient to say, in addi¬ 
tion, that by a most striking and remarkable provi¬ 
dence aiding our exertions, suggesting precautions, 
and timeing our various removals, we continued to 
drop the ship down the narrow dangerous chan¬ 
nel betwixt the floes, until their approximation 
ceased. Thus was the ship most miraculously 
preserved, throughout a removal of a mile, under 
the most dangerous, difficult, and discouraging 
circumstances, when there was not a single spot 
in all the distance that we accomplished, in 
which a ship remaining five or ten minutes after 
we left it, could have been saved from being 
crushed. The reason of this was evident. The 
two floes betwixt which we were involved, though 
full of little prominences or points, were, in the 
main, of a circular form. As these were revol¬ 
ving against eaclx other in contrary directions, like 
the action of a pair of toothed wheels, when one 
is put in motion by the other, every part of the 
circumference of each floe became in its turn the 
point of contact. 
These anxious and energetic operations conti¬ 
nued until midnight, when we obtained the first 
respite, on observing that the floes had ceased to 
revolve. But we were still in jeopardy. A large 
body of ice having been drifted by the violence of 
