“Last night, mounted as we are, the nipping caused our timbers to complain sadly. We had to send out parties to crowbar away the ice from our bowsprit. The bob-stays were forced up and broken. Our floe movement continued to the southeast, driving the heavy ice in upon the Rescue. She rose up under the pressure, and is now surrounded by hummock ruins like ourselves. She is not more than fifty yards distant from us, astern.”
From this time to the 21st our drift was without intermission. As one headland after another defined itself against the horizon, it was apparent that we were skirting the northern coast of the sound. At first this gave us some anxiety, when our floe, pressing hard against the shore-ice as we doubled some projecting point, threatened to wreck us among its fragments. But as we drew nearer to the outlet, and began to compute the new hazards of entering Baffin’s Bay, this very circumstance became for us an important ground of hope. Theory, as well as the accounts of the whalers, made the southeastern cape of Lancaster Sound the seat of intense hummock action. The greater the distance from that point, the broader must be the curvature of the meeting currents, and the less perilous the conflict of the ice-masses in their rotation. There was, of course, no escape for us from this encounter; and the only question was of the degrees of hazard it must involve.
On the 19th, the tall, mural precipices to the northward, and the cape in which they terminated toward the east, convinced us that we had almost reached the western headland of Croker’s Bay. We had drifted one hundred and eleven miles since the beginning of the month. Our course had been without any cheering incident. There was the same wretched succession of openings and closings about our floe, somewhat dangerous, but too uniform to be exciting; and we had drilled with knapsack and sledge, till we were almost martinets in our evolutions on the ice. I group the few entries of my journal that have any interest.
“December 11. Wind last night fierce from the north; to-day as fierce from the west. It has carried us clear of the great cape that stretches out east of Maxwell’s Bay, and that threatened us with the variety of a lee shore. The Rescue has had another trial: her stern-post is carried away, her pintle and gudgeon wrenched off. A party of officers and men are out, trying the experiment of a night upon the ice, tented and bag-bedded. I wish them luck; but the thermometer fifty-seven degrees below freezing is unfavorable to a fête chainpêtre.
“December 12. Every thing solid, and looking as if it had always been so; yet, a few days ago, I had this journal of mine stitched up in its tarred canvas-bag, and ready for a fling upon the ice four times in the twenty-four hours. The floes have stopped abrading each other, and are driving ahead right peacefully, with our brig mounted on top: how far we are from the edges, it is too dark to see.
“December 13. A little clearer than yesterday, but too dark to read small print at noon. Something like a long reach of land looming up to southward: it can not be Croker’s Bay?
“All our mess took our tour of practice to-day, with a sledge and four hundred pounds of provender. Hard work, and sweating abundantly; but we feel already the good effects of this sort of exercise. Thermometer at -11°.
“December 14. A quiet day; the winds at rest, and the stars twinkling through the lazy sky as I never saw them before. The moon, too, is in high heaven, almost a three-quarter disk. She is a great comfort to us; her high northern declination makes her visible all the time. It looks strangely this undying fortnight moon. The frost-smoke is wreathing the red zone of our southern horizon. It would be a good night-scene for a painter.
“At 7 P.M. the thermometer rose from -3° to -1°. At 10 o’clock it was -4°. Its maximum was +10°, a temperature mild and comfortable. The wind changed from west by south to west by north, and the ice and the drift are as yesterday.