TOPOGRAPHY OF FLOE, JUNE 5.
PROFILE OF FLOE; PORT SIDE.
"J
UNE 6. Our bumping continued all I night, without any apparent effect I upon our sticking-plaster. Acting, as this impact does, at the long end of a lever, our stern being immovably fixed, it must be hard upon the rudder post, a beam that is now protruding from the least strengthened part of our brig into a transparent glue of tenacious ice. The twelve-feet saw, suspended from a tripod of spars, is at work, trying to cut a line across the mass to our keel. But for this appendage, we would be now warping through the fissures.
“7 P.M. The position of things continues unchanged. Our ice-saw with great labor buried its length in the floe, reaching nearly to our stern; but the submerged material is so thick that it has little or no effect. Wedging, by billets of wood between her sides and the mounding ice, was equally ineffectual. Gunpowder would perhaps release us; but that we can not spare.