Lightening the ship as much as possible, the rising tide floated her in about a couple of hours, and at 5 P.M., having hoisted up all our boats, we were again able to proceed.
As we rounded the point we hoisted the colours and dipped them three times as a parting farewell to our consort, who had just time to whip up the signal “Good luck” before we were finally shut out from each other’s view.
Rounding Distant Cape, we found the channel full of ice, some of the floes being very massive and of great extent; but between them existed narrow lanes of water, in some places choked by loose slack ice, through which we had little difficulty in penetrating, although at the expense of our rudder, which was so severely injured by the heavy nature of the ice as to be rendered almost useless.
At midnight, when within about a mile of Cape Beechey, ice was encountered stretching right across the channel and pressing so tightly in to the land as to form a dead block to our farther advance. We had then by estimation reached the 82° parallel of latitude. This check was a great damper to our hopes, especially as no bays, or protection of any description for the ship from the pack, could be found in our immediate vicinity.
Our only resource was to return a few miles to the southward and there, in a slight indentation of the land, affording little or no protection, secure the ship to an ice floe, and employ ourselves at once with the rather heavy operations connected with shifting the rudder. This work was performed in about three hours. In the mean time, a small herd of musk oxen having been observed on shore, our sportsmen were despatched in pursuit, and we soon had the satisfaction of hearing that they had succeeded in shooting three, the remainder of the herd having escaped over the hills. This was a very welcome addition to our stock of fresh meat. Our mizzen-rigging was now literally groaning with the amount of meat suspended there; for, in addition to the recent accumulation of musk-ox flesh, the remainder of our sheep, some seven or eight in number, had been slaughtered and added to the general stock. So hard were the portions frozen, that they were very truthfully compared to the legs of mutton and sides of sheep made of wood usually seen hanging in the front of a butcher’s shop in a pantomime!
The bay in which we had taken refuge was, in consequence of the work there performed, named “Shift-Rudder Bay.”
Sunday, August 29th.—At noon we were again under weigh, Captain Nares having ascended a high hill during the forenoon, from which he had observed an opening in the pack by which we might proceed. Cape Beechey was easily rounded; but, in consequence of the floes closing into the land, we had a very narrow escape of being caught whilst going round Cape Frederick VII., and it was only by pressing the ship at her utmost speed that we succeeded in rounding it in safety. Two minutes after we were round, the floe came into contact with the high steep side of the cape, crumbling against it and piling up hummock on hummock from the irresistible force of the outside pressure. What would have been the fate of our poor little frail ship had she been caught between these two stupendous works of nature?
The ice had now assumed a totally different character from any that we had hitherto seen, being infinitely more massive and heavy. The thickness was estimated at from eighty to one hundred feet, whilst the hummocks formed along the shore and round the edges of the floes were fully twenty-five and thirty feet in height.
These large hummocks received from us the name of “floe-bergs,” the term being intended to convey the idea of masses of ice more bulky than ordinary hummocks, and formed in a different way. Some of these huge fragments that fringed the coast line were fully sixty feet in height, yet they were aground in some ten and twelve fathoms of water! This will give some idea of the massive nature of the ice with which we were contending. The region of icebergs, the creation of land glaciers, had been passed, and in their place were substituted these floe-bergs, the production of a floating glacier.
To contend with this massive ice required the greatest care and judgment, for little respect is shown to the unfortunate vessel that is exposed to the fatal embrace of what has been aptly termed by our old Arctic navigators “ye unmercifull yce.” Before midnight the ship was secured to a large floe in Lincoln Bay, the pack having again closed in to the land, thereby obstructing our advance.