SEAL STEAKS.
11th.—Two small seals free from taint were shot yesterday, so we had fried liver and steaks for breakfast this morning; both were good, but the steaks were preferred; they were very dark and very tender, had been cut thin, deprived of all fat, and washed in two or three waters to get rid of the blubber.
16th.—Several long lanes of water have again opened, but now all of them extend parallel to the direction of the straits; one lane passed within 120 yards of the ship; its extremes are not visible even from aloft; the ice upon its east side has a more rapid southerly motion than that upon its west side.
18th.—Last night the ice closed, shutting up our lane, but its opposite sides continued for several hours to move past each other, rubbing off all projections, crushing, and forcing out of water masses four feet thick: although 120 yards distant, this pressure shook the ship and cracked the intervening ice.
AN ICE-NIP.
I went out with a lantern to see the nip,—it certainly was awe-inspiring; no one in his senses could avoid reflecting upon the inevitable fate of a ship if exposed to such fearful pressure. It is now spring tides.
19th.—All yesterday the lane remained open; in the evening it closed with but slight pressure; yet as the opposing fields of ice continued to move in opposite directions, all jagged points were brushed off, and the débris thus formed between their edges presented a heaving surface of ice-masses,—an ice river. On the separation of the floes, mass after mass forced itself up to the surface, until at length all the submerged ice had risen, except such as had been forced quite under their edges. One seldom meets with a cleanly fractured floe-edge, they are usually fringed with crushed-up ice or newly formed sludge.
23rd.—Seals and dovekies are now common; the latter have already made considerable advances towards their summer plumage.
Yesterday there was a very heavy S.E. gale; it blew so furiously, and the snow-drift was so dense, that we could neither hear nor see what was going on twenty yards off; at night the ship, becoming suddenly detached from the ice, heeled over to the storm; until the cause was ascertained we thought the ice had broken up and pressed against the ship. It was not so; but when the weather moderated we found that there had been heavy pressure upon the edge of the floes,—so much, indeed, that the lane of water was now within 70 yards of the 'Fox;' and that ice 4½ feet thick had been crushed during the storm for a distance of about 50 yards.
STRONG GALES.