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We ran along to the eastward without any obstruction, in a channel about five miles wide, till we were within four or five miles of Cape Hearne, where the bay-ice, in unbroken sheets of about one third of an inch in thickness, began to offer considerable impediment to our progress.
Has been called at various times "fast-ice," "coast-ice," "land-ice," "bay-ice" by Shackleton and David and the Charcot Expedition; and possibly what Drygalski calls "Schelfeis" is not very different. "Floe". An area of ice, level or hummocked, whose limits are within sight. Includes all sizes between brash on the one hand and fields on the other.
On the Danish charts six different kinds of sea-ice are marked namely, unbroken polar ice; land-floe; great ice-fields; tight pack-ice; open ice; bay-ice and brash. With the exception of bay-ice, which is more generally known as young ice, all these terms pass current in the Antarctic.
On approaching the floes, however, we found such a quantity of bay-ice, the formation of which upon the surface had been favoured by the late calm weather, that the Hecla was soon stopped altogether; a circumstance which gave us, as usual, much trouble in extricating ourselves from it, but not very material as regarded our farther progress to the southward, the floes being found to stretch quite close in to the land, leaving no passage whatever between them.
The term bay-ice should possibly, therefore, be dropped altogether, especially since, even in the Arctic, its meaning is not altogether a rigid one, as it may denote firstly the gluey "slush," which forms when sea-water freezes, and secondly the firm level sheet ultimately produced.
Shortly before midnight on the 15th we came abreast of the northern edge of a great glacier or overflow from the inland ice, projecting beyond the barrier into the sea. It was 400 or 500 ft. high, and at its edge was a large mass of thick bay-ice. The bay formed by the northern edge of this glacier would have made an excellent landing- place.
Some of the sealers ascribed this obstinacy in the bay-ice to its greater thickness; believing that the shallowness of the water had favoured a frozen formation below, that did not so much prevail off soundings. This theory may have been true, though there was quite as much against it, as in its favour, for polar ice usually increases above and not from below.
On the 2d of April a thin sheet of bay-ice several miles square had formed on the sea to the eastward and southward, where for two or three days past there had been a space of open water.
One floe of bay-ice had black earth upon it, apparently basaltic in origin, and there was a large berg with a broad band of yellowish brown right through it. The stain may have been volcanic dust. Many of the bergs had quaint shapes. There was one that exactly resembled a large two-funnel liner, complete in silhouette except for smoke.
I was growing anxious to reach land on account of the dogs, which had not been able to get exercise for four weeks, and were becoming run down. We passed at least two hundred bergs during the day, and we noticed also large masses of hummocky bay-ice and ice-foot.
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