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Updated: June 4, 2025
Then a tremendous storm arose, and the sea became choked up with icebergs and floes, which the frost soon locked together into a solid mass.
The travellers struggled gallantly against these adverse circumstances as long as any progress northward was at all possible, being desirous of realising, as fully as might be, for themselves the difficulties experienced by explorers in these high latitudes; but at length they found themselves so completely hemmed in by vast floes and drifting masses of pack-ice that to prolong the struggle would only be endangering the ship, and they were reluctantly compelled to own themselves beaten and to rise into the air.
We have arrived at the edge of one of these floes, and the ship will not go through under sail, but I'm sure she would do so under steam. Is this a typical floe? And are there more ahead? One of the ponies got down this afternoon Oates thinks it was probably asleep and fell, but the incident is alarming; the animals are not too strong.
"Yes," agreed White, "we simply must go, and the quicker we set about it the better. If we make haste I believe we can get across by dark." Thus determined, and disregarding a further expostulation from the fisherman, our lads set their faces resolutely towards the confusion of hummocks, "pans," floes tilted on edge, and up-reared masses of blue ice forming the "strait's pack" of that season.
He showed a fair amount of information as he changed his subject from the ice floes of Spitzbergen to the dunes of Gascony, from a Carlovingian charter to the flora of the Sahara, from the progress in beetroot growing to Caesar's trenches before Alesia.
In the middle of the river the prow of a flat boat projects upward from between two huge ice floes which have mashed it, like a miniature wreck in arctic seas. The best view of this annual ice spectacle is to look up the river and see the big field of broken, tumbling, crashing, grinding ice coming down.
Its sides dipped deep in the sea, and as it rose again the water seemed to be streaming from its eyes, as though it were weeping at our escape from the clutch of the floes. This may seem fanciful to the reader, but the impression was real to us at the time.
But soon we came to a compacter body of floes, and running behind this we were agreeably surprised to find comparatively smooth water. We ran on for a bit, then stopped and lay to. Now we are lying in a sort of ice bay there is a mile or so of pack to windward, and two horns which form the bay embracing us. The sea is damped down to a gentle swell, although the wind is as strong as ever.
These poor fellows cannot tell us. 'Out on the ice to the north' is a wide word. Fred, Fred, can you not tell us in which direction we ought to go to search for them?" "Yes, far out on the floes among hummocks far out," murmured Fred, half unconsciously. "We must be satisfied with that. Now, Mr. Saunders, assist me to get the small sledge fitted out. I'll go to look after them myself."
The animal sought by the sealers of Newfoundland amid the furious storms and crashing floes of the great ice pack is not the fur-bearing seal of Alaska, but a variety of the much less important hair seal, which may be seen almost anywhere along the Atlantic coast.
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