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This gale was a particularly heavy one. The ship and gear were covered with ice, owing to the freezing of spray, and Stenhouse had anxious hours amid the heavy, ice-encumbered waters before the gale moderated.

The red man returned to the wigwams of his people, while the young Eskimo, descending the river in his kayak, continued to hunt the white-whale and pursue the feathered tribes which swarmed in the creeks, rivulets, and marshes that bordered the ice-encumbered waters of the polar seas. Alas for the hopes and efforts of good men!

His knowledge of those Arctic seas had taught him that their position was most critical, and that escape would be almost miraculous, for they were eight or ten miles at least off the land, on a perishable iceberg, with an ice-encumbered sea around, and no means of going afloat, even if the water had been free.

Headland after headland, in most imposing array, was seen plunging sheer and bare from dizzy heights, and planting its feet in the ice-encumbered water without leaving a spot on which one could land from a boat, while no part of the great glacier that pours all these miles of ice into the fiord was visible.

Meeting with continual rebuffs, but persistently forging ahead and gaining deliberately day by day, the Roosevelt pushed steadily northward through the ice-encumbered waters of Kane Basin, Kennedy and Robeson Channels, and around the northeast corner of Grant Land to the shelter of Cape Sheridan, which was reached early in the afternoon of September 5, 1908.

Now and then, with a startling report, the big floe on which rested the auto ice boat containing the girls would be lessened by a great chunk, that would break off, and go floating away. "Oh, hurry! Do, please, hurry!" breathed Grace, as she sat huddled close beside Amy, gazing now and then into the ice-encumbered black water that seemed momentarily to be encroaching on their margin of safety.

The little craft, obedient to the powerful impulse, combined as it was with the current of the ebb-tide, flew rather than floated toward the narrows, through which it passed, and opened up a view of the ice-encumbered waters of Ungava Bay.

For at the very time that the Eskimos, in their remote home on the ice-encumbered sea, were informally debating the propriety of making an unprovoked attack on the Dogrib Indians whom they facetiously styled Fire-spouters the red men were also holding a very formal and solemn council of war as to the advisability of making an assault on those presumptuous Eskimos, or eaters-of-raw-flesh, who ventured to pay an uncalled-for visit to the Greygoose River their ancestral property every spring.

Making our way down the river, in clouds of flying snow, we soon reached the coast, and started westward, along a narrow strip of ice-encumbered beach, between the open water of the sea and a long line of black perpendicular cliffs, one hundred and fifty to three hundred feet in height.

When April brought the Gibraltar regiments from Virginia, Pepperrell sent in to Shirley his general report on the three thousand men with whom he had begun the autumn. Barely one thousand were fit for duty. Eleven hundred lay sick and suffering in the ghastly hospital. Eight hundred and ninety lay buried out on the dreary tongue of land between the lime-pit and the fog-bound, ice-encumbered sea.