e ice
meets in the vitals of the ship. A vessel might stay thus, suspended
between two floes, for twenty-four hours--or until the movement of the
tides relaxed the pressure, when she would sink. The ice might open at
first just sufficiently to let the hull go down, and the ends of the
yards might catch on the ice and break, with the weight of the
water-filled hull, as was the case with the ill-fated _Jeannette_. One
ship, in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, was caught in the ice and dragged
over the rocks like a nutmeg over a nutmeg grater. The bottom was sliced
off as one would slice a cucumber with a knife, so that the iron
blubber tanks in the hold dropped out of her. The ship became nothing
but the sides and ends of a box. She remained some twenty-four hours,
gripped between the floes, and then went down.

On the 22d of August, the fifth day, our lucky stars must have been
working overtime; for we made a phenomenal run--more than a hundred
miles, right up the middle of Kennedy Channel, uninterrupted by ice or
fog! At midnight the sun burst gloriously through the clouds, just over
Cape Lieber. It seemed a happy omen.

Could such good fortune continue? Though my hopes were high, the
experience of former journeys reminded me that the brightest coin has
always a reverse side. In a day we had run the whole length of Kennedy
Channel, and immediately before us there was only scattered ice. But
beyond lay Robeson Channel, only some thirty miles away, and the
navigator who knows Robeson Channel will never be sanguine that it has
anything good in store for him.

Soon we encountered both ice and fog, and, while working slowly along in
search of an opening, we were forced clear across to the Greenland coast
at Thank God Harbor, the winter quarters of the _Polaris_ in 1871-72. I
have mentioned the lane of water which often lies at ebb tide between
the land and the moving central pack; but the reader must not fancy that
this is an unobstructed lane. On the contrary, its passage means
constant butting of the smaller ice, and constant dodging of larger
pieces.

Of course the steam is up at all times, ready, like ourselves, for
anything at a moment's notice. When the ice is not so heavy as to be
utterly impenetrable, the ship under full steam moves back and forth
continually, butting and charging the floes. Sometimes a charge will
send the ship forward half her length, sometimes her whole
length--sometimes not an inch. When, with all