ht--for night was now of some two hours' duration--the wind
piped merrily, and we rolled most cruelly; the long and narrow
"Pioneer" threatening to pitch every spar over the side, and refusing
all the manoeuvring upon the part of her beshaken officers and men to
comfort and quiet her.

A poet, who had not been fourteen hours in the cold, and whose body was
not racked by constant gymnastic exertion to preserve his bones from
fracture, might have given a beautiful description of the lifting of a
fierce sky at about half-past one in the morning, and a disagreeable
glimpse through snow-storm and squall of a bold and precipitous coast
not many miles off, and ahead of us. I cannot undertake to do so, for I
remember feeling far from poetical, as, with a jerk and a roll, the
"Pioneer," under fore and aft canvas, came to the wind. Fast increasing
daylight showed us to have been thrown considerably to the northward;
and as we sailed to the south the ice showed itself in far from
pleasing proximity under the lee--_boiling_, for so the edge of a pack
appears to do in a gale of wind. It was a wild sight; but we felt that,
at any rate, it was optional with a screw steamer whether she ran into
the pack or kept the sea, for her clawing-to-windward power astonished
us who had fought in the teeth of hard gales elsewhere in flying
Symondite brigs. Not so, however, thought a tough old Hull quarter-master
whose weather-beaten face peered anxiously over the lee, and watched
the "Resolute" beating Cromer-a-lee, for I heard him growl out, "Wull,
if they are off a strait lee-pack edge, the sooner they make up their
minds to run into it the better!" "Why so, Hall?" I inquired. "Because,
sir," replied the old man, "that ship is going two feet to leeward for
one she is going ahead, and she would _never_ work off _nothing!_"

"Pleasant!" I mentally ejaculated; but, willing to hear more from my
dry old friend, who was quite a character in his way,--"Perhaps," I
said, "you have occasionally been caught in worse vessels off such a
pack as you describe, or a lee shore, and still not been lost?"

"Oh! Lord, sir! we have some rum craft in the whaling ships, but I
don't think any thing so sluggish as the Resolute.' Howsomdever, they
gets put to it now and then. Why, it was only last year, we were down
on the south-west fishing-ground: about the 10th of October, it came on
to blow, sir, from the southward, and sent in a sea upon us, which
nearly drowned