t part, and sloping gradually away for one hundred yards.
After weighing a cubic foot of the snow, I calculated that, at the
lowest computation, the mass thus deposited in twenty-four hours was
not less than four hundred tons in weight! How the floe bore the
pressure seemed unaccountable to me; but it did around the "Pioneer,"
although that near the "Intrepid" broke down, and the water flowed up
above the snow, forming it rapidly into ice.

Much later in the winter--indeed in the month of March--a succession of
furious gales quite smothered us; the drift piled up as high as the top
of the winter housing, which was fifteen feet above the deck, and then
blew over to leeward, filling up on that side likewise; whilst we,
unable to face the storm without, could only prevent the housing from
being broken in, by placing props of planks and spars to support the
superincumbent weight. We had actually to dig our way out of the
vessel; and I know not how we should have freed the poor smothered
craft, had not Nature assisted us, by the breaking down of the floe.
This at first threatened to injure and strain the "Pioneer," for,
firmly held as she was all round, the vessel was immersed some two feet
deeper than she ought to have been by the subsiding ice. We set to
work, however, to try and liberate her, when one night a series of loud
reports awakened me, and the quarter-master at the same time ran down
to say, in his quaint phraseology, that "she was a going off!" a fact
of which there was no doubt, as, with sudden surges, the "Pioneer"
overcame the hold the floe had taken of her poor sides, and after some
time she floated again at her true water-line; while the mountain of
snow around us had sunk to the level of the floe, and at first formed
enormously thick ice; but this in time, by the action of the
under-currents of warm water, reduced itself to the ordinary thickness
of the adjoining floe.

[Headnote: _WINTER EMPLOYMENTS._]

Before we enter upon the subject of returning spring, and the new
occupations and excitement which it called forth, let me try to convey
an idea of a day spent in total darkness, as far as the sun was
concerned.

Fancy the lower deck and cabins of a ship, lighted entirely by candles
and oil lamps; every aperture by which external air could enter, unless
under control, carefully secured, and all doors doubled, to prevent
draughts. It is breakfast-time, and reeking hot cocoa from every
mess-table is sen