that effort was to be unaccompanied by any of the usual harassing labour
of working the ship to windward through the ice, and they set to with a
will. A sufficient length of the hawser was hauled on board to enable
them to take a couple of turns round the barrel of the windlass and two
more round the heel of the foremast, the eye of the hawser being further
secured by tackles to every ring-bolt in the ship capable of bearing a
good substantial strain; and then, the skipper himself going aloft to
the crow's-nest, the signal was given for the _Flying Fish_ to go ahead.

CHAPTER TEN.

THE "HUMBOLDT" GLACIER.

The two ships were at this time floating in a tolerably broad expanse of
open water; but at a distance of some seven miles ahead the pack-ice
stretched, apparently unbroken, across their track for miles. The
skipper of the whaler, however, shouted down to them from his elevated
perch the intelligence that a somewhat intricate but continuous channel
extended through this ice in a northerly direction as far as the eye
could reach. Toward this channel, then, away they went at a speed of
something like sixteen knots per hour, the barque with her string of
colours still fluttering bravely in defiance of the adverse gale, and
the _Flying Fish_ with the white ensign of the Royal Yacht Squadron, of
which Sir Reginald was a member, streaming from her ensign staff in
honour of little Florrie. It was a strange sight, even in that region
of fantastic phantasmagoria, to see the two ships, one of which,
moreover, wore such an unaccustomed shape, dashing rapidly along through
the black foam-flecked water, with ice in every conceivable form heaped
and piled around them, and their bright-hued flags fluttering against
the dark and dismal background of a stormy sky; and the skipper of the
whaler possesses to this day a spirited water-colour sketch of the
scene, executed on the spot by the colonel, which he exhibits with
becoming pride whenever he relates the story of his wonderful escape
from the threatening icebergs.

Half an hour later they entered the channel through the ice. Narrow and
tortuous at first, it gradually widened out, and, after a journey of
some fourteen or fifteen miles, turned sharply off in a direction almost
due west. About the same time the gale broke, the sun made his
appearance through the rifted clouds, and by seven o'clock that evening,
at which hour Florrie's father duly put in an appearance on bo