t so happen, as was not improbable, that we should
return to the eastward. It is impossible to describe the labour
attending this attempt. Suffice it to say, that, after working for
fourteen hours, they returned on board at midnight, having accomplished
about four miles out of the six. The next day they returned to the boat,
and, after several hours' exertion, landed her on the beach with the
stores. What added to the fatigue of this service was the necessity of
taking a small boat to cross pools of water on their return, so that
they had to drag this boat both ways, besides that which they went to
convey. Having, however, had an opportunity of trying what could be done
upon a regular and level floe which lay close to the beach, everybody
was of opinion, as I had always been, that we could easily travel twenty
miles a day on ice of that kind.

It will not be wondered at if the apparent hopelessness of getting the
ship free for the present again suggested the necessity of my own
setting out: and I had once more, on the 1st of June, after an anxious
consultation with my officers, resolved on making a second attempt, when
the ice near us, which had opened at regular hours with the tide for
three or four days past, began to set us much more rapidly than usual to
the eastward, and towards a low point which runs off from Red Beach,
near its western end, causing us to shoal the water in a few hours from
fifty-two to twenty fathoms, and on the following morning to fourteen
and a half. By sending a lead-line over the ice a few hundred yards
beyond us, we found ten fathoms water. However unfavourable the aspect
of our affairs seemed before, this new change could not fail to alter it
for the worse. The situation of the ship now, indeed, required my whole
attention; for the ice occasionally opened and shut within twenty or
twenty-five yards of us on the in-shore side, the ship herself was still
very firmly imbedded by the turned up masses which pressed upon her on
the 19th, and which, on the other side, as well as ahead and astern,
were of considerable extent. Thus she formed, as it were, part of a
floe, which went drifting about in the manner above described. This was
of little importance while she was in sixty fathoms of water, as she was
for the first fourteen days of our besetment, and a distance of five or
six miles from the land; but now that she had shoaled the water so
considerably, and approached the low point within two or