the opinions of the senior officers of the expedition as to the
expediency of immediately seeking a harbour in which the ships
might securely lie during the ensuing winter. The opinions of the
officers entirely concurring with my own as to the propriety of
immediately resorting to this measure, I determined, whenever the
ice and the weather would allow, to run back to the bay of the
Hecla and Griper, in which neighbourhood alone we had any reason
to believe that a suitable harbour might be found.

At half past two on the morning of the 22d, the night signal was
made to weigh, and we began to heave at our cables; but such was
the difficulty of raising our anchor and of hauling in our
hawsers, owing to the stiffness of the ropes from frost and the
quantity of ice which had accumulated about them, that it was five
o'clock before the ships were under way. Our rudder, also, was so
choked by the ice which had formed about it, that it could not be
moved till a boat had been hauled under the stern, and the ice
beaten and cut away from it. We ran along to the eastward without
any obstruction, in a channel about five miles wide, till we were
within four or five miles of Cape Hearne, where the bay-ice, in
unbroken sheets of about one third of an inch in thickness, began
to offer considerable impediment to our progress. We at length,
however, struck soundings with twenty-nine fathoms of line, and at
eight P.M. anchored in nine fathoms, on a muddy bottom, a little
to the eastward of our situation on the 5th.

In going to the westward we passed a shoal and open bay,
immediately adjacent to the harbour which we were now about to
examine, and soon after came to a reef of rocks, in some parts
nearly dry, extending, about three quarters of a mile to the
southward of a low point on the southeastern side of the harbour.
On rounding the reef, on which a quantity of heavy ice was lying
aground, we found that a continuous floe, four or five inches in
thickness, was formed over the whole harbour, which in every other
respect appeared to be fit for our purpose; and that it would be
necessary to cut a canal of two miles in length through the ice,
in order to get the ships into a secure situation for the winter.
We sounded the channel into the harbour about three quarters of a
mile, by making holes in the ice and dropping the lead through,
and found the depth from five to six fathoms.

The ships weighed at six A.M. on the 24th. the wind being