enough to be of much
use when it came to a question of pushing forward with a ship.

Sanguine folk on board, however, attached more importance to such
open stretches. June 15th I wrote in my diary: "There are several
lanes visible in different directions, but none of them is wide or
of any great extent. The mate, however, is always insisting that we
shall certainly get open water before autumn, and be able to creep
along northward, while with the rest, Sverdrup excepted, it seems
to be a generally accepted belief. Where they are to get their open
water from I do not know. For the rest, this is the first ice-bound
expedition that has not spent the summer spying after open water, and
sighing and longing for the ice to disperse. I only wish it may keep
together, and hurry up and drift northward. Everything in this life
depends on what one has made up one's mind to. One person sets forth
to sail in open water, perhaps to the very Pole, but gets stuck in
the ice and laments; another is prepared to get stuck in the ice, but
will not grumble even should he find open water. It is ever the safest
plan to expect the least of life, for then one often gets the most."

The open spaces, the lanes, and the rifts in the ice are, of course,
produced, like the pressure and packing, by the shifting winds and
the tidal currents that set the ice drifting first in one direction,
then in another. And they best prove, perhaps, how the surface of
the Polar Sea must be considered as one continuous mass of ice-floes
in constant motion, now frozen together, now torn apart, or crushed
against each other.

During the whole of our drift I paid great attention to this ice,
not only with respect to its motion, but to its formation and growth
as well. In the Introduction of this book I have pointed out that,
even should the ice pass year after year in the cold Polar Sea, it
could not by mere freezing attain more than a certain thickness. From
measurements that were constantly being made, it appeared that the ice
which was formed during the autumn in October or November continued
to increase in size during the whole of the winter and out into the
spring, but more slowly the thicker it became. On April 10th it was
about 2.31 metres; April 21st, 2.41 metres; May 5th, 2.45 metres;
May 31st, 2.52 metres; June 9th, 2.58 metres. It was thus continually
increasing in bulk, notwithstanding that the snow now melted quickly
on the surface, and large pools of fr