the weather, though gloomy, was favourable to 1842. our purpose, and we were again drifting in the desired direction. In the course of reading the usual church service in the morning, we offered up our most heartfelt thanksgivings to God for his merciful and wonderful preservation of us when we were in extreme peril, who had showed us the terrible things and wonders of the great deep, from which we might learn our own weakness, and his power and readiness to help all those that call upon and trust in Him, whose mercy is over all his works, but had been most especially manifested to us; and we implored a continuance of His blessing on all our future exertions.
In the evening, the ice slackened around our ship so much as to admit of our trying the anxious experiment of shipping the rudder, which we had the satisfaction of accomplishing without much difficulty; and, although the circumstances were not sufficiently favourable to do any thing with the Terror's, yet it was a relief to our minds to have one of the ships again in a condition, if necessary, to aid her more crippled companion.
The port or lee side of the Erebus, which hadJan. 24. suffered most severely from grinding and striking against the ice, received our first attention: cutting away the splinters, and smoothening the surface as low down as we could by heeling the ship over to starboard, and then replacing, so far