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Chap. VII.]
BREADTH OF THE PACK.
183
1842
swiftly from the north-west across the face of the sun, which occasionally appeared dimly in the intervals between the clouds, and the shattered crystals of the falling snow indicated its descent from a more disturbed region to one of almost perfect tranquillity. We had now given our rudders a fair trial, and found them to answer admirably, so that we considered our vessels as fit to fulfil the objects of the voyage as before the gale in which they had suffered so severely.
We were disappointed by our observations at noon placing us only in latitude 67° 39′ S., when, by our reckoning, we had nearly attained the sixty-eighth degree. Our longitude was 155° 59′ W., and the dip 80° 34′: we were therefore about four hundred and fifty miles from the place where we entered the pack; and, making allowance for a daily drift of about ten miles to the southward, which we found to be about the average since the 18th of December, the breadth of the belt of ice we had thus far passed through could not be less than eight hundred miles, and still we were not much more than half a degree beyond Cook, who never had occasion to enter the pack at all: so great is the difference that circumstances of season make in the navigation of icy seas. We turned our present detention to good account by trying the temperature of the sea at various depths, and employing our shipwrights in replacing some of the sheets of copper that had been torn off during the