ship and a fine crew, all eager to commence the more active duties of sledge travelling; and, indeed, on looking at our thirty large and ravenous dogs that crowded our decks, we could not but think that our sledge parties would solve, in the following spring, the extraordinary mystery of Franklin's fate. How these hopes were to be disappointed that year the sequel will show. It is well for us that we cannot know what the morrow may bring forth. During August 7 and 8, we steered out due west from Upernavik to try to cross in that parallel of latitude; but on the evening of the latter day, the keenness of the air, the ice-blink ahead, and the fast increasing number of bergs, prepared us for seeing the Middle Pack. In the evening and during that night we passed streams of loose sailing ice, and on the morning of the 8th further progress was stopped by impenetrable floes. This was in lat. 72° 40' north, long. 59° 50' west.
Getting clear of the loose ice in the pack edge, we steered to the northward, to look for an opening in any place where we could attempt a passage. The ice, however, presented an impenetrable line, and having reached, on August 12, latitude 75° 10' north, longitude 58° west, we made fast to an iceberg aground under the glacier. It was a lovely evening; the sky bright and clear, and the thermometer standing at 36° in the shade. Seals were playing about the ship, and we added to our stock of beef. But a dreary prospect rather damped our pleasure. The ice extended in one unbroken mass right into the land, and pressed hard upon the very coast; not a drop of water could be seen from the masthead, in the direction in which we desired to go. The southerly winds, before which we had been running, appeared to have driven the whole pack into the head of Melville Bay. The season was passing away, and without an early change to wind and a continuance of it from the northward, we were almost without a hope.
In the evening we visited the glacier, but the débris of shattered ice, and the innumerable bergs and floe pieces, prevented our getting close to its base. It was a beautifully calm night; not a sound to be heard, save the crashing of some enormous mass rent from the face of the glacier, or distant rumbling of the vast inland ice, as it moved slowly down towards the sea. Far away over the continent, nothing but the surface of glacier could be seen, excepting here or there a mountain peak, showing up through the ice; and the bright glare of the ice-blink shot up into the sky, giving a yellow tinge to the otherwise deep blue vault of heaven. Flights of ducks winged their way to the southward, reminding us that it was the season when those desolate regions were deserted, and that we should be left alone. Our distant ship was lying so surrounded with huge and lofty bergs, that only her masthead could be seen through an opening; and a low melancholy howling (such as an Esquimaux dog alone knows how to make) occasionally broke upon the ear—for our dogs had all gone up to the very top of a lofty berg, and were thus expressing their home-sick longings, and, perhaps, a foreboding of the unhappy fate that awaited many of them.
We lay secured to the iceberg until the 16th August, when the wind changed to the north-eastward, and the floes began to move off the land
