Page:The open Polar Sea- a narrative of a voyage of discovery towards the North pole, in the schooner "United States" (IA openpolarseanarr1867haye).pdf/121

 success, but in half an hour the navigation became so tortuous that we were compelled again to go about and stand in-shore. And thus we continued for many hours, tacking to and fro,—sometimes gaining a little, then losing ground by being forced to go to leeward of a floe, which we could not weather.

The space in which we could manœuvre the schooner became gradually more and more contracted; the collisions with the ice became more frequent. We were losing ground. The ice was closing in with the land, and we were finally brought to bay. There was no longer a lead. And it was now too late to retreat, had we been even so inclined. The ice was as closely unpacked behind us as before us. With marvelous celerity the scene had shifted. An hour later, and there was scarcely a patch of open water in sight from the deck, and the floes were closing upon the schooner like a vice. Utterly powerless within its jaws, we had no alternative but to await the issue with what calmness we could.

The scene around us was as imposing as it was alarming. Except the earthquake and volcano, there is not in nature an exhibition of force comparable with that of the ice-fields of the Arctic Seas. They close together, when driven by the wind or by currents against the land or other resisting object, with the pressure of millions of moving tons, and the crash and noise and confusion are truly terrific.

We were now in the midst of one of the most thrilling of these exhibitions of Polar dynamics, and we became uncomfortably conscious that the schooner was to become a sort of dynamometer. Vast ridges were thrown up wherever the floes came together, to be submerged again when the pressure was exerted in