Page:The open Polar Sea- a narrative of a voyage of discovery towards the North pole, in the schooner "United States" (IA openpolarseanarr1867haye).pdf/353

 *

Basin through the broader gateway above mentioned, known as Kennedy Channel; and the ice, escaping but slowly through the narrow Sound into Baffin Bay, has accumulated within the sea from century to century. The summer dismembers it to some extent and breaks it up into fragments of varying size, which are pressing together, wearing and grinding continually, and crowding down upon each other and upon the Greenland coast, thus producing the result which we have seen.

In order fully to appreciate the power and magnitude of this ice-movement, it must be borne in mind that a very large proportion of the ice is of very ancient formation,—old floes or ice-fields of immense thickness and miles in extent, as well as of icebergs discharged from Humboldt Glacier. These vast masses, tearing along with the current in the early winter through the sea as it is closing up and new ice is making rapidly, are as irresistible as a tornado among the autumn leaves. As an illustration, I will give the dimensions of an old field measured by me while crossing the Sound. Its average height was twenty feet above the sea level, and about six by four miles in extent of surface, which was very uneven, rising into rounded hillocks as much as eighty feet in height, and sinking into deep and tortuous valleys.

To cross such a floe with our sledges was almost as difficult as crossing the hummocks themselves; for, in addition to its uneven surface, like that of a very rough and broken country, it was covered with crusted snow through which the sledge-runners cut continually, and which broke down under the foot. I estimated its solid contents, in round numbers, at