In the first of the basins named, the schooner wore short round on her heel, her foresail being set to help her.  A breathless moment passed as she ran down towards the narrow strait.  It was quickly reached, and that none too soon; the opening now not exceeding sixty feet.  The yards of the vessel almost brushed the rocks in passing; but she went clear.  As soon as in the lower basin, as one might call it, the jib and foresail were taken in, and the head of the mainsail was got on the craft.  This helped her to luff up towards the slip, which she reached under sufficient head-way fairly to enter it.  Lines were thrown to the people on the ice, who soon hauled the schooner up to the head of her frozen dock.  Three cheers broke spontaneously out of the throats of the men, as they thus achieved the step which assured them of the safety of the vessel, so far as the ice was concerned!  In this way do we estimate our advantages and disadvantages, by comparison.  In the abstract, the situation of the sealers was still sufficiently painful; though compared with what it would have been with the other schooner wrecked, it was security itself.

By this time it was quite dark; and a day of excitement and fatigue required a night of rest.  After supping, the men turned in; the Vineyarders mostly in the house, where they occupied their old bunks.  When the moon rose, the party from the wreck arrived, with their carts well loaded, and themselves half frozen, notwithstanding their toil.  In a short time, all were buried in sleep.

When Roswell Gardiner came on deck next morning, his first glance told him how little was the chance of his party’s returning north that season.  The strange floe had driven into the Great Bay, completely covering its surface, lining the shores far and near with broken and glittering cakes of ice; and, as it were, hermetically sealing the place against all egress.  New ice, an inch or two thick, or even six or eight inches thick, might have been sawed through; and a passage cut even for a league, should it be necessary.  Such things were sometimes done, and great as would have been the toil, our sealers would have attempted it, in preference to running the risk of passing a winter in that region.  But almost desperate as would have been even that source of refuge, the party was completely cut off from its possession.  To think of sawing through ice as thick as that of the floe, for any material distance, would be like a project to tunnel the Alps.

Melancholy was the meeting between Roswell and Daggett that morning.  The former was too manly and generous to indulge in reproaches, else might he well have told the last that all this was owing to him.  There is a singular propensity in us all to throw the burthen of our own blunders on the shoulders of other folk.  Roswell had a little of this weakness, overlooking the fact that he was his own master; and as he had come to the group by himself, he ought to have left it in the same manner, as soon as his own particular task was accomplished.  But Roswell did not see this quite as distinctly as he saw the fact that Daggett’s detentions and indirect appeals to his better feelings had involved him in all these difficulties.  Still, while thus he felt, he made no complaint.