Having made the ship snug, so as to be in readiness to round to should the land be seen ahead, and the Griper having come up within a few miles of us, we again bore up at one A.M., the 4th.  At half past three, Lieutenant Beechey, who had relieved me on deck, discovered from the crow’s-nest a reef of rocks, in-shore of us to the northward, on which the sea was breaking.  The cliffs on this part of the coast present a singular appearance, being stratified horizontally, and having a number of regular projecting masses of rock, broad at the bottom, and coming to a point at the top, resembling so many buttresses, raised by art at equal intervals.

After lying-to for an hour, we again bore up to the westward, and soon after discovered a cape, afterward named by Captain Sabine, cape Fellfoot, which appeared to form the termination of this coast; and as the haze, which still prevailed to the south, prevented our seeing any land in that quarter, and the sea was literally as free from ice as any part of the Atlantic, we began to flatter ourselves that we had fairly entered the Polar Sea, and some of the most sanguine among us had even calculated the bearing and distance of Icy Cape, as a matter of no very difficult or improbable accomplishment.  This pleasing prospect was rendered the more flattering by the sea having, as we thought, regained the usual oceanic colour, and by a long swell which was rolling in from the southward and eastward.  At six P.M., however, land was reported to be seen ahead.  The vexation and anxiety produced on every countenance by such a report were but too visible, until, on a nearer approach, it was found to be only an island, of no very large extent, and that, on each side of it, the horizon still appeared clear for several points of the compass.  At eight P.M. we came to some ice of no great breadth or thickness, extending several miles in a direction nearly parallel to our course; and as we could see clear water over it to the southward, I was for some time in the hope that it would prove a detached stream, from which no obstruction to our progress westerly was to be apprehended.  At twenty minutes past ten, however, the weather having become hazy and the wind light, we perceived that the ice, along which we had been sailing for the last two hours, was joined, at the distance of half a mile to the westward of us, to a compact and impenetrable body of floes, which lay across the whole breadth of the strait, formed by the island and the western point of Maxwell Bay.  We hauled our wind to the northward, just in time to avoid being embayed in the ice, on the outer edge of which a considerable surf, the effect of the late gale, was then rolling.