On the morning of the 9th a musk-ox came down to graze on the beach near the ships.  A party was despatched in pursuit, and, having hemmed him in under the hill, which was too steep for him to ascend, succeeded in killing him.  When first brought on board, the inside of this animal, which was a male, smelled very strong of musk, of which the whole of the meat also tasted more or less, and especially the heart.  It furnished us with four hundred and twenty-one pounds of beef, which was served to the crews as usual, in lieu of their salt provisions, and was very much relished by us, notwithstanding the peculiarity of its flavour.[*] The meat was remarkably fat, and, as it hung up in quarters, looked as fine as any beef in an English market.  A small seal, killed by the Griper’s people, was also eaten by them; and it was generally allowed to be very tender and palatable, though not very sightly in its appearance, being of a disagreeable red colour.

[Footnote:  Some pieces of this meat which we brought to England were found to have acquired a much more disagreeable flavour than when first killed, though they had not undergone putrefaction in the slightest degree.]

At ten P.M. the whole body of ice, which was then a quarter of a mile from us, was found to be drifting in upon the land, and the ship was warped back a little way to the westward, towards that part of the shore which was most favourable for allowing her to be forced up on the beach.  At eleven o’clock, the piece of a floe which came near us in the afternoon, and which had since drifted back a few hundred yards to the eastward, received the pressure of the whole body of ice as it came in.  It split across in various directions with a considerable crash, and presently after we saw a part, several hundred tons in weight, raised slowly and majestically, as if by the application of a screw, and deposited on another part of the floe from which it had broken, presenting towards us the surface that had split, which was of a fine blue colour, and very solid and transparent.  The violence with which the ice was coming in being thus broken, it remained quiet during the night, which was calm, with a heavy fall of snow.

The mass of ice which had been lifted up the preceding day being drifted close to us on the morning of the 10th, I sent Lieutenant Beechey to measure its thickness, which proved to be forty-two feet; and as it was a piece of a regular floe, this measurement may serve to give some idea of the general thickness of the ice in this neighbourhood.

I began to consider whether it would not be advisable, whenever the ice would allow us to move, to sacrifice a few miles of the westing we had already made, and to run along the margin of the floes, in order to endeavour to find an opening leading to the southward, by taking advantage of which we might be enabled to prosecute the voyage to the westward in a lower latitude.  I was the more inclined to make this attempt, from