Upon these grounds it was that I was anxious to make an attempt, at least, as soon as our arrangements could be completed; and the officers being of the same opinion as myself, we hoisted out the boats early in the morning of the 27th, and, having put the things into one of them, endeavoured, by way of experiment, to get her to a little distance from the ship.  Such however, were the irregularities of the ice, that, even with the assistance of an additional party of men, it was obvious that we could not have gained a single mile in a day, and, what was still more important, not without almost certain and serious injury to the boats by their striking against the angular masses.  Under these circumstances, it was but too evident to every one that it would have been highly imprudent to persist in setting out, since, if the ice, after all, should clear away, even in a week, so as to allow us to get a few miles nearer the main body, time would be ultimately saved by our delay, to say nothing of the wear and tear, and expense of our provisions.  I was, therefore, very reluctantly compelled to yield to this necessity, and to order the things to be got on board again.

Immediately after we had, on the 27th, proved experimentally the extreme difficulty of transporting our boats and stores over the ice which now surrounded us, I made up my mind to the very great probability there seemed to be of the necessity of adopting such alterations in our original plans as would accommodate them to these untoward circumstances at the outset.  The boats forming the main impediment, not so much on account of their absolute weight as from the difficulty of managing so large a body upon a road of this nature, I made preparations for the possible contingency of our having to take only one, continuing the same number of men in our whole party.  All that I saw reason to apprehend from having only a single boat on our outward journey, was some occasional delay in ferrying over spaces of water in two trips instead of one; but we considered that this would be much more than compensated by the increased rate at which we should go whenever we were upon the ice, as we expected to be nine days out of ten.  The principal disadvantage, therefore, consisted in our not all being able to sleep in the boat, and this we proposed to obviate in the following manner.

We constructed out of the Lapland snow-shoes fourteen sledges, each sledge consisting of two pairs well fastened together.  Upon these we proposed dragging almost all the weight, so as to keep the boat nearly without any cargo in her, as we found by experiment that a man could drag about three hundred pounds on one of the sledges with more facility than he could drag the boat when his proportion did not exceed one hundred pounds.  Upon these sledges we proposed lodging half our party alternately each night, placing them under the lee of the boat, and then stretching over them, as a sloped roof, a second awning, which