On the morning of the 12th we were once more favoured with a breeze from the eastward, but so light and unsteady that our progress was vexatiously slow; and on the 13th, when within seven leagues of Cape York, we had the mortification to perceive the sea ahead of us covered with young ice, the thermometer having, for two days past, ranged only from 18 deg. to 20 deg.

The next breeze sprung up from the westward, drawing also from the southward, at times, out of Prince Regent’s Inlet, and for three days we were struggling with the young ice to little or no purpose, now and then gaining half a mile of ground to windward in a little “hole” of open water, then losing as much by the necessity of bearing up or wearing (for the ice was too strong to allow us to tack), sallying from morning to night with all hands, and with the watch at night, two boats constantly under the bows; and, after all, rather losing ground than otherwise, while the young ice was every hour increasing in thickness.

Towards sunset on the 17th we became more and more hampered, and were eventually beset during the night.  The sea was covered with ice between us and the shore, all of this year’s formation, but now of considerable thickness and formidable appearance.  The wind continuing strong, the whole body was constantly pressed in upon the land, bearing the ships along with it, and doubling one sheet over another, sometimes to a hundred thicknesses.  We quickly shoaled the water from seventy to forty fathoms, the latter depth occurring about a mile from the beach; and after this we drifted but little, the ice being blocked up between the point and a high perpendicular berg lying aground off it.

Under such circumstances, it evidently became expedient to endeavour, by sawing, to get the ships as close in-shore as possible, so as to secure them either to grounded ice, or by anchoring within the shelter of a bay at no great distance inside of us; for it now seemed not unlikely that winter was about to put a premature stop to all farther operations at sea for this season.  At all events, it was necessary to consult the immediate safety of the ships, and to keep them from being drifted back to the eastward.  I therefore gave orders for endeavouring to get the ships in towards the bay, by cutting through what level floes still remained.  So strong had been the pressure while the ice was forcing in upon us, that on the 20th, after liberating the Hecla on one side, she was as firmly cemented to it on the other, as after a winter’s formation; and we could only clear her by heavy and repeated “sallying.”  After cutting in two or three hundred yards, while the people were at dinner on the 21st, our canal closed by the external pressure coming upon the parts which we had weakened, and in a few minutes the whole was once more in motion, or, as the seamen not inaptly expressed it, “alive,” mass doubling under mass, and raising those which were uppermost to a