period when it was working it registered a gust of over 91 miles an hour.  While it was not working there came a gust which woke most people up, and which was a far more powerful one, making a regular hail of stones against the wall.  The next morning the wind was found to be averaging 104 miles an hour when the anemometer on the hill was checked for three minutes.  Later it was averaging 78 miles an hour.  This blizzard continued to rage all this day and the next, but on May 6, which was one of those clear beautiful days when it is hard to believe that it can ever blow again, we could see something of the damage to the sea-ice.  The centre of the Sound was clear of ice, and the open water stretched to the S. W. of us as far back as Tent Island.  We were to have many worse blizzards during this winter, but this particular blow was important because it came at a critical time in the freezing over of the sea, and, once it had been dispersed, the winds of the future never allowed the ice to form again sufficiently thick to withstand the wind forces which obtained.

Thus I find in my diary of May 8:  “Up to the present we have never considered the possibility of the sea in this neighbourhood, and the Sound out to the west of us, not freezing over permanently in the winter.  But here there is still open water, and it seems quite possible that there may not be any permanent freezing this year, at any rate to the north of Inaccessible Island and this cape.  Though North Bay is now frozen over, the ice in it was blown away during the night, and, having been blown back again, is now only joined to the ice-foot by newly frozen ice.”

During this winter the ice formed in North Bay was constantly moving away from the ice-foot, quite independently of wind.  I watched it carefully as far as it was possible to do so in the dark.  Sometimes at any rate the southern side of the sea-ice moved out not only northwards from the land, but also slightly westwards from the glacier face.  To the north-east the ice was sometimes pressed closely up against the glacier.  It seemed that the whole sheet was subject to a screw movement, the origin of which was somewhere out by Inaccessible Island.  The result was that we often had a series of leads of newly frozen ice stretching out for some forty yards to an older piece of ice, each lead being of a different age.  It was an interesting study in the formation of sea-ice, covered at times by very beautiful ice-flowers.  But it was dangerous for the dogs, who sometimes did not realize that these leads were not strong enough to bear them.  Vaida went in one day, but managed to scramble out on the far side.  He was induced to return to the land with difficulty, just before the whole sheet of ice upon which he stood floated out to sea.  Noogis, Dimitri’s good leader, wandered away several times during the winter:  once at any rate he seems to have been carried off on a piece of ice, and to have managed to swim to land, for when he arrived in camp his coat was full of icy slush:  finally he disappeared altogether, all search for him was in vain, and we never found out what had happened.