From this pleasing scene, however, they found themselves, the next day, very differently situated.

On the 30th of July, in the afternoon, they were among what are called the Seven Islands, and in the ice, with no appearance of any opening for the ships.  Between eleven and twelve at night, Mr. Crane, master of the Racehorse, was dispatched by Captain Phipps, in the four-oared boat, to try if he could get through, and find an opening for the ship which might afford a prospect of getting farther; with directions, if he could reach the shore, to go up one of the mountains, in order to discover the state of the ice to the eastward and northward.  Captain Lutwidge, who had employed a boat, conducted by his young coxswain for the same purpose, joined Mr. Crane on shore, and they proceeded to ascend a high mountain, from whence the prospect extended ten or twelve leagues to the east and north-east, over one continued plain of smooth ice, bounded only by the horizon.  They also saw land stretching to the south-east, laid down in the Dutch charts as islands:  and now plainly discovered that the main body of ice, which the ships had traced from west to east, actually joined to these islands; and, from them, to what is called the north-east land.  In returning to their ships, about seven in the morning, round which the ice had, in their absence, so completely got, that with their ice-anchors out they had moored alongside a field of it, they were frequently obliged to haul the boats, over ice which had closed since they went, to other openings.

At nine o’clock, in the morning, the 31st, having a light breeze to the eastward, they cast off, and endeavoured to force through the ice; but, at noon, finding it too close to proceed, again moored to a field.  In the afternoon they filled their casks with fresh water from the ice, which they found very pure and soft.  The field of ice, to which both vessels were now moored, was found to be eight yards ten inches thick at one end, and seven yards eleven inches at the other.  The ice closed fast, and was all round the ships; no opening to be any where seen, except a hole of about a mile and a half, where the ships lay fast to the ice, with ice-anchors.  It being calm the greater part of the day, and the weather very fine, the ships companies amused themselves, almost the whole time, in playing on the ice.  The pilots, however, finding themselves much farther than they had ever before penetrated, and reflecting on the advanced state of the season, seemed alarmed with apprehensions of being beset.

On the 1st of August, the ice pressed in so fast, that there was now not the smallest opening.  The two ships were within less than two lengths of each other, neither of them having room to turn.  The ice, which had been all flat the day before, and almost level with the water’s edge, was now in many places forced higher than the main-yard by the pieces squeezing together.  Their latitude this day at noon, by the double altitude, was eighty degrees thirty-seven minutes.