pressure-ridge close to the smithy. It now served, as I have said, as a beacon, and is perhaps to-day drifting about in the Polar Sea in that capacity--unless it has been found and taken possession of by some Eskimo housewife on the east coast of Greenland. As the sun and mild weather brought their influence to bear upon the surface of the ice and the snow, the vessel rose daily higher and higher above the ice, so that by July 23d we had three and a half planks of the greenheart ice-hide clear on the port side and ten planks to starboard. In the evening of August 8th our floe cracked on the port, and the Fram altered her list from 7° to port to 1.5° starboard side, with respectively four and two planks of the ice-hide clear, and eleven bow-irons clear forward. I feared that the small floe in which we were now embedded might drift off down the channel if the ice slackened any more, and I therefore ordered the mate to moor the vessel to the main flow, where many of our things were stored. The order, however, was not quickly enough executed, and when I came on deck half an hour later the Fram was already drifting down through the channel. All hands were called up immediately, and with our united strength we succeeded in hauling the vessel up to the floe again and mooring her securely. As we were desirous of getting the Fram quite clear of the ice-bed in which she had been lying so long, I determined to try blasting her loose. The next day, therefore, August 9th, at 7.30 P.M., we fired a mine of about 7 pounds of gunpowder, placed under the floe 6 feet from the stern of the vessel. There was a violent shock in the vessel when the mine exploded, but the ice was apparently unbroken. A lively discussion arose touching the question of blasting. The majority believed that the mine was not powerful enough; one even maintained that the quantity of gunpowder used should have been 40 or 50 pounds. But just as we were in the heat of the debate the floe suddenly burst. Big lumps of ice from below the ship came driving up through the openings: the Fram gave a great heave with her stern, started forward and began to roll heavily, as if to shake off the fetters of ice, and then plunged with a great splash out into the water. The way on her was so strong that one of the bow hawsers parted, but otherwise the launch went so smoothly that no ship-builder could have wished it better. We moored the stern to the solid edge of ice by means of ice-anchors, which we had recently forged for this purpose.