Now began the most perilous adventures of the navigators. The summer day was drawing to a close; the diurnal visits of the pale sun were rapidly shortening, and soon the long polar night, with all its darkness and horrors, would fall upon them. Slowly they drifted in those vast fields of ice, whither, or to what result, they knew not. Locked in the moving yet compact mass; liable every moment to be crushed; far away from land; the mercury sinking daily lower and lower from the zero figure, toward the point where that metal freezes, they felt small hope of ever reaching home again. Yet they prepared for winter comforts and winter sports, as cheerfully as if lying safe in Barlow's Inlet. As the winter advanced, the crews of both vessels went on board the larger one. They unshipped the rudders of each to prevent their being injured by the ice, covered the deck of the _Advance_ with felt, prepared their stores, and made arrangements for enduring the long winter, now upon them. Physical and mental activity being necessary for the preservation of health, they daily exercised in the open air for several hours. They built ice huts, hunted the huge white bears and the little polar foxes, and when the darkness of the winter night had spread over them, they arranged in-door amusements and employments. [Illustration: SITUATION OF THE ADVANCE IN BARROW'S STRAITS] Before the end of October, the sun made its appearance for the last time, and the awful polar night closed in. Early in November they wholly abandoned the _Rescue_, and both crews made the _Advance_ their permanent winter home. The cold soon became intense; the mercury congealed, and the spirit thermometer indicated 46° below zero! Its average range was 30° to 35°. They had drifted helplessly up Wellington Channel as high as the point 4. on the map, almost to the latitude from whence Captain Penny saw an open sea, and which all believe to be the great polar basin, where there is a more genial clime than that which intervenes between the Arctic Circle and the 75th degree. Here, when almost in sight of the open ocean, that mighty polar tide, with its vast masses of ice, suddenly ebbed, and our little vessels were carried back as resistlessly as before, through Barrow's Straits into Lancaster Sound! All this while the immense fields of _hummock-ice_ were moving, and the vessels were in hourly danger of being crushed and destroyed. At length, while drifting through Barrow's Straits, the congealed mass, as if crushed together by the opposite shores, became more compact, and the _Advance_ was elevated almost seven feet by the stern, and keeled two feet eight inches, starboard, as seen in the engraving. In this position she remained, with very little alteration, for five consecutive months; for, soon after entering Baffin's Bay in the midst of the winter, the ice became frozen in one immense tract, covering millions of acres. Thus frozen in, sometimes more than a hundred miles from land, they drifted