About 10 P. M. of the 16th, as I was on the bridge taking a look about before turning in, a large floe moving on the flood-tide pivoted around the point of Sheridan and crashed into the smaller ice about the ship, driving it bodily before it. At the first shock the _Roosevelt_ reeled and shook a bit, then heeled slightly toward the crowding ice and turned it under her starboard bilge. Standing on the starboard end of the bridge and looking down upon the ice the sensation was much like that of being on a large sledge moving over the ice, so rapidly did the rounding side of the _Roosevelt_ turn the ice under her. Once or twice she hung for an instant and quivered with the strain, then heeled and turned the ice under again. This continued until a corner of the floe itself, some portions of which were higher than the rail, came full against the _Roosevelt’s_ starboard side amidships, with no intervening cushion of smaller ice and held the ship mercilessly between its own blue side and the unyielding face of the ice-foot. Its slow resistless motion was frightful yet fascinating; thousands of tons of smaller ice which the big floe drove before it, the _Roosevelt_ had easily and gracefully turned under her sloping bilges, but the edge of the big floe rose to the plank sheer and a few yards back from its edge, was an old pressure ridge which rose higher than the bridge deck. This was the crucial moment. For a minute or so, which seemed an age, the pressure was terrific. The _Roosevelt’s_ ribs and interior bracing cracked like the discharge of musketry; the deck amidships bulged up several inches, while the main rigging hung slack and the masts and rigging shook as in a violent gale. Then with a mighty tremor and a sound which reminded me of an athlete intaking his breath for a supreme effort, the ship shook herself free and jumped upward till her propeller showed above water. The big floe snapped against the edge of the ice-foot forward and aft and under us, crumpling up its edge and driving it inshore some yards, then came to rest, and the commotion was transferred to the outer edge of the floe which crumbled away with a dull roar, as other floes smashed against it, and tore off great pieces in their onward rush, leaving the _Roosevelt_ stranded but safe.