formed of sails was engulfed, and our water-hole utterly displaced by the pressures; it was only after many attempts that we succeeded in finding a thinner ice-table, which we pierced till we found water. January 26, again tremendous pressures roused us from sleep. In half an hour every preparation was made to leave the ship, and I believe that many of us, while waiting the issue amid the fearful din heard from the deck, longed that the ship might be crushed, in order to escape from the torture of continually preparing to depart. [Illustration: ICE-PRESSURE IN THE POLAR NIGHT.] 2. I will not, however, fatigue the reader with the monotonous rehearsal of our ever-recurring daily dangers, but will here insert a few passages from my journal of that date, which will suffice to explain our position:— “Scarcely asleep after the exhaustion and cares of the day, the timbers of the ship begin to moan and groan close by our ear, and we awake and lie listening to the onset of the ice. We hear the step of the watch on deck crackling on the ice as he paces to and fro; as long as it is measured and steady we know there is nothing to be feared. Again that uncanny creaking in the timbers, and the watch comes to announce to those below that the terrible movement in the ice has begun, and once more we all spring from our beds, put on our fur clothes, seize our ready-filled bags, and amid the darkness stand ready on deck, and listen to the war between the ice and the elements. In autumn, when the ice-fields were not nearly so large as in the winter, their collision was accompanied by a deep dull sound; but now, rendered hard and brittle by the extreme cold, a sound as of a howl of rage[19] was emitted as they crashed together. Ever nearer come the rushing, rattling sounds, as if a thousand heavy waggons were driving over a plain. Close under us the ice begins to tremble, to moan and wail in every key;—as the fury of the conflict increases, the grumbling becomes deeper and deeper, concentric fissures open themselves round the ship, and the shattered portions of the floes are rolled up into heaps. The intermitting howls become fearfully rapid, announcing the acme of the conflict, and anxiously we listen to the sound which we know too well. Then follows a crash and crack, and many dark lines wander over the ice: these are for a moment narrow fissures, the next moment they yawn asunder like abysses. Often with such a crash the force of the pressure seems broken; the piles of ice collapse, like the undermined walls of a fortress, and calm is again restored. But to-day this was but the commencement, and with renewed violence a second assault of the ice begins,—then a third, yea a fourth. Tables of ice broken off from the floes around us rise perpendicularly from the sea; some are bent under the enormous pressure, and their curved shapes attest the elasticity of ice. Like a giant in the conflict, a veteran floe, many winters old, crushes in its rotations its feeble