moisture, from which there was no escape, became exceedingly troublesome. In spite of our stout leather boots we had never the comfort of dry feet during the whole of the summer, and this we felt the more, as our labours to free the ship, which we had commenced at the beginning of May, necessitated our being constantly amid the snow and ice. 3. At the end of May the ship began slowly to settle, and the water rose between the ice and the hull on the fore-part of the ship. But we soon discovered that these small changes would not suffice to free us from our prison-house, but that we must ourselves endeavour to loosen the fetters which held us fast, if it were only to banish gloomy thoughts of the future by action of some kind or other. Hence constant digging, sawing, and blasting on our floe, through May, June, July, and August—labours in which the whole crew of the ship, with the exception of the sick and of the cook, took part; labours, alas! which admonished us of the impotence of man when he contends against the power of Nature. Only on the port side of the ship were our efforts to dig through the floe at all successful; on the starboard side the floe had been so enormously increased by the tables of ice forced upon one another, that we had not pierced through the ice after sinking a shaft eighteen feet deep; and at last the water, forcing itself through the pores of the ice, compelled us to desist from the labour of sinking deeper. The process of sawing was possible only where we had broken through the ice—that is, on the port side; yet even there the great thickness of the floe necessitated the construction of longer instruments, for which the iron casing of the engine-room had to furnish the material. The difficulty of sawing increases with the thickness of the ice in an almost incredible manner. It is easy enough to cut through a floe, four or five feet thick, but to break up one, eight or ten feet thick, is a matter of great difficulty. Our saws too, even when they were lengthened, permitted a play of only a foot; and their twisting, as they cut deep, proved a great hindrance. Besides, when we had cut to the depth of a fathom, the saws were always frozen fast, and when we attempted to free them by blasting they were very often broken in pieces. But even the sections, made with so much difficulty, often proved to be quite useless, as they were frozen together again by broken ice left in the cut. Blasting with gunpowder proved as ineffectual as in the previous year; in fact, the process was only applicable to ice-blocks which had been loosened by sawing, and which could not be broken up by the crow-bar alone.