4. By the middle of June we were at last convinced that the thickness of the ice rendered it impossible to join together, by sawing, the two-and-twenty holes which we had dug out round the ship. Henceforward our labours were confined to the formation of a basin at the fore-part of the ship. Although we saw the impossibility of liberating the vessel, as long as she rested on a mountain of ice, we hoped that the basin would help to break up the floe, and that the _Tegetthoff_ would of itself return to its normal position. The gliding down of the ship, raised as it was, to its natural water-line might indeed easily end in a catastrophe, but we braved this peril when we thought of the vain attempts we had made to free her. Though the ship sunk so much in the course of the summer, that its height above the water-line was a little more than two feet in the fore-part of the ship, and three feet in the after-part, this circumstance in our favour was outweighed by the disadvantage of the rapid melting away of the ice at its sides. The ship, freed from its covering of ice, stood so high above it, that in order to guard against the danger of its overturning we were obliged, in the second half of the summer, to shore it up by strong timbers fastened to its masts. It looked no longer like a ship, but like a building ready to fall in! In the middle of July Lieutenant Weyprecht ordered Krisch, the engineer, to construct heavy chisels and borers to ascertain the thickness of the ice. After long and hard labour, we found that after boring through several ice-tables, to a depth of twenty-seven feet, we still struck on ice! Every attempt, therefore, to break through this accumulation had to be given up, and we contented ourselves with leading the basin we had formed on the fore-part round the larboard side of the ship. On the 27th of the month, twenty tons of coal were removed to the ice, in order to lighten the ship as much as possible, and every day we had to look to the props which steadied the ship, as the melting of the ice rendered them unsafe. In the following weeks, the bows continued to sink into the water, while the after-part as a natural consequence was raised up.