9. On the morning of Saturday, July 13, officers and crew heard mass from a French priest, and bidding adieu to our Tromsoe friends, we left the quiet little city, the most northerly of Europe, early on Sunday morning. The passengers of the Hamburg mail steamer, entering the harbour as we left it, greeted us with loud and long cheers, and steaming through the narrow Grötsound, close under the cliffs of Sandoe and Rysoe we came into the open sea, Captain Carlsen acting as our pilot. As we issued from the _Scheeren_, a mist arose which covered and obscured the huge rock of Fingloe. Here the engine fires were put out and the sails set, and the first and last voyage, which the _Tegetthoff_ was destined to make, began. On July 15 we steered towards the north, the Norwegian coast with its many glaciers in full view, and on the 16th we sighted the North Cape in the blue distance. CHAPTER II. ON THE FROZEN OCEAN. 1. Unfavourable winds had hindered our progress for some days; we now encountered heavy seas. On July 23 a sudden fall of the temperature and dirty rainy weather told us that we were close to the ice, which we expected to find later and much more to the northward, and on the evening of July 25, lat. 74° 0′ 15″ N., we actually sighted it, the thermometer marking 32·5° F., and 34·5° F. in the sea. The northerly winds, which had prevailed for some time had broken up the ice, and it lay before us in long loose lines. Its outer boundary was consequently the very opposite of those solid walls of ice which we met with in Greenland in 1869, and two years afterwards on the east of Spitzbergen. Though surprised at finding the ice so far to the south, we never imagined that this was anything but a collection of floes, which had drifted out perhaps from the Sea of Kara through the Straits of Matotschkin. But only too soon the conviction was forced upon us that we were already within the Frozen Ocean, and that navigation in the year 1872 was to differ widely from that of the preceding year. Lieutenant Weyprecht had the day before fastened “the crow’s nest” to the mainmast of the _Tegetthoff_, and henceforth it became the abode of the officer of the watch. On July 26, while steering in a north-easterly direction, the ice became closer, though it was still navigable; but we nowhere saw the heavy fields which had astonished us on the east coast of Greenland, and which Lütke found to be so dangerous to navigation. The temperature of the air and the sea fell rapidly, and during the two following weeks it remained below the freezing point almost uniformly, and without any essential difference between day and night. [Illustration: STILL LIFE IN THE FROZEN OCEAN.]