The N 25 started leaking so badly from the pressure she received the other night that Captain Amundsen and I were obliged to pitch our tent on the floe upon which the N 24 was resting. We were wondering how much more she could stand. N 24 still lay with her nose on the ice floe, as we left her, but she had now listed sideways, so that the tip of one wing was firmly imbedded in the freshly frozen ice around her. During the past few days the ice had been freezing in from both sides, forming a long, narrow lane in front of N 24, but parts of this lane have bent into a curve. It was a narrow, crooked passage, but Riiser-Larsen felt that it offered one more opportunity for a take-off. He taxied N 25 forward, narrowly escaping an accident. As he slowed up to negotiate the curve, the nose broke through the ice with the reduced speed. The plane suddenly stopped and lifted its tail into the air. We jumped out and hacked away the ice until the plane settled on an even keel. We dared not remain where we were because the main body of the pack was fast closing in upon us from both sides. At two o’clock the next morning we commenced work on an extension of our previous course and continued on throughout the day and on into the following night. It was a tremendous task, as the ice was covered with tightly frozen lumps, old pressure-ridges of uptilted ice cakes. Hacking away with our short-handled pocket-ax and ice anchor was such back-breaking work that we were compelled to work on our knees most of the time. The sweat was rolling down my face and blurred my snow-glasses, so that I was compelled to take them off for a couple of hours. I paid the penalty by becoming snow-blind in one eye. Dietrichson was not so fortunate. He was badly attacked in both eyes, and had to lie in the tent in his sleeping-bag for two days with his eyes bandaged and suffering acutely from the intense inflammation. We awoke on the morning of June 5th, tired and stiff, to look upon the level track we had so frantically labored to prepare, but saw in its place a jumbled mass of upturned ice blocks. With the destruction of our fourth course our position was now desperate. But we would hang on till the 15th, when the vital decision would have to be made as to whether or not we should abandon N 25 and make for the Greenland coast while there were yet sufficient provisions left. But we had come here on wings, and I know we all felt only wings could take us back to civilization. If we could only find a floe of sufficient area from which to take off. That was our difficulty.