After rounding the north-east point of Grant's Land, instead of discovering, as had been expected, a continuous coast leading a hundred miles farther towards the north, the _Alert_ found herself on the confines of what was evidently a very extensive sea, but covered as far as the eye could reach by closely-packed ice of prodigious thickness. Through this ice it was at once seen that it would be impossible to penetrate. The ship, indeed, herself was placed in the greatest peril, for the ice was seen bearing down upon her while she lay unable to escape, with a rock-bound coast to the southward, and no harbour in which to seek for refuge. Happily she was saved by the extraordinary depth to which the ice sank; for the mass grounding on the beach, formed a barrier inside of which she was tolerably safe. We can well enter into the disappointment of those who expected to have found the long-talked-of open Polar Sea, instead of which ice, evidently of great age and thickness, the accumulation, it might be, of centuries, and resembling rather low floating icebergs massed together, than the ordinary appearance of salt-water. When two vast floes meet, the lighter portions floating between the closing masses are broken up and thrown over their surface, sometimes to the height of fifty feet above the water, forming a succession of ice-hills of the most rugged description. Although Captain Nares saw at once the almost impracticable character of the ice in the direction of the Pole, and which there was every probability would prove continuous, he resolved, as soon as the weather would allow, to despatch a sledge party in the desired direction. The supposed Polar Sea was appropriately named the "Palaeocrystic Sea," or "Sea of Ancient Ice." The ice hitherto met with was seldom more than from two to ten feet in thickness; that which was now stretched before them was found to measure from eighty to one hundred and twenty feet in depth, its lowest part being fifteen feet above the water-line. This enormous thickness was produced in consequence of its being shut up in the Polar Sea, with few outlets by which it could escape to the southward, the ice of one season being added in succession to that of the previous year.