Meanwhile Hegemann, trying to pass to the north more to the westward, got the _Hansa_ beset on the 9th of September some twenty-four miles from Foster Bay. As the ice-pressure threatened to become too great for the vessel to resist, an elaborate house was planned and built on the floe. Briquettes were used for the walls, the joints were filled up with dry snow on which water was poured, and in ten minutes it hardened into a compact mass. The house was twenty feet long, fourteen feet wide, and four feet eight inches high at the sides, with a rising roof consisting of sails and mats covered with deep snow. Into this house, which took a week to build, provisions for two months were carried, besides wood and fuel. The boats were put out, a flagstaff was set up, and quite a little settlement was started on the ice; and no sooner was it completed than a violent snowstorm, lasting for five days, buried both the ship and the house. The ice increased around, and, the pressure of the accumulation lifting the _Hansa_ seventeen feet above her original level, everything of value was removed from her on to the ice and into the house. On the 22nd of October she sank, having drifted below the seventy-first parallel; and all through the winter the floe, which was about two miles across, leisurely made its way to the south. Off Knighton Bay Christmas was kept with all possible honour. The briquette house was decorated with coloured-paper festoons, and, by the light of the sole remaining wax candle, the genial Germans made themselves merry around a stubby Christmas tree devised out of an old birch broom. Three weeks afterwards the floe cracked beneath the dwelling. There was barely time to take refuge, but all hands were saved in the boats. For two days they remained in them, poorly sheltered from the storm and unable to clear out the snow. Then a smaller house was built of the ruins of the old one, but it was only large enough for half the party; and as the spring advanced the floe decreased, breaking away at the edges as did that on which the _Polaris_ people drifted to Labrador. [Illustration: THE LAST DAYS OF THE "HANSA"] At the end of March it entered Nukarbik Bay and there it stayed four weeks, caught in an eddy, slowly moving round and round just far enough from the shore to render an attempt at escape impossible; twice a day they went in with the tide and out with the tide, the ice too bad for the boats and never promising enough for a dash to the land. Having become thoroughly acquainted with this portion of the coast with its bold range of hills, its deep bays, its inlets, headlands, and islands, a storm came on which cleared them out of the eddy and drove them further south. Three weeks after that the floe had become so diminished by the lashing of the surge that it was hardly a hundred yards across, and large fragments were slipping off every hour.