In the morning of the 30th of July the ships found themselves caught in a gale with the ice close to leeward. The only way of escaping destruction seemed to be by taking refuge in the pack. It was a desperate expedient rarely resorted to by whalers and only in extreme cases. In the _Trent_ a cable was cut up into thirty-foot lengths, and these, with plates of iron four feet square, supplied as fenders, and some walrus hides, were hung around her, mainly about her bows; the masts were secured with extra ropes, and the hatches were battened and nailed down. When a few fathoms from the ice those on board searched with anxiety for an opening in the pack, but saw nothing but an unbroken line of furious breakers with huge masses heaving and plunging with the waves and dashing together with a violence that nothing but a solid body seemed likely to withstand; and the noise was so great that the orders to the crew could with difficulty be heard. At one moment the sea was bursting upon the ice blocks and burying them deep beneath its wave, and the next, as the buoyancy brought them up again, the water was pouring in foaming cataracts over their edges, the masses rocking and labouring in their bed, grinding and striving with each other until one was either split with the shock or lifted on to the top of its neighbour. Far as the eye could reach the turmoil stretched, and overhead was the clearness of a calm and silvery atmosphere bounded by a dark line of storm cloud lowering over the masts as if to mark the confines within which no effort would avail. "At this instant," says Beechey, "when we were about to put the strength of our little vessel in competition with that of the great icy continent, and when it seemed almost presumption to reckon on the possibility of her surviving the unequal conflict, it was gratifying in the extreme to observe in all our crew the greatest calmness and resolution. If ever the fortitude of seamen was fairly tried it was assuredly not less so than on this occasion; and I will not conceal the pride I felt in witnessing the bold and decisive tone in which the orders were issued by the commander of our little vessel, and the promptitude and steadiness with which they were executed by the crew."