The whole sea was covered with floes varying from a few yards to miles in diameter. Their surfaces were undulating, and assumed peculiar blue and metallic greens in low sunlight. Small angular spaces between them were choked with fragments broken from the parent masses, and long irregular hedges made of similar _débris_ surrounded each ice-field. These hedges rarely reflected the same tint as the floes; when one was purple, the other was green, and _vice versa_. It was months before we realised the full import of this ice. At first it seemed impossible that the great masses grounded along the shore could be mere fragments of sea ice we saw spread before us. We mistook them for icebergs. Like them, they were stratified. They grew in the same way, only the land is the parent of one, and the sea of the other. The Polar floes are in fact a floating glacier, and we accordingly called the fragments floebergs. In this the sea before us differed from ordinary frozen seas. Baffin’s Bay, for example, renews its ice year by year. Every summer great part of it is, as we saw it, free from ice; in autumn, its surface freezes first into a pasty mass, then into floes nearly as flat as a frozen pond. During the winter, frost and snow thicken them, and wind piles them into hummocks. Sometimes part of the ice lasts for more than one year—thus whalers talk of ice of one or more seasons old. But the floes of the Polar Sea are perennial. They bear the plainest evidences of great age. They grow from above, and are stratified by seasonal deposits of snow slowly converted into ice. Excepting in insignificant spots along shore, the surface of the Polar Sea never freezes into new floe; it is never long enough exposed. The only ice of a single season possible here is a frozen together conglomerate of boulder blocks between the thick old floes. With this distinction in view, the term “Paleocrystic” was applied to this “sea of ancient ice.” “Archäiocrystic” would more exactly represent what we meant, but sounds, if possible, more pedantic. The age of the floes is a subject for speculation; whether there is any limit to their thickness is also unknown. It does not in any way depend on crushing or piling together. They should be thinnest near land, where they are most frequently broken, and yet there were several on our beach—Floeberg Beach, as we called it—over eighty feet in thickness. We met with others floating so high out of water that they could not be less than two hundred feet deep. When strong winds and tides occur together during autumn, pools and fissures, crevasses rather, sometimes form in the edges of this polar-ice cap, but only those who have seen it can fully appreciate the utter impossibility of “boring” any ship through this polar pack; a nut-shell would have as much chance under a steam-hammer as a ship between the closing walls of such a crevasse. This was the open polar sea we had heard so much of, but which in truth no one in the Expedition had ever