expected to sail in. What we had not calculated on was the absence of land northward; and that the coasts shown in the maps were absent was soon beyond all doubt. Day by day our disappointing position became plainer. The continuous coast-line upon which every hope depended was at least not in sight. One chance still remained. Possibly the land beyond Cape Joseph Henry turned to the northward, and though the ship had reached the utmost limit of navigation, sledges could travel along the frozen shore. Depôts pushed far northwards on a continuous coast-line would yet enable us to reach a high latitude, if that northward-running coast-line could be found at any reasonable distance from the ship. Meanwhile, it was plainly necessary to accommodate our aspirations to the stern negatives before us. The infinite possibilities of the unknown were no longer at our disposal. We could no longer cherish little unspoken hopes of rapid success, more navigable seas, richer hunting-grounds, or milder climate, polewards. Our ship lay about a hundred yards from the beach, her bows pointed to the north, her right side against the grounded ice which protected her, and on her left a space of shallow water stretching to the shore. Even this space was by no means “open water;” it was, on the contrary, filled with floating lumps of ice of every size, from that of a hailstone to that of a house, moving about with every change of tide. Some of the large ones were troublesome neighbours, and had to be secured with hawsers to prevent them getting into damaging positions. One of them, more erratic and less manageable than the rest, was commonly known as the Wandering Jew. The poet, by-the-bye, who placed that hero on a piece of polar pack, must have had a prophetic glimpse of these perennial floes ever drifting slowly round and round the pole. A few days after the gale the whole space between the ship and the shore froze hard, and it was possible to walk to land. The shelving beach was of rough shale, but, like the rest of the land, was almost entirely covered with snow. Much of the latter was soft and white, and had fallen recently; but here and there, in sheltered hollows, hard brown patches had evidently remained through the summer. Half-a-mile inshore low undulating hills rose to about four hundred feet. None of them had anything characteristic about them; they were simply rounded-off banks of brown slate and grey shale, with long straight slopes of hard snow on their northward faces—splendid places for headlong “toboggoning,” as we found later on. Nothing could be more dismal than our new territory. But we still hoped that the next spring tides might allow the ship to advance a little way into some more favoured spot before she was finally frozen in for the winter. Two short excursions had already been made in search of safer quarters, but the reports they brought back were not encouraging. There were several bays not far north of the ship, but most of them