Yet though there was no trace of man or his doings, Nature had left deeply significant records of her own to tell the history of the land. The neighbourhood of the ship was rich in such evidences. No one could walk over the broad “mud flats” half-a-mile inland from the ship without being convinced that the land had risen from the sea at, geologically speaking, no very distant period. Shells similar to those still living in the sea two hundred feet below lay strewn in abundance on the fine sand. Here a pair of valves, enormously thickened to bear the crush of ice, there a whole bed of slighter shells, still covered with their brown filmy skins, and connected by their gristly hinges. The mud itself was so salty, that where it dried in the sun a white briny coat formed on its surface. Stems and roots of laver sea-weeds were sometimes picked up, but the most interesting and eloquent witnesses of the past were the splinters and logs of drift-wood that lay imbedded in the mud, or scattered along the crests of these raised beaches. The wood was easily recognised by the microscope as the wood of pine trees, and though probably very many centuries old, was often so apparently fresh as to smell woody when cut. It was not for us to conjecture when or where that wood had grown, or how it had drifted to its present elevated site; but we could not help thinking that it told of a time when the shores, though perhaps far more deeply laden with glaciers, were washed by a less ice-bound sea. At one o’clock in the morning of 23rd July, the pack broke from the shore under the influence of a strong wind, and left pools of water outside our barrier bergs, but the ice still crushed close on Cape Rawson, and when the wind lessened, all closed in. Again, on the evening of 26th a space of water formed outside the bergs, and in order to be ready when an opportunity for a rush southward should offer, we set about breaking a channel through the floes between the ship and the nearest gap in the wall of grounded bergs. The ice was far too thick for even our longest and heaviest ice-saws, but with the aid of three hundred pounds of gunpowder, judiciously disposed in torpedoes made of tin cans and lime-juice jars, it was shattered, piece by piece, and as each mass broke off and floated free, it was pushed out to seaward by the united efforts of the whole crew wielding levers and ice-poles.