While we lay waiting for a path southward to open, we could not but look forward to the ordeal before us with a good deal of anxiety. Once round Cape Rawson, there would be no turning back. Thirty miles of shelterless cliff must be passed before we reached Lincoln Bay, and for the whole of that distance the ship would have to run the gauntlet through a mere fissure between a perpendicular wall of ice-foot, and a moving, irresistible mass of floe eighty feet and more in thickness. If fortune did not favour us, the destruction of the ship was certain, and every preparation was made to meet such an eventuality. Provisions and sledges were piled on deck ready to launch on the floes, and notes and sketches and carefully-selected specimens were packed into the smallest possible bundles, so that they could be pushed hastily into a pocket if it should be necessary to desert the ship. Early on the morning of 31st, an unusual sound awoke us; a strong breeze whistled and sung in the rigging overhead, and a low vibration, like the bass notes of an organ, filled the ship. It came from our heating boilers—steam was being got up. On deck one glance round told us that the time had come. A long black canal of water skirted the coast as far as we could see towards Cape Rawson, and the rush through it must be made now or never. Screw and rudder were already down in their places, and the sails “bent,” ready to be loosed. A few strong charges of gunpowder shook the ship from her icy bed. The order “full speed ahead” was given. The screw flung a stream of foaming water over the ice, and the ship moved slowly forward into the channel blasted for her. Then, as she swung round under steam and sail through the narrow portal in the wall of bergs, we caught our last glimpse of Floeberg Beach. Shadows of clouds chased each other down over the brown slopes. The headstone of Petersen’s grave stood out like a solitary human figure, and a piece of canvas fluttered on a pole over “the doctor’s garden,” where mustard and cress were just beginning to appear above ground. Our tall cairn on top of the hill remained in sight for a few minutes longer, then the bend of the coast shut it from view. At full speed we flew past the well-known headlands so often painfully rounded with tired crew and heavy sledge, past the ice-rounded rocks of Cape Rawson, the tower-like buttresses of Half-way Cliffs, and the dark precipices of Black Cape; but before we got to Cape Union our career was cut short—the angle of a floe lay right across our narrow path, and we had to wait in anxious inactivity till the next tide moved it off and let us slip past. All that night and next morning, the floes, closing in behind us, literally hunted us along the coast from one little hollow of the ice-foot to another. Over and over again the ship had to be pushed and wriggled through desperately narrow gaps to avoid the closing floes behind her. Several times there was so little space