to pass that our boats, hoisted high up at the davits, scraped along the perpendicular wall of ice-foot. The accompanying etching is from a sketch made near midnight on 2nd August, looking back along our track, but no sketch can convey an idea of the chief feature of the scene—the majestic and irresistible motion of the ice-fields. [Illustration: RUNNING THE GAUNTLET.] Two days later, when we lay walled in by bergs in “Shift Rudder Bay,” we could look back past Cape Beechey into the strait from which we had escaped, and watch the tight pack of ice islands streaming south from Robeson Channel into Hall’s Sea, without the distracting influence of immediate danger, and we one and all came to the conclusion that, as an impressive example of magnificent and imposing force, no other natural phenomena could equal it. Our little vessel went very near leaving her bones on the shores of this same bay. When we reached it, the ice was closing in. A line of grounded bergs lay along the beach, with a gap in it just large enough to admit the ship. Into this we thrust her, feeling thankful for so good and opportune a shelter, but unfortunately the gateway of our castle had no portcullis to close behind us, the ice followed us in, and, foot by foot, forced the ship up on the ice-foot, heeling her over and damaging her rudder. At four in the morning the pressure suddenly relaxed, and the ship fell two feet, but remained imprisoned. For days not a patch of water was to be seen, though the whole pack moved south with one tide and halted with the next. On 8th August it blew a gale, and the ice swept past with increased speed. One large, dome-shaped fragment of polar floe crushed through our gateway, and though it grounded long before getting near the ship, the pressure behind was so enormous that it continued to advance, shovelling round lumps of ice as big as a house on either side of it, and rising out of the water as it did so, till it came against the side of the ship. Now we were nipped in earnest. First a rattle on deck, exactly like a hail-storm overhead, as the pitch cracked and flew out of the seams; then a crunch as the ship yielded, then an interval, and then another horrible vibrating crunch—for downright unpleasantness, not even the tear of a shot through a ship’s timbers can compare with such a sound—but the decks did not buckle up under our feet, and the sides did not collapse. The “Alert” was evidently not fated to be destroyed in that way. Nevertheless, when the crush ceased, her position was far from comfortable; she was raised four feet by the stern and completely imprisoned in a citadel of bergs, apparently as hopelessly walled in as she well could be. There might be oceans of water outside, but how was she to get out? One chance only remained. It might be possible to make our jailor berg float by digging off the whole top of it; so all hands set to work, and for three days all that gunpowder, pick, and shovel could do was done.