As she scudded from the crush of the tumbling ice, Hudson remarked something extraordinary in the conduct of his ship. Veering about, sails down, there was no mistaking it—_she was drifting against the wind_! As the storm subsided, it became plainer: the wind was carrying in one direction, the sea was carrying in another. Hudson had discovered that current across the Pole, which was to play such an important part with Nansen three hundred years later. Icebergs were floating _against_ the wind, too, laboriously, with apparently aimless circlings round and round, but circles that carried them forward against the wind, and the ship was presently moored to a great icepan drifting along with the undertow. Then the curse of all Arctic voyagers fell on the sea—fog thick to the touch as wool, through which the icebergs glided like phantoms with a great crash of waters, where the surf beat on the floes. Never mind! Their anchor-hold acts as a breakwater. They are sheltered from the turmoil of the waves outside the ice. And they are still headed north. And they are up to Seventy-three along a coast, which no chart has ever before recorded, no chart but the myths of death’s realm. As the coast might prove treacherous if the ice began thumping inland, Hudson names the region “Hold Hope,” which may be interpreted, “Keep up your Courage.” [Illustration: Prince Rupert, from a Photograph in the Ottawa Archives, after Painting by Vandyke.] Ice and fog, fog and ice, and the eternal silences but for the thunder of the floes banging the ports; up to Seventy-five by noon of June 25, when the sailors notice that the floundering clumsy grampus are playing mad pranks about the ship. The glistening brown backs race round the prow and somerset bodily out of the water in a very deviltry of sauciness! Call it sailors’ superstition, but when the grampus schools play, your Northern crew looks for storm, and by noon of June 26, the storm is there pounding the hull like thunder and shrieking through the rigging. Not a good place to be, between land and ice in hurricane! Hudson scampers for the sea, still north, but driven out east by the trend of Greenland’s coast along an unbroken barrier of ice that seems to link Greenland to Spitzbergen.