For six weeks, north, northwest, they drove over the tumbling world of waters, sliding from crest to trough, from blue hollow to curdling wave-top, ploughing a watery furrow into the region of long, white light and shortening nights, and fogs that lay without lifting once in twenty days. The farther north they sailed, the tighter drew the cords of cold, like a violin string stretched till it fairly snapped—air full of pure ozone that set the blood jumping and finger-tips tingling! Green spray froze the sails stiff as boards. The rigging became ropes of ice, the ship a ghost gliding white through the fogs. At last came a squall that rolled the mists up like a scroll, and straight ahead, high and lonely as cloud-banks, towered the white peaks of Greenland’s mountains. Though it was two o’clock in the morning, it was broad daylight, and the whole crew came scrambling up the hatches to the shout of “Land!” Hudson enthusiastically named the mountain “God’s Mercy”; but the lift of mist uncurtained to the astonished gaze of the English sailors a greater wonder than the mountains. North, south, east, west, the ship was embayed in an ice-world—ice in islands and hills and valleys with lakes and rivers of fresh water flowing over the surface. Birds flocked overhead with lonely screams at these human intruders on a realm as white and silent as death; and where one crystal berg was lighted to gold by the sun, a huge polar bear hulked to its highest peak and surveyed the newcomers in as much astonishment at them as they felt at him. Truly, this was the _Ultima Thule_ of poet’s dream—beyond the footsteps of man. Blue was the sky above, blue the patches of ocean below, blue the illimitable fields of ice, blue and lifeless and cold as steel. The men passed that day jubilant as boys out of school. Some went gunning for the birds. Others would have pursued the polar bear but with a splash the great creature dived into the sea. The crew took advantage of the pools of fresh water in the ice to fill their casks with drinking water. For the next twenty-four hours, Hudson crept among the ice floes by throwing out a hook on the ice, then hauling up to it by cable. By night the sea was churning the ice in choppy waves, with a growl of wind through the mast, and the crew wakened the next morning to find a hurricane of sleet had wiped out the land. The huge floes were turning somersets in the rough sea with a banging that threatened to smash the little ship into a crushed egg shell. Under bare poles, she drove before the wind for open sea.