By sailing, towing, and warping, the _Hansa_ made slow progress through the ice. The captain and two officers and two sailors made an attempt to land on August 24, but were obliged to return to the ship without having accomplished their mission. On the 25th of August the _Hansa_ reached within thirty-five nautical miles of Sabine Island. The ship was continually subjected to dangerous ice pressure, and often forced southward by the drifting ice-fields. By the 6th of September, she lay between two promontories of a large ice-field, which eventually proved a raft of deliverance. By the 14th of September, she was completely frozen up in 73° 25.7´ north latitude and 18° 39.5´ west latitude. At the mercy of the drifting currents, the _Hansa_ stood in imminent peril of total destruction. Between October 5 and 14 the drift had carried the ship seventy-two nautical miles to the south-southwest. The nights were cold, sometimes 4° F. below zero. The only sign of animal life to be seen were ravens, which were doubtless wintering on the coast; once a gull and a falcon made the ship a visit. A severe storm from the north-northwest on the 19th brought disastrous pressure upon, the _Hansa_. “Shortly before one o’clock, the deck seams sprang, but still she seemed tight. Mighty blocks of ice pushed themselves under the bow, and, although they were crushed by it, they forced the ship up no less than seventeen feet. The rising of the ship was an extraordinary and awful, yet splendid spectacle, of which the whole crew were witnesses from the ice.” Realizing the gravity of the situation, Captain Hegemann at once ordered clothing, nautical instruments, and stores to be removed from the ship to a safe distance. The pumps were put in action to free her from water, but to the horror of all, it was discovered before many hours that the _Hansa_ was doomed. “Calmly, though much moved, we faced this hard fact.” There was not a minute’s time to lose; while one-half of the men stayed by the pumps, the others were busily engaged bringing the most necessary articles from the vessel to the floe. Gradually the ship filled with water, and by eight in the morning the men who were busy in the fore-peak getting out firewood came with anxious faces to say that the wood was already floating below. At three o’clock the water in the cabin had reached the table, and all movable articles were floating. “Round about the ship lay a chaotic mass of heterogeneous articles, and groups of feeble rats struggling with death, and trembling with cold.” On the morning of the 21st, a last trip was made to the _Hansa_ for fuel and her masts sacrificed to the stress of need. She was then cut away from the ice that she might not endanger the lives of those on the floe when she sank. [Sidenote: _WINTER_]