Anxiously the castaways watched for the coming together again of the divided packs, in the hope that the _Polaris_ would again be caught and held. Those who remained on board were equally anxious, for they knew the vessel must be leaking terribly, and to be left much longer in the open water meant that she would founder and they be drowned. A man ran to the rudder and tried to bring her round to the ice which glimmered through the snow-storm, but the rudder was damaged too much for steering and the ship drifted on. Soon it was obscured from those on the pack, and the truth of their position dawned on them. Whether the ship had foundered or not they did not know, but this was clear: they were adrift on an ice-pack which might at any moment split asunder and precipitate them into the freezing water, or, if it held together, carry them till they died of cold and starvation. Either alternative was sufficiently gloomy to depress the spirits of the bravest; as the nineteen cowered behind their stack of provisions for shelter from the keen snow-filled wind, into the mind of each there came a grim determination to fight while there was an ounce of food in the casks or a vestige of ice to float them. In the morning, when the storm had abated and the air was clear, they emerged from their shelter and looked about for a sign of the vessel. Some of them clambered up on to the top of the highest hummocks so as to command a wider field of vision, but they saw no more than those who remained below. All around them was ice, piled in heaps, or stretching out in flat expanses; but always ice, as far as the eye could reach, and nowhere a vestige or a sign of the _Polaris_. They gathered together round the heap of stores and looked at one another in silence, each one reading the other's thoughts and always finding them the same as his own. The ship had probably gone to the bottom, with all on board, as soon as she broke away from the ice. The packs had closed again over the spot where she had disappeared, so that there was no chance of any spars or timber floating to the surface and confirming their suspicions. Everything was under the ice, everything except the scanty supply of provisions that had been put overboard.