“The fog gradually lifted, now in one direction, and now in another, just sufficient to discover to us, that we were fairly surrounded, and that, to whatever point of the compass we could turn the eye or the ship, interminable masses of drift-ice, of uplift, and icebergs, seemed to cover the sea. So sudden and unexpected was this discovery, that it seemed more like fairy work than reality. Surprise and astonishment, at the novel and wonderful scene around us, seemed at first to make us all unconscious of our own critical situation. Separating from it the idea of danger, it would be difficult to imagine a scene combining and blending more of the elements of beauty, grandeur and sublimity. Far as the eye could reach, it was no longer sea and sky, but ice, ice, ice, floating like an archipelago of a thousand isles, great and small, of highland and lowland, mountain, peninsula, promontory, and Gibraltar rock. “Running in countless directions through these masses, the ocean waves appeared in narrow but doubly dark currents, forming the most crooked and irregular passages, of rivulet and river, and endless indentations of inlet and bay. Through these labyrinthine passages, perpetually opening and closing by the action of winds and waves, our escape was to be made. Once, in attempting to force a passage through a long but narrow neck of broken blocks of ice, which had drifted across our way, the cutwater, bows and wheels of the ship, were pretty seriously battered. “All night long the ship was kept running slowly, threading her way through these little passages of clear water, until four o’clock in the morning, when she was so pressed on every side, with sheets of ice, crowded and packed far above the surface of the water, and urged on by the momentum of vast masses of iceberg, that prudence required to stop the engine and wait for daylight. The morning brought little cheering prospect. The man at mast-head reported no clear water, as far as the eye could reach, excepting in narrow and scarcely navigable patches and veins. The surface of the sea all around the horizon, seemed an almost unbroken plain of field and mountain ice. As early as light allowed, the ship was again under way for the largest space of clear water that could be seen, and continued all day long to retrace her path to the westward, veering her course, however, through every point of the compass, to find the intricate passages toward the open sea. The wind, fresh from the north-west, came with intense and piercing cold. The man at the mast-head could not stand its severity more than half an hour. The masts, shrouds and cordage of the ship, were completely incrusted, and altogether what with field-ice, drift, and icebergs, snow, rain and hail, gale and storm, these days in the ice will not soon be forgotten.