Finding that our valuable dogs must be now wholly dependant on our own exertions in providing meat, a boat from each ship was carried down to the neighbourhood of the open water, and shortly afterward two others, to endeavour to kill walruses for them. This was the more desirable from the probability of the Fury's passing her next winter where no natives were resident, and the consequent necessity of laying in our stock for that long and dreary season during the present summer. Our people, therefore, pitched their tents near the old Esquimaux habitations; and thus were four boats constantly employed, whenever the weather would permit, for the three succeeding weeks. On the 16th Lieutenant Hoppner and his party returned to the ships, having only been enabled to travel to the south shore of Cockburn Island, on account of their guides not yet proceeding any farther. Two of the Esquimaux accompanied our travellers back to Igloolik, and, being loaded with various useful presents from the ships, returned home the following day. CHAPTER XV. Extraordinary Disruption of Ice in Quilliam Creek.--Some Appearance of Scurvy among the Seamen and Marines.--Discovery of Gifford River.--Commence cutting the Ice outside the Ships to release them from their Winter-quarters.--Considerations respecting the Return of the Expedition to England.--Unfavourable State of the Ice at the Eastern Entrance of the Strait.--Proceed to the Southward.--Ships beset and drifted up Lyon Inlet.--Decease of Mr. George Fife.--Final Release from the Ice, and Arrival in England.--Remarks upon the practicability of a Northwest Passage. Among the various changes which the warmth of the returning summer was now producing around us, none was more remarkable than that noticed by Captain Lyon in an excursion to Quilliam Creek, and which, in a note received from him by the return of the sledges on the 17th, he thus describes: "Between the two points forming the entrance of the creek, we saw a high wall of ice extending immediately across from land to land, and on arriving at it, found that, by some extraordinary convulsion, the floe had burst upward, and that immense masses of ice had been thrown in every direction. Several blocks, eight or nine feet in thickness, and many yards in diameter, were lying on the level solid floe; yet we were for some time at a loss to discover whence they had been ejected, till at length we found a hole or pool, which appeared so small as to be hardly capable of containing the immense fragments near it; yet from this place alone must they have been thrown."