There is at present sufficient water in long leads to navigate, and to reach this is the ambition of all on board, from the Commandant to the cabin-boy. But thus far we have done nothing to liberate the ship. It is true, our men have had more than sufficient work to prepare the sleeping _Belgica_ for the sea, but for this they will have sufficient time during the many days when we shall be pressing out of the pack. If we do not help ourselves, as matters go now there is a great possibility of wintering again in the pack. To do something in this direction, I submitted, yesterday, a plan to the Commandant. It is based on the fact that the sun acts much more powerfully upon water, and upon everything else of a dark colour, than upon snow. Keeping this in mind, my suggestion involves the digging of two trenches, one from the bow, the other from the stern to the water, at the edge of the _Belgica_ field. These trenches are to be carried through the snow and the superficial fresh water sheet of ice, leaving a narrow current of water from the ship to the lead, which we hope by the aid of the sun will so weaken the ice in this direction that it may break in this line. Otherwise it might fracture, if it fractured at all, a mile to the other side of us, and then our position would be no better than it is now. January 12.--We have finished the trenches. For three days we have worked, not like men, but like dogs in chase of game. With picks and axes and shovels, we have excavated the ditches, and have hardly taken time to eat or sleep, because we have been so eager to watch the progress and effect of our work. As the work is completed, we find that our project is a failure. The sun at midnight is now so feeble that it permits the formation of new ice to such a thickness that the heat of the following day is barely sufficient to melt it. Had we done this in December, the result might have been more satisfactory, but now it is too late. With the cutting of these trenches I proposed, as a last resort, to cut a canal through the ice from the _Belgica_ to the edge of the field. The lines for the trenches were so laid that the saws might be run through the same groove; in this way we hoped to save the labour of twice removing the upper sheets of ice and snow. The work of sawing was begun last night and at first the progress was encouraging. Upon more careful examination, however, by drilling, we found that the lines which we had laid out for the canal, though shorter, ran over several submarine projections of ice from fifteen to twenty-five feet thick. We had learned by this time that with the saws it is nearly impossible to cut ice more than seven feet in depth. We now began renewed experiments with tonite, an explosive said to be more powerful than dynamite and much safer. It certainly is decidedly safer, but we were unable to discover its power.