able to get so far to the eastward as we had been on the fourth and fifth by seventy or eighty miles.
Feb. 11.At noon we were in lat. 76° 11′ S., long. 187° 53′ E., and were very much hampered by the newly formed ice, which was so thick, and extended so far from the main pack, as to render our efforts to examine it quite fruitless, and the fatigue and labour excessive. We continued, however, to coast along its western edge seeking for an opening; but the severe cold of the last few days had completely cemented it together, and the thick covering of snow that had fallen had united it, to appearance, into a solid unbroken mass: although we knew quite well that it consisted entirely of loose pieces, through which only a few days before we had sailed upwards of fifty miles, yet we could find no part of it now in which we could have forced the ships their own length.
We had further evidence of the approach of winter in the very great thickness of young ice we had to pass through as we ran along the pack edge, in many places between three and four inches thick, and entirely covering the surface of the sea for many miles around us: had we not been favoured with a strong breeze of very precarious duration, which enabled us to force our ships through it, we should certainly have been frozen in; and I could not but feel that the object we were pursuing was by no means of sufficient importance to justify the hazard of thus
