north of their position. After twelve days’ travelling they came to the base of the “Great Glacier,” where Morton left his party, and, in company with an Esquimaux named Hans, set out with a dog-sledge to prosecute the journey of exploration.
They walked on the sea-ice in a line parallel with the glacier, and proceeded twenty-eight miles that day, although the snow was knee-deep and soft. At the place where they encamped a crack enabled them to measure the ice. It was seven feet five inches thick! And this in June. We may mention here, in passing, that Dr. Kane never got his vessel out of that frozen strait, which seems to be bound by perpetual ice. He and his party escaped with their lives; but the vessel that bore them thither is probably still embedded in that ice.
Next day Morton and Hans came to a region of icebergs, which had arrested a previous sledging-party of the same expedition. “These [icebergs] were generally very high, evidently newly separated from the glacier. Their surfaces were fresh and glassy, and not like those generally met with in Baffin’s Bay,—less worn, and bluer, and looking in all respects like the face of the Great Glacier. Many were rectangular, some of them regular squares, a quarter of a mile each way; others more than a mile long.”
To pass amidst these bergs was a matter of labour, difficulty, and danger. Sometimes the sides of them came so close together, that the men could
