themselves, they were
drifting at a fearful rate towards an iceberg. The _Discovery_ seemed
to be in the greatest danger, but suddenly the floe wheeled round, and
the icy mountain was seen tearing its way through the surface ice
directly down on the _Alert_. Her destruction seemed inevitable, when,
at the distance of scarcely a hundred yards, the iceberg turned over,
the floe splitting up, when the ship, although nipped, made her escape.
They both then got round in the wake of the iceberg. For the next
twenty-four hours they were struggling towards the shore, through ice
four feet thick, amidst bergs of 300 feet in diameter, although only
from twenty to forty high. At length successful, they reached, on the
8th of August, the land of Victoria. Thus they pushed forward,
sometimes struggling with the ice, and boring their way through the
packs, at others making progress by an open space near the shore. So
closely-packed was the ice, that the channel by which the ships advanced
was often immediately closed astern, so that they would have found it as
difficult to return as to proceed northward.

On the 25th August, after many hairbreadth escapes, a sheltered harbour
was reached on the west side of the channel in Hall's Basin, north of
Lady Franklin's Sound, in latitude 81 degrees 44 minutes north. Here
the _Discovery_ was secured for the winter, while the _Alert_, as it had
been arranged, pushed onwards, for the purpose of proceeding as far as
possible through the supposed open Polar Sea, and reaching, some might
have vainly hoped, the Pole itself.

After rounding the north-east point of Grant's Land, instead of
discovering, as had been expected, a continuous coast leading a hundred
miles farther towards the north, the _Alert_ found herself on the
confines of what was evidently a very extensive sea, but covered as far
as the eye could reach by closely-packed ice of prodigious thickness.
Through this ice it was at once seen that it would be impossible to
penetrate. The ship, indeed, herself was placed in the greatest peril,
for the ice was seen bearing down upon her while she lay unable to
escape, with a rock-bound coast to the southward, and no harbour in
which to seek for refuge.

Happily she was saved by the extraordinary depth to which the ice sank;
for the mass grounding on the beach, formed a barrier inside of which
she was tolerably safe. We can well enter into the disappointment of
those who expected to h