nd re-adjustment of the cables, the bight was
pressed in so much, as to force the Fury against the berg astern of
her, twice in the course of the day. Mr. Waller, who was in the hold
the second time that this occurred, reported that the coals about the
keelson were moved by it, imparting the sensation of part of the
ship's bottom falling down; and one of the men at work there was so
strongly impressed with that belief, that he thought it high time to
make a spring for the hatchway. From this circumstance, it seemed more
probable that the main keel had received some serious damage near the
middle of the ship.

'From this trial of the efficacy of our means of security, it was
plain that the Fury could not possibly be hove down under
circumstances of such frequent and imminent risk. I therefore directed
a fourth anchor, with two additional cables, to be disposed, with the
hope of breaking some of the force of the ice, by its offering a more
oblique resistance than the other, and thus by degrees turning the
direction of the pressure from the ships. We had scarcely completed
this new defence, when the largest floe we had seen since leaving
Port Bowen came sweeping along the shore, having a motion to the
southward of not less than a mile and a half an hour, threatened to
overturn it, and would certainly have dislodged it from its situation
but from the cable recently attached to it.

'A second similar occurrence took place with a smaller mass of ice
about midnight, and near the top of an unusually high spring tide,
which seemed ready to float away every security from us. For three
hours about the time of this high water, our situation was a most
critical one, for had the bergs, or, indeed, any one of them, been
carried away or broken, both ships must inevitably have been driven on
shore by the very next mass of ice that should come in. Happily,
however, they did not suffer any further material disturbance, and the
main body keeping at a short distance from the land until the tide had
fallen, the bergs seemed to be once more firmly resting on the ground.
The only mischief, therefore, occasioned by this disturbance was the
slackening of our cables by the alteration in the position of the
several grounded masses, and the consequent necessity of employing
more time, which nothing but absolute necessity could induce us to
bestow, in adjusting and tightening the whole of them afresh.

'The wind veering to the W.N.W. on the morni