ed a gust of over
91 miles an hour. While it was not working there came a gust which woke
most people up, and which was a far more powerful one, making a regular
hail of stones against the wall. The next morning the wind was found to
be averaging 104 miles an hour when the anemometer on the hill was
checked for three minutes. Later it was averaging 78 miles an hour. This
blizzard continued to rage all this day and the next, but on May 6, which
was one of those clear beautiful days when it is hard to believe that it
can ever blow again, we could see something of the damage to the sea-ice.
The centre of the Sound was clear of ice, and the open water stretched to
the S. W. of us as far back as Tent Island. We were to have many worse
blizzards during this winter, but this particular blow was important
because it came at a critical time in the freezing over of the sea, and,
once it had been dispersed, the winds of the future never allowed the ice
to form again sufficiently thick to withstand the wind forces which
obtained.

Thus I find in my diary of May 8: "Up to the present we have never
considered the possibility of the sea in this neighbourhood, and the
Sound out to the west of us, not freezing over permanently in the winter.
But here there is still open water, and it seems quite possible that
there may not be any permanent freezing this year, at any rate to the
north of Inaccessible Island and this cape. Though North Bay is now
frozen over, the ice in it was blown away during the night, and, having
been blown back again, is now only joined to the ice-foot by newly frozen
ice."

During this winter the ice formed in North Bay was constantly moving away
from the ice-foot, quite independently of wind. I watched it carefully as
far as it was possible to do so in the dark. Sometimes at any rate the
southern side of the sea-ice moved out not only northwards from the land,
but also slightly westwards from the glacier face. To the north-east the
ice was sometimes pressed closely up against the glacier. It seemed that
the whole sheet was subject to a screw movement, the origin of which was
somewhere out by Inaccessible Island. The result was that we often had a
series of leads of newly frozen ice stretching out for some forty yards
to an older piece of ice, each lead being of a different age. It was an
interesting study in the formation of sea-ice, covered at times by very
beautiful ice-flowers. But it was dangerous for the dogs