ludicrous affair, the men falling over one another amid shouts of
laughter without producing much effect on the ship. She remained fast,
while all hands jumped at the word of command, but finally slid off
when the men were stamping hard at the double. We were now in a
position to take advantage of any opening that might appear. The ice
was firm around us, and as there seemed small chance of making a move
that day, I had the motor crawler and warper put out on the floe for a
trial run. The motor worked most successfully, running at about six
miles an hour over slabs and ridges of ice hidden by a foot or two of
soft snow. The surface was worse than we would expect to face on land
or barrier-ice. The motor warped itself back on a 500-fathom steel wire
and was taken aboard again. "From the mast-head the mirage is
continually giving us false alarms. Everything wears an aspect of
unreality. Icebergs hang upside down in the sky; the land appears as
layers of silvery or golden cloud. Cloud-banks look like land,
icebergs masquerade as islands or nunataks, and the distant barrier to
the south is thrown into view, although it really is outside our range
of vision. Worst of all is the deceptive appearance of open water,
caused by the refraction of distant water, or by the sun shining at an
angle on a field of smooth snow or the face of ice-cliffs below the
horizon."

The second half of February produced no important change in our
situation. Early in the morning of the 14th I ordered a good head of
steam on the engines and sent all hands on to the floe with ice-
chisels, prickers, saws, and picks. We worked all day and throughout
most of the next day in a strenuous effort to get the ship into the
lead ahead. The men cut away the young ice before the bows and pulled
it aside with great energy. After twenty-four hours' labour we had got
the ship a third of the way to the lead. But about 400 yards of heavy