When the sun reappeared, on the morning of the sixth day after he had left the Horn, Roswell Gardiner believed himself to be far enough west for his purposes.  It now remained to get a whole degree further to the south, which was a vast distance in those seas and in that direction, and would carry him a long way to the southward of the ‘Ne Plus Ultra.’  If there was any truth in Daggett, however, that mariner had been there; and the instructions of the owner rendered it incumbent on our young man to attempt to follow him.  More than once, that morning, did our hero regret he had not entered into terms with the Vineyard men, that the effort might have been made in company.  There was something so portentous in a lone vessel’s venturing within the ice, in so remote a region, that, to say the truth, Roswell hesitated.  But pride of profession, ambition, love of Mary, dread of the deacon, native resolution, and the hardihood produced by experience in dangers often encountered and escaped, nerved him to the undertaking.  It must be attempted, or the voyage would be lost; and our young mariner now set about his task with a stern determination to achieve it.

By this time the schooner had luffed up within a cable’s length of the ice, along the margin of which she was running under easy sail.  Gardiner believed himself to be quite as far to the westward as was necessary, and his present object was to find an opening, by means of which he could enter among the floating chaos that was spread, far and wide, to windward.  As the breeze was driving the drifting masses to the northward, they became loosened and more separated, every moment; and glad enough was Gardiner to discover, at length, a clear spot that seemed to favour his views.  Without an instant’s delay, the sheets were flattened in, a pull was taken on the braces, and away went the little Sea Lion into a passage that had a hundredfold more real causes of terror than the Scylla and Charybdis of old.

One effect of the vicinity of ice, in extensive fields, is to produce comparatively still water.  It must blow a gale, and that over a considerable extent of open sea, to produce much commotion among the fields and bergs, though that heaving and setting, which has been likened to the respiration of some monster, and which seamen call the “ground-swell,” is never entirely wanting among the waters of an ocean.  On the present occasion, our adventurers were favoured in this respect, their craft gliding forward unimpeded by anything like opposing billows.  At the end of four hours, the schooner, tacking and waring when necessary, had worked her way to the southward and westward, according to her master’s reckoning, some five-and-twenty miles.  It was then noon, and the atmosphere being unusually clear, though never without fog, Gardiner went aloft, to take a look for himself at the condition of things around him.