to move the vessel at once, the men set to work with hearty goodwill, another glimpse of home rising before their imaginations; and, in five minutes after Hazard had made his communication, the Sea Lion had gone six or eight times her length towards the cliffs.  Then came the pinch!  Had not the ice been solid between the cape and the berth just before occupied by the schooner, she would have been hopelessly nipped by the closing of the artificial channel.  As it was, she was caught, and her progress was arrested, but the field took a cant, in consequence of the resistance, of the solid ice that filled the whole cove to the eastward of the channel; and, before any damage was done, the latter began to open even faster than it had come together.  The instant the craft was released the sealers manned their hauling lines again, and ran her up lo the rocks with a hurrah!  The margin of water was just opening, but so prompt had been the movement of the men that it was not yet wide enough to permit the vessel to go any further; and it was found necessary to wait until the passage was sufficiently wide to enable her to move ahead.  The intervening time was occupied in bringing to the craft the articles left behind.

By nine o’clock everything was on board; the winding channel that followed the sinuosities of the coast could be traced far as the eye could see; the lines were manned; and the word was again given to move.  Roswell now felt that he was engaged in much the most delicate of all his duties.  The desperate run through the fleet of bergs, and the second attempt to get to sea, were not in certain particulars as hazardous as this.  The field had been setting back and forth now, for several weeks; the margin of cleat water increasing by the attrition at each return to the rocks; and it was known by observation that these changes often occurred at very short notices.  Should the wind haul round with the sun, or one of the unaccountable currents of those seas intervene before the south-east cape was reached, the schooner would probably be broken into splinters, or ground into powder, in the course of some two or three hours.  It was all-important, therefore, to lose not a moment.

Several times in the course of the first hour, the movement of the schooner was arrested by the want of sufficient room to pass between projecting points in the cliffs and the edge of the ice.  On two of these occasions passages were cut with the saw, the movement of the field not answering to the impatience of the sealers.  At the end of that most momentous hour, however, the craft had been hauled ahead a mile and a half, and had reached a curvature in the coast where the margin of open water was more than fifty fathoms wide, and the tracking of the vessel became easy and rapid.  By two o’clock the Sea Lion was at what might be called the bottom of the Great Bay, some three or four leagues from the cove, and at the place where the long low cape began to run out