At half past two on the morning of the 22d, the night signal was
made to weigh, and we began to heave at our cables; but such was
the difficulty of raising our anchor and of hauling in our
hawsers, owing to the stiffness of the ropes from frost and the
quantity of ice which had accumulated about them, that it was five
o'clock before the ships were under way. Our rudder, also, was so
choked by the ice which had formed about it, that it could not be
moved till a boat had been hauled under the stern, and the ice
beaten and cut away from it. We ran along to the eastward without
any obstruction, in a channel about five miles wide, till we were
within four or five miles of Cape Hearne, where the bay-ice, in
unbroken sheets of about one third of an inch in thickness, began
to offer considerable impediment to our progress. We at length,
however, struck soundings with twenty-nine fathoms of line, and at
eight P.M. anchored in nine fathoms, on a muddy bottom, a little
to the eastward of our situation on the 5th.
In going to the westward we passed a shoal and open bay,
immediately adjacent to the harbour which we were now about to
examine, and soon after came to a reef of rocks, in some parts
nearly dry, extending, about three quarters of a mile to the
southward of a low point on the southeastern side of the harbour.
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