A Diary and Journal from the Second Grinnell Expedition

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dogs which became every moment more manifest extended to our own party. The instinct of a sledge dog makes him perfectly aware of unsafe ice and I know nothing more subduing to a man than the warnings of an unseen danger through a dumb beast.

We had to keep moving, for we could not camp in the gale now howling around as so that we could barely hold down the sledge, [when] but we moved with caution feeling one way with tent poles, which I had divided among our party. Slowly came to my ear a suspicion soon ripening to a certainty that a low murmur, which I had for some time heard was the sea. Hardly had I sung out "turn the dogs"! before a wreath of wet frost smoke swept over us and the sea with a great fringe of foam was seen about 1/4 of a mile ahead.

This told us well enough where we were but instead of a direct retreat I determined to run to the S.W. where I knew that the ice was firm and where Godsend Id would give as a shelter. The march was a frightful one, worse in my eyes than Von Wrangells "break up" off the River Kolyma. The seething boiling surf line so encroached on us that we could feel the undulation of the ice. Often we would run the gaunlet between lanes of closing ice the hummock walls closing on either side like the [sides] closing walls of the Vinition [Venetian] dungeon. Again we were painfully labouring over crushed ice areas : of miles in diam