June-October 1881, Cruise of the Corwin, Part II Image 30

and woolly white. We have seen so little sunshine since setting out on this cruise that what we call a bright sunny day has come to mean any day that has bits of blue sky and blinks of cool tempered light. Last evening the sunset on St. L. mountains and hills was beautiful. The snow richly flushed with alpine purple – the first effect of the kind have seen hereabouts. About seven o’clock, fearing that we might be hemmed in by the ice, weighed anchor and pushed through a mile or so of heavy pack and got into open water and put the ship on her course for Plover Bay for coal, furs, and to beach the ship to repair the rudder. This is our third attempt to get into that harbor. The largest ice-blocks are in this pack about 100 ft. dia. and 15 or 20 ft. thick. A steamer can make way slowly through ice of this kind when the temp[erature] is above 32 and the masses not connected with little difficulty. 12 o’clock. Bright sky overcast and the usual daily dusting of snow crystals. Sloppy all afternoon. Ice-pack along with 10 to 15 miles of the coast. At 8 P.M. it is uncertain whether we will be able to enter Plover Bay. Unwilling to enter the pack in this dark weather. Half past 9, have rounded the pack and found clear water inshore. Both Capes at mouth of the inlet clearly seen and open water some dist[ance] inside. Several smaller inlets to the N.E. with their dividing ridges abutting on the sea, shorn off by the ice that no doubt filled all the strait and sea. The slope of the shorn faces is exactly like those unmistakably glacial in the same rock inside the inlets. One of these inlets hashttps://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/jmj-all/3031/thumbnail.jp