cold, in fact we did not know another warm day, judged by home stan- dards of temperature, for nearly a full year. He began to encounter low- lying fog and we had lots of it during the next few weeks. Often the sky would be clear and blue overhead while it was [illegible] thick near the water that we could not run with safety. For four days, baffled by light head winds and calms, we slowly skirted the edge of the pack, sailing northeastward till the morning of the sixteenth, when we were off Devil's Thumb, where Melville Bay is considered as beginning. Then we changed our course to north- ward and began our drift across this ice-blocked body of water, which was always the bane of the whalers who used to fre- guent the North Water of Baffin Bay.