It rained nearly all night, and the wind was much stronger. We lay in bed till 8.30, when Shorty made us some corn-meal cakes, as the oatmeal was finished. It went on raining hard, and we lay in the tent, the wet coming through freely on to our blankets, till half-past three, when it began to clear and the sun came partly out. It soon went in again, but the wind had gone round to the south-west, so we had hope for the morrow.
_Wednesday, the 29th._—None of us except Finn were able to sleep much, owing partly to so much lying in the tent, and partly to the influx of insect life which had appeared on the cessation of the rain. Small black spiders which bit like anything, swarms of mosquitoes, and the biggest sand-fleas I ever saw,—they kept up such a pop-popping all night by jumping against the tent, that we thought it was raining when it was really quite fine.
We were up at five and off by 6.30, when we pulled east for an hour round the point into Cross Sound. Here we found a dense fog and an icy-cold north-east wind coming off the glacier in Taylor’s Bay, so we set sail and ran across the Sound in an hour and twenty minutes to Lisianski Channel, between Tchitchagoff and Jacobi Islands. This channel is extremely narrow, and we sailed down it with a light breeze for three hours, seeing quantities of white-headed eagles on the trees. We then reached the corner where the strait turns sharp to the west, and landed for about an hour. We found here a skull on the beach, about which Shorty and Finn had an argument which culminated in the former betting twenty dollars to Finn’s watch on its being a deer’s head; but he lost, for Ned, whom they appointed umpire, pronounced it to be that of a seal.
We went on again at one o’clock, pulling and paddling steadily against the tide, and had almost reached the open sea at 4.30, when the tide turned and a good north-west wind sprang up. We found a heavyish sea outside still running up from the south-east, but the wind drove us through it at a great pace, and we passed Cape Edwardes at about sunset. We then got in among the fringe of small islands, and landed at nine o’clock some six miles further on in a little harbour which took some finding in the dark. We landed over some rather broken rocks, and Lyons was much taken aback at finding himself at the edge of what seemed in the blackness of the night to be a bottomless chasm, though in the morning it proved to be only about four feet deep. We lit a fire and prepared some pea-soup, after consuming which we curled up on the moss under the trees, the men rolling up in the tent, while I had blankets enough to take a nook apart. The night was lovely and the starlight most brilliant.