Our harbor-ice is weak and covered a foot deep with a sludgy compound of snow and water.
The ice of yesterday loose with sludgy thin floes between.
The only drawback to the present position is that the ice is getting thin and sludgy in the cracks and on some of the floes.
Under such conditions the thin sludgy ice ought to be weakening all the time; a few inches of such stuff should allow us to push through anywhere.
In Arrival Bay it is 6 to 7 inches thick, but the new pools beyond have only I inch of the regular elastic sludgy new ice.
Cheetham in the last dog watch was running the ship through sludgy new ice, making with all sail set four or five knots.
Later Campbell told me one of the men had dropped a leg through crossing a sludgy patch some 200 yards from the ship.
There it was, with the gangway stairs of ice-block masonry, looking down upon the dark water, and the useless embankment embracing a sludgy ice-pool.
In crossing some sludgy ice between the hummocks, on the 11th, Lieutenant May unfortunately went through, and was so severely frost-bitten that he eventually had to suffer amputation of one of his great toes.
After the long use of moccasins, it took us some time to get accustomed to leather boots, which we were obliged to wear on account of the sludgy state of the surface of the floes and the land.
In consequence of the heavy fall of snow yesterday, the surface of the water was coated with a soft sludgy substance, half ice and half snow, which greatly impeded our progress.
