I'm working on a project involving Orde-Lees journal at the moment and am sharing entries as I come across them. Like this one...
"Friday, 11 December 1914
Ran into loose pack of thick ice about midnight and have been steaming very slowly through it all day in magnificent weather, continually charging and splitting or pushing aside great slabs of snow covered ice varying in size but averaging about the size of the fountain ponds in Trafalgar Square, some of them flat and only a few inches above water others hummocky and as high as the ship's side and here and there a small berg.
This then is the pack, a sight it is worth coming so far to see, and even as I write, the book is constantly being jerked from under my pen as the ship takes the shock of charging each slab and we go along, scrunch, scrunch through the pack."
This photo that I took in November, 2000 shows you what Orde-Lees' was describing.
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