He scanned and scanned, turning his face and shoulders from the wind, his eyes watering as he tried to cipher the dimensions of the blue-black forms. “There were two immensely big patches,” he said, “stretching northwest to southeast. They were about ten miles long and one mile wide.” When he told Bartlett about them and suggested, with excitement, that they might be land, islands maybe, the captain just spat off the rail and said, “Pressure ridges.”
