By March, navigational observation showed that the ship (and the mass of pack ice that contained it) was still moving, but now swinging towards the west-northwest and increasing in the speed of its drift, moving between the start of March and May 2, when the sun disappeared below the horizon and the dark Antarctic winter began. Still, the men on the ship hoped for either a change in the weather which would break up the pack or that, by the spring, the warmer weather and the ship's northward drift would mean it was released.