after which comes a strip without visible land, and then the mountain tops mentionedabove. Beyond this western shore, distant only seven miles, we see mountain tops, distant and very high, rising above the clouds.
[B]I have followed my journal literally. I find, however, in my copy of the log-book, below the entry of the watch-officer which mentions this island, a note made by me at the time: “I can see no island, but simply this prolongation or tongue.”
[B]I have followed my journal literally. I find, however, in my copy of the log-book, below the entry of the watch-officer which mentions this island, a note made by me at the time: “I can see no island, but simply this prolongation or tongue.”
“September25, Wednesday. The wind has changed, so that our helpless drift is now again to the north. The day was comparatively free from snow; but not clear enough to give us an observation, or to exhibit the more distant coast-lines. We can see the western shore very plainly covered with snow, and stretching in rolling hills to the north and west. A little indentation, nearly opposite the day before yesterday, is now in nearly the same phase—if any thing, a little to the southward. We have therefore changed our position by drift not so much as on the preceding days. The winds, however, have been very light. Advance Bluff is now shut in by ‘Cape Rescue,’ the westernmost point yet discovered of Cornwallis Island. This shows that we are nearing the shore.
“Toward the north and a little to the west is a permanent dark cloud, a line of stratus with a cumulated thickening at the western end. This is the same during sunshine andsnow-storm, night and day. It is thought by Captain De Haven to be indicative of open water. It may be that Cornwallis Island ends there, and that this is a continuation of the present channel trending to the westward. Or this dark appearance may be merely the highland clouds over the mountains seen on Sunday; but De Haven suggests that it is rather a vacant space, or water free from ice; the exemption being due to the island and adjacent western shore (not more than seven miles from it), acting as a barrier to the northern drift of the present channel."
CHAPTER VI
I
AM reluctant to burden my pages with the wild, but scarcely varied incidents of our continued drift through Wellington Channel. We were yet to be familiarized with the strife of the ice-tables, now broken up into tumbling masses, and piling themselves in angry confusion against our sides—now fixed in chaotic disarray by the fields of new ice that imbedded them in a single night—again, perhaps, opening in treacherous pools, only to close round us with a force that threatened to grind our brigs to powder. I shall have occasion enough to speak of these things hereafter. I give now a few extracts from my journal; some of which may perhaps have interest of a different character, though they can not escape the saddening monotony of the scenes that were about us.
I begin with a partial break-up that occurred on the 23d.
“September23. How shall I describe to you this pressure, its fearfulness and sublimity! Nothing that I have seen or read of approaches it. The voices of the ice and the heavy swash of the overturned hummock-tables are at this moment dinning in my ears. ‘All hands’ are on deck fighting our grim enemy.
“Fourteen inches of solid ice thickness, with some half dozen of snow, are, with the slow uniform advance of a mighty propelling power, driving in upon our vessel. As they strike her, the semi-plastic mass is impressed with a mould of her side, and then, urged on by the force behind, slides upward, and rises in great vertical tables. When these attain their utmost height, still pressed on by others, they topple over, and form a great embankment of fallen tables. At the same time, others take a downward direction, and when pushed on, as in the other case, form a similar pile underneath. The side on which one or the other of these actions takes place for the time, varies with the direction of the force, the strength of the opposite or resisting side, the inclination of the vessel, and theweight of the superincumbent mounds; and as these conditions follow each other in varying succession, the vessel becomes perfectly imbedded after a little while in crumbling and fractured ice.
“Perhaps no vessel has ever been in this position but our own. With matured ice, nothing of iron or wood could resist such pressure. As for the British vessels, their size would make it next to impossible for them to stand. Back’s ‘Winter’ is the only thing I have read of that reminds me of our present predicament. No vessel has ever been caught by winter in these waters.
“We are lifted bodily eighteen inches out of water. The hummocks are reared up around the ship, so as to rise in some cases a couple of feet above our bulwarks—five feet above our deck. They are very often ten and twelve feet high. All hands are out, laboring with picks and crowbars to overturn the fragments that threaten to overwhelm us. Add to this darkness, snow, cold, and the absolute destitution of surrounding shores.
“This uprearing of the ice is not a slowwork: it is progressive, but not slow. It was only at 4P.M.that nips began, and now the entire plain is triangulated with ice-barricades. Under the double influence of sails and warping-hawsers, we have not been able to budge a hair’s-breadth. Yet, impelled by this irresistible, bearing-down floe-monster, we crush, grind,eatour way, surrounded by the ruins of our progress. In fourteen minutes we changed our position 80 feet, or 5.71 per minute.
“Sometimes the ice cracks with violence, almost explosive, throughout the entire length of the floe. Very grand this! Sometimes the hummock masses, piled up like crushed sugar around the ship, suddenly sink into the sea, and then fresh mounds take their place.
“Our little neighbor, theRescue, is all this time within twenty yards of us, resting upon wedges of ice, and not subjected to movement or pressure—a fact of interest, as it shows how very small a difference of position may determine the differing fate of two vessels.
“September24. The ice is kinder; nofresh movements; a littlewhiningin the morning, but since then undisturbed. The ice, however, is influenced by the wind; for open water-pools have formed—three around the ship within eye distance. In one of these, the seals made their appearance toward noon; no less than five disporting together among the sludge of the open water. I started off on a perilous walk over the ruined barricades of last night’s commotion; and, after cooling myself for forty minutes in an atmosphere ten degrees above zero, came back without a shot. The condensed moisture had so affected my powder that I could not get my gun off.
“This condensation is now very troublesome, dripping down from our carlines, and sweating over the roof and berth-boards. When we open the hatchway, the steam rises in clouds from the little cabin below.
“We have as yet no fires; worse! the state of uncertainty in which we are placed makes it impossible to resort to any winter arrangements. Yet these lard lamps give us a temperature of 46°, which to men like ourselves, used to constant out-door exercise, exposure,and absence of artificial heat, is quite genial. But for the moisture—that wretched, comfortless, rheumatic drawback—we would be quite snug.
“Our captain is the best of sailors; but, intent always on the primary objects and duties of his cruise, he is apt to forget or postpone a provident regard for those creature-comforts which have interest for others. To-day, with the thermometer at 10°, we for the first time commenced the manufacture of stove-pipes. I need not say that the cold metal played hob with the tinkers. If they go on at the present rate, the pipes will be nearly ready by next summer.
“September26. The hummocks around us still remain without apparent motion, heaped up like snow-covered barriers of street rioters. We are wedged in a huge mass of tables, completely out of water, cradled by ice. I wish it would give us an even keel. We are eighteen inches higher on one quarter than the other.
“The two large pools we observed yesterday, one on each side of us, are now coated by a thick film of ice. In this the poor sealssometimes show themselves in groups of half a dozen. They no longer sport about as they did three weeks ago, but rise up to their breasts through young ice, and gaze around with curiosity-smitten countenances.
“The shyness of the seal is proverbial. The Esquimaux, trained from earliest youth to the pursuit of them, regard a successful hunter as the great man of the settlement. If not killed instantaneously, the seal sinks and is lost. The day before yesterday, I adopted the native plan of silent watching beside a pool. Thus for a long time I was exposed to a temperature of +8°; but no shots within head-range offered; and I knew that, unless the spinal column or base of the brain was entered by the ball, it would be useless to waste our already scanty ammunition.
“To-day, however, I was more fortunate. A fine young seal rose about forty yards off, and I put the ball between the ear and eye. A boat was run over the ice, and the carcass secured. This is the second I have killed with this villainous carbine: it will be a valuable help to our sick. We are nowvery fond of seal-meat. It is far better than bear; and the fishiness, which at first disturbed us, is no longer disagreeable. I simply skin them, retaining the blubber with the pelt. The cold soon renders them solid. My bear, although in a barrel, is as stiff and hard as horn.
“Took a skate this morning over some lakelets recently frozen over. The ice was tenacious, but not strong enough for safety. As I was moving along over thetickly-benders, my ice-pole drove a hole, and came very near dropping through into the water.
“September27. This evening the thermometer gave 3° above zero. A bit of ice, which I took into my mouth to suck, fastened on to my tongue and carried away the skin. When we open the cabin hatch now, a cloud of steam, visible only as the two currents meet, gives evidence of the Arctic condensation.
“Afar off, skipping from hummock to hummock, I saw a black fox. Poor desolate devil! what did he, so far from his recorded home, seven miles from even the naked snow-hills of this dreary wilderness?In the night-time I heard him bark. They set a trap for him; but I secretly placed a bigger bait outside, without a snare-loop or trigger. In the morning it was gone, and the dead-fall had fallen upon no fox. How the poor, hungry thing must have enjoyed his supper! half the guts, the spleen, and the pluck of my seal.
“Lovell raised a swing; cold work, but good exercise. He rigged it from the main studding-sail boom. Murdaugh and Carter are building a snow-house. The doctor is hard at work patching up materials for an overland communication with the English squadron—an enterprise fast becoming desperate. Yet, drifting as we are to unknown regions north, it is of vast importance that others should know of our position and prospects.”
Our position, however, at the end of September, thanks to the rapidly-increasing cold, gave promise of a certain degree of security and rest. TheAdvancehad been driven, by the superior momentum of the floes that pressed us on one side, some two hundred and fifty feet into the mass of lessresisting floes on the other; theRescuemeanwhile remaining stationary; and the two vessels were fixed for a time on two adjacent sides of a rectangle, and close to each other. The unseen and varying energies of the ice movements had occasionally modified the position of each; but their relation to each other continued almost unchanged.
We felt that we were fixed for the winter. We arranged our rude embankments of ice and snow around us, began to deposit our stores within them, and got out our felt covering that was to serve as our winter roof. The temperature was severe, ranging from 1°.5, and 4° to +10°; but the men worked with the energy, and hope too, of pioneer settlers, when building up their first home in our Western forests.
The closing day of the month was signalized by a brilliant meteor, a modification of the parhelion, the more interesting to us because the first we had seen.
“October1, Tuesday. To-day the work of breaking hold commenced. The coal immediately under the main hatch was passedup in buckets, and some five tons piled upon the ice. The quarter-boats were hauled about twenty paces from our port-bow, and the sails covered and stacked; in short, all hands were at work preparing for the winter. Little had we calculated the caprices of Arctic ice.
“About ten o’clockA.M.a large crack opened nearly east and west, running as far as the eye could see, sometimes crossing the ice-pools, and sometimes breaking along the hummock ridges. The sun and moon will be in conjunction on the 3d; we had notice, therefore, that the spring tides are in action.
“Captain Griffin had been dispatched with Mr. Lovell before this, to establish on the shore the site for a depôt of provisions: at one o’clock a signal was made to recall them. At twoP.M., seeing a seal, I ran out upon the ice; but losing him, was tempted to continue on about a mile to the eastward. The wind, which had been from the westward all the morning, now shifted to the southward, and the ice-tables began to be again in motion.Thehumming of beesand upheaving hummocks, together with exploding cracks, warned me back to the vessel.
“At 3:20, while we were at dinner, commenting with some anxiety upon the condition of things without, that unmistakable monitor, the ‘young puppies,’ began. Running on deck, we found a large fissure, nearly due north and south, in line with theAdvance. A few minutes after, the entire floe on our starboard side was moving, and the ice breaking up in every direction.
“The emergency was startling enough. All hands turned to, officers included. The poor land party, returning at this moment, tired and dinnerless, went to work with the rest. Vreeland and myself worked like horses. Before dark, every thing was on board except the coal; and of this, such were the unwearied efforts of our crew, that we lost but a ton or two.
“This ice-opening was instructive practically, because it taught those of us who did not understand it before how capriciously insecure was our position. It revealedmuch, too, in relation to the action of the ice.
“1. The first crack was nearly at right angles to the axis of the channel; the subsequent ones crossed the first; the wind being in the one case from the westward, and afterward changing to the southward.
“2. The next subject of note was the disintegration of the old floes. It took place almost invariably at their original lines of junction, well marked by the hummocky ridges. This shows that the cementation was imperfect after seventeen days of very low temperature; a circumstance attributable, perhaps, to the massive character of the up-piled tables, which protected the inner portion of them from the air, and to the constant infiltration (endosmose) of salt-water at the abraded margins.
“3. The extent to which the work of super and infra position had been carried during the actions may be realized, when I say that the floe-piece which separated from us to starboard retained the exact impression of the ship’s side. There it was, with the gangwaystairs of ice-block masonry, looking down upon the dark water, and the useless embankment embracing a sludgy ice-pool.
“We could see table after table, more properly layer after layer, each not more than seven inches thick, extending down for more than twenty feet. Thus, it is highly probable, may be formed many of those enormous ice-tables, attributed by authors to direct and uninterrupted congelation.
“The quantity of ice adhering to our port-side must be enormous; for although the starboard floe, in leaving us, parted a six-inch hawser, it failed to budge us one inch from the icy cradle in which we are set.”
CHAPTER VII
T
HREE days after this entry the thermometer had fallen to 11° below zero. Our housings were not yet fixed, and we had no fires below; indeed, our position was so liable to momentary and violent change that it would have been impracticable to put up stoves. Still, our lard-lamp in the cabin gave us a temperature of +44°; and so completely were our systems accommodated to the circumstances in which we were, that we should have been quite satisfied but for the condensed moisture that dripped from every thing about us. Our commander had allowed me to place canvas gutters around the hatchways, and from these we emptied every day several tin cans full of water, that would otherwise have been added to the slop on our cabin floor. But the state of things was, on the whole, exceedingly comfortless, and, to those whom the scurvy had attacked, full ofperil. I remember once, when the lard-lamp died out in the course of the night, the mercury sunk in the cabin to 16°. It was not till the 19th that we got up our stoves.
The adaptation of the human system to varying temperatures struck me at this time with great force. I had passed the three winters before within the tropics—the last on the plains of Mexico—yet I could now watch patiently for hours together to get a shot at seals, with the thermometer at +10°. I wrote my journal in imaginary comfort with a temperature of 40°, and was positively distressed with heat when exercising on the ice with the mercury at +19°.
I return to my diary.
“October3. I write at midnight. Leaving the deck, where I have been tramping the cold out of my joints, I come below to our little cabin. As I open the hatch, every thing seems bathed in dirty milk. A cloud of vapor gushes out at every chink, and, as the cold air travels down, it is seen condensing deeper and deeper. The thermometer above is at 7° below zero.
“The brig and the ice around her are coveredby a strange black obscurity—not a mist, nor a haze, but a peculiar, waving, palpable, unnatural darkness: it is the frost-smoke of Arctic winters. Its range is very low. Climbing to the yard-arm, some thirty feet above the deck, I looked over a great horizon of black smoke, and above me saw the heaven without a blemish.
“October4. The open pools can no longer be called pools; they are great rivers, whose hummock-lined shores look dimly through the haze. Contrasted with the pure white snow, their waters are black even to inkyness; and the silent tides, undisturbed by ripple or wash, pass beneath a pasty film of constantly forming ice. The thermometer is at 10°. Away from the ship, a long way, I walked over the older ice to a spot where the open river was as wide as the Delaware. Here, after some crevice-jumping andtickly-bendercrossing, I set myself behind a little rampart of hummocks, watching for seals.
“As I watched, the smoke, the frost-smoke, came down in wreaths, like the lambent tongues of burning turpentine seenwithout the blaze. I was soon enveloped in crapy mist.
“To shoot seal, one must practice the Esquimaux tactics of much patience and complete immobility. It is no fun, I assure you after full experience, to sit motionless and noiseless as a statue, with a cold iron musket in your hands, and the thermometer 10° below zero. But by-and-by I was rewarded by seeing some overgrown Greenland calves come within shot. I missed. After another hour of cold expectation, they came again. Very strange are these seal. A countenance between the dog and the mild African ape—an expression so like that of humanity, that it makes gun-murderers hesitate. At last, at long shot, I hit one. God forgive me!
“The ball did not kill outright. It was out of range, struck too low, and entered the lungs. The poor beast had risen breast-high out of water, like the treading-water swimmers among ourselves. He was thus supported, looking about with curious, expectant eyes, when the ball entered his lungs.
“For a moment he oozed a little brightblood from his mouth, and looked toward me with a sort of startled reproachfulness. Then he dipped; an instant after, he came up still nearer, looked again, bled again, and went down. A half instant afterward, he came up flurriedly, looked about with anguish in his eyes, for he was quite near me; but slowly he sunk, struggling feebly, rose again, sunk again, struggled a very little more. The thing was drowning in the element of his sportive revels. He did drown finally, and sunk; and so I lost him.
“Have naturalists ever noticed the expression of this animal’s phiz? Curiosity, contentment, pain, reproach, despair, even resignation I thought, I saw on this seal’s face.
“About half an hour afterward, I killed another. Scurvy and sea-life craving for fresh meat led me to it; but I shot him dead.
“On returning to the ship, I found one toe frost-bitten—a tallow-looking dead man’s toe—which was restored to its original ugly vitality by snow-rubbing. Served me right!
“Spent the afternoon in unsuccessful seal stalking, and in rigging and contriving aspring-gun for the Arctic foxes: a blood-thirsty day. But we ate of fox to-day for dinner; and behold, and it was good.
“October5, Saturday. The wind evidently freshens up. The day has been bitterly cold. Although our lowest temperature was zero and—1°, we felt it far more than the low temperature of yesterday. Our maximum was as high as 4°; yet, with this, it required active motion on deck to keep one’s self warm.
“At 12h. 55m., we had an interval of clear sunshine. The utmost, however, to which it would raise one of the long register Smithsonian thermometers was 7°. The air was filled with bright particles of frozen moisture, which glittered in the sunshine—a shimmering of transparent dust.[C]
[C]Under the microscope these again showed obscure modifications of the hexagon.
[C]Under the microscope these again showed obscure modifications of the hexagon.
“At the same time, we had a second exhibition of parhelia, not so vivid in prismatic tints as that of the 30th of September, but more complete. The sun was expanded in a bright glare of intensely white light, and was surrounded by two distinct concentriccircles, delicately tinted on their inner margins with the red of the spectrum. The radius of the inner, as measured by the sextant, was 22° 04'; that of the outer, 40° 15'. The lowest portions of both were beneath the horizon, and of course not seen.
“From the central disk proceeded four radii, coincident with the vertical and the horizontal diameters of the circles.
“Their visible points of intersection were marked by bright parhelia; each parhelion having its circumference well defined, but compressed so as to have no resemblance to the solar disk.
“Six of these were visible at the same moment; those of the outer circle being fainter than the inner. Touching the upper circumference of this outer circle was the arc of a third, which extended toward the zenith. Indeed, at one time I thought I saw a luminosity overhead, which may have corresponded to its centre. The tints of this supplemental circle were very bright. The glowing atmosphere about the sun was very striking.
“The strange openings in the water of afew hours ago are now great rivers, lined by banks of hummocks, and wreathed in frost smoke. The continually increasing wind from the northward explains this southern drift of the ice, and with it these unwelcome openings. We are stationary, and the detached ice is leaving us.
“The strong floe of ice-table under ice-table, and hummock upon hummock, makes our position one of nearly complete solidity. We are glued up in ice; and to liberate us, some fearful disruption must take place. Twenty-five feet of solid ice is no feeble matrix, for a brig drawing but ten. Yet the water is wider, and still widening around us; so that now we hold on—that is, our floe holds on, to the great mass to the north of us, like a little peninsular cape.
“To the south every thing is in drifting motion—water, sludge, frost-smoke—but no seals.
“We caught a poor little fox to-day in a dead-fall. We ate him as an anti-scorbutic.
“October6, Sunday. A dismal day; the wind howling, and the snow, fine as flour, drifting into every chink and cranny. Thecold quite a nuisance, although the mercury is up again to +6°. It is blowing a gale. What if the floe, in which we are providentially glued, should take it into its head to break off, and carry us on a cruise before the wind!
“8P.M.Took a pole, and started off to make a voyage of discovery around our floe. After some weary walking over hummocks, and some uncomfortable sousings in the snow-dust, found that our cape has dwindled to an isthmus. In the midst of snow and haze, of course, I did not venture across to the other ice.
“We look now anxiously at the gale—turning in, clothes on, so as to be ready for changes.
“12 Midnight. They report us adrift. Wind, a gale from the northward and westward. An odd cruise this! The American expedition fast in a lump of ice about as big as Washington Square, and driving, like the shanty on a raft, before a howling gale.
“October7, Monday. Going on deck this morning, a new coast met my eyes. Our little matrix of ice had floated at least twentymiles to the south from yesterday’s anchorage. The gale continues; but the day is beautifully clear, and we have neared the western coast enough to recognize the features of the limestone cliffs, although many a wrinkle of them is now pearl-powdered with snow-drift.
“Prominent among these was Advance Bluff; and to the south of it, a great indentation in the limestone escarpment, which ran back into a gray distance—a sort of gorge, with a summer water-course. Further off. Point Innes again, and the shingle beach of ‘the Graves’; and a high bluff-like cape or headland to the southward and westward, which the captain supposes to be Barlow’s Inlet.
“10P.M.Our master got an observation this evening of a Aquila (circum-meridian altitude), giving us a latitude of 74° 54′ 07″. The seat of our late resting place was in latitude 75° 24′ 52″ N. We have therefore voyaged 30 miles 45 seconds since this new start. At this rate, should the wind continue, another day will carry us again into Lancaster Sound.
“October8. Still we drift. Barlow’s Inlet is nearly abreast of us, and Cape Hotham seen distinctly. The broad, unterminated expanse of ice to the south is Lancaster Sound, sixty miles distant when we first began our prisoner’s journey. Thermometer at +8°.
“To-day seemed like a wave of the handkerchief from our receding summer. Winter is in every thing. Yet the skies came back to us with warm ochres and pinks, and the sun, albeit from a lowly altitude, shone out in full brightness. It was a mockery of warmth, however, scarcely worthy the unpretending sincerity of the great planet; for the mercury, exposed to the full radiance of his deceitful glare, rose but two degrees: from +7° to 9°. In spite of this, the day was beautiful to remember, as a type of the sort of thing which we once shared with the world from which we are shut out; a parting picture, to think about during the long night. These dark days, or rather the dark day, will soon be on us. The noon shadows of our long masts almost lose themselves in the distance.
“A little white fox was caught alive in a trap this morning. He was an astute-visaged little scamp; and although the chains of captivity, made of spun-yarn and leather, set hardly upon him, he could spare abundant leisure for bear bones and snow. He would drink no water. His cry resembled the inter-paroxysmal yell of a very small boy undergoing spanking. The note came with an impulsive vehemence, that expressed not only fear and pain, but a very tolerable spice of anger and ill-temper.”
He was soon reconciled, however. The very next day he was tame enough to feed from the hand, and had lost all that startled wildness of look which is supposed to characterize his tribe. He was evidently unused to man, and without the educated instinct of flight. Twice, when suffered to escape from the vessel, he was caught in our traps the same night. Indeed, the white foxes of this region—we caught more than thirty of them—seemed to look at us with more curiosity than fear. They would come directly to the ship’s side; and, though startled at first when we fired at them, soon came back. Theyeven suffered us to approach them almost within reach of the hand, ran around us, as we gave the halloo, in a narrow circle, but stopped as soon as we were still, and stared us inquisitively in the face. One little fellow, when we let him loose on the ice after keeping him prisoner for a day or two, scampered back again incontinently to his cubby-hole on the deck. There may be matter of reflection for the naturalist in this. Has this animal no natural enemy but famine and cold? The foxes ceased to visit us soon after this, owing probably to the uncertain ice between us and the shore: they are shrewd ice-masters.
CHAPTER VIII
W
E remained during the rest of this month ice-cradled, and drifting about near the outlet of Wellington Channel. Occasionally a strong southerly wind would set us back again to the north, as far, perhaps as Barlow’s Inlet; but it was soon apparent that the greater compactness of the barrier that had come down after us, and the force of some unknown current, were resisting our progress in that direction. A northerly wind, on the other hand, seemed to have no counteracting influences. A little while after it began to blow, open leads would present themselves under our lee, and the floe which imbedded us moved gradually and without conflict through them toward the south. Our thoughts turned irresistibly to the broad expanse of Lancaster Sound, which lay wild and rugged before us, and to the increasing probability that it was to beour field of trial during the long, dark winter—perhaps our final home.
With this feeling came an increasing desire to communicate with our late associates of Union Bay. I had volunteered some weeks before to make this traverse, and had busied myself with arrangements to carry it out. TheRescue’sIndia-rubber boat was to carry the party through the leads, and, once at the shore, three men were to press on with a light tent and a few days' provisions. The project, impracticable perhaps from the first, was foiled for a time by a vexatious incident. I had made my tent of thin cotton cloth, so that it weighed, when completed, but fourteen pounds, soaking it thoroughly in a composition of caoutchouc, ether, and linseed oil, the last in quantity. After it was finished and nearly dried, I wrapped it up in a dry covering of coarse muslin, and placed it for the night in a locked closet, at some distance from the cook’s galley, where the temperature was between 80° and 90°. In the morning it was destroyed. The wrapper was there, retaining its form, and not discolored; but the outerfolds of the tent were smoking; and, as I unrolled it, fold after fold showed more and more marks of combustion, till at the centre it was absolutely charred. There was neither flame nor spark.
In a few days more the tumult of the ice-fields had made all chance of reaching the shore hopeless. But the meantime was not passed without efforts.
“October23. I started with a couple of men on another attempt to reach the shore. After five miles of walking, with recurring alternations of climbing, leaping, rolling, and soaking, we found that the ice had driven out from the coast, and a black lane of open water stopped our progress. This is the seventh attempt to cross the ice, all meeting with failure from the same cause. The motion of ice, influenced by winds, tides, and currents, keeps constantly abrading the shore-line. Any outward drift, of course, makes an irregular lane of water, which a single night converts into ice; the returning floes heap this in tables one over another; and the next outward set carries off the floes again, crowned with their new increment.
“The haze gathered around us about an hour after starting, and the hummocks were so covered with snow that the chasms often received us middle deep. We walked five hours and a half, making in all but eleven miles; and even then were at least a mile from the beach.
“At one portion of our route, the ice had the crushed sugar character; the lumps varying in size from a small cantaloupe to a water-melon, but hard as frozen water at zero ought to be. Over this stuff we walked in tiptoe style—and a very miserable style it was.
“At another place, for a mile and a half, we trod on the fractured angles of upturned ice. Call these curbstones; toss them in mad confusion, always taking care that their edges shall be uppermost; dust them over with flour cooled down to zero; and set a poor wretch loose, in the centre of a misty circle, to try for a pathway over them to the shore!
“At another place, break-water stones, great quarried masses of ice, let you up and down, but down oftener than up. At anothertime, you travel over rounded dunes of old seasoned hummock, covered with slippery glaze. Again, it is over snow, recent and soft, or snow, recent and sufficiently crusty to bear you five paces and let you through the sixth—a trial alike to temper and legs.
“At last, to crown thedeliciæof our Arctic walk, we come to a long meadow of recent ice, just enough covered with snow to keep you from slipping, and just thin enough to make it elastic as a polka floor. Over this, with a fine bracing air, every nerve tingling with the exercise, and the hoary rime whitening your beard, you walk with a delightful sense of ease and enjoyment.
“One of my attendants had both ears frost-bitten; the whole external cartilage (Pinna) was of tallow, jaundiced. Snow-rubbing set him right. I have ordered the men to take ear-rings from their ears. Wilson, a Livournese, rejoiced in a couple of barbaric pendules, doubtless of bad gold, but good conducting power.”
The indications of winter were still becoming more and more marked. On the11th, the sun rose but 9° at meridian; on the 15th but 6°; and on the 7th of November, at the same hour, it almost rested on the horizon. The daylight, however, was sometimes strangely beautiful. One day in particular, the 8th, a rosy tint diffused itself over every thing, shaded off a little at the zenith, but passing down from pink to violet, and from violet to an opalescent purple, that banded the entire horizon.
The moon made its appearance on the 13th of October. At first it was like a bonfire, warming up the ice with a red glare; but afterward, on the 15th, when it rose to the height of 4°, it silvered the hummocks and frozen leads, and gave a softened lustre to the snow, through which our two little brigs stood out in black and solitary contrast. The stars seemed to have lost their twinkle, and to shine with concentrated brightness as if through gimlet-holes in the cobalt canopy. The frost-smoke scarcely left the field of view. It generally hung in wreaths around the horizon; but it sometimes took eccentric forms; and one night, I remember, it piled itself into a column at the west, andAquila flamed above it like a tall beacon-light. We were glad to note these fanciful resemblances to the aspects of a more kindly region; they withdrew us sometimes from the sullen realities of the world that encompassed us—ice, frost-smoke, and a threatening sky.
We had parhelia again more than once, but developed imperfectly; a mass of incandescence 22° from the sun, with prismatic coloring, but without the circular and radial appearances that had characterized it before. On the 27th, a partial paraselene was visible, the first we observed—merely the limbs of two broken arcs, destitute of prismatic tint, stretching like circumflexes at about 23° distance on each side the moon; the moon about 20° high, thermometer -10°, barometer 30.55, atmosphere hazy. The sky clearing shortly afterward, it shone out with increased beauty for a while, but died away as the haze disappeared.
The thermometer was now generally below the zero point, sometimes rising for a little while about noon a few degrees above it, once only as high as +13°. When there was no wind, even the lowest of its range wasquite bearable; and while we were exercising actively, it was difficult to believe that our sensations could be so strikingly in contrast with the absolute temperature. But a breeze, or a pause of motion till we could raise the sextant to a star or make out some changing phasis of the ice-field, never failed to persuade us, and that feelingly, that the mercury was honest. Night after night the bed-clothes froze at our feet; and a poor copy of theNew York Herald, that lay at the head of the captain’s bunk, was glazed with ice.
“November8. Tempted by the overarching beauty of the sky, I started off this morning with Captain De Haven on a walk of inspection shoreward. The open water, frozen since October 2d, is now nearly two feet thick, and at this low temperature (-15°) it becomes hard and brittle as glass. Wherever the nipping has caught two of the floes, they have been driven with a force inconceivable one above the other, rising and falling until they now form a ridge fifteen or twenty feet high.
“The tension of the great field of ice overwhich we passed must have been enormous. It had a sensible curvature. On striking the surface with a walking-pole, loud reports issued like a pistol-shot, and lines of fissure radiated from the point of impact. It seemed as if the blow of an axe would sever the keystone, and break up by a shock the entire expanse. In one place the ice suddenly arched up like a bow while we were looking at it, burst into fragments, collapsed at the exterior margins of fracture, and by the work of a moment created a long barrier line of ruins ten feet high. Our position was one of peril. We had crossed two miles of ice. A change of tide relieved the strain, and we returned.
“The nearest break-up to our homestead floe is about one hundred and fifty yards off. It is now to the south; though our position, constantly changing, alters the bearing by the hour. Very many of the masses that compose it are as large as the grapery at home, two hundred feet long perhaps, and lifted up, barricade-fashion, as high as our second story windows.”
The next day our winter arrangementswere completed. They were simple enough, and hardly worth describing in detail. A housing of thick felt was drawn completely over the deck, resting on a sort of ridge-pole running fore and aft, and coming down close at the sides. The rime and snow-drift in an hour or two made it nearly impervious to the weather. The cook’s galley stood on the kelson, under the main hatch; its stove-pipe rising through the housing above, and its funnel-shaped apparatus for melting snow attached below. The bulkheads between cabin and forecastle had been removed; and two stoves, one at each end of the berth-deck, distributed their heat among officers and seamen alike. We had of course a community of all manner of odors; and as our only direct ventilation was by the gangway, we had the certainty of a sufficient diversity of temperatures.
The exemption from gales, that has attracted the notice of other travelers in this region, had not yet been confirmed by our experience. On the contrary, our approach to Lancaster Sound, and the earlier part of our drift after we entered it, were markedby frequent storms. Some of these had all the sublimity that could belong to a mingled sense of danger and discomfort. They reminded me of the sand-storms of the Sahara. "The fine particles of snow flew by us in a continuous stream. When they met the unprotected face, the sensation was like the puncture of needles. Standing under the lee of our brig, and watching the drift as it scudded on the wings of the storm throughthe interval between the two vessels, the lines of sweeping snow were so unbroken that its filaments seemed woven into a mysterious tissue. Objects fifty yards off were invisible: no one could leave the vessels."
STOVE IN COOK’S GALLEY WITH APPARATUS FOR MELTING SNOW.
The month of November found us oscillating still with the winds and currents in the neighborhood of Beechy Island. Helpless as we were among the floating masses, we began to look upon the floe that carried us as a protecting barrier against the approaches of others less friendly; and as the month advanced, and the chances increased of our passing into the sound, our apprehensions of being frozen up in the heart of the ice-pack gave place to the opposite fear of a continuous drift. We had seen enough, and encountered enough of the angry strife among the ice-floes in the channel, to assure us of disaster if we should be forced to mingle in the sterner conflicts of the older ice-fields of the sound. Yet, as the new fields continued forming about us, thickening gradually from inches to feet, and locking together the floes in one great amorphous expanse, we retained a hope to the lastthat our island floe, thickening like the rest, and piling its wall of hummocks around us, would continue to ward us from attack, till the all-pervading frost had made it a stationary part of the great winter covering of the Arctic Sea. It encountered almost daily immense hummocks, some of them impinging against us while we were apparently at rest; some, apparently motionless, receiving the impact from us. At such times our floe would be deflected at an angle from its normal course, or would rotate slowly round its centre, and pass on—not, however, always in the same direction; sometimes nearing the western shore, sometimes closing in upon the beach of “the Graves,” and sometimes fluctuating slowly to the northward.
But our general course was toward the south and east. On the 17th we were fairly in the sound. It welcomed us coldly. The mercury stood for a while at -19°, and sunk during the night to -27°.
The next day, however, a shift of wind, gradually increasing in force, combined with a tidal influence to drive us back to our old position. The thermometer was at this timelower than we had ever seen it, and the sky seemed to sympathize with the temperature. The moon had a solid look, resting upon the snow-hills of Cape Riley, like a great viscid globe of illumination. In the morning the sky combined all the tints of the spectrum in regular zones, a broad band of orange girding the horizon with an almost uniform intensity of color. The stars shone during the entire day. At daybreak on the 18th, Leopold’s Island rose by refraction above the ice, standing with its unmistakable outline clearly black against the orange sky; but it went down as the sun neared the horizon, and passed to the south of his low circuit. My journal for the next two days shows the degree of illumination at the different hours.
“November20, Wednesday. The winds are unlike those encountered by Parry, our only predecessor in this region at this season of the year. It has been very providential, and very unexpected for us, this predominance of breezes from the southward and eastward. It has prevented our drifting into the dreaded sound, there to be carried, if itpleased Fortune, into Baffin’s Bay by the easterly current.
“We had a heavy gale from 2P.M.of yesterday (19th) until this morning at 9A.M., hauling round from southeast to east-south-east. After this last hour, it gradually died away; and now, at 3P.M., we have a gentle breeze from the same quarter. The wind has left the north since the 18th.
“Our temperature, which on the 18th gave us -27°, the lowest we have yet recorded, was at the close of the next day but -6°; and to-day its extreme was -4°. Now, by gradual elevation, it has reached zero.
“Zero once more, and a positive sensation of warmth! There was no wind; and the haze vapors so softened this once greatest cold, that I walked about with bare hands and sweating body.
“The daylight is hardly now worthy of the name, according to the Philadelphia notions of the blessing; but to us it is the last leaf of the sibyl. Here is a little record of its incomings and outgoings.
“9A.M.Breakfast over; furs on; deck covered in with black felt, the frozen condensationpatching it with large white wafers of snow. A lantern makes it barely light enough to walk. No red streak to the east: one misty haze of visible darkness.
“10A.M.A twilight gloom: can just see the Azimuth, with its tripod stand, thirty yards off on the ice. Snow whirling in drifts.
“11A.M.Can read newspaper print by going to open daylight,i. e., twilight—the twilight of a foggy sunrise at home.
“12 M. Noonday. A streak of brown red looms up above the mist to the south. Save a little more light from the ‘foggy sunrise’ of 11A.M., no great perceptible difference; yet I can now read the finest print easily.
“1P.M.Very decidedly more hazy than at 11, the corresponding hour before meridian. Can read with difficulty the newspaper—London Illustrated News.
“2P.M.A hazy darkness, but so compounded with the fast-rising light of the dear moon, that it is far lighter than the corresponding hour before meridian.
“Day is over. Moonlight begins!
“This is a fair specimen of our usual day. The occasional clear day, such as we had the 18th, is far lighter, and full of variety and interest.
“November21, Thursday. The day is clear; but the moonlight, an absoluteclair de lune, so confounds itself with the day as to make a merely solar register impossible.
“8A.M.The whole atmosphere bathed in pellucid clearness. The moon, like a luminous sphere, not a circle, as with us, is away up the straits in the northern sky. Not a speck betokens sunrise.
“9A.M.The southeastern horizon is zoned with a mellow uniform band of light. Nothing we have seen has its extension or its uniformity. The visual angle is an unbroken tint, rising from the ice with a raw sienna, mellowing into pink, and softened again into an orange yellow, which runs sometimes through a gradation of green into the clear blue sky. The moon absorbs all perception of other light.
“10A.M.The light of dawn begins to mingle with the moon-light; I can not say where or how, but I am conscious of an interferinglight. To the southward all is orange, and red, and solar. To the northward, from a cobalt sky of even tint, the moon ‘shineth down alone’—alone, save the bright planet Saturn to the northward, and the broad zone of red sunrise at the south.
“11A.M.Day upon us on one side, and moon bright on the other: moon-light and sunlight blend overhead. To the north and south, each keeps its separate dominion. I read the finest print readily.
“12 M. Walked out to see the ice. I have no change of words left to describe noonday. The sunlight zone of color was more light and less bright, perhaps—and the moon was more bright and less light, perhaps; but both were there.
“1P.M.The light hardly dimmed; but the moon shines out so emulously, that it is hard to measure the sunlight.
“2P.M.It is evidently no longer day, although the southwestern horizon is flared with red streaks, and a softening of yellow into the blue of heaven says that the sun is somewhere below it. The moon has confused the day; and coming as she does atthis commencement of our long night, I bless her for the grateful service. I make my four to six hours of daily walk, and hardly miss the guidance of day.
“3P.M.Moonlight!"
CHAPTER IX