O
N the 2d of February the sun rose up in full disk at a quarter before eleven. The atmosphere was clear, but filled with minute spiculæ. The cold was becoming more intense: our ship thermometers stood at -32°, my spirit standard at -34°, and my mercurial at -38°. The ice that had formed between the floes since our break-up of January 12th was already twenty-seven inches thick, and was increasing at the rate of five inches in the twenty-four hours. The floes crackled under the intense frost, and we heard loud explosions around us, which one of our seamen, who had seen land service in Mexico, compared very aptly to the sound of a musket fired in an empty town. The 6th was still colder. At seven in the evening my spirit standard was at -40°. The day, however, had been graced with some hours of sunshine, and we worked andplayed foot-ball out on the ice till we were many of us in a profuse perspiration. The next morning my mercurial thermometer had frozen, leaving its parting record at -42°; and at half past eight one of the spirit standards indicated the same point. Up to this period, it was our lowest temperature. The frozen mercury resembled in appearance lead, recently chilled after melting. You could cut the thinner edges easily enough with a penknife; but where it was heaped up, nearer the centre of the solid mass, it was tenacious and resisting. I wished to examine it under the microscope, but was unable to procure a fractured surface.
Between six and eight o’clock in the evening of the 2d, we had a magnificent though nearly colorless exhibition of the aurora; and on the 7th, at 10h. 20m.A.M., the southern sky presented the appearance of a day aurora attending on the sun. The observations which I made of these two phenomena may be the subject of a distinct chapter; I will only say here, that it was difficult to doubt their identity of characteror cause. We had several displays of the paraselene, too, in the earlier days of the month, and an almost constant deposition of crystalline specks, which covered our decks with a sort of hoar-frost. The rate of this deposition on the vessel was about a quarter of an inch in six hours; but in an ice-basin on the floes, surrounded by hummocks, and thus protected from the wind, I found it nine inches deep.
When accumulated in this manner, it might, on a hurried inspection, be confounded with snow; but it differs as the dew does from rain. It is directly connected with radiation, and is most copious under a clear sky. Snow itself, the flaky snow of a clouded atmosphere, has not been noticed by us when the temperature was lower than -8° or at most -10°. Our last snow-fall was on the 1st of February and the day preceding. It began with the thermometer at -1°, and continued after it had sunk to -9°; but it had ceased some time before it reached -13°.
“February9. To-day we had a sky of serene purity, and all hands went out for asanitary game of romps in the cold light. Presently three suns came to greet us—strange Arctic parhelia—and a great golden cross of yellow brightness uniting them in one system. Under the glare of these we played foot-ball.
“At meridian we made a rough horizon of the ice, and found ourselves in latitude about 72° 16'. At this time another marvel rose before us—Land. The monster was to the W.S.W., in the shape of two round-topped hills, lifted up for the time into our field of view. An hour or two later, while the day was waning, these hills became mountains, and then a line of truncated cones, the spectre of some distant coast. Looking a few minutes later out of the little door in our felt house, the port gangway of the log-book, to where for this last fortnight a bleak sameness of snow has been stretching to the far north, we saw a couple of icebergs standing alone in the sky, and at their shadowy tops their phantom repetitions inverted. By this time the mountains also had become twain, and the long line of resurrected coast was duplicated in the clouds. A stratum offalse horizon separated the two sets of images.
“We have been now for many months without seeing the icebergs. They were beautiful objects, monuments of power, when we met them on the coast of Greenland, floating along on a liquid sea. Now they admonish us only of our helplessness and of perils before us. We should be glad to keep them in the clouds.
“The sun begins to make himself felt, though as yet feebly enough. My large spirit thermometer, in the shade of a hummock some hundred yards from the brig, gave us at noon -21° 5', and on the sunny side of the same hummock -12°. The same thermometer, before a blackboard exposed to the sun, was at -7°. Twenty minutes later, the thermometer at the blackboard rose to +2°, and twenty minutes later still it was at -2°. The ice formed within the twenty-four hours in the fire-hole measured four and a quarter inches; three quarters of an inch less than our measurements of it a week ago. A thermometer plunged two feet deep in a bank of light snow-drift indicated -12°.
“February10. A hazy day; with moon-light, and a drizzling fall of broken spiculæ following it. Mr. Murdaugh obtained observations for meridian altitude and time-sights of Aldebaran: our latitude is 72° 19', our longitude 68° 55'. The winds have been unfavorable to the rapidity of our drift, which has been reduced in its rate since our observation on the 29th of January from five and a quarter to four miles a day. It may be that our approach to the narrower parts of the bay and the increased cold together have been disturbing causes in the movement of the great pack; but the wind has been the most important in its influence.
“To look at the completely unbroken area which shows itself from our mast-head, motion would be the last idea suggested. In Lancaster Sound the changing phases of the coast gave us a feeling of progress, movement, drift—that sensation of change so pleasing to one’s incomprehensible moral machinery. But here, with this circle of impenetrable passive solidity everywhere around us, it is hard to realize that we move.But for the stars, my convictions of rest would be absolute. Yet we have thus traveled upward of three hundred miles. I shall not soon forget this inevitable march, with its alternations of gloomy silence and fierce disruptions.
“February11, Wednesday. Day very hazy, and nothing to interrupt its monotony. It requires an effort to bear up against this solemn transit of unvarying time.
“I will show you how I spend one of these days—that is, all of them. It is the only palliation I can offer for my meagreness of incident. As for the study we used to talk about—even you, terrible worker as you are, could not study in the Arctic regions.
“Within a little area, whose cubic contents are less than father’s library, you have the entire abiding-place of thirty-three heavily-clad men. Of these I am one. Three stoves and a cooking galley, four Argand and three bear-fat lamps burn with the constancy of a vestal shrine. Damp furs, soiled woolens, cast off boots, sick men, cookery, tobacco-smoke, and digestion are compounding their effluvia around andwithin me. Hour by hour, and day after day, without even a bunk to retire to or a blanket-curtain to hide me, this and these make up the reality of my home.
“Outside, grim death, in the shape of -40°, is trying—most foolishly, I think—to chill the energy of these his allies. My bedding lies upon the bare deck, right under the hatch. A thermometer, placed at the head of my cot, gives a mean temperature of 64°; at my feet, under the hatchway, +16° to -4°—ice at my feet, vapor at my head. The sleeping-bunks aft range from 70° to 93°; those forward, regulated by the medical officer, from 60° to 65°.
“We rise, the crew at six bells, seven o’clock, and the officers at seven bells, half an hour later. Thus comports himself your brother. He sits up in the midst of his blankets, and drinks a glass of cold water; eyes, nose, and mouth chippy with lamp-black and undue evaporation. Oh! how comforting this water is! That over, a tin-basin, in its turn, is brought round by Morton, mush-like with snow; and in this mixture, by the aid of a hard towel, with a dailyregularity that knows no intermission, he goes over his entire skeleton, frictionizing.
“This done, comes the dressing—the two pairs of stockings, the three under-shirts, the fur outer robing, and the seal-skin boots; and then, with a hurried cough of disgust and semi-suffocation, he is on deck. There the air, pure and sharply cold, now about 26° or 30°, last week 40° below zero, braces you up like peach and honey in a Virginia fog, or a tass of mountain dew in the Highlands. Then to breakfast. Here are the mess, with the fresh smell of overnight undisturbed, and on our table griddle cakes of Indian meal, hominy, and mackerel: with hot coffee and good appetites, we fall to manfully.
“Breakfast over, on go the furs again; and we escape from the accumulating fumes of ‘servants’ hall,' walking the floes, or climbing to the tops, till we are frozen enough to go below again. One hour spent now in an attempt at study—vainly enough, poor devil! But he does try, and what little he does is done then. By half past ten our entire little band of officers are out upon thefloes for a bout at anti-scorbutic exercise, a game of romps: first foot-ball, at which we kick till our legs ache; next sliding, at which we slide until we can slide no more: then off, with carbine on shoulder, and Henri as satellite, on an ice-tramp.
“Coming back, dinner lags at two. Then for the afternoon—God spare the man who can with unscathed nose stand the effluvium. But night follows soon, and with it the saddening question. What has the day achieved? And then we stretch ourselves out under the hatches, and sleep to the music of our thirty odd room-mates.
“February14, Friday. A glorious day, with the sun from nine to half past two. Three bergs seen by refraction. The mercury rose to +2° over a black surface turned toward the sun. To-day the usual foot-ball.
“Our Arctic theatre gave us to-night ‘The Mysteries and Miseries of New York,’ followed by a pantomime. The sitting temperature was -20°; that outside, -36°; behind the scenes, -25°. A flat-iron used by the delicate Miss Jem Smith gave the noveltheatrical effect of burning by cold. Poor Jem suffered so much in her bare sleeves and hands, that whenever the iron touched she winced. Cold merriment; but it concluded with hotchpot and songs.
“February15, Saturday. Another glorious day; the sun visible from 9A.M.to 3 P.M., and embanked during the remaining time. Much to our surprise, at the moment of setting, a startling ridge of mountain peaks rose into sight to the westward. Their distance, as estimated by the latest charts, was no less than 76 miles.
“February22, Saturday. ‘Some things can be done as well as others:’ so at least Sam Patch said, when he scrambled up after his jump at Niagara. I walked myself into a comfortable perspiration this morning, with the thermometer at -42°, seventy-four degrees below the freezing point. My walk was a long one. When about three miles from the brig, a breeze sprang up: it was very gentle; but instantly the sensation came upon me of intense cold. My beard, coated before with massive icicles, seemed to bristle with increased stiffness. Henri, who walkedahead, began to suffer: his nose was tallow white. Before we had rubbed it into circulation, my own was in the same condition; and an unfortunate hole in the back of my mitten stung like a burning coal. We are so accustomed to cold that I did not suffer during our walk back, though it was more than an hour of hummock crossing.
“The sensation most unendurable of these extremely low temperatures is a pain between the eyes and over the forehead. This is quite severe. It reminded me of a feeling which I have had from over-large quantities of ice-cream or ice-water, held against the roof of the mouth. I reached the brig in a fine glow of warmth, having skated, slid, and made the most of my time in the open air.
“An increased disposition to scurvy shows itself. Last week twelve cases of scorbutic gums were noted at my daily inspections. In addition to these, I have two cases of swelled limbs and extravasated blotches, with others less severely marked, from the same obstinate disease. The officers too, the captain, Mr. Lovell, and Mr. Murdaugh,complain of stiff and painful joints and limbs, with diarrhœa and impaired appetite: the doctor like the rest. At my recommendation, the captain has ordered an increased allowance of fresh food, to the amount of two complete extra daily rations per man, with potatoes, saur-kraut, and stewed apples; and we have enjoined more active and continued daily exercise, more complete airing of bedding, &c. I have commenced the use of nitro-muriatic acid, as in syphilitic and mercurial cases, by external friction.
“The state of health among us gives me great anxiety, and not a little hard work. Quinine, the salts of iron, &c., &c., are in full requisition. For the first time I am without a hospital steward.
“It is Washington’s birth-day, when ‘hearts should be glad;’ but we have no wine for the dinner-table, and are too sick for artificial merriment without it. Our crew, however, good patriotic wretches, got up a theatrical performance, ‘The Irish Attorney;’ Pierce O’Hara taken by the admirable Bruce, our Crichton. The ship’s thermometer outside was at -46°. Inside,among audience and actors, by aid of lungs, lamps, and housings, we got as high as 30° below zero, only sixty-two below the freezing point! probably the lowest atmospheric record of a theatrical representation.
“It was a strange thing altogether. The condensation was so excessive that we could barely see the performers: they walked in a cloud of vapor. Any extra vehemence of delivery was accompanied by volumes of smoke. The hands steamed. When an excited Thespian took off his hat, it smoked like a dish of potatoes. When he stood expectant, musing a reply, the vapor wreathed in little curls from his neck. This was thirty degrees lower than the lowest of Parry’s North Georgian performances.
“February23, Sunday. Mist comes back to us. After our past week of glorious sunshine, this return to murkiness is far from pleasing. But it might be worse: one month ago, and a day like this would have made our winter-stricken hearts bound with gladness.
“Caught a cold last night in attending the theatre. A cold here means a suddenmalaise, with insufferable aches in back and joints, hot eyes, and fevered skin. We all have them, coming and going, short-lived and long-lived: they leave their mark too. This Arctic work brings extra years upon a man. A fresh wind makes the cold very unbearable. In walking to-day, my beard and mustache became one solid mass of ice. I inadvertently put out my tongue, and it instantly froze fast to my lip. This being nothing new, costing only a smart pull and a bleeding abrasion afterward, I put up my mittened hands to ‘blow hot’ and thaw the unruly member from its imprisonment. Instead of succeeding, my mitten was itself a mass of ice in a moment: it fastened on the upper side of my tongue, and flattened it out like a batter-cake between the two disks of a hot griddle. It required all my care, with the bare hands, to release it, and that not without laceration.
“February25. A murky day. Two hundred and forty-four fathoms of line gave no bottom at the air-hole. Scurvy getting ahead. Began using the remnant of our fetid bear’s meat: nasty physic, but we willtry it. It is colder to-day, with the wind and fog at -15°, than a few days ago at -46°. Wind south by east: sun not seen.
“February26, Wednesday. The sun came back again with such vigor, that my spirit standard rose over black to +14°; my glass—cased, to +35°. The difference between shade and sunshine is 30°: a thermometer freely suspended in shade and in sun gave -32° and -2°. Black surfaces begin to scale off their snowy covering, not by thawing attended by moisture, but with a manifest diminution in the tenacity and adhesiveness of the snow. We observe these indications of returning heat closely.
“The scurvy has at last fairly extended to our own little body, the officers. Pains in the limbs, and deep-seated soreness of the bones, seem to be its most common demonstration. The complaint is of ‘a sort of tired feeling,’ or as if ‘they had had a beating.’ Our usual supper, the saur-kraut, has become excessively popular. Even the abused bear is not quite as bad as it was.
“The crew have been snow-rubbing their blankets. The snow is so fine and sand-like,that under these low Arctic temperatures it acts mechanically, and is an effectual cleanser. Withal, if you beat it well out of the tissue, it is not a damp application. The only trouble is that, on taking the bedding below, the condensation covers it with dew-drops. With drying-lines on the lower decks, the resort would be excellent.
“The setting sun, now fast approaching the home quarter of setting suns, the west, gave us again the spectral land about Cape Adair, eighty miles off.
“Sirius is beautifully resplendent on the meridian. What a fine exhibition it is! As it rises from the banked horizon, it gives us nightly freaks of terrestrial refraction. Its colors are blue, crimson, and white; its shapes oval, hour-glass, rhomboid, and square. Sometimes it is extinguished; sometimes flashing into sudden life: it looks very like a revolving light.
“To-day, in putting my hand inside my reindeer hood, I felt a something move. The something had a crepitating, insectine wriggle. Now, at home and everywhere else, without being a nervous man as to insects—forI have eaten locusts In Sennaar and bats in Dahomey—I rather dislike the crawl of centipede or slime of snail. Here, with an emotion hard to describe, surprise, pleasure, and a don’t-know-why wonderment, I caught my bug gently between thumb and finger.
“An air insect would be, in this dreary waste of cold, an impossibility greater than the diamond in the snow-drift. Save a seal and a fox, nothing sharing our principle of vitality has greeted us for months. The teeming myriads of life which characterized the Arctic summer have gone. The anatidæ are clamoring in the great bays and water-courses of the middle south. The gulls have sought the regions of open water. The colymbi and auks are lining the northern coasts of my own dear home. The croaking raven, dark bird of winter, clings to the inshore deserts. The tern are far away, and so, thank Heaven, are the mosquitoes. There are no bugs in the blankets, no nits in the hair, no maggots in the cheese. No specks of life glitter in the sunshine, nosounds of it float upon the air. We are without a single sign, a single instinct of living thing.
“If now, with the thermometer eighty degrees below the freezing point, and the new sun casting a cold gray sheen upon the snow, you leave the thirty-one, to whom you are the thirty-second, and walk out upon the ice away off—so far that no click of hammer nor drone of voice places you in relation with that little outside world—then you will know how I felt when I caught that ‘creeping wonder’ on my reindeer hood. It was a frozen feather.
“February27, Thursday. An aurora passing through the zenith, east and west, at 3h. 30m. this morning. What little wind we have is coming feebly from the west and southwest. The thermometer has traveled from -40° to -31°, and the sun is out again in benign lustre. A difference of 27°, due to his influence, was evident as early as 10h. 20m., viz.: Green’s spirit standard gave, in shade,-33°; over black surface, in sunshine, -7° and -6°. At noonday, thesame thermometer gave +2°. My glass—cased, hot-house like,—gave the pleasant deception of +40°.
“Still the scurvy increases. I am down myself to-day with all the premonitories. It is strangely depressing: a concentrated ‘fresh cold’ pain extends searchingly from top to toe. I am so stiff that it is only by an effort that I can walk the deck, and that limpingly. Once out on the floes, my energies excited and my blood warmed by exercise, I can tramp away freely; back again, I stiffen.
“Walked with our other cook, Auguste Canot. Queer changes these Frenchmen see! Canot’s father, a captain in the French army, was shot while serving with Oudinot, beneath the infernal ‘barricades’ of Rome—Canot the younger looking on. A few months after, the son had figured upon the list of condemned for the affair at Lyons, and was a fugitiveemigréto the United States. The same sergeant-major, Canot, is now cooking salt junk in Baffin’s Bay. Hisconfrère, the modest but gifted Henri, although a worse soldier, is a bettercook. He first saw ice among the glaciers of La Tour. He has scullionized at the 'Trois Frères/ and playedchêfto a London club-house. He passed through this latter ordeal, strange to say, unscathed; and, but for an amorous temperament, might be now at Delmonico’s, upon good wages and bad Bordeaux. Henri is a boy of talent, pensive by temperament, and withal ambitious. Were it not for the somewhat unequal distribution of two molars and an incisor, his entire stock of teeth, he would be an insufferable coxcomb. As it is, he treats his infirmity with amiable, if not philosophic contempt. He made me this morning an idea of white bear’s liver,à la brochette. The idea was good, the liver hippuric and detestable. Henri prides himself upon that most difficult simplicity, thefilet. He prepares thus a sea-gullà merveille.
“February28, Friday. The most wintery-looking day I have ever seen. The winds have been let loose, and the cheering novelty of a northwester breaks in on our calm. The drifting snow either rises like smoke from the levels, or whirls away inwreaths from the hummocks. The atmosphere has an opaline ashy look; in the midst of which, like a huge girasole, flashes the round sun. The clouds are of a sort seldom seen, except in the conceptions of adventurous artists, quite undefinable, and out of the line of nature, defying Howard’s nomenclature. They are blocked out in square, stormy masses, against a pearly, misty blue—harsh, abrupt, repulsive, quite out of keeping with the kindly lightness of things belonging to the sky."
The lowest temperature we recorded during the cruise was on the 22d of this month, when the ship’s thermometer gave us -46°; my offship spirit, -52°; and my own self-registering instruments, purchased from Green, placed on a hummock removed from the vessels, -53°, as the mean of two instruments. This may be taken as the true record of our lowest absolute temperature.
Cold as it was, our mid-day exercise was never interrupted, unless by wind and drift storms. We felt the necessity of active exercise; and although the effort was accompanied with pains in the joints, sometimeshardly bearable, we managed, both officers and crew, to obtain at least three hours a day. The exercise consisted of foot-ball and sliding, followed by regular games of romps, leap-frog, and tumbling in the snow. By shoveling away near the vessel, we obtained a fine bare surface of fresh ice, extremely glib and durable. On this we constructed a skating-ground and admirable slides. I walked regularly over the floes, although the snows were nearly impassable.
With all this, aided by hosts of hygienic resources, feeble certainly, but still the best at my command, scurvy advanced steadily. This fearful disease, so often warded off when in a direct attack, now exhibited itself in a cachexy, a depraved condition of system sad to encounter. Pains, diffuse, and non-locatable, were combined with an apathy and lassitude which resisted all attempts at healthy excitement.
These, of course, were not confined to the crew alone: out of twenty-four men, but five were without ulcerated gums and blotched limbs; and of these five, strange to say, four were cooks and stewards. Allthe officers were assailed. Old pains were renewed, old wounds opened; even old bruises and sprains, received at barely-remembered periods back, came to us like dreams. Our commander, certainly the finest constitution among us, was assailed like the rest. In a few days purpuric extravasations appeared on his legs, and a dysentery enfeebled him to an extent far from safe. An old wound of my own became discolored, and, curious to say, painful only at such points of old suppuration, three in number, as had been relieved by the knife. The seats of a couple of abscess-like openings were entirely unaffected and free from pain.
The close of the month found this state of things on the increase, and the strength of the party still waning.
THE RESCUE IN HER ICE-DOCK.
CHAPTER XV
O
UR brig was still resting on her cradle, and her consort on the floe a short distance off, when the first month of spring came to greet us. We had passed the latitude of 72°.
To prepare for our closing struggle with the ice-fields, or at least divide its hazards, it was determined to refit theRescue. To get at her hull, a pit was sunk in the ice around her, large enough for four men to work in at a time, and eight feet deep, so as to expose her stern, and leave only eighteeninches of the keel imbedded. This novel dry-dock answered perfectly. The hull was inspected, and the work of repair was pressed so assiduously, that in three days the stern-post was in its place, and the new bowsprit ready for shipping. We had now the chances of two ships again in case of disaster.
Since the middle of February the felt housing of our vessel had shown a disposition to throw off its snowy crust. There was an apparent recession, or, rather, want of adhesion about it, that spoke of change. But it was not till the 7th of March that we witnessed an actual thaw. On the black planking of the brig’s quarter, in full sun glare, the snow began to move, and fell, leaving a moist stain. This was either evaporated or frozen instantly; but still it had been there, unequivocal moisture. A sledge, too, alongside the vessel, kept laden to meet emergencies, with a black felt cover, gave on its southern side a warm impression to the unmittened hand; and several drops of water rolled from its mounting of snow, and formed in minute icicles.
With these cheering signs of returning warmth came a sensible improvement in my cases of scurvy. I ascribed it in a great degree to the free use of saur-kraut and lime-juice, and to the constant exercise which was enforced as part of our sanitary discipline. But I attributed it also to the employment of hydrochloric acid, applied externally with friction, and taken internally as a tonic. The idea of this remedy, hitherto, so far as I know, unused in scurvy, occurred to me from its effects in cachectic cases of mercurial syphilis. I am, I fear, heterodox almost to infidelity as to the direct action of remedies, and rarely allow myself to claim a sequence as a result; but, according to the accepted dialectics of the profession, theAcid. chlorohyd. dilut.may be recommended as singularly adapted to certain stages of scorbutus.
The great difficulty that every one has encountered in treating this disease is in the reluctance of the patient to rouse himself so as to excite the system by cheerful, glowing exercise, and in the case of seamen, to control their diet. My ingenuity was oftentaxed for expedients to counteract these predispositions. Some that I resorted to were ludicrous enough.
James Stewart, with purpuric blotches and a stiff knee, had to wag his leg half an hour by the dial, opposite a formidable magnet, each wag accompanied by a shampooing knead. Stewart had faith; the muscular action, which I had enjoined so often ineffectually, was brought about by a bit of steel and a smearing of red sealing-wax. They cured him.
Another, remarkable for a dirty person, of well used-up capillary surface, a hard case—one of a class scarcely ever seen by any but navy doctors—sponged freely and regularly from head to foot in water colored brown by coffee, and made acid with vinegar. His gums improved at once. He would never have washed withaqua fontana.
Another set of fellows adhered pertinaciously to their salt junk and hard tack, ship bread and beef. These conservative gentlemen gave me much trouble by repelling vegetable food. The scurvy was playing the very deuce with them, when thebright idea occurred to me of converting the rejected delicacies into an abominable doctor-stuff. It was an appeal to their spirit of martyrdom: they became heroes. Three times a day did these high-spirited fellows drink a wine glass of olive-oil and lime-juice, followed by raw potato and saur-kraut, pounded with molasses into a damnable electuary. They ate nobly, and got well.
But the causes of scurvy were relaxing their energies only for the time. Before the month was out, the disease had come back with renewed and even exacerbated virulence. Some of its phases were curious. The joint of Captain De Haven’s second finger became the seat of severe pain, accompanied by a distinct tubercle cartilaginous to the touch. It exactly recalled, he said, the appearance and feeling of the part for some months after it had been hurt by a schoolmaster’s ruler twenty-five years before. One of the crew had his tongue completely excoriated. Another, who had lost a molar tooth seven years ago, spit from the cavity a conoidal wedge: I had no chanceof examining it by the microscope; but an impression of the cavity in wax showed the sides perfectly smooth, and the vertex intersected by lines of ossification. I have spoken already of my lance mark in the groin: it had been healed some three years; but it now threatened suppuration again wherever it bore the marks of the surgeon’s knife.
We had unfortunately almost exhausted our supply of anti-scorbutic drinks, and were driven to the manufacture of substitutes not always the most palatable. One of them, which served at least as a vehicle for lime-juice and muriate of iron, was, however, a recognized exception. It was a beer, of which a remnant of dried peaches and some raisins, with barley and brown sugar, formed the fermenting basis. The men drank it in most liberal quantities.
On the 10th we had an exhibition of the day aurora again, less brilliant than the one I have described a few pages back, but quite well marked. It was followed at night by the paraselene. Another atmospheric display,which occurred a few days afterward, attracted more notice.
“March13. Again a day of bright sunshine, but to my feelings colder than our lowest temperatures. The thermometer stood at -24° in the shade at noon, and the wind was very light. Yet there was a cutting asperity about it that made your face tingle—a sensation as if evaporation was going on under the skin—quite a painful one. At four in the afternoon the atmosphere was studded with glistening particles. I have never seen them so manifest and so numerous. Our slide, a polished surface of clear ice, became clouded in a few minutes, and before five o’clock it was perfectly white. The microscope gave me the same broken hexagonal prisms, mixed with tables closely resembling the snow-crystal. A haze surrounded the horizon, rising for some six degrees in a bronzed purple bank; after which it gradually blended with the sky, a clear blue, undisturbed by cirri.
“Accompanying this redundancy of atmospheric spiculæ was a parhelion of remarkableintensity. There was no halo round the sun, and no vertical or horizontal column; but at the distance of 22° 04' from the sun’s centre were three solar images, one on each side, and the other immediately above the sun. This latter image was intensely luminous, but not prismatic; the others had the rudiments of an arc, highly colored, the red upon the inner margin. The haze rose as high as these horizontal images; and the arc, which in so short a segment presented no visible curvature, expanded as it descended, so as to form an elongated pyramid or column, the prismatic tints increasing in intensity as they approached the horizon. The effect of this was that of two illuminated beacons or rainbow towers, the sun blazing between them. As we stood a little way off on the ice, it was very beautiful to see the brig, with its spars and rigging cutting like tracery against the central light, with these prismatic structures on each side, capped by a spectral sun."
Two evenings later, the parhelia gave us another spectacle of interest. Two mock suns, which had accompanied the sun belowthe horizon, sent up an illuminated and colored arc some eight or ten degrees in height. Midway rose a brush-like column of crimson (baryta) light. A series of flame-colored strata, alternating with an incomprehensible black cloud, was so completely eclipsed by the vertical column, that it seemed to cut its way without a diminution of its brightness. The whole atmosphere was as warmly tinted as in the evenings of Melville Bay.
Indeed, from the beginning of the month, the skies had undergone a sensible change of aspect. Instead of the heavy-banked or linear stratus about the horizon, and the light, cold cirri above, we were getting back to something like the fall skies of our own climate, the misty bands of morning becoming fleecy as the day wore on, and taking the marbled or mackerel character before they blended with the western skies.
I am tempted to apologize, once for all, for the imperfect character of these observations. Our stock of instruments on board was scanty at the best, and the routine observances of a ship of war do not favor theprosecution of merely scientific researches. We had no actinometer to mark the daily increments of solar radiation: om' thermometers were generally of rude construction, and were not so placed as to give the highest value to their results; and an entry which I find in my journal explains why my barometrical records were so few.
“March12. To-day, for the first time during the cruise, I had the pleasure of seeing our mountain barometer released from its stowage, and an attempt made to compare it with our aneroids. Before we began our drift to the north, when we had no fires below to give us a constantly vibrating temperature, and the aneroid of theRescuehad not come into the over-crowded cabin of our vessel to divide the formalities of registration with our own, it might have been well to make a careful comparison of the two with those of the British vessels, and with our mountain barometer also. The index error of this instrument on its zero point could have been adjusted then by reference to others that were just from Greenwich, and it would have been practicable, perhaps,to give something of increased value to our log-book records of the atmospheric pressure. Under all the circumstances, I have not thought it necessary to transfer them to my journal."
As the middle of March approached, our drift became gradually slower, until we almost reached a state of rest. For several days we advanced at an average rate of scarcely half a mile a day. We were at this time some seventy miles east of Cape Adair, our nearest Greenland shore being somewhere between Upper Navik and Disco; and the idea of encountering the final break-up among the closely-impacted masses that surrounded us, or of being carried back to the north by some inopportune counter-current, was far from pleasant. But our log-line, in an attempt at soundings, showed still a marked under-draught toward the south; and in a few days more we were moving southward again with increased velocity.
The 19th gave us a change of scene. I was aroused from my morning sleep by the familiar voice of Mr. Murdaugh, as he hurried along the half-deck: “Ice opening”—“Openleads off our starboard quarter”—“Frost-smoke all around us!” Five minutes afterward, Henri had been summoned from the galley; and, carbine in hand, I was tumbling over the hummocks.
After a heavy walk of half a mile, sure enough there it was—the open lead—stretching with its film of forming ice far in a narrowing perspective to the east and west. Balboa himself never looked out upon an ocean with more grateful feelings than I did upon this open chasm, the first inbreak upon complete solidity which we had known since the 15th of January. It was a breach in our prison-walls. The undulatory movement of the mercury and the varied appearance of the clouds were now explained. Although only discovered this morning, the rupture must have been going on for days, perhaps a week. Our winds had favored the separation of cracks into wide channels; but how such changes could have taken place puzzled me.
The ice, as shown by my measurements, was from four to eight feet; and even now, when I recall the fearful sounds which accompaniedthe Lancaster Sound commotions, I can hardly realize that such extensive chasms should have been formed almost in silence. We could only guess what had been the extent of our ice-field at this time. Baffin’s Bay was nearly three hundred miles across, and the field may have been twice as long in the other direction. Perhaps the wave action of a heavy sea, great subglacial billows, unfelt at our fast-cemented little vessel, may have broken the tables without the crash and tumult of a collision. The lead where I first reached it, to the southeast of our brig, was nearly three hundred yards across; not, however, three hundred yards of open water, but a separation between the two sides of the original floe of about that distance. The sides still showed their clean-edged fracture, diversified by drift and hummock, and rising above the intervening level, like the banks of a tideless river, margined by new ice and crusted with efflorescing snow. But at its further or southern side, a long strip, narrow and very black, gave evidence of open water. In this, surrounded by exhaling mist and frost-smoke,were our old friends, the seal; grave, hirsute-looking fellows, who rose out of the water breast-high, and gazed upon us with the curious faces of old times. Near them was a solitary dovekie, dressed in its gray winter plumage, the first bird I had seen for days; here, too, had crossed the tracks of a bear.
All this was very cheering. To see something, no matter what, checkering the waste of white snow, was like a shady grove to men sun-tired in a prairie; but to see life again—life, tenanting the desolate air and inhospitable sea—was a spring of water in the desert. My old hostility to gun-murder was forgotten. I wasted, of course, some small remnant of poetic sympathy with fellow-life thus springing up out of the wilderness; but then, in the midst of my sympathies, came the destructive instinct which longed to make it subservient to my wants. The scurvy, the scurvy patients, myself among the rest!—but the seal and the dovekies kept themselves out of shot.
At this lead we saw the recent frost-smoke within a few yards of us in pointedtongues of vapor: further off, the long, wreathy brown clouds were rising. I never before, not even in Wellington Channel, saw this phenomenon in greater perfection: in Wellington it was an interesting, sometimes a gloomy feature; here it was imposing. As far back as the twelfth, we had caught glimpses of brown vapor in this very direction: we now learned to look upon it in certain phases as an unerring indication of open water, and wondered that we did not so regard it earlier.
The chasms were not limited to the long lead before us. They extended to the east and west indefinitely; and were intersected by transverse fissures, which so met each other as completely to surround our vessels. From this circuit the frost-smoke was rising. The thermometer stood at -20°, fifty-two degrees below the freezing point in the shade; but the sun was shining brilliantly, raising the mercury to +10°. Under these circumstances, theoretically so favorable, this Arctic phenomenon became the most prominent feature in the scene.
As I stood upon a tall knob of hummock,the entire horizon seemed to be sending up, exhaling a bronzine smoke—not the lambent, smoky wreaths which I have compared to burning turpentine, but a peculiar russet brown smoke, tongued and wreathy when near, but at a distance rolling in cumulated masses. These seemed to cling at their bases to the surface from which they rose, like the discharges of artillery over water, or a locomotive steaming over a cold, wet meadow. They were wafted by the wind, so as to drive them out in lines two or three hundred yards long; but they clung tenaciously to the water and young ice, giving us a varying but always narrow horizon of smoke. The Rescue was enveloped with the heavy, sooty clouds of repeated broad-sides. If I had seen the flashing of guns or the glimmer of burning prairie-grass, I should have been less impressed; so strange, very strange, was this ordinary attendant on conflagration rolling in the midst of our winteriness.
EFFECT OF FROST-SMOKE.
CHAPTER XVI
"M
ARCH20. Thursday, the 20th of March, opens with a gale, a regular gale. On reaching deck after breakfast, I found the wind from the southeast, the thermometer at zero, and rising. These southeast storms are looked upon as having an important influence on the ice. They are always warm, and by the sea which they excite at the southern margin of the pack, have a great effect in breaking the floes. Dr. Olrik told me that they were anxiously looked for on the Greenland coast as precursors of open water. The date of the southeast gale last year, at Uppernavik, was April 25th. Our thermometer gave +5° at noonday, +7° at one, and +8° at three o’clock!
“This is the heaviest storm we have had since entering Lancaster Sound, exactly seven months and a day ago. The snow iswhirled in such quantities, that our thick felt housing seems as if of gauze: it not only covers our decks, but drives into our clothes like fine dust or flour. A plated thermometer was invisible fourteen feet from the eye: from the distance of ten paces off on our quarter, a white opacity covers every thing, the compass-stand, fox-traps, and all beyond: theRescue, of course, is completely hidden. This heavy snow-drift exceeds any thing that I had conceived, although many of my Arctic English friends had discoursed to me eloquently about their perils and discomforts. As to facing it in a stationary position, nothing human could; for a man would be buried in ten minutes. Even in reaching our little Tusculum, we tumble up to our middle, in places where a few minutes before the very ice was laid bare. The entire topography of our ice is changing constantly.
“7P.M.‘The wind is howling.’ Our mess begin to talk again of sleeping in boots, and the other luxuries of Lancaster Sound. For my own part, better, far better this, with the spicy tingling of a crisis, than thecorroding, scurvy-engendering sameness of the past two months. Every moment now is full of expectation.
“March21. The wind changed this morning to the westward, and by daylight was blowing freshly. After breakfast, Murdaugh and myself started on a tramp to the ‘open water,’ to see the effects of the gale. The drift was beyond conception; sufficient, in many places, to have covered up our whole ship’s company. The wind made it as cold at -5° as I have seen it at -30°, and the fine snow pelted our faces; but the surface was frozen so hard that we walked over the crust, and in a little over half an hour we reached the lead.
“Planting a signal pole, with a red silk handkerchief as a mark, and taking compass-bearings to guide us back again, we began to look around us. Our expectations of hummock action were agreeably disappointed. We thought that the storm would have driven the ice from the southward, and that the change of wind would have marshaled opposing floes to meet it. But it was not so. Even the young, marginal ice,though warped, was unbroken. The pressure had evidently taken place, but with little effect. After the gigantic upheavings of Lancaster Sound, excited by winds much weaker, no wonder I was surprised. Upon thinking it over, I came to the conclusion that the absence of apoint d’appui, either of land or land-ice, was the cause of these diminished actions. We were now in a great sea, surrounded by consolidated floes, and away from salient capes or shore-bound ice. The pressure was diffused throughout a greater mass, without points of special or even unequal resistance. If this reasoning holds, we will not experience the expected tumult until we drift into a region where forces are more in opposition; perhaps not until we reach the contraction of Davis' Straits.
“The young ice margin of this open lead had the appearance of a beautiful wave-flattened sand beach. The lead itself had opened so far that its opposite shores were barely visible. The wind checked the immediate formation of new ice; and, to our inexpressible joy, there, glittering in thecold sunlight, were little rippling waves. So long have we been pent up by this wretched circle of unchanging snow, that I make myself ridiculous by talking of trifles, with which you, milk-drinking, sun-basking, melted-water-seeing people at home can have no sympathy. In spite of the winds and the snow-drift, I could hear the babbling of these waves as they laughed in their temporary freedom.
“March22, Saturday. I started again for the ice-openings. There had evidently been a good deal of commotion in the night; but nothing so violent as to negative my yesterday’s conclusions. Still there were hummocks of young tables, and some ugly twists of the beach line; and matters had not yet settled themselves into rest. As the great floe on which I stood traveled, under the influence of the west wind, obliquely eastward, I heard once more the familiar sounds of ournoctes Lancastrianæ. The grating of nutmegs, the cork rubbing of old-fashioned tables, the young puppies, and the bee-hives; all these were back again; but we missed pleasantly the wailing, the howling, the clattering,the exploding din, which used to come to us through the darkness. The pulse-like interval was there too, like a breathing-time; but the daylight modified every thing, my feelings most of all. They became almost pleasant, as I listened, after a lullaby fashion, to the bees and puppies; and something very like gratitude came over me, as I thought of the uncertain gloom or palpable midnight which accompanied a few weeks ago the ‘voices of the ice.’ The thermometer was 21° below zero, and the wind blowing: naturally enough, my nose became a tallow nose in the midst of my reverie. So I rubbed the nose, blew the nose, buffeted my armpits until my fingers tingled, and then started off on a tramp.
“Seal were seen, curious as usual, but indulging in the weakness afar off. Presently two poor winter-mated little divers met my meat-seeking senses. One of these I killed with my rifle, covetously regretting that my one ball could not align his mate. This was the first game we had obtained since the fall: he was divided, poor fellow, between two of my scurvy patients. In getting thisbird out, I came very near getting myself in; and that, when a ducking means a freezing, is no fun.
“10P.M.To-night finds me knocked up. Be it known, that after crawling on my belly, not like the wisest of animals, for two hours, I came nearly within shot of a week’s fresh meat. The fresh meat dived, first shaking his whisker tentacles at my disconsolate beard, leaving me half frozen and wholly discontented. Fool-like, after the long walk back, the warming, the drying, and the feeding, I returned by the other long walk to the ice-openings, tramped for two hours, saw nothing but frost-smoke, and came back again, dinnerless, with legs quaking, and spirits wholly out of tune.
“Our drift to-day, at meridian, was in the neighborhood of 9 miles; our latitude was 71° 9′ 18″.
“March23, Sunday. After divine service, started for the ice-openings. We are now in the centre of an area, which we estimated roughly as four miles from north to south, and a little more east and west. On reaching what was yesterday’s sea-beach, Iwas forced to recant in a measure my convictions as to the force of the opposing floes. Yesterday’s beach existed no longer; it was swallowed up, crushed, crumbled, submerged, or uplifted in long ridges of broken ice.
“The actions were still in progress, and fast intruding upon the solid old ice which is our homestead. The ice-tables now crumbling into hummocks were from eight to fourteen inches thick, generally ten. Not even in Lancaster Sound did the destruction of surface go on more rapidly. The wind was a moderate breeze from the northwest, and the floes were advancing on each other at a rate of a knot and a half an hour, building up hummock tables along their Hue of collision. Several rose in a few minutes to a height of ten or twelve feet. I have become so accustomed to these glacial eruptions, that I mounted the upheaving ice, and rode upon the fragments—an amusement I could hardly have practiced safely before I had studied their changes.
“The snow-covered level upon whichBrooks and myself were walking was about thirty paces wide, between the older ice on one side and the encroaching hummock-line on the other. Upon our return, after a walk of a short half mile, we found our footsteps obliterated, and the hummock-line within a few yards of this older ice. Things are changing rapidly.
“A new crack was reported at one o’clock, about the third of a mile from our ship; and the bearings of the sun showed that our brig had, for the first time since entering Baffin’s Bay, rotated considerably to the northward. Here were two subjects for examination. So, as soon as dinner was over, I started with Davis and Willie, two of my scurvy henchmen, on a walk to the openings. Reaching the recent crack, we found the ice five feet four inches thick, and the black water, in a clear streak a foot wide, running to the east and west.[G]I had often read of Esquimaux being carried off by the separation of these great floes; but,knowing that our guns could call assistance from the brig, we jumped over and hurried on. We were well paid.