[G]This direction, transverse to the long axis of Baffin’s Bay, seems to be that of most of our fissures.
[G]This direction, transverse to the long axis of Baffin’s Bay, seems to be that of most of our fissures.
“The hunamockings of this morning had ceased; the wind so gentle as hardly to be perceptible: the lead before me was an open river of water, and in it were narwhals (M. monoceros), in groups of five or six, rolling over and over, after the manner of the dolphin tribe. They were near me; so near that I could see their checkered backs, and enjoy the rich coloring that decorates them. The horn, that monodontal process which gives them their name of sea-unicorn, was perfectly examinable. Rising in a spirally indented cone, this beautiful appendage appeared sometimes eight and ten feet out of water; one especially, whose tall curvetings astonished my body-guard. I never saw a more graceful, striking, and beautiful exhibition than the unrestrained play of these narwhals.[H]In the same openwater, almost in company with the narwhals, were white whales (Delphinopterus albicans, orBeluga: these cetacea have so many names, they puzzle me), and seal besides.
[H]I have seen many of these fish since, but never under such circumstances. I stood on a ledge of hummock within short gunshot. The animals were entirely unapprehensive. The non-symmetrical character of the “horn” (an unduly developed tooth, say the naturalists) was not seen; and as this long lance-like process played about at a constantly varying angle, it reminded me of the mast of some sunken boat swayed by the waves.
[H]I have seen many of these fish since, but never under such circumstances. I stood on a ledge of hummock within short gunshot. The animals were entirely unapprehensive. The non-symmetrical character of the “horn” (an unduly developed tooth, say the naturalists) was not seen; and as this long lance-like process played about at a constantly varying angle, it reminded me of the mast of some sunken boat swayed by the waves.
“I was tempted to stay too long. The wind sprang up suddenly. The floe began to move. I thought of the crack between me and the ship, and started off. The walking, however, was very heavy, and my scurvy patients stiff in the extensors. By the time I reached the crack, it had opened into a chasm, and a river as broad as the Wissahiccon ran between me and our ship. After some little anxiety—not much—I saw our captain ordering a party to our relief. The sledges soon appeared, dragged by a willing party; the India rubber boat was lowered into the lead, and the party ferried over. So ends this last trip to these ice-openings.
“It is evident that these gradual crack-formings and chasm-openings, with the hummocking and other attendant actions, arebut preludes to a complete breaking up. Our previous observations show that the disruption of these large areas can not be effected suddenly. It is a gradual process; so gradual, even in Lancaster Sound, as to allow time for personal escape, although the vessel be a victim.
“From the 12th of January, the date of our last break-up, down to the present movement, is two months. The intense cold, with feeble winds and the absence of impact or collisions, have kept up the integrity of this great pack. I think it may reasonably be doubted whether it will now close again before our liberation or destruction. The excessive thickness of the tables, the wave and tidal actions, the mildening temperature, and the probable continuance of winds, all point to this. We have already a system of fissures within a third of a mile of us; and a continued augmentation of their number must soon place us in a centre of commotion. It is pleasant by one’s ice-experience to anticipate the state of things: and now that the battle is coming on again, I make a record of these reasoned expectations,to show you hereafter how well I am reasoning.
“One thing more: the days have stolen upon us—longer, and longer, and longer, until now the long twilight lets me read on deck as late as eightP.M.In fact, the sun’s greatest depression below the horizon is now 18°, the limit of theoretical twilight.
“March26, Wednesday. The same peculiar crisping or crackling sound, which I noted on the 2d of February, was heard this morning in every direction. This sound, as the ‘noise accompanying the aurora,’ has been attributed by Wrangell and others, ourselves among the rest, to changes of atmospheric temperature acting upon the crust of the snow. We heard it most distinctly between seven and eightA.M., when the solar ray should begin to affect the snow. The mercury stood at -27° at five, rising to -19° by nineA.M., and attaining a maximum of -2° by noonday. But this is not to be regarded as indicating the temperature of the snow surface. The snow, when horizontal, according to all my observations, differs but little in temperature from the atmosphere,owing probably to its oblique reception of the solar ray; while the snow-coverings of the hummocks and angular floe-tables, which receive the rays at right angles, show by repeated trials a marked augmentation. I venture, therefore, to refer this peculiar crisping sound to the unequal contraction and dilatation of these unequally presenting surfaces, not to a sudden change of atmospheric temperature acting upon the snow.
“To-day we saw a couple of icebergs looking up in the far south.
“March27, Thursday. The sun shone out, but not as yesterday. The little cirrus clouds interfere with its brightness, and affect very perceptibly its warmth. To the eye, however, the day is undimmed.
“The wind, which we watch closely as the index of our ice-changes, our leading variety, came out at seven in the evening from the northward; and with it came a rise of black frost-smoke to the south, showing that the old ice-opening had gaped again. I had started before this at half past five, with old Blinn, my faithful satellite, for abright plain, glittering in the low sunshine some three miles to the west, a new direction. We did not get back till eight.
“Let me make a picture for you without a jot of fancy about it, and you may get H. to put it into colors if he can. The sun was low, very low; and his long, slanting beams, of curious indescribable purple, fell upon old Blinn and myself as we sat on a crag of ice which overhung the sea. The chasm was perhaps a mile wide, and the opposite ice-shores were so painted by the glories of the sunshine, that they appeared like streaks of flame, licking continuous water. The place to which we had worked ourselves had been subjected to forces which no one could realize, so chaotic, and enormous, and incomprehensible were they. A line of old floe, eight feet thick and four miles long, had been powdered into a pedragal of crushed sugar, rising up in great efflorescing knobs fifteen and twenty feet high; and from amid these, like crystal rocks from the foam of a cataract, came transparent tables of blue ice, floating, as it were, on unsubstantial whiteness. Some of these blocks measured eightfeet in thickness by twenty-two long, and of indeterminate depth, one side being obliquely buried in the mass. On one of these tables, that stretched out like a glass spear-point, directly over the water, were straddled your brother and his companion. Underneath us the narwhals were passing almost within pole-reach. As they rolled over, much after the fashion of our own porpoises, I could see the markings of their backs, and the great suction of their jaws throwing the water into eddies. Seal, breast-high, were treading water with their horizontal tails, and the white whale was blowing purple sprays into the palpable sunshine.
“March23, Friday. I visited the western opening of yesterday. The sea has dwindled to a narrow lane, flanked by the heavy hummocks, whose rupture formed the sides. Although the aperture was so distant yesterday that I could barely see the further banks, here and there dotting the horizon, it has now closed with such nice adaptation of its line of fracture, that, but for a few yards of lateral deviation, this ‘yesternight sea’ would be nothing but acrack in the ice-field. The area of filmy ice that was between the edges of the lead had been thrust under the floe, thus aiding the process of re-cementation. These ice-actions are very complicated and various.
“Retracing my steps by a long circuit to the southward, I came to a spot where, without any apparent axis of fracture (chasm), the ice presented all the phenomena of table-hummocks. It was very old and thick, at least nine feet in solid depth. About a little circle of a hundred yards diameter, it had been thrown up into variously-presenting surfaces, with a marked bearing toward a focus of greatest energy and accumulation, presenting an appearance almost eruptive. The crushed fragments exuding and falling over, and rolling down toward the level ice, so as to cover it for feet in depth with powdery, granulated rubbish!”
CHAPTER XVII
M
Y journal for the closing days of March and the early one of April is full of varying drifts and alternating temperatures. Still, it seemed as if, by some gradual though scarcely explicable process, the work of our extrication was going on. Sometimes the wind would come to us from the southeast—the breaking-up wind as we called it, because as it subsided the reaction of the floes developed itself in fissures; but more frequently from the north, expediting our course to a more genial latitude. The floes themselves were, however, much more massive and gnarled than any we had seen before: every party that left the vessel for an ice-tramp came back with exaggerated impressions of the mighty energies that had hurled them together. We felt that it would have been impossible for any organizedstructure of wood and metal to resist such Maelstroms of solid ice as had left these memorials around us, and looked forward with scarcely pleasurable anticipations to the equivalent forces that might be required to obliterate them. Some extracts from my journal may show how far other causes were in the mean time operating our release.
“April7, Monday. For the last fortnight the ice has been perceptibly moist at the surface. The open crack near our brig to the south has now been closed for nearly a fortnight; yet the snow which covers it is quite slushy. The trodden paths around our ship are in muddy pulp, adhering to the boots. All this can hardly be the direct influence of the sun upon the surface; for the thermometer seldom exceeds +16°, and is more generally below +10° at noonday. Yet this temperature has an evident influence upon the status of the ice, increasing its permeability, and permitting some changes analogous to thawing, but which I can not explain. May it be that the crystalline structure of the ice is undergoing some modification, that increases its capillarity,or develops an action like the endosmose and exosmose!
“It is a mere puzzle, of course, for we have not data enough to make it a question. Yet there is another like it that I can not help setting down. Can it be that our thermometers, so notorious in this Polar region for their imperfect coincidence with ‘sensations of cold,’ are equally fallacious as measures of absolute increments or decrements of sensible caloric? It will not do, I suppose, to admit such a supposition; yet the marvels which come constantly before me may almost justify it. You know that I am no heat-maker. Well, my winter trials, as you may imagine, have not increased my vital energies. Suppose me, then, as you knew me when I left New York. For the past week I have almost lived in the open air—genial, soft, bland, and to sensation just cool enough to be pleasantly tonic. I walk moderately, and am in comfortable, glowing warmth. I walk over the hummocks or ice floes, and am oppressed with perspiration and lassitude. This at a temperature of zero in the shade, and +11° in the sun! Ican not realize it. To-day the thermometer gave +10° in the shade of the ship, obviously affected not a little by radiation, +34° in the sun over the ship’s painted side, +13° by my own observation of an instrument suspended at a distance from the ship, and under the same circumstances in the shade,zero! Yet the day seemed spring-like and delicious. The early breezes (8A.M.) from the southeast came with a sensation of reviving coolness, although to their warmth we perhaps owed our sensations of pleasant heat. While I am writing, the skaters come in to say that ‘it is too warm to skate:’ yet the sun is low, and my shade thermometer gives some ten degrees below the point of freezing.
“I have often alluded to this discrepancy between our feelings and the recorded temperature. I have read of the same thing in the Arctic voyages, with a reference to contrast for the explanation. But I never until to-day realized so fully that we were warmed from within by a mysterious, and, I must believe, unknown system of functional compensation. I wish Liebig could make aPolar voyage! As you feel open-windowed at the first breaking-in day of spring, with your thermometers at vernal 60°, so feel I with the thermometer at zero!
“April10, Thursday, 2P.M.The south-easter blows on with steady endurance. It is now east by south; a snow-storm reminding me of home, so soft and flaky, drifting every where; and the thermometer rising steadily to +32° at noonday. Once more at the freezing point! it seems hard to realize. The decks are wet, the housing dripping, the snow adhesive and slushy.
“9P.M.The gale continues. Our thermometer outside at a maximum of +33°. Every thing wet, warm, and summer-like.
“I have a story to tell—a foolish adventure; but I was ennuied past all bearing. Walking the deck, beast-like, in our damp cage, it occurred to me that I would climb the rigging. Climb the rigging I did; and, by a glimpse between the long wreaths of drift, saw Water! The temptation was a sore one: I yielded to it, came down from my perch, donned my seal-skin, shouldered my carbine, and walked off with my face towardthe wonder. None of the crew would accompany me: my mess-mates did not volunteer: so I was alone.
“It was a walk to be remembered. Snow up to the neck; drift moist and blinding; and a gale, luckily not a cold one, in my face. But after a mile of such promenading as no other region can boast of, I reached the water at last. Water it was; dark, surging water; no pellicles of glazing ice; no sludgy streams of pancake; but the liquid element itself, such as we saw last summer, and you see every day, stretching out as broad as the Delaware, and in contrast with the snow at its margin as black as Styx.
“I took a good look at it, and turned to come back. The wind had wiped out my footsteps: all within the horizon was a waste of sleet. I had neither compass nor signal pole to show me the way; but I kept the gale behind me, and waded onward. I do not know how far I might have traveled before reaching the vessel; but I had buffeted the elements quite long enough to content me, when I heard Captain Griffin hailing me through the drift. He had been uneasy atmy stay, and was out in search of me. We took a new departure together, were blown over a few times, and tumbled over, no matter how often; but we hit the ships to a notch.
“This crack is the old transverse one from northeast to southwest, off theRescue’sport beam. The gale, with such a temperature, must be achieving much upon the ice to the southward. It can hardly reach men so imbedded as we are; but it may so break up the southern edge of the pack as to give us a ready drift, should we have a favoring wind. As it is, we are undoubtedly flicking it to the north again.
“April15. The sun perceptibly warmer, and the indications of thaw unequivocal. To guard as far as we can against the chance of the two vessels being separated among the floes when the general break-up comes, we began a trench to-day from one to the other. It goes down through the snow to the solid ice; and we are going to strew rock-salt in it, remembering that even a slight scratch on the surface will determine the line of fracture. We will try it at any rate, even across the entire floe to the present seatof hummocking at the open water, though it is a distance of nearly or quite two miles. We are looking to our approaching disruption with absorbing interest; and whether our theories are good or bad, they give us something to think and talk about. Our ice-cutting machine belongs to the same family. We finished it to-day, and it will be tested to-morrow.
“The ice in the neighborhood of the fire-hole is wet and overflowed. It seems to be depressed below the water-level. The snow has piled up some seven or eight feet high on the vessel’s side, and this, with the radiating heat, may possibly explain this depression. But I am strongly inclined to believe in endosmotic actions in the ice.
“April16. To-day the salting continues. The men call it our spring-seed sowing. On board theRescue, a party are at work preparing for the return to her. The ice-cutting machine proves a failure.
“This afternoon a solitary snow-bunting was seen flitting around our vessel. The last time we saw this little animal was at Griffith’s Island, in the midst of the terriblestorm which we were sharing with our English brethren. Goodsir saw the same bird on the 13th, in latitude 54°; but he was not at Winter Island till the 27th. Since then, the little family have made their migratory journey, and are now on their way again to these Polar seas. They breed seldom or never south of 62°, and linger late among the Northern snows. This poor little wanderer was an estray from his fellows. He paused at the treasures which surrounded our ship, refreshed himself from our dirt pile, and then flew away again on his weary journey.
“April17. A memorable day. We put out our cabin lamps, and are henceforward content with daylight, like the rest of the world. Our latitude is 69° 52'; our longitude, 63° 03'.
“This afternoon, while walking deck, this endless deck, with Murdaugh, we discovered a bear walking tranquilly alongside, nearly within gunshot. We have lost so many opportunities by the bustle and ignorance of a universal chase, that I crawled out to attack him alone. To my sorrow, the brute,who had been gazing at the ship dog-fashion and curious, turned tail. He was out of range for my carbine, but I gave him the ball as he ran in his right hind-quarter. He fell at once, and I thought him secure; but rising instantly, he turned upon his wounded haunch, and, very much as a dog does at a bee-sting, bit spasmodically at the wound. For a little while he spun round, biting the bloody spot with a short, probing nip; and then, before I could reload my piece, started off at a limping but rapid gait. I mention this movement on account of the very curious fact which follows. The animal had found the ball, seized it between the incisors, andextracted it. The bullet is now in my possession, distinctly marked by his teeth.
“After a very tedious and harassing pursuit, I came up to him at the young ice. He stood upon the brink of the lead. I was within long shot, and about to make preparations for a more deliberate and certain aim, when he took to the water, and then to the opposite young ice, bleeding and dropping every few yards.
“Joined by Daly, a bold, bull-headedIrishman, I crossed by a circuitous channel, and then took to the young ice myself, and tried to run him down. It was very exciting; and I fear I was not as prudent as I ought to have been; for a dense fog had gathered around us, and the young floe, level as the sea which it covered, was but two nights old. The bear fell several times; and at last, poor fellow, dragged himself by his fore feet, trailing his hind quarters over the incrusted snow, so as to leave a long black imprint stained by blood.
“The fog was getting more and more dense, and the frail ice—we were now walking, as it were, over the sea itself—bent under us so much, that I, like a prudent man, ordered a return. This chase cost us at least ten miles of journey, part of it at an Indian trot. We dripped like men in a steam bath.
“April20, Sunday. Daly started with a company of sailors after the wounded bear. They walked, by their own account, six miles before they found him. He was unable to retreat—stood at bay; and the fools were so scared at his ‘growlings’ and his 'bloodytongue,' that they returned without daring to attack him.
“April21, Monday. I have more than common cause for thankfulness. A mere accident kept me from starting last night to secure our bear. Had I done so, I would probably have spared you reading more of my journal. The ice over which we traveled so carelessly on Saturday has become, by a sudden movement, a mass of floating rubbish. An open river, broader than the Delaware, is now between the old ice and the nearest part of the new, over which I walked on the 19th more than three miles.
“In the walk of this morning, which startled me with the change, I saw for the first time a seal upon the ice. This looks very summer-like. He was not accessible to our guns. To-day, for the first time too, the gulls were flying over the renovated water. Coming back we saw fresh bear tracks. How wonderful is the adaptation which enables a quadruped, to us associated inseparably with a land existence, thus to inhabit an ice-covered ocean. We are at least eightymiles from the nearest land, Cape Kater; and channels innumerable must intervene between us and terra firma. Yet this majestic animal, dependent upon his own predatory resources alone, and, defying cold as well as hunger, guided by a superb instinct, confides himself to these solitary, unstable ice-fields.
“Parry, in his adventurous Polar effort, found these animals at the most northern limit of recorded observation. Wrangell had them as companions on his first Asiatic journey over the Polar ocean. Navigators have found them also floating upon berg and floe far out in open sea; and here we have them in a region some seventy miles from the nearest stable ice. They have seldom, or, as far as my readings go, never—if we except Parry’s Spitzbergen experience—been seen so far from land. In the great majority of cases, they seem to have been accidentally caught and carried adrift on disengaged ice-floes. In this way they travel to Iceland; and it may have been so perhaps with the Spitzbergen instances. Others have been reported thirty miles from shorein this bay. I myself noticed them fifty miles from the Greenland coast last July.
“There is something very grand about this tawny savage; never leaving this utter destitution, this frigid inhospitableness—coupling in May, and bringing forth in Christmas time—a gestation carried on all of it below zero, more than half of it in Arctic darkness—living in perpetual snow, and dependent for life upon a never-ending activity—using the frozen water as a raft to traverse the open seas, that the waterunfrozenmay yield him the means of life. No time for hibernation has this Polar tiger: his life is one great winter.”
CHAPTER XVIII
"A
PRIL22. The past week has been one of dismantling, rubbish-creating, ship-cleaning torment. First, bull’s-eyes were inserted in the deck; and the black felt housing, so comfortable in the winter darkness, but that now shut out the sunlight like a great pall, was triced up fore and aft, remaining only amidships. Next, theRescue, with her new bowsprit in, received her crew and officers. They slept on board last night for the first time, but still walk over the ice to their meals.
“When I saw the little brig through the darkness, on the afternoon of the 13th of January, moving slowly past us and losing herself in the gloom, while sounds like artillery mingled with the shrieking, howling, and crashing of the ice, as the great ridges rose and fell—and when the India-rubber boat was launched, and the men took theirknapsacks, and old Brooks called out to us to get out of the way of the rigging, believing the brig about to topple over—I did not think there would be a spring-time for theRescue.
“We are now in the midst of those intestine changes which characterize the house-cleanings at home. The disgusting lamps have done smoking, the hatches are allowed to look out at the sun, and the galley, with its perpetual odors, is banished to the hurricane-house on deck. That peculiar interspace between the coal and the ‘purser’s slops,’ so dark and full of head-bumping beams, exults in the full glare of day. What a wonderful hole we have been existing in! It, the half-deck, as it is called on board ship, is three feet six inches high, by fourteen feet long and seventeen broad. On it, forgetful of precedence and rank, our bedding separated from the loose planking by a canvas cot frame, slept Murdaugh, Vreeland, Brooks, De Haven, two cooks, and Dr. Kane. The last-named came on board last, and found, though he is not a very large man, a sufficiently narrow kennelbetween the companion-ladder and the dinner-table. Our clothing, as it now welcomed the sun, was black with lamp-soot; the beams above fringed, and festooned, and wreathed with the same. My bed-coverings, frozen over the feet in the winter, are bathed with inky water. But all this is to be removed to-day; and we go back to the luxuries of bunks, and daylight, and a long breath.
“The day was bright and sunny. I walked out to the open water. Marks of commotion, hummock ridges, and chasms. A new feature was the thaw. Heretofore I could stand upon the brink of the cleanly-separated fissures, and look down upon the bleak water as securely as from a quartz rock. To-day every thing around (pshaw! the snow and ice, I mean; we have nothingshere) was wet and crumbling. The snow covered deceitfully some very dangerous cracks: in one of these I sunk neck deep. My carbine caught across it, and Holmes pulled me out.
“We are very anxious to obtain fresh meat for the invalids. Indeed, our longingfor something fresh is itself a disease. To-day a tantalizing seal kept me prostrate upon the slushy ice for an hour and a half. In spite of all my seal craft, the prime secret of which is patience, I could not draw him into gunshot. With the characteristic curiosity of his tribe, the poor animal would rise breast high to inspect my fur cap. Presently a whale spouted, and off he went.
“The decks are clear! the barrels stowed away below, the fore-peak restored, the old bunks reoccupied, and my mess-mates snoozing away as in old times, a fire burning in the stove, and lard lamps flaming away vigorously upon my paper. Daylight still finds its way down the hatch, although it is eleven o’clock.
“April24, Thursday. The snow falls in loose, flaky, home feathers. The decks are wet, and the misty air has the peculiar ground-glass translucency which I noticed last summer. When I came up before breakfast to look around, the thermometer gave +32°, the familiar temperature of old times: to me it was warm and sultry.
“The season of summer, if not now uponus, is close at hand. It seems but yesterday that we hailed the dawning day and burned our fingers in the frozen mercury; now we have a summer snow-storm at 32°.
“This little table will show you how stealthily and how rapidly summer has trampled down winter:
Mean temperature for week ending March 14th, -23° 94'.Mean temperature for week ending March 21st, -9° 07'; gain, 14° 87'.Mean temperature for week ending March 28th, -16° 90'; loss, 7° 83'.Mean temperature for week ending April 4th, -4° 31'; gain, 12° 39'.Mean temperature for week ending April 11th, +8° 59'; gain, 12° 90'.Mean temperature for week ending April 18th, +9° 55'; gain, 0° 55'.Mean temperature for five days ending April 23d, +14° 56'; gain, 5° 01'.
Mean temperature for week ending March 14th, -23° 94'.
Mean temperature for week ending March 21st, -9° 07'; gain, 14° 87'.
Mean temperature for week ending March 28th, -16° 90'; loss, 7° 83'.
Mean temperature for week ending April 4th, -4° 31'; gain, 12° 39'.
Mean temperature for week ending April 11th, +8° 59'; gain, 12° 90'.
Mean temperature for week ending April 18th, +9° 55'; gain, 0° 55'.
Mean temperature for five days ending April 23d, +14° 56'; gain, 5° 01'.
“Changes show themselves in the configuration of the snow surfaces. The hummocks seem already to have diminished by evaporation. They are less angular, and blend in rounder hues with the snow drifts. Night has gone. I see still at midnight thecircumpolar stars, and Jupiter, in his splendor, on the eastern sky; but I can read at midnight.
“April25, Friday. Walked to open water to the northeast. The snow is melted through the crust. I sink up to my knees. Saw the tracks of a fox, very recent. The little fellow had come from the direction of the poor wounded bear, now cut off from us by the broken ice, swimming the lead at its narrowest crossing, some fifteen paces. So long as his patron could have supplied him with food, the little parasite would not have left him. It may be that the bear has perished from inability to hunt for both.
“Saw a right whale! Saw also a large flock of geese at 9A.M., winging their way to the northward, and flying very low. They were so irregular in their order of flight, that I would have taken them for ducks—theSomateria; but my mess-mates say geese.
“April26, Saturday. One of the changes which we must expect has brought back to us comparative winter. Yesterday gave us a noonday and morning temperature of+28°. It is now (10P.M.) -9°. It was -7° at noonday, with a bright, clear sunshine. The change is due to a northerly wind. It has blown steadily throughout the day from northwest by north. We hope much from it in the way of drift. Our latitude was 69° 40′ 42″ N.; our longitude, 63° 08′ 46″ W.
“The wind change has given us no new ruptures. Indeed, it seems to have shut up the environing ‘leads’ around us. This may be a good preface to a squeeze; for I can see no water from the mast-head.
“The stars at midnight remind me of our Lancaster Sound noondays. The peculiar zone of fairly blended light, stretching over an amplitude of some seventy degrees—the colors red, Indian red, Italian pink, with the yellows; and then a light cobalt, gradually deepening into intense indigo as it reaches the northern horizon.
“April27, Sunday. The cold increases, and our northwest wind continues. The day’s observation gives us 69° 35′ 50", so that we still go south encouragingly, though slowly. This big floe is so solid, that someof us are beginning to fear it may resist the pressure, and not break up in the bay; leaving us to the thaws of summer and the stormy winds of September before our imprisonment ceases. The apprehension has no mirth in it.
“Walked to the open water to the northward, nearly ahead of us. The leads were so frozen over as to bear me. Looking across the level, letting my eyes wander from tussock to tussock of entangled floe-ice, as they had grouped themselves in freezing, I heard the blowing of a narwhal, followed by the peculiar swash of squeezing ice. A short walk showed me some six or eight conical elevations, forced upward upon the recently-formed ice, evidently by a force protruding from beneath. While looking at these, the sounds, though seemingly further off, increased to such a degree that I was convinced the ice was in action, and started off to double a cape of hummocks and see the commotion. Our steward, Morton, a shrewd, observant fellow, who was with me, suddenly called out, ‘Look here, sir—here!’
“Each of these little cones was steaminglike the salices or mud-volcanoes of Mexico, the broken ice on top vibrating, and every now and then tumbling, as if by some pulsatory movement below. Presently, in one concerted diapason, a group of narwhals, imprisoned by the congelation of the opening,[I]spouted their release, scattering spray and snow in every direction. I was not more than three yards from the nearest cone; yet I could see nothing of the animal except this jet.
[I]I found afterward from the Danes that they assemble in this way when extensive areas are frozen. Mr. Moldrup, of Godhaven, mentions fifty being killed at one of these congregations.
[I]I found afterward from the Danes that they assemble in this way when extensive areas are frozen. Mr. Moldrup, of Godhaven, mentions fifty being killed at one of these congregations.
“The noise was so great that I could hardly make the steward hear me. It had, moreover, more of voice mingled with its sibilant ‘blow’ than I had ever heard—a distinct and somewhat metallic tone, thrown out impulsively, and yet with the crescendo and diminuendo of an expiration. According to the views of some systematic naturalists, the cetacea have, strictly speaking, no voice. This opinion admits of much modification. The white whale in Wellington Sound whistled while submerged and swimmingunder our brig; and, in the present singular case, the ejaculatory character of the tone sounded like a gigantic bark.[J]
[J]On this occasion, I heard the white whale singing under water—a peculiar note between the whistle and the Tyrolean yodel. Our men compared it to the Jew’s-harp. Once, off Cape James, it was so loud that we heard it in the cabin, as if proceeding from the cable-tier. I have often, in my walks over the ice-openings, been startled by the resemblance between the sudden spout of a near narwhal and the bark of an animal.
[J]On this occasion, I heard the white whale singing under water—a peculiar note between the whistle and the Tyrolean yodel. Our men compared it to the Jew’s-harp. Once, off Cape James, it was so loud that we heard it in the cabin, as if proceeding from the cable-tier. I have often, in my walks over the ice-openings, been startled by the resemblance between the sudden spout of a near narwhal and the bark of an animal.
“May1, Thursday. A little before ten this morning, the sun showed almost half its disk above the snow horizon, with his usual appanage of pearly opals and mellowed fire displayed about the southern heavens. At noon I walked out in the full glare, twenty-five degrees above the freezing-point on my face, and about as many below it on my back—a May-day frolic in the snow! The crisp covering, over which I used to skim along a few weeks ago, broke through with me at every step. It was just strong enough to tantalize and deceive. Never, in the warmest days of summer harvest-time, have I felt the heat so much as on this Arctic May-day; and yet no life, no organization carried me back to the spring-time of reviving nature.Even the tinnitus of the idle ear, that inner droning that sings to you in the silent sunshine at home, was wanting. In fact, the silentness was so complete, and the reflection from the snow so excessive, though I had a green rag over my face, that when I got far away, and out of sight of every thing but the interminable ice, it made me feel as if the world I left you in and the world about me were not exactly parts of the same planet.
“And so I traveled back to my sick men. God bless us! here are old Blinn, and Carter, and Wilson, all on my list for fainting spells: the same scurvy syncope our officers complain of. Captain Griffin fainted dead away, and Lovell complains of strange feelings. We need fresh food sorely. I hardly think any organized expedition to these regions was ever so completely deprived of anti-scorbutic diet as we are at this time.
“Midnight. My old scurvy symptoms, it may be, that keep me from sleeping. But I write by the light of the sun; and it really seems to me that there is a something about this persistent day antagonistic to sleep.The idea thrust itself upon me last summer. Thinking the fact over afterward, I referred it to habit, acting unphilosophically, as it is apt to do; and concluded that my sleeplessness was not connected directly with the augmented or continued light. But this is not so. I neither get to sleep so easily nor sleep as long, nor, indeed, do I seem to need the same quantity of sleep as when we had the alternation of light and darkness. On the other hand, I think our long Arctic night solicited a more than common ration of the same restorative blessing, though my journal has shown you that our waking energies during that period were not so heavily taxed as to require more than their usual intermission."
The day after this entry superadded the visitation of snow blindness to our trials. Four of the party were attacked severely, myself among the rest; so severely, indeed, as to make it impossible for me to write, and, what was much more important in the estimation of our scurvy patients, impossible for me to hunt. The brief notes which were made in my journal by the kindness of a brother officerspeak of our sensible approach toward a final disengagement from the ice-field. Though the winds were generally from the southwest, our drift tended very plainly to the south: in one day, we reduced our latitude eighteen miles, passing at the same time nearly a degree of longitude, twenty-two miles to the east. The ice, too, was becoming more infiltrated, and the heavy snow-banks that surrounded our vessel were saturated with water. Spring was doing its office.
CUTTING OUT, MAY, 1851.
CHAPTER XIX
"O
N the 11th, I was well enough, or imprudent enough, to attempt a seal hunt. Our mean temperature had sunk to 19° 5\ and the snow-crust was strong enough to bear. A gale had swept away the loose, fleecy drifts of the fortnight before, exposing the familiar surface of the older snow. I walked over it as I did in April.
“Reaching the seat of the open water tothe northward, I found it closed by young ice, an extensive surface frail and unsafe. About a quarter of a mile from the edge of the old floe, almost in the centre of this recent lead, was a seal. The temptations of the flesh were too much for me: I ventured the ice, crawled on my belly, and reached long-shot distance.
“The animal thus laboriously stalked was large; a hirsute, bearded fellow, with the true plantigrade countenance. All his senses were devoted to enjoyment: he wallowed in the sludge, stretched out in the sunshine, played with his flippers, lying on his back, much as a heavy horse does in a skin-loosening roll. I rose to fire—and down he went. An unseen hole had received him: a lesson for future occasions. This hole was critically circular, beveled from the under surface, and symmetrically embanked round with the pulpacious material which he had excavated from the ice.
“Crawling back less actively than I had approached, my carbine arm broke through, carrying my gun and it up to the shoulder. It was very well, all things considered, thatmy body did not follow; for I was on a very rotten shell, and nearly two miles from the brigs, alone.
“Wednesday, 12. For the last fortnight, our ice-saw, under Murdaugh’s supervision, has been hard at work. To-day we have a trench opened to our gangway.
“The ice shows the advancing season. It is no longer splintery and quartz-like, spawling off under the axe in dangerous little chips; but sodden, infiltrated ice, such as we see in our ice-houses. The water has got into its centre, and the crowbars, after the sawing out, break it readily up for hauling upon the field. The process is this: First, we cut two parallel tracks, four feet asunder, through six and five feet ice, with a ten-foot saw; then lozenged diagonals; then straps (ropes) are passed around the fragments, and a block and line,nauticejigger, or watch tackle, made fast to the bowsprit, hauls the lumps upon the floe, where they are broken up by the ice bars. A formidable barricade of dirty ice, about the size and shape of gneiss building stones, is already inclosing our vessel. Many a poor fellow hashad an involuntary slide-bath into the freezing mixture alongside; but in most cases without unpleasant consequences."
I remember only one serious exception. It was that of our heroine of the Thespian corps, Jim Smith. The immediate result for him was an attack of scurvy, so marked, yet so blended with the active symptoms belonging to arthritic disease, as to incline me to an opinion for the time that there may be such a thing as acute scurvy, or a sudden inflammatory sthenic action, whose characteristics are scorbutic. He had immediately stitch, dyspnœa, pains in the back and joints, and in the alveolar and extensor muscles, just as in his previous attacks of scurvy, but without fever. The day after, he was so distressed by his stitch, that I feared pleuritis. On looking at his shins, I found large purpuric blotches, which were not there a week before. I commenced the anti-scorbutic tyranny at once; and the next morning his gums bled freely, his pains left him, and he took his place again at the ice-saw.
“Several laridæ flew about us: I heard them to-day for the second time—pleasanttones, with all their discord. Do you remember the skylark’s song, ‘a dropping from the sky,’ in the ‘Ancient Mariner’? I thought of it this morning when the gulls screeched over our motionless brig.
“May18, Sunday. First, of late, in my daily records is this glorious wind, still from the northwest, fresh and steady. It is, as is every thing else for that matter, a Godsend. To-day’s observation places us but thirty-two miles from Cape Searle, and seventy from Cape Walsingham, the abutting gates of Davis' Straits, where the channel is at its narrowest, and where our imprisonment ought to end.
“This welcome wind-visitor is still freshening: it is not perpetrating, I hope, an extra brilliancy before itscongé.
“I found to-day a rough caricature drawing by one of the men: some of the mess call it a portrait of myself. By-the-way, suppose I tell you of my latest rig? Here it is. A long musket on shoulder; a bear-knife in the leg of the left boot; a rim of wolf-skin around my head, leaving the bare scalp with its ‘hairs’ open to the breeze; rough Guernseyfrock, overlined by a red flannel shirt, in honor of the day on which thou shalt do no labor; legs in sailor pants of pilot cloth, slop-shop cut; feet in seal-hide socks or buskins, of Esquimaux fabric and Esquimaux smell; a pair of crimson woolen mittens, which commenced their career as a neck comforter; and a little green rag, the snow veil, fluttering over a weather-beaten face: place all this, for want of a better lay figure, on your brother of the Arctic squadron.