DR. KANE IN ARCTIC RIG.
“With a delicacy which may possibly do me discredit, I have never before alluded to the garniture of my outer man. I may as well tell the truth at once. We are an uncouth, snobby, and withal, shabby-looking set of varlets.L’illustreBertrand would be a Beau Brummel alongside of us. We are shabby, because we have worn out allour flimsy wardrobes, and have of late resorted to domestic tailorization. We are snobby, because our advance in the new art does not yet extend to the picturesque or well-fitting. I wish some of my soda-water-in-the-morning club friends could see me perspiring over a pair of pants, dorcassing a defunct sock. We do our own sewing, clothing ourselves cap-à-pie; and it astonishes me, looking back upon my dark period of previous ignorance, to feel how much I have learned. I wonder whether your friend the Philadelphia D’Orsay knows how to adjust with a ruler and a lump of soap the seat of a pair of breeches?
“Why, I have even made discoveries in—I forget the Greek word for it—the art which made George the Fourth so famous. Thus a method, adopted by our mess, of cutting five pairs of stockings out of one hammock blanket—a thing hitherto deemed impossible—is altogether my own. In the abstract or speculative part of the profession, I claim to be the first who has reduced all vestiture to a primitive form—an integral particle, as it were. I can’t dwell on thismatter here: it might, perhaps, be out of place; perhaps, too, attributed in some degree to that personal vanity almost inseparable from invention. I will tell you, however, that this discovered type, this radical nucleus, is the ‘bag.’ Thus a bag, or a couple of parallelogramic planes sewed together, makes the covering of the trunk. Similar bags of scarcely varied proportion cover the arms; ditto the legs; ditto the hands; ditto the head: thus going on, bags, bags, bags, even to the fingers; a cytoblastic operation, having interesting analogies with the mycelium of the fungus or the saccine vegetation of the confervas.
“All this is a digression, perhaps; yet I am not the first traveler whose breeches have figured in his diary of wonders: you remember the geometrical artist of Laputa who re-enforced the wardrobe of Mr. Gulliver. But to return to less ambitious topics. The birds, in spite of the increasing wind, fly over in numbers, all seeking the mysterious north. What is there at this unreached pole to attract and sustain such hordes of migratory life? Since the day before yesterday,the 16th, we can not be on deck at any hour, night or day—they are one now—without seeing small bodies, rather groups than flocks, on their way to the unknown feeding or breeding grounds. Toward the west the field of a telescope is constantly crossed by these detachments. The ducks are now scarce: in fact, they have been few from the beginning. Geese are seen only in the forenoon and early morning. The guillemots, also, are not so numerous as they were two days ago; but from to-day we date the reappearance of the little auk. This delicious little pilgrim is now on his way to his far north breeding grounds. Toward the open lead the groups fly low, sometimes doubtless pausing to refresh. At the water’s edge I shot five, the first game of the season; and most valuable they were to our scurvy men. If this snow blindness permits me, I hope to-morrow to prove myself a more lucky sportsman.
“May19, Monday. Jim Smith, little Jim Smith, reported ‘Land.’ We have become so accustomed to this great sameness of snow, that it was hard to realize at firstthe magnitude of our drift. Our last land was the spectral elevation upreared in the sunset sky of the 9th of February. The land itself must have been eighty miles off. Our drift, although now not absolutely fixed by observation, has probably carried us to within forty miles, perhaps thirty, of Cape Searle. Land it certainly is, shadowy, high, snow-covered, and strange. It is ninety-nine days since we looked at the refracted tops of the Lancaster Bay headlands, our last land.
“May20, Tuesday. So snow-blind that I can barely see to write. A gauzy film floats between me and every thing else. I have been walking twelve miles upon the ice. No sun, but a peculiar misty, opalescent glare. I bagged thirty-three auks; but my snow-blindness avenges them.”
For some days after this entry my snow-blindness unfitted me for active duty. Several of the officers and men shared the visitation, Captain De Haven more severely than any of us. My next quotation from my journal dates of the 24th.
“May24, Saturday. The ship showssigns of change, grating a little in her icy cradle, and rising at least nine inches forward. The work of removing the ice goes on painfully, but constantly. The blocks are now hoisted with winch and capstan by a purchase from the fore-yard; the saw, of course, pioneering. The blocks when taken out resemble great break-water stones, measuring sometimes eight by six feet.
“Thus far, by persevering labor, we have cut a four-feet wide trench to our starboard gangway, a little vacant pool of six yards by three in our bows, and a second trench now reaching amidships of our fore-chains.
“The difference of level between the deck at our bows and stern is still five feet three inches. It is proposed to launch the brig, as it were, from her ice-ways. To this purpose a screw jack is to be applied aft, and strong purchases on the ice ahead. The experiment will take place this afternoon. We have now been five months and a half, since the seventh of December, living on an inclined plane of about one foot in sixteen.
“10P.M.The effort failed, as no doubt it ought to have done: we must wait for thegreat break-up to give us an even keel. From the mast-head we can see encroachments all around. The plains, over which I chased the bear and shot at auks, are now water. The floe is reduced to its old winter dimensions, three miles in one diameter, five in the other. We have not yet reached the narrow passage; and the wind, now from the southward, seems to be holding us back. Strange as it sounds, we are in hopes of a break-up at Cape Walsingham.
“May25, Sunday Howling a perfect gale; drift impenetrable. By some providential interference the wind returned last night to its old quarter, the northwest, a direction corresponding with the trend of the shore. It is undoubtedly driving us fast to the southward, and is, of all quarters, that most favorable to a passage without disruption. Once past Cape Walsingham, the expansion of the bay is sudden and extensive. If, then, our floe maintains its integrity through the strait, the relief from pressure may allow us to continue our drifting journey. So at least we argue.
“And just so, it may be, others have arguedbefore us about chances of escape that never came: there is a cycle even in the history of adventure. It makes me sad sometimes when I think of the fruitless labors of the men who in the very olden times harassed themselves with these perplexing seas. There have been Sir John Franklins before, and searchers too, who in searching shared the fate of those they sought after. It is good food for thought here, while I am of and among them, to recall the heart-burnings and the failures, the famishings and the freezings, the silent, unrecorded transits of ‘yeArctic voyageres.’
“Mount Raleigh, named by sturdy old John Davis ‘a brave mount, the cliffes whereof were as orient as golde,’ shows itself still, not so glittering as he saw it two hundred and sixty-five years ago, but a ‘brave mount’ notwithstanding. No Christian eyes have ever gazed in May time on its ice-defended slope, except our own. Yet there it stands, as imperishable as the name it bears.
“I could fill my journal with the little histories of this very shore. The Cape of God’sMercy is ahead of us to the west, as it was ahead of the man who named it. The Meta Incognita, further on, is still as unknown as in the days of Frobisher. We have passed, by the inevitable coercion of ice, from the highest regions of Arctic exploration, the lands of Parry, and Ross, and Franklin, to the lowest, the seats of the early search for Cathay, the lands of Cabot, and Davis, and Baffin, the graves of Cortereal, and Gilbert, and Hudson—all seekers after shadows. Men still seek Cathay."
CHAPTER XX
"T
HE storm broke in the early morning hours. We have drifted more than sixteen miles since Saturday. The true bearing of the prominent cape we supposed to be Cape Walsingham was found by solar distance to be S. 63° W.; while our observed position, by meridian altitude and chronometers, placed us but four miles north of Exeter Bay. Either, then, the protruding cape is not Walsingham, or our chronometers are at fault. This latter is probably the case; for if the coast line be correctly laid down on the charts, the true bearing cited above, projected from our present parallel of latitude, would place us thirty-six miles from the cape. More likely this than so near Exeter.
“Our latitude is about 66° 51', a very few miles north of the projecting headland, the western Gades of our strait. The characterof the land is rugged and inhospitable. Ridges, offsetting from the higher range, project in spurs laterally, creviced and water-worn, but to seaward escarped and bluff. Some of these are mural and precipitous, of commanding height. The main range does not retire very far from the sea; it seems to follow the trend of the peninsula, and most probably on the Greenland shore is but the abutment of a plateau. Its culminating points are not numerous: the highest. Mount Raleigh, is, by my vague estimate, about fifteen hundred feet high.
“May27. The land is very near to the eye; but in these regions we have learned to distrust ocular measurements of distance. Though we see every wrinkle, even to the crows' feet, on the cheeks of Mount Raleigh, I remember last year, on the west coast of Greenland, we saw almost under our nose land that was thirty-five miles off. A party from theRescuemeasured a base upon the ice to-day, and attempted trigonometrical measurements with sextant angles. They make Cape Walsingham seven miles distant, and the height of the peak at thecape fifteen hundred feet. Our observation places us in latitude 66° 42′ W; our longitude by time sights, at 5h. 43m.P.M., was 60° 54'. According to the Admiralty chart, this plants us high and dry among the mountains of Cape Walsingham.
“It is evident that our rate of drift has increased. The northwest winds carried us forward eight miles a day while near the strait—a speed only equaled in a few of the early days of our escape from Lancaster Sound. What has become of all the ice that used to be intervening between us and the shore? At one time we had a distance of ninety miles: we are now close upon the coast. What has become of it? If it moves at the same rate as we do, why have we no squeezing and commotion at this narrow strait? Can it be that the ice to the westward of us has been more or less fixed to the land floe, and that we have been drifting down in a race-course, as it were, an ice-river whose banks were this same shore ice? Or is it, as Murdaugh suggests, that the inshore currents, more rapid, have carried down the inshore ice before us, thus wideningthe pathway for us? It is certainly very puzzling to find ourselves, at the narrowest passage, close into the land; and no commotion, no disturbance. On the contrary, from the mast-head abundant open water meets the eye; and could we escape from our imprisoning, but—thankfully I say it—protecting floe, we might soon be moving in open seas.
“May28, Wednesday. The fact of the day is the rotation of our floe. In spite of its irregular shape, it has rotated a complete circle within the past twenty-four hours. It is still turning at the same rate, wheeling us down along the inshore fields. TheRescue, early this morning, was between us and the land: the evening before, the same land was astern of us. Strange that no rupture takes place!
“May29, Thursday. I have just been witnessing one of the oddest of Arctic freaks. We were all of us engaged in tracing out the rugged indentations on Mount Raleigh, as the floe was rolling our vessels slowly along past Cape Walsingham, when, at five o’clock in the afternoon—the thermometerat 27°, the barometer at 30.31, and the atmosphere of the usual pearly opalescence—the captain, sweeping shoreward with his glass, saw a large pyramidal hummock, with a well-defined figure projecting in front of it, evidently animated and moving. Murdaugh, looking afterward, declared it ‘a man.’ I saw it next, a large human figure, covered with a cloak, and motionless. Murdaugh took the glass again, and holding it to his eye, suddenly exclaimed, ‘It moves:’ ‘it spreads out its arms;’ ‘it is a gigantic bird!’
“The hummock was within a mile of us. The words were hardly uttered before the object had disappeared, and the white snow was without a speck. A discussion followed. The size made us at once reject the bird idea: the shape, too, was that of a cloak-covered man; the motion, as if he had opened his mantle-covered arms. Convinced that it was a human being, an Esquimaux astray upon the ice, Murdaugh and myself started off, nearing the hummock with hearts full of expectation. The traces on the soft snow would soon solve the mystery, and removeour only doubt, whether the ‘Rescues’ might not be playing us a trick.
“Whatever it was, it either did not perceive us approaching, or was willing to avoid us; for it kept itself hidden behind a crag. Reaching, however, the spot where it had stood, we found traces, coprolitic and recent, of a bird; footprints, as a learned professor would have said, of certain familiar animal processes, exaggerated and dignified by those of refraction.
“On returning to the brig, the watchers told us that we had been ourselves curiously distorted; and that, when perched on the little icy crag we had gone to scrutinize, we lengthened vertically into gigantic forms. The position of the bird, probably a glaucous gull, had been breast toward the brig: a vertical enlargement, with the white body and moving wings, explained the phenomenon.
“The ‘Rescues’ had a very large bear hovering around them all this morning. At oneP.M.he came within reach of a carefully-prepared ambush, receiving four out of a half dozen balls, a number soon increased to nine. You may have some idea of the superbtenacity of life of this beast, when I tell you that he ran, thus perforated, with his skull broken and his shoulder shivered. He even attempted a charge, uttering a hissing sound, ejaculated by sudden impulse, like the ‘blowing of a whale,’ to use Captain Griffin’s comparison. He measured eight feet five inches, only three inches less than my own big trophy, which, with one exception, is the largest recorded in the stories of the Polar American hunt. What a glorious feed for the scurvy-stricken ships!
“To-day, for the first time, we had a tide, made evident by the changing phases of the shore. We made southing in the forenoon: now, at half past eightP.M., the alignment of the hills shows a northward drift. The ice is unchanged: our floe is rotating from west to south, against the sun, but not equably. We crossed the Arctic circle at some unknown hour this forenoon. To the eye every thing is as before; yet it cheats one into pleasant thoughts. I do not wish to see a midnight sun again.
“May30. The seal are out upon the ice, one of the most certain signs of summer.They are few In number, and very cautious. We notice that they invariably select an open floe for their hole, and that they never leave it more than a few lengths. Their alertness is probably due to their vigilant enemy, the bear. Sometimes you will see them frolicking together like a parcel of swimming school-boys; sometimes they are solitary, but keenly alive always to the enjoyment of the sunshine. I have often crawled within fair eye-shot, and, seated behind a concealing lump of ice, watched their movements.
“The first act of a seal, after emerging, is a careful survey of his limited horizon. For this purpose he rises on his fore flippers, and stretches his neck in a manner almost dog-like. This maneuver, even during apparently complete silence, is repeated every few minutes. He next commences with his hind or horizontal flippers and tail a most singular movement, allied to sweeping; brushing nervously, as if either to rub something from himself or from beneath him. Then comes a complete series of attitudes, stretching, collapsing, curling, wagging; then a luxurious,basking rest, with his face toward the sun and his tail to his hole. Presently he waddles off about two of his own awkward lengths from his retreat, and begins to roll over and over, pawing on the most ludicrous manner into the empty air, stretching and rubbing his glossy hide like a horse. He then recommences his vigil, basking in the sun with uneasy alertness for hours. At the slightest advance, up goes the prying head. One searching glance; and, wheeling on his tail as on a pivot, he is at his hole, and descends head foremost.
“I have watched so many without success, that to-night I determined to try the Esquimaux plan—patience and a snow-screen. This latter, the easier portion of the formula, I have just returned from completing; it was a mile’s walk and an hour’s snow-shoveling. The other, the patience, I attempt to-morrow, ‘squat like a toad’ on the ice for an unknown series of hours, with the sun blistering my nose, and blinking my eyes the while; a sort of sport so much like fishing, that it ought to be reserved for the Piscators of our Schuylkill Club.
“The walk over the snow to-night was very delightful. The opalescence, so painful to the eyes, had given place to a clear atmosphere; and the low sun was full of rich coloring. Land, too, that pleasing representative of the world we are cut off from, was refracted into grotesque knolls and long spires.
“The surface of the floes shows more and more the thawing influence of our sun, now half as high at meridian as in the torrid zone! The immediate surface to-day was often entire, though we plunged almost knee-deep in water below it. This you will easily understand when I tell you that the thermometer in the sun gave, for four successive hours to-day, a mean of nearly 80°. The surface thaw percolates through the loosely-compacted snow, and, forming a pasty substratum, is protected from re-freezing by the very snow through which it has descended. Our mean temperature of late has varied but little between 25° and 27° for any twenty-four hours.
“The infiltration of saline water through the ice assists the process of disintegration.The water formed by surface or sun thaw is, by the peculiar endosmitic action which I believe I have mentioned elsewhere, at once rendered salt, as was evident from Baumé’s hydrometers and the test of the nitrate of silver. The surface crust bore me readily this evening at a temperature of 21° and 19°, giving no evidences of thaw. Beneath, for two inches, it was crisp and fresh. As I tried it lower, cutting carefully with my bear-knife, it became spongy and brackish; at eight inches markedly so; and at and below twelve, salt-water paste. On the other hand, all my observations, and I have made a great many, prove to me that cold, if intense enough, will, by its unaided action, independent of percolation, solar heat, depending position, or even depth of ice, produce from salt water a fresh, pure, and drinkable element.
“May31, Saturday. Walked to-night to the southward in search of seal: found the ice in motion, and had some difficulty in getting back. Wind from southward, and freshening, after a day of nearly perfect calm. The drift is somewhat to the eastward.The tables were heaping up actively, and the chewing process of demolition was in full energy among them. I have some hope that the action may extend itself to the core of our veteran floe-circle; but for the present it is confined to those peripheral adjuncts that have grown up around it in more recent freezings. A bird’s-eye view from the mast-head, corrected by my walks, enables me to map out its present shape with considerable accuracy."
The “month of roses” closed on us without adventure; but its last ten days were full of monitory changes. The increased temperature had been visibly acting upon the ice, softening down its rough angles, and reducing bowlders to mere knobs on the surface; its weary monotony becoming every day only more disgusting. From the 1st to the 19th we had drifted almost a hundred miles, and had been expecting daily to make the eastern shore, when land was reported ahead. It proved to be the Highlands around Cape Searle, about thirty-five miles off.
It was the first inbreak upon our desolate circle of ice and water that we had experiencedin ninety-nine days. The hundredth gave us a complete range of dreary, snow-covered hills; but to men whose last recollections of terra firma were connected with the refracted spectres that followed us eighty miles from shore, just one hundred days since, the solid certainty of mountain ridges was inexpressibly grateful. We studied their phases, as we drew nearer to them, with an intentness which would have been ludicrous under different circumstances: every cranny, every wrinkle spoke to us of movement, of a relation with the shut-out world. Our drift which brought us this blessed variety was favored by an unusual prevalence of northwesterly winds. We made in the thirty-one days of May one hundred and ninety odd miles to the southward and eastward.
For the last four days of the month we were at the margin of the Arctic circle, alternating within and without it. We passed to the south of it on the 30th, to recross it on the 31st with an accidental drift to the northward. We were experiencing at this time the rapid transition of seasonswhich characterizes this climate. The mean of the preceding month, April, had been +7° 96'; that of May was 20° 22'—a difference of nearly twelve degrees. At the same time, there was a chilliness about the weather, an uncomfortable rawness, both in April and May, which we had not known under the deep, perpetual frosts of winter. Cold there seemed a tangible, palpable something, which we could guard against or control by clothing and exercise; while warmth, as an opposite condition, was realizable and apparent. But here, in temperatures which at some hours were really oppressing, 60° to 80° in the sun, and with a Polar altitude of 45°, one half the equatorial maximum, we had the anomaly of absolute discomfort from cold. I know that hygrometric conditions and extreme daily fluctuations of the thermometer explain much of this; but it was impossible for me to avoid thinking at the time that there must also be a physiological cause more powerful than either.
I have alluded in my journal to the return of the birds. They were most welcome visitors.Crowds of little snow-birds (EmberizaandPlectrophanes), with white breasts and jetty coverts, were attracted by the garbage which the thaw had reproduced around us, and twittered from pile to pile, chirping sweet music over their unexpected store-house. Some of the larger birds, too, were with us, returning to the mysterious North; the anatinæ, represented by the eiders (Somateria), followed by two of the uria genus, the grylle and the alke. We recognized the latter as our little fat friend of last summer, and gave him treatment accordingly. I shot thirty-three in one day, which my mess-mates made up to sixty.
The characteristic disease of May was the snow-blindness, severe and acute, leaving with some of us a disturbed, uncertain state of vision far from pleasing. The remedy most effective was darkness. A disk of hard wood, with a simple slit, admitting a narrow pencil of light, we found a better protection than the goggle or colored lens; the increased sensibility of the retina seeming to require a diminution of the quantity rather than amodification of the character of the ray. The slightest automatic movement varied, of course, the sentient surface affected by the impression.
TOPOGRAPHY OF THE FLOE, MAY 31.A. Advance. B B. Shorter diameter, 314 miles. R. Rescue. CC. Longer diameter, 51/2 miles. Distance between the vessels, 500 yards.
CHAPTER XXI
"J
UNE1. June opens on us warm. Our mean temperature to-day has been above the freezing point, 34°; our lowest only 29°; and at 11 this morning it rose to 40°. The snow-birds increase in numbers and in confidence. It is delightful to hear their sweet jargon.They alight on the decks, and come unhesitatingly to our very feet. These dear little Fringillides have evidently never visited Christian lands.
“June3. The day misty and obscure: no land in sight from aloft; and no change apparent in the floe. But we notice a distinct undulation in the ice trenches alongside, caused probably by some propagated swell.
“I walked out at night between 9 and 11 o’clock in search of open water. We had the full light of day, but without its oppressive glare. The thawed condition of the marginal ice made the walk difficult, and forced us at last to give it up. But, climbing to the top of a hummock, we could see the bay rolling its almost summer waves close under our view. It was a grand sight, but more saddening than grand. It seems like our cup of Tantalus; we are never to reach it. And while we are floating close upon it, the season is advancing; and if we are ever to aid our brothers in the search, we should even now be hurrying back.
“June4. Yesterday over again. But the water is coming nearer us. As we standon deck, we can see the black and open channel-way on every side of us, except off our port quarter: it is useless to talk of points of the compass; our floe rotates so constantly from right to left, as to make them useless in description. To port, the extent of ice baffles the eye, even from aloft; it must, however, be a mere isthmus.
“June5, Thursday. We notice again this morning the movement in the trench alongside. The floating scum of rubbish advances and recedes with a regularity that can only be due to some equable undulation from without to the north. We continue perched up, just as we were after our great lift of last December. A more careful measurement than we had made before, gave us yesterday, between our height aft and depression forward, a difference of level of 6 feet 4 inches. This inclination tells in a length of 83 feet—about one in thirteen.
“P.M. Thebreak-up at last! a little after five this afternoon, Mr. Griffin left us for theRescue, after making a short visit. He had hardly gone before I heard a hail and its answer, both of them in a tone ofmore excitement than we had been used to for some time past; and the next moment, the cry, ‘Ice cracking ahead!’
“Murdaugh and myself reached the deck just in time to see De Haven crossing our gangway. We followed. Imagine our feelings when, midway between the two vessels, we saw Griffin with the ice separating before him, and at the same instant found a crack tracing its way between us, and the water spinning up to the surface. ‘Stick by the floe. Good-by! What news for home?’ said he. One jump across the chasm, a hearty God-bless-you shake of the hand, a long jump back, and a little river divided our party.
“Griffin made his way along one fissure and over another. We followed a lead that was open to our starboard beam, each man for himself. In half a minute or less came the outcry, ‘She’s breaking out: all hands aboard!’ and within ten minutes from Griffin’s first hail, while we were yet scrambling into our little Ark of Refuge, the whole area about us was divided by irregular chasms in every direction.
BIRD’S-EYE view of floe, JUNE 5.A. Advance. D. Floe adhering to the Advance. R. Rescue. C. Path between brigs before break-up. H H. Hummocks.
“All this was at half past five. At six I took a bird’s-eye sketch from aloft. Many of the fissures were already some twenty paces across. Conflicting forces were at work every where; one round-house movinghere, another in an opposite direction, the two vessels parting company. Since the night of our Lancaster Sound commotion, months ago, theRescuehad not changed her bearing: she was already on our port-beam. Every thing was changed.
“Our brig, however, had not yet found an even keel. The enormous masses of ice, thrust under her stern by the action of repeated pressures, had glued themselves together so completely, that we remained cradled in a mass of ice exceeding twenty-five feet in solid depth. Many of these tables were liberated by the swell, and rose majestically from their recesses, striking the ship, and then escaping above the surface for a moment, with a sudden vault.
“To add to the novelty of our situation, two cracks coming together obliquely, met a few yards astern of us, cleaving through the heavy ice, and leaving us attached to a triangular fragment of 14 by 22 paces. This berg-like fragment, reduced as it was, continued its close adhesion. Its buoyancy was so great, that it acted like a camel, retaining the brig’s stern high in the air, her bowsthrown down toward the water. We are so at this moment, 10P.M."
All hands were in the mean time actively at work. The floe had been to us terra firma so long that we had applied it to all the purposes of land. Clothes and clothes' lines, sledges, preserved meats, kindling wood and planking, were now all bundled on board. The artificial horizon, which had stood for eight months upon a little ice-pedestal, was barely saved; and I had to work hard to get one of my few remaining thermometers from a neighboring hummock.
The cause of this sudden disruption—I mean the immediate cause, for the summer influences had prepared the floe for disintegration—was evidently the sea-swell setting from the southeast. This swell had given us minor manifestations of its existence as far back as the 1st of June. Whether it was increased without, or our floe made more accessible to it by the drifting away of other and protecting floes, I can not say. This, however, was clear, that the great undulations propagated by wave actioncaused our disruption. The proof of this I shall not forget.
Standing on our little deck, and looking out on the floe, we had the strange spectacle of an undulating solidity, a propagated wave borne in swell-like ridges, as if our ice was a carpet shaken by Titans. I can not convey the effect of this sublime spectacle. The ice, broken into polyhedric masses, gave at a few hundred yards no indications to the eye of the lines of separation; besides which, the infiltration of salt water had no doubt increased the plasticity of the material. Imagine, then, this apparently solid surface, by long association as unyielding to us as the shore, taking suddenly upon itself the functions of fluidity, another condition of matter. It absolutely produced something like the nausea of sea-sickness to see the swell of the ice, rising, and falling, and bending, transmitting with pliant facility the advancing wave.
A hummock hill, about midway between us and theRescue, gave me an opportunity of measuring rudely the height of the swell. It rose till it covered her quarter boat; sinkingagain till I could see the side of the brig down to her water-line, an interval of five feet at least.
“As we walk along the edge of the open fissures, we see a wonderful variety in the thickness of the ice. Our apparently level surface is, in fact, a mosaic work of ices, frozen at separate periods, and tesselated by the several changes or disruptions which we have undergone. Thus I can see the tables under our stern extending down at least twenty-five feet: adjoining this is ice of four feet; next comes a field of six feet; and then hummock ridges, with tables choked below, so as to give an apparent depth of twenty.
“The ‘calves’ also, of which a great many have now risen to the surface, are worthy of note. These singular masses are evidently fragments of tables, of every degree of thickness, which have been forced down by pressure, and afterward, by some change in the temperature of the water, or by wave and tidal actions, have been liberated again from the floe, and find their way upward wherever an opening permits. We saw them honeycombed and cellular, water-sodden and inrounded bowlders, rising from the depths of the sea. Their density, so near that of the liquid in which they were submerged, made this rise slow and impressive. We could see them many fathoms below, voyaging again to the upper world. Once between the gaping edges of the lead, they effectually prevent the closing. They are about us in every direction, interposed between the fields.
“The appendage which sustains our brig has a good deal of this character. I will try to make an exact drawing of it as a curiosity, if it hangs on to us much longer. Its buoyancy indicates great submerged mass. A strong cable and ice anchor have been carried to a floe on our starboard bow, and the swell drives it upon us like a great battering-ram. This ingenious method of pounding us out of our tenacious cradle subjects us to a regular succession of heavy shocks, which would startle a man not used to ice navigation. At the time I write, 11P.M., we have been nearly three hours subjected to this banging without any apparent impression. To-morrow we will, if not liberated,apply the saw; and then again to the warps!
“11:20P.M.In the midst of fragments, few more than a hundred yards in length, nearly all much smaller. Between them are zigzag leads of open water. Astern of us is an expansion of some fifty yards across; ahead, a winding creek, wider than our brig. Thus closes the day.
“One thing more: a thought of gratitude before I turn in. This journal shows that I have been in the daily habit of taking long, solitary walks upon the ice, miles from the ship. Suppose this rupture to have come entirely without forewarning! I had greased my boots for a walk a few hours before the change, and only postponed it because I happened to get absorbed in a book.”
TOPOGRAPHY OF FLOE, JUNE 5.
PROFILE OF FLOE; PORT SIDE.
CHAPTER XXII
"J
UNE6. Our bumping continued all I night, without any apparent effect I upon our sticking-plaster. Acting, as this impact does, at the long end of a lever, our stern being immovably fixed, it must be hard upon the rudder post, a beam that is now protruding from the least strengthened part of our brig into a transparent glue of tenacious ice. The twelve-feet saw, suspended from a tripod of spars, is at work, trying to cut a line across the mass to our keel. But for this appendage, we would be now warping through the fissures.
“7P.M.The position of things continues unchanged. Our ice-saw with great labor buried its length in the floe, reaching nearly to our stern; but the submerged material is so thick that it has little or no effect. Wedging, by billets of wood between her sides and the mounding ice, was equally ineffectual. Gunpowder would perhaps release us; but that we can not spare.
“I tried to measure the depth of this inveterate companion of ours. Standing at our port gangway, I lowered the pump-rod twenty-four feet to a shelf projecting from the mass: beneath this, a prolongation or tongue stretched to a depth which I could not determine. On the other side, to starboard, the ice descends in solid mass some twenty feet. Adopting twenty-four feet as a mean depth, and ninety by fifty feet as the mean of dimensions at the surface, the solid contents of this troublesome winter relic would be 108,000 cubic feet. No wonder it lifts up our little craft bodily. I have made my drawings of it with all topographical accuracy.
“The wind has been hauling round fromthe south to the west, and by afternoon blew quite freshly. We made all sail, even to studding-sails, in hopes of forcing the cracks ahead, and tearing ourselves, as it were, from our impediment. Thus far all has failed.
“10P.M.The ship is covered with canvas: she stands motionless amid the ice, although her wings are spread and tense. The wind is fresh and steady from the northwest. Our swell ceases with this wind, and the floes seem disposed to come together again; but the days of winter have passed by, and the interposing calves prevent the apposition of the edges.
“The effects of a constant force, slight as it seems, have been beautifully shown by our brig. Pressing as we do, under full canvas, against heavy yet quiescent masses, we gradually force ahead, breasting aside the floes, and leaving behind us a pool of open water. Our rate is ten feet per hour! Remember that the old man of Sinbad still clings to us, and that we carry the burden in this slow progress. I hope that the Sinbad comparison will end here; for I can readily, without much imagination, carry it further.
“12 Midnight. Still advancing, dragging behind us this pertinacious mass. We have butted several times against projecting floes, but it is as unmoved as solid rock. Very foggy:Rescuenot visible. Thermometer at 29 degrees.
“We recognize, among the floe fragments around us, old play-fellows. Here we played foot-ball; there we skated; by this hummock crag stood my thermometers; and here I shot a bear. We are passing slowly from them, or they from us. Now and then a rubbish pile will show itself, cresting the pure ice. Even an old champagne basket, full of nothing but sadly-pleasant associations, is recognized upon a distant floe. This breaking up of a curtilage is not without its regrets. I wish that our ‘old man’ would loosen his gripping knees: three hours would put us into comparatively open water.
“June7, Saturday. The captain says that the shocks of the night of the fifth were the hardest our brig has experienced yet.
“This morning we made our incubus fast to one end of a passing floe, and ourselves fast to the other: double hawsers were used,blocks and tackle rigged, and all hands placed at our patent winch, the slack being controlled by a windlass. We parted our stern hawser, and that was all. Our resort now is to the fourteen-feet saw. With this, before the day closes, we shall cut a skerf as far as our fore-foot, and then try the efficacy of wedges.
“Toward evening theRescuemade sail, and forced her way slowly through the fragments. By eightP.M.she was snugly secured to the other side of our own floe. A beautiful sight it was to see once more, even in this labyrinth of rubbish, a moving sail-spread vessel. Once a momentary opening showed us the dark water, and beneath it the shadow of the brig.
“10:40. A crash! a low, grinding sound, followed by loud exclamations of ‘Back,’ ‘back!’ ‘Hold on,’ ‘hold on!’ I ran upon deck in time to add one cheer more to three which came from the ice. A large fragment, extending from her saw-crack along the bottom on the port side, had broken off, cutting the triangle in half, and leaving the crew behind floating and separated from the ship.All that now confined us was the mass (a) which remained on her starboard quarter. This descended some twenty or more feet, embracing our keel, and by its size sustaining us in our perched condition. We had settled but nine inches in consequence of our partial disengagement.
“Looking from the taffrail down the stern-post, we can now see the position of this portion of our brig distinctly. A strip of her false keel has been forced from its attachments, drawing the heavy bolts, and tearing away some of our sheathing. How far the injury extends, whether the entire length of the brig, or through some few yards, we can not tell. It must have occurred during the great ice commotion of December 7th and 8th. The disruption of January no doubt added to the thickness of the underlying tables; but our keel probably received its shock at the same time that we received our elevation. We have escaped wonderfully.
“June8, Sunday. Even keel again! Once more floating ship-fashion, in a ship’s element. It was between twelve and one o’clock this morning. Murdaugh wentdown upon the fragment, which was still adhering to our starboard side. He had hardly rested his weight upon it, when, with certain hurried, scarcely premonitory grindings, it cleared itself. He had barely time to scramble up the brig’s side, tearing his nails in the effort, before, with crash and turmoil, it tumbled up to the surface, letting us down once more into clear water. When I reached the deck, I could hardly realize the level, horizontal condition of things, we have been accustomed to this up and down hill work so long.
“9P.M.At 1 o’clockP.M.the wind freshened from the northward, enough to make sail. We cast off, and renewed the old time process of boring, standing irregularly among the fragments to the southward and eastward. We received some heavy bumps, but kept under weigh until 6P.M., when an impenetrable ice-fog caused us to haul up to a heavy floe, to which we are now fast by three anchors. We estimate our progress at six miles. TheRescueis not visible.
“From the heavy floe to which we are secured we obtained freshthawedwater. Thisis the first time since the 15th of September that I have drunk water liquefied without fire. Eight months and twenty-four days: think of that, dear strawberry and cream eating family!
“We saw an ice-floe to-day, which had evidently come from the upper northern regions of Wellington, or the North Baffin’s Straits. This ice, though pure and beautiful, could never have been created in any single winter. It has made me understand for the first time the startling stories of Wrangell. This floe is now more than two hundred and fifty yards long by four hundred wide; a size too large for infraposition of tables, while its purity precludes the idea of ground ice. Its depth, ascertained from its mean line of flotation, exceeds forty feet. Its surface is level, and the appearance, looking down into its pure depths, beautiful beyond description. It forms part of a great field, miles in circumference, as similar coaptating fragments are seen in every direction; the great swell of the 5th having no doubt destroyed its integrity. From what great winter basin comes this colossal ice?”