CHAPTER VII.Winter Climate—Preservative Effect of Cold—Falling Temperature—Unprecedented Cold—Extreme Low Temperature not Unendurable—A Visitor from the Shore—Cold v. Vitality—Sudden Changes—A Breeze from the South—Warm Wind Aloft—Danger from East Wind—Dawn—Brilliant Effect of Low Sunlight—Lemming—Sunrise—Preparations for Spring—Snow-shoes—Our Prospects—Motion of the Floes—A Tide Wave.Illustrated capital letterAS the absence of the sun lengthened, so the cold increased. Arctic Expeditions have almost invariably registered their lowest temperatures in February and March, the months in which the earth is coldest even in England. The darkness and the low temperature of winter do not occur together: the cold, indeed, belongs rather to spring than to winter. In our case, it was not till after darkness had left us and dawn was well advanced that the state of our thermometer became a subject of general interest.We did not expect an unusually cold winter. Maps marked the “pole of cold” far south of our position, and it seemed likely that the great polar sea, though much the reverse of open, would make our winter warm. The thermometer stands were conspicuous objects as we came out from the ship to the floes. The first was supported on a barrel and snow pedestal only seventeen feet from the ship, so as to be convenient for hourly or half-hourly registration. Then came the self-registering thermometer, elevated on a tripod about thirty yards from the ship. Others were placed on the floe near shore, and on a hillock close to the beach.It may be said to be always freezing in the far north. Even in a warm summer day, when the air is perhaps 40° Fahrenheit, flakes of ice rise up from the cold sides of the floebergs, and in the shade float in a thin pellicle on the water in the ice-cracks. Meat exposed to the air keeps all the year round, and for many months our rigging was decorated with sides of musk ox and carcases of mutton. In connection with the keeping of meat, it is worth while to mention that a piece of musk ox meat, exposed for six months in the rigging, and sealed up in the cold air, remained, very unexpectedly, unchanged when the temperature rose, and was exhibited perfectly fresh three months after the Expedition returned to England.The temperature of the air sank permanently below freezing in the middle of August before we had reached winter quarters, and continued below for nine months. Fifty-four degrees of frost were registered during the October sledging. In November, mercury froze and the spirit thermometers fell to forty-five below zero (i.e., 77° of frost). The lowest in December was one degree colder. Then hopes of a warm winter were given up, and we watched the spirit shrink degree after degree past the coldest recorded by our predecessors. January’s lowest was 58°.7; February brought 66°.3 below zero; but on the third of March, three days after sunrise, the unparalleled temperature of 73.7 degrees below zero was indicated by our Kew-corrected thermometers, and for many hours the temperature remained more than one hundred degrees below freezing.EXAMINING THERMOMETER: -73.4°.As a general rule, people look upon extreme cold as the most characteristic and most insupportable part of Arctic service, but this is altogether a mistake. It is not nearly as trying as the long darkness, and both are insignificant compared to the social friction of the confined life—a friction which would be unbearable if the men and officers had not been accustomed to habits of discipline, and inured to the confinement and restraints of “man-of-war” life. The hardships of mere low temperature are by no means unendurable. In comfortable winter quarters, and with plenty of dry warm clothing, we found the extremest cold rather curious and interesting than painful or dangerous. An icy tub on an English winter morning feels colder to the skin than the calm Arctic air. Cold alone never interrupted daily exercise. It was possible to walk for two or three hours over our snow-clad hills, in a temperature of one hundred degrees below freezing, without getting a single frost-bite, or perceptibly lowering the temperature of the body. It is possible even to perspire if one works hard enough. The fact is, only the face and lungs are really exposed, and neither appear to suffer from it. Our experience led us to think that men, thoroughly prepared, might safely encounter far lower temperatures. Many a time, as we sat round the stove on the main-deck discussing the events of the day and the state of the weather, the relative merits of Arctic cold and tropic heat were warmly canvassed. Several of both our officers and men had lately returned from the Ashantee campaign, and they could speak with authority. There was one thing clear—one could sometimes get warm in the Arctic, but never get cool on the Coast.If the intense cold was more endurable in winter quarters than some of us had anticipated,it was altogether a different thing camping out away from the ship on a sledge party. Then, with food and clothing limited by the sledge-weights, with no warmer bed than a snowdrift, and no possibility of changing ice-saturated clothes, cold, far less than that experienced in winter quarters, becomes a real hardship, and its miseries can hardly be exaggerated.During the period of intense cold, we amused ourselves with many experiments on its effects on various substances. Ordinary spirit, such as brandy or rum, froze into crystalline paste. Even the alcohol in our astronomer’s spirit levels acted sluggishly. Glycerine became as hard as soap; mercury remained frozen for ten or twelve days at a time. Everyone knows the danger of handling metal at low temperatures. The danger depends greatly upon the state of the hand; if it is at all moist or soft, it will adhere, and soon be dangerously frost-bitten; but if quite dry, we could, for experiment sake, take a mitt off and turn the brass handle of our outer door without experiencing anything more serious than a sudden sting, which was like neither heat nor cold. It was even possible to melt a small fragment of mercury on the naked palm without leaving a trace of injury.We had few opportunities of noting how the lower animals bore the cold. Our Eskimo dogs evidently suffered much at times, but never learnt to use a snow-kennel built to shelter them. Some of the bitches had sumptuous apartments constructed for them on deck, in the vain hope that comfort would make them more careful of their offspring. One old dog, Master Bruin, who had no tail to coil round his neck when he went to sleep, and was perhaps more susceptible to cold on that account, discovered that the magnetic observatory was warmer than the star-lit side of a hummock, and would willingly have taken up his quarters there if it had been allowed. Nellie, the retriever, always took her daily exercise, but slept between decks in the warmth. Pussy paid one visit to the deck just to see what Arctic winter was like; but she hopped about shaking one foot after another, and sneezed so incessantly that she seemed in danger of choking, and had to be taken below again.Neither rats nor mice had come north with us. Three of our useless carrier pigeons had reached winter quarters alive, fluttering round the ship and perching on the frozen rigging, but none survived long. It was in the depth of winter, when the land seemed utterly lifeless and deserted, that the first living inhabitant of Floeberg Beach presented himself on board our ship. Midnight was past, and one officer alone lingered beside the main-deck stove, watching the red light flickering on a much-weathered musk ox skull that had been picked up on shore and was now being dried before the fire. Suddenly he falls on his knees and stares intently at the bone, then rushes to the naturalist’s cabin, and reappears with that gentleman lightly clad in scarlet flannel, and bearing the first bottles and specimen boxes that came to hand. A little black spider, revived by the warmth, had crept out of a small hole in the skull, but retreated again before he could be bottled. Two weary hours elapsed ere he reappeared, but the watchers were at length rewarded, and he was triumphantly captured, packed away, dated, and labelled in the naturalist’s store, commonly known as “South Kensington.”At that time we had an unreasoning impression that no live thing could endure actual reduction to the temperatures of Arctic night. But cold is by no means so deadly. The mosquitoes, butterflies, and dragon-flies of brief Arctic summer are assuredly not all new arrivals. A good example of vitality in the vegetable kingdom was afforded by the wheat left at “Hall’s Rest” by the ill-fated “Polaris.” In spite of the cold of five winters, it was still alive when we found it. Sown at Discovery Bay, it germinated freely, and, as I write, some of it carried home with the ships promises to reproduce itself in a fair crop of bearded “Polaris wheat.” Even at the Polar Sea, and inthe midnight of winter, the air holds spores of moulds, and many of them grew rapidly when carried into the warmth inside the ship. It is hard to say what temperatures would kill such primitive organisms—in fact, so far as our little experience goes, Sir William Thomson’s “moss-grown fragment of another world” might have carried the germ of terrestrial life safely enough through the chills of stellar space.The temperature of winter was by no means steady; on the contrary, its progressive fall was interrupted by many sudden rises.In ordinary cold weather the sky was wonderfully clear, and the weather wonderfully calm. Many a time, as we walked at daily exercise up and down our half-mile of shadowy snow, with nothing to look at but the stars, the whole sky was absolutely vapourless, from the pole star in the zenith to Orion or the three stars of Aquila just skirting along the horizon. Sometimes a faint fleecy mist, hardly distinguishable from one of our feeble auroras, would pass overhead; but round piled-up masses of cloud, such as are common in southern skies, were never seen.A change rarely came unexpectedly. Often for days beforehand “mare’s tail” clouds, with a hard wavy outline, would float up against the faint moonlight in the southern sky, and spread themselves into wings and fingers over Robeson Channel. Then, with a sudden gust from the south, and a mist of flying snow from the land, the temperature would rise. Mercurial thermometers would thaw, and soon register as faithfully as spirit instruments beside them. After a while the wind begins to come more and more from the westward. The thermometers remain high, but the wind feels piercingly cold wherever it can find a way inside our sealskins. While the storm lasts, it is impossible to go outside the ship. Whirling snow hides everything. Even on deck exercise is uncomfortable, for powdery snow floats in through every chink in the carefully-closed tent-like awnings. Notes on the instruments on shore have to be suspended, for no one could force a way as far as the beach through the darkness and whirlwind of drifting snow; and if they could, they would find the observatories so buried that it would take several hours to dig out their doorways. Even the thermometers within seventeen feet of the ship were not always easily registered. Upon one occasion the officer in charge of the meteorological work had to confess himself beaten, after two determined attempts to reach and register them. In twenty-four hours or more the storm lessens, and gradually dies away to a gentle breeze from the northward; and with it the temperature declines, until it is as cold or colder than before.A striking change of this sort came in December. From thirty-five degrees below zero, the thermometers rose rapidly with a gusty southerly wind till the temperature reached the freezing-point. This strangely warm wind cannot have travelled far in contact with the frozen earth, for it was being rapidly cooled. The quick changes, with every puff of wind, suggested the advisability of trying what the temperature was in the air overhead, and it was discovered that the higher we climbed up the rigging the warmer it got. The main-top was three degrees warmer than the deck at the same instant, and a thermometer secured high aloft in the cross-trees actually registered + 36°—a temperature which can hardly be accounted for by supposing that the wind was warmed by passing over pools of open water in Robeson Channel or Smith’s Sound.At times, when the air was undergoing rapid changes of this sort, it was striking to find that, by boring a hole into the ice with an auger, it was possible to get down past zero, and reach the temperature of yesterday or last week before coming to + 28°.3, the steady temperature of the Polar Sea beneath.Although such warm southerly breezes sometimes occurred, our winter was on the wholemarvellously calm. During its earlier months, the wind was anxiously watched. Our safety depended entirely upon its direction. A north-easterly wind might force the whole polar pack with irresistible pressure upon our unprotected shore. Many parts of the beach bore witness to the effects of such pressure in former seasons. Vast blocks of ice, thousands of tons in weight, had been forced high upon the shore, pushing up redans of mud, sand, and shells before them. It was not pleasant to contemplate the enormous force which had accomplished such work, and might any day repeat it. And our autumn efforts to reach the “Discovery” gave us poor encouragement for a march southward from a crushed or stranded ship.Towards the end of January a pale violet light made its appearance over the southern horizon. It was at first only noticeable at noon, and the glow was so faint that stars shone brilliantly through it. It heralded the returning sun, and every one watched it hopefully. It and the increasing cold were the two staple subjects for every conversation. Day by day the faint noon-light imperceptibly increased, till, in the first week in February, a tender greenish glow succeeded the violet, and for an hour at noon we could fairly call it twilight.Plate IX.—THE DAWN OF 1876. H.M.S. “ALERT” IN WINTER QUARTERS.—p.49.Decorative breakDrop Cap dDAWN in the latitude of Floeberg Beach is a season rather than an hour, and the growing brightness skirts round the whole horizon almost impartially. This is a sketch very early in March, looking north at midnight. At the time it was made, the spirit thermometers on the small stand, and on the tripod seen to the left of the ship, registered -70° Fahrenheit. The outlines were made without much difficulty, with a pencil pushed through two pairs of worsted mitts. The colours were laid on in the warmth and candle-light between decks, and verified by repeated trips into the cold. In regions where wind could crush the ice together, or where open water existed to leeward, Arctic ships have more than once been blown to sea with the ice of their winter quarters; and, as a precautionary measure, our ship was secured to shore by chain cables, raised at intervals on casks to prevent them sinking into the ice.Plate X.—THE “ALERT” IN WINTER QUARTERS, FROM AMONGST THE BARRIER BERGS,March, 1876.—p.50.Decorative breakDrop Cap nNOWHERE is it more true that “the low sun makes the colour” than in the Arctic regions. The ice and snow, that are wearily white in midsummer, glow with all sorts of opaline tints in the sunrise light of March. The sketch is from amongst the floebergs to seaward of the ship. The sides of the berg in the centre have been worn into columns and alcoves by the surface floods of some former summer; but it has since been forced higher on the beach, and into shallower water. Snow-drifts fill up all the gorges and ravines amongst the bergs, and are in some places so hardened by wind and infiltration of sea-water, that tidal motion cracks and fissures them, especially round the grounded bergs.If any part of Arctic life deserves the sentiment and romance that have been lavished on it, it is returning daylight. However practical and matter-of-fact a man may be, a long spell of Egyptian darkness will make him glad to see daylight again, and he may well be excused a little unnecessary emotion at the dawn of the pale young year. With us the day and the year were all but the same. When daylight was once established there was no more real night, though the sun made thirty-seven more and more shallow dips below the horizon before rising spirally through the heavens in perpetual day. Winter was our night, and the morning and the evening were spring and autumn. As February advanced, we began to have light enough to walk about on shore. Up to this time we had laboured under two disadvantages that had not oppressed our predecessors—namely, the extra noon darkness and the softness of the snow. Both together rendered it utterly impossible to indulge in exercise except along the well-trodden half-mile, with empty meat tins for guide posts, or backwards and forwards to the shore along the track of the sledges carrying stores to and from “Markham Hall.” It was not till we were able to walk about a little at noon that we got impatient of the darkness, and began to realise its length and intensity. The transition from darkness to daylight was like recovery from a long and somewhat delirious illness.As the light increased, the sky displayed all the colours of the rainbow, from rosy red at the horizon to cold violet overhead, and the ice, borrowing the spectrum sky tints, assumed hues of indescribable delicacy and beauty. A few hundred yards ahead of the ship some acres of floe had stranded and split into bergs with narrow lanes between them. The cliff-like walls afforded convenient sections of the ice, where its varying saltness and its strange lines of “air dust” could be favourably examined. Accordingly, these narrow clefts were well explored, and in them especially the low light produced most magical changes of opaline colour. Such effects are unsketchable. Form there was none, but while the low light lasted the tints of the ice vista were incredible—a brilliant transformation scene would look commonplace and natural beside them.Our walks were not carried very far from the ship before we discovered that other animals had begun, like ourselves, to take advantage of the returning daylight. Even while the darkness was at its greatest, men carrying lanterns to and from the water-berg or the shore occasionally noticed the little lines of curved scratches left by lemming. What the little creatures could have been doing out on the floes we could not understand; their tracks usually led into deep cracks and fissures of the ice. Perhaps they found warmer quarters near the water. After daylight one could hardly walk half-a-mileon shore without coming across their burrows—little circular tunnels leading long distances under the snow, either to saxifrage pastures, or to warm nests made of grass that must have taken them a long time to collect. Sometimes we came across them sitting near their burrows. They were about the size of a small rat, almost tailless, and as yet in their yellowish white winter fur. Later on, ermine tracks were met with, but they were much less common. They were generally found pursuing lemming, but upon one occasion it was quite plain that the ermine had followed a hare. Of course whoever met a hare track was bound to follow it. Three hares remained in our neighbourhood; they lived in burrows in the snow five or six feet long; two were shot, but the third would never allow us within rifle range.On 29th February the sun rose, but those who climbed to Cairn Hill to see him were disappointed. The high flat land southwards shut him from view. On the 2nd of March, however, when we mustered as usual by sledge crews on the floes beside the ship, bright sunlight lit up the tops of the higher floebergs and shone on the upper parts of the ship’s rigging. The Greenland mountains were already pink, and as the sun approached the gap between them and Cape Rawson, half his orb was seen for a moment by a few who climbed the rigging to look for it; the others thought they could well wait another day after waiting so long.The month after sunrise was a busy time for all hands, for there was much to be done before the whole strength of the Expedition was diverted to the sledging campaign.Although there was broad daylight outside the ship, the work inside had still to be done by lamp and candle-light. In one place a group of figures might be seen surrounded by open packing-cases, carefully weighing out sledging-rations, and dividing the daily allowances in little bags made of fancy calico intended for theatrical purposes; in another an officer and the captain of his sledge might be seen filling a large gutta-percha box with the stores to be placed in depôt for his return journey. Everywhere through the ship men were busy with needle and thread making many small improvements in the fit of their duffle suits or holland overalls; some were adding linen leggings to their mocassins, others strengthening the soles with thick soft leather cut from the top of their fishermen’s boots. The general sledging outfit was of course rigorously adhered to, but each man made such small changes in the fit of his clothes as his autumn experience suggested.During the darkness the snow had hardened considerably; in many places a sledge now travelled readily where it would have sunk out of sight in the autumn, and as early as the 28th February an exercise party travelling with a dog-sledge to the south reached in a few hours the spot from which our autumn sledges had returned baffled after a ten days’ struggle towards the “Discovery.”But the snow was not hardened everywhere. There were many drifts and patches along the shore that were not easily crossed except on snow-shoes. With these, travelling over smooth snow was easy, and a man could even pull along another seated on a small sledge, faster than a third could wade beside them. No Arctic expedition had hitherto used snow-shoes, though the Germans three hundred miles south of us on the east coast of Greenland had found it necessary to extemporise rough substitutes during the winter. Some of our men made two excellent copies of a well-worn pair presented by Dr. Rae to one of our officers. These were at times most useful, but much of our travelling was over snow and ice so rugged that no one, however expert, would have attempted snow-shoeing.Constant preparation for the sledging soon superseded the winter evening routine. School was suspended, and the theatrical season closed on 24th February with a very successful burlesque written by our chaplain. On the following Thursday the weekly lectures were concluded by an address from the captain on the sledging work we were about to undertake, and on the prospects that lay before us. Those prospects were not promising, however we looked at them; they were no more encouraging than when we first rounded Cape Rawson and saw no land to the northwards. The very first elements of success were absent, but it was still possible that the land might trend to the north somewhere beyond Cape Joseph Henry. It was possible, too, that sledges journeying northward over the floes might reach some land where depôts could be left, and which might next year serve as a fresh base for poleward sledges.A few in the ship cherished a third hope, founded on the character of our ice. It seemed not unlikely that if sledges could penetrate that zone of the floating ice-cap which had been fractured year after year by contact with the shores, they might reach a broad mass of almost continental ice rounded into hills and valleys by ages of summers, but not offering insuperable obstacles to poleward travel.If the floes had not been in rapid motion all the autumn, and if Sir Leopold M’Clintock’s method of pushing forward sledges on depôts deposited in the autumn could have been applied to the polar pack, we might start from the land with fair hopes of practical success. But, as it was, our sledges would have to leave shore carryingalltheir fuel and provisions, and therefore greatly limited in point of time, for no men can drag more than between forty and fifty days’ provisions and fuel, together with tent, bedding, cooking-gear, and sledge. The system of supporting sledges was still applicable. By it additional sledges would fall back from the main party when say one-third of their provisions were expended, retaining a third to return on, and filling up the advancing sledges with the remainder.We were by no means certain that the motion of the floes would not even now prove a serious obstacle. Even as late as January they were heard roaring and crushing in the darkness to seaward, and their pressure forced our protecting floeberg somewhat shoreward, cracking and buckling up the floes, and heeling the ship over four degrees. For months, however, little sign of motion had been apparent except at tidal periods, when it sometimes came with curious suddenness, as if the tide wave had all at once overcome the resistance of the ice that bound it. For example, the morning of the 12th of March was beautifully calm and still, and few but those whose special duty it was knew that a high tide was due that day. I was engaged picking out some stones grooved and scratched by ice-motion from an overturned “floeberg” not far from the ship, when suddenly a curious faint sound came from the north-west, at first a dull, indistinct hum, but in a moment it grew nearer and louder, like the rush of a railway train. Then, as it swept down along the beach, the ice cracked visibly in every direction with a sharp rattle like musketry, and a loud rush of water under the floes came so suddenly and unexpectedly that I ran to the top of the berg with a vague idea that the ice was breaking up. But in a moment the tide wave had passed off to the south-west, and all was still again.
CHAPTER VII.
Winter Climate—Preservative Effect of Cold—Falling Temperature—Unprecedented Cold—Extreme Low Temperature not Unendurable—A Visitor from the Shore—Cold v. Vitality—Sudden Changes—A Breeze from the South—Warm Wind Aloft—Danger from East Wind—Dawn—Brilliant Effect of Low Sunlight—Lemming—Sunrise—Preparations for Spring—Snow-shoes—Our Prospects—Motion of the Floes—A Tide Wave.
Illustrated capital letter
AS the absence of the sun lengthened, so the cold increased. Arctic Expeditions have almost invariably registered their lowest temperatures in February and March, the months in which the earth is coldest even in England. The darkness and the low temperature of winter do not occur together: the cold, indeed, belongs rather to spring than to winter. In our case, it was not till after darkness had left us and dawn was well advanced that the state of our thermometer became a subject of general interest.
We did not expect an unusually cold winter. Maps marked the “pole of cold” far south of our position, and it seemed likely that the great polar sea, though much the reverse of open, would make our winter warm. The thermometer stands were conspicuous objects as we came out from the ship to the floes. The first was supported on a barrel and snow pedestal only seventeen feet from the ship, so as to be convenient for hourly or half-hourly registration. Then came the self-registering thermometer, elevated on a tripod about thirty yards from the ship. Others were placed on the floe near shore, and on a hillock close to the beach.
It may be said to be always freezing in the far north. Even in a warm summer day, when the air is perhaps 40° Fahrenheit, flakes of ice rise up from the cold sides of the floebergs, and in the shade float in a thin pellicle on the water in the ice-cracks. Meat exposed to the air keeps all the year round, and for many months our rigging was decorated with sides of musk ox and carcases of mutton. In connection with the keeping of meat, it is worth while to mention that a piece of musk ox meat, exposed for six months in the rigging, and sealed up in the cold air, remained, very unexpectedly, unchanged when the temperature rose, and was exhibited perfectly fresh three months after the Expedition returned to England.
The temperature of the air sank permanently below freezing in the middle of August before we had reached winter quarters, and continued below for nine months. Fifty-four degrees of frost were registered during the October sledging. In November, mercury froze and the spirit thermometers fell to forty-five below zero (i.e., 77° of frost). The lowest in December was one degree colder. Then hopes of a warm winter were given up, and we watched the spirit shrink degree after degree past the coldest recorded by our predecessors. January’s lowest was 58°.7; February brought 66°.3 below zero; but on the third of March, three days after sunrise, the unparalleled temperature of 73.7 degrees below zero was indicated by our Kew-corrected thermometers, and for many hours the temperature remained more than one hundred degrees below freezing.
EXAMINING THERMOMETER: -73.4°.
EXAMINING THERMOMETER: -73.4°.
As a general rule, people look upon extreme cold as the most characteristic and most insupportable part of Arctic service, but this is altogether a mistake. It is not nearly as trying as the long darkness, and both are insignificant compared to the social friction of the confined life—a friction which would be unbearable if the men and officers had not been accustomed to habits of discipline, and inured to the confinement and restraints of “man-of-war” life. The hardships of mere low temperature are by no means unendurable. In comfortable winter quarters, and with plenty of dry warm clothing, we found the extremest cold rather curious and interesting than painful or dangerous. An icy tub on an English winter morning feels colder to the skin than the calm Arctic air. Cold alone never interrupted daily exercise. It was possible to walk for two or three hours over our snow-clad hills, in a temperature of one hundred degrees below freezing, without getting a single frost-bite, or perceptibly lowering the temperature of the body. It is possible even to perspire if one works hard enough. The fact is, only the face and lungs are really exposed, and neither appear to suffer from it. Our experience led us to think that men, thoroughly prepared, might safely encounter far lower temperatures. Many a time, as we sat round the stove on the main-deck discussing the events of the day and the state of the weather, the relative merits of Arctic cold and tropic heat were warmly canvassed. Several of both our officers and men had lately returned from the Ashantee campaign, and they could speak with authority. There was one thing clear—one could sometimes get warm in the Arctic, but never get cool on the Coast.
If the intense cold was more endurable in winter quarters than some of us had anticipated,it was altogether a different thing camping out away from the ship on a sledge party. Then, with food and clothing limited by the sledge-weights, with no warmer bed than a snowdrift, and no possibility of changing ice-saturated clothes, cold, far less than that experienced in winter quarters, becomes a real hardship, and its miseries can hardly be exaggerated.
During the period of intense cold, we amused ourselves with many experiments on its effects on various substances. Ordinary spirit, such as brandy or rum, froze into crystalline paste. Even the alcohol in our astronomer’s spirit levels acted sluggishly. Glycerine became as hard as soap; mercury remained frozen for ten or twelve days at a time. Everyone knows the danger of handling metal at low temperatures. The danger depends greatly upon the state of the hand; if it is at all moist or soft, it will adhere, and soon be dangerously frost-bitten; but if quite dry, we could, for experiment sake, take a mitt off and turn the brass handle of our outer door without experiencing anything more serious than a sudden sting, which was like neither heat nor cold. It was even possible to melt a small fragment of mercury on the naked palm without leaving a trace of injury.
We had few opportunities of noting how the lower animals bore the cold. Our Eskimo dogs evidently suffered much at times, but never learnt to use a snow-kennel built to shelter them. Some of the bitches had sumptuous apartments constructed for them on deck, in the vain hope that comfort would make them more careful of their offspring. One old dog, Master Bruin, who had no tail to coil round his neck when he went to sleep, and was perhaps more susceptible to cold on that account, discovered that the magnetic observatory was warmer than the star-lit side of a hummock, and would willingly have taken up his quarters there if it had been allowed. Nellie, the retriever, always took her daily exercise, but slept between decks in the warmth. Pussy paid one visit to the deck just to see what Arctic winter was like; but she hopped about shaking one foot after another, and sneezed so incessantly that she seemed in danger of choking, and had to be taken below again.
Neither rats nor mice had come north with us. Three of our useless carrier pigeons had reached winter quarters alive, fluttering round the ship and perching on the frozen rigging, but none survived long. It was in the depth of winter, when the land seemed utterly lifeless and deserted, that the first living inhabitant of Floeberg Beach presented himself on board our ship. Midnight was past, and one officer alone lingered beside the main-deck stove, watching the red light flickering on a much-weathered musk ox skull that had been picked up on shore and was now being dried before the fire. Suddenly he falls on his knees and stares intently at the bone, then rushes to the naturalist’s cabin, and reappears with that gentleman lightly clad in scarlet flannel, and bearing the first bottles and specimen boxes that came to hand. A little black spider, revived by the warmth, had crept out of a small hole in the skull, but retreated again before he could be bottled. Two weary hours elapsed ere he reappeared, but the watchers were at length rewarded, and he was triumphantly captured, packed away, dated, and labelled in the naturalist’s store, commonly known as “South Kensington.”
At that time we had an unreasoning impression that no live thing could endure actual reduction to the temperatures of Arctic night. But cold is by no means so deadly. The mosquitoes, butterflies, and dragon-flies of brief Arctic summer are assuredly not all new arrivals. A good example of vitality in the vegetable kingdom was afforded by the wheat left at “Hall’s Rest” by the ill-fated “Polaris.” In spite of the cold of five winters, it was still alive when we found it. Sown at Discovery Bay, it germinated freely, and, as I write, some of it carried home with the ships promises to reproduce itself in a fair crop of bearded “Polaris wheat.” Even at the Polar Sea, and inthe midnight of winter, the air holds spores of moulds, and many of them grew rapidly when carried into the warmth inside the ship. It is hard to say what temperatures would kill such primitive organisms—in fact, so far as our little experience goes, Sir William Thomson’s “moss-grown fragment of another world” might have carried the germ of terrestrial life safely enough through the chills of stellar space.
The temperature of winter was by no means steady; on the contrary, its progressive fall was interrupted by many sudden rises.
In ordinary cold weather the sky was wonderfully clear, and the weather wonderfully calm. Many a time, as we walked at daily exercise up and down our half-mile of shadowy snow, with nothing to look at but the stars, the whole sky was absolutely vapourless, from the pole star in the zenith to Orion or the three stars of Aquila just skirting along the horizon. Sometimes a faint fleecy mist, hardly distinguishable from one of our feeble auroras, would pass overhead; but round piled-up masses of cloud, such as are common in southern skies, were never seen.
A change rarely came unexpectedly. Often for days beforehand “mare’s tail” clouds, with a hard wavy outline, would float up against the faint moonlight in the southern sky, and spread themselves into wings and fingers over Robeson Channel. Then, with a sudden gust from the south, and a mist of flying snow from the land, the temperature would rise. Mercurial thermometers would thaw, and soon register as faithfully as spirit instruments beside them. After a while the wind begins to come more and more from the westward. The thermometers remain high, but the wind feels piercingly cold wherever it can find a way inside our sealskins. While the storm lasts, it is impossible to go outside the ship. Whirling snow hides everything. Even on deck exercise is uncomfortable, for powdery snow floats in through every chink in the carefully-closed tent-like awnings. Notes on the instruments on shore have to be suspended, for no one could force a way as far as the beach through the darkness and whirlwind of drifting snow; and if they could, they would find the observatories so buried that it would take several hours to dig out their doorways. Even the thermometers within seventeen feet of the ship were not always easily registered. Upon one occasion the officer in charge of the meteorological work had to confess himself beaten, after two determined attempts to reach and register them. In twenty-four hours or more the storm lessens, and gradually dies away to a gentle breeze from the northward; and with it the temperature declines, until it is as cold or colder than before.
A striking change of this sort came in December. From thirty-five degrees below zero, the thermometers rose rapidly with a gusty southerly wind till the temperature reached the freezing-point. This strangely warm wind cannot have travelled far in contact with the frozen earth, for it was being rapidly cooled. The quick changes, with every puff of wind, suggested the advisability of trying what the temperature was in the air overhead, and it was discovered that the higher we climbed up the rigging the warmer it got. The main-top was three degrees warmer than the deck at the same instant, and a thermometer secured high aloft in the cross-trees actually registered + 36°—a temperature which can hardly be accounted for by supposing that the wind was warmed by passing over pools of open water in Robeson Channel or Smith’s Sound.
At times, when the air was undergoing rapid changes of this sort, it was striking to find that, by boring a hole into the ice with an auger, it was possible to get down past zero, and reach the temperature of yesterday or last week before coming to + 28°.3, the steady temperature of the Polar Sea beneath.
Although such warm southerly breezes sometimes occurred, our winter was on the wholemarvellously calm. During its earlier months, the wind was anxiously watched. Our safety depended entirely upon its direction. A north-easterly wind might force the whole polar pack with irresistible pressure upon our unprotected shore. Many parts of the beach bore witness to the effects of such pressure in former seasons. Vast blocks of ice, thousands of tons in weight, had been forced high upon the shore, pushing up redans of mud, sand, and shells before them. It was not pleasant to contemplate the enormous force which had accomplished such work, and might any day repeat it. And our autumn efforts to reach the “Discovery” gave us poor encouragement for a march southward from a crushed or stranded ship.
Towards the end of January a pale violet light made its appearance over the southern horizon. It was at first only noticeable at noon, and the glow was so faint that stars shone brilliantly through it. It heralded the returning sun, and every one watched it hopefully. It and the increasing cold were the two staple subjects for every conversation. Day by day the faint noon-light imperceptibly increased, till, in the first week in February, a tender greenish glow succeeded the violet, and for an hour at noon we could fairly call it twilight.
Plate IX.—THE DAWN OF 1876. H.M.S. “ALERT” IN WINTER QUARTERS.—p.49.
Plate IX.—THE DAWN OF 1876. H.M.S. “ALERT” IN WINTER QUARTERS.—p.49.
Decorative break
Drop Cap dDAWN in the latitude of Floeberg Beach is a season rather than an hour, and the growing brightness skirts round the whole horizon almost impartially. This is a sketch very early in March, looking north at midnight. At the time it was made, the spirit thermometers on the small stand, and on the tripod seen to the left of the ship, registered -70° Fahrenheit. The outlines were made without much difficulty, with a pencil pushed through two pairs of worsted mitts. The colours were laid on in the warmth and candle-light between decks, and verified by repeated trips into the cold. In regions where wind could crush the ice together, or where open water existed to leeward, Arctic ships have more than once been blown to sea with the ice of their winter quarters; and, as a precautionary measure, our ship was secured to shore by chain cables, raised at intervals on casks to prevent them sinking into the ice.
Drop Cap d
DAWN in the latitude of Floeberg Beach is a season rather than an hour, and the growing brightness skirts round the whole horizon almost impartially. This is a sketch very early in March, looking north at midnight. At the time it was made, the spirit thermometers on the small stand, and on the tripod seen to the left of the ship, registered -70° Fahrenheit. The outlines were made without much difficulty, with a pencil pushed through two pairs of worsted mitts. The colours were laid on in the warmth and candle-light between decks, and verified by repeated trips into the cold. In regions where wind could crush the ice together, or where open water existed to leeward, Arctic ships have more than once been blown to sea with the ice of their winter quarters; and, as a precautionary measure, our ship was secured to shore by chain cables, raised at intervals on casks to prevent them sinking into the ice.
Plate X.—THE “ALERT” IN WINTER QUARTERS, FROM AMONGST THE BARRIER BERGS,March, 1876.—p.50.
Plate X.—THE “ALERT” IN WINTER QUARTERS, FROM AMONGST THE BARRIER BERGS,March, 1876.—p.50.
Decorative break
Drop Cap nNOWHERE is it more true that “the low sun makes the colour” than in the Arctic regions. The ice and snow, that are wearily white in midsummer, glow with all sorts of opaline tints in the sunrise light of March. The sketch is from amongst the floebergs to seaward of the ship. The sides of the berg in the centre have been worn into columns and alcoves by the surface floods of some former summer; but it has since been forced higher on the beach, and into shallower water. Snow-drifts fill up all the gorges and ravines amongst the bergs, and are in some places so hardened by wind and infiltration of sea-water, that tidal motion cracks and fissures them, especially round the grounded bergs.
Drop Cap n
NOWHERE is it more true that “the low sun makes the colour” than in the Arctic regions. The ice and snow, that are wearily white in midsummer, glow with all sorts of opaline tints in the sunrise light of March. The sketch is from amongst the floebergs to seaward of the ship. The sides of the berg in the centre have been worn into columns and alcoves by the surface floods of some former summer; but it has since been forced higher on the beach, and into shallower water. Snow-drifts fill up all the gorges and ravines amongst the bergs, and are in some places so hardened by wind and infiltration of sea-water, that tidal motion cracks and fissures them, especially round the grounded bergs.
If any part of Arctic life deserves the sentiment and romance that have been lavished on it, it is returning daylight. However practical and matter-of-fact a man may be, a long spell of Egyptian darkness will make him glad to see daylight again, and he may well be excused a little unnecessary emotion at the dawn of the pale young year. With us the day and the year were all but the same. When daylight was once established there was no more real night, though the sun made thirty-seven more and more shallow dips below the horizon before rising spirally through the heavens in perpetual day. Winter was our night, and the morning and the evening were spring and autumn. As February advanced, we began to have light enough to walk about on shore. Up to this time we had laboured under two disadvantages that had not oppressed our predecessors—namely, the extra noon darkness and the softness of the snow. Both together rendered it utterly impossible to indulge in exercise except along the well-trodden half-mile, with empty meat tins for guide posts, or backwards and forwards to the shore along the track of the sledges carrying stores to and from “Markham Hall.” It was not till we were able to walk about a little at noon that we got impatient of the darkness, and began to realise its length and intensity. The transition from darkness to daylight was like recovery from a long and somewhat delirious illness.
As the light increased, the sky displayed all the colours of the rainbow, from rosy red at the horizon to cold violet overhead, and the ice, borrowing the spectrum sky tints, assumed hues of indescribable delicacy and beauty. A few hundred yards ahead of the ship some acres of floe had stranded and split into bergs with narrow lanes between them. The cliff-like walls afforded convenient sections of the ice, where its varying saltness and its strange lines of “air dust” could be favourably examined. Accordingly, these narrow clefts were well explored, and in them especially the low light produced most magical changes of opaline colour. Such effects are unsketchable. Form there was none, but while the low light lasted the tints of the ice vista were incredible—a brilliant transformation scene would look commonplace and natural beside them.
Our walks were not carried very far from the ship before we discovered that other animals had begun, like ourselves, to take advantage of the returning daylight. Even while the darkness was at its greatest, men carrying lanterns to and from the water-berg or the shore occasionally noticed the little lines of curved scratches left by lemming. What the little creatures could have been doing out on the floes we could not understand; their tracks usually led into deep cracks and fissures of the ice. Perhaps they found warmer quarters near the water. After daylight one could hardly walk half-a-mileon shore without coming across their burrows—little circular tunnels leading long distances under the snow, either to saxifrage pastures, or to warm nests made of grass that must have taken them a long time to collect. Sometimes we came across them sitting near their burrows. They were about the size of a small rat, almost tailless, and as yet in their yellowish white winter fur. Later on, ermine tracks were met with, but they were much less common. They were generally found pursuing lemming, but upon one occasion it was quite plain that the ermine had followed a hare. Of course whoever met a hare track was bound to follow it. Three hares remained in our neighbourhood; they lived in burrows in the snow five or six feet long; two were shot, but the third would never allow us within rifle range.
On 29th February the sun rose, but those who climbed to Cairn Hill to see him were disappointed. The high flat land southwards shut him from view. On the 2nd of March, however, when we mustered as usual by sledge crews on the floes beside the ship, bright sunlight lit up the tops of the higher floebergs and shone on the upper parts of the ship’s rigging. The Greenland mountains were already pink, and as the sun approached the gap between them and Cape Rawson, half his orb was seen for a moment by a few who climbed the rigging to look for it; the others thought they could well wait another day after waiting so long.
The month after sunrise was a busy time for all hands, for there was much to be done before the whole strength of the Expedition was diverted to the sledging campaign.
Although there was broad daylight outside the ship, the work inside had still to be done by lamp and candle-light. In one place a group of figures might be seen surrounded by open packing-cases, carefully weighing out sledging-rations, and dividing the daily allowances in little bags made of fancy calico intended for theatrical purposes; in another an officer and the captain of his sledge might be seen filling a large gutta-percha box with the stores to be placed in depôt for his return journey. Everywhere through the ship men were busy with needle and thread making many small improvements in the fit of their duffle suits or holland overalls; some were adding linen leggings to their mocassins, others strengthening the soles with thick soft leather cut from the top of their fishermen’s boots. The general sledging outfit was of course rigorously adhered to, but each man made such small changes in the fit of his clothes as his autumn experience suggested.
During the darkness the snow had hardened considerably; in many places a sledge now travelled readily where it would have sunk out of sight in the autumn, and as early as the 28th February an exercise party travelling with a dog-sledge to the south reached in a few hours the spot from which our autumn sledges had returned baffled after a ten days’ struggle towards the “Discovery.”
But the snow was not hardened everywhere. There were many drifts and patches along the shore that were not easily crossed except on snow-shoes. With these, travelling over smooth snow was easy, and a man could even pull along another seated on a small sledge, faster than a third could wade beside them. No Arctic expedition had hitherto used snow-shoes, though the Germans three hundred miles south of us on the east coast of Greenland had found it necessary to extemporise rough substitutes during the winter. Some of our men made two excellent copies of a well-worn pair presented by Dr. Rae to one of our officers. These were at times most useful, but much of our travelling was over snow and ice so rugged that no one, however expert, would have attempted snow-shoeing.
Constant preparation for the sledging soon superseded the winter evening routine. School was suspended, and the theatrical season closed on 24th February with a very successful burlesque written by our chaplain. On the following Thursday the weekly lectures were concluded by an address from the captain on the sledging work we were about to undertake, and on the prospects that lay before us. Those prospects were not promising, however we looked at them; they were no more encouraging than when we first rounded Cape Rawson and saw no land to the northwards. The very first elements of success were absent, but it was still possible that the land might trend to the north somewhere beyond Cape Joseph Henry. It was possible, too, that sledges journeying northward over the floes might reach some land where depôts could be left, and which might next year serve as a fresh base for poleward sledges.
A few in the ship cherished a third hope, founded on the character of our ice. It seemed not unlikely that if sledges could penetrate that zone of the floating ice-cap which had been fractured year after year by contact with the shores, they might reach a broad mass of almost continental ice rounded into hills and valleys by ages of summers, but not offering insuperable obstacles to poleward travel.
If the floes had not been in rapid motion all the autumn, and if Sir Leopold M’Clintock’s method of pushing forward sledges on depôts deposited in the autumn could have been applied to the polar pack, we might start from the land with fair hopes of practical success. But, as it was, our sledges would have to leave shore carryingalltheir fuel and provisions, and therefore greatly limited in point of time, for no men can drag more than between forty and fifty days’ provisions and fuel, together with tent, bedding, cooking-gear, and sledge. The system of supporting sledges was still applicable. By it additional sledges would fall back from the main party when say one-third of their provisions were expended, retaining a third to return on, and filling up the advancing sledges with the remainder.
We were by no means certain that the motion of the floes would not even now prove a serious obstacle. Even as late as January they were heard roaring and crushing in the darkness to seaward, and their pressure forced our protecting floeberg somewhat shoreward, cracking and buckling up the floes, and heeling the ship over four degrees. For months, however, little sign of motion had been apparent except at tidal periods, when it sometimes came with curious suddenness, as if the tide wave had all at once overcome the resistance of the ice that bound it. For example, the morning of the 12th of March was beautifully calm and still, and few but those whose special duty it was knew that a high tide was due that day. I was engaged picking out some stones grooved and scratched by ice-motion from an overturned “floeberg” not far from the ship, when suddenly a curious faint sound came from the north-west, at first a dull, indistinct hum, but in a moment it grew nearer and louder, like the rush of a railway train. Then, as it swept down along the beach, the ice cracked visibly in every direction with a sharp rattle like musketry, and a loud rush of water under the floes came so suddenly and unexpectedly that I ran to the top of the berg with a vague idea that the ice was breaking up. But in a moment the tide wave had passed off to the south-west, and all was still again.