CHAPTER IV
WE ARE FROZEN IN
It was clear by this time that there would be no chance this year to reach new lands to the north by direct voyaging and that we should be lucky if we succeeded in winning our way through to Herschel Island before the ice closed in for the winter. By the afternoon of the eleventh we managed to get as far east as Lion Reef. Here we tied on to a grounded floe to hold our gain and take advantage of our next chance to go east. Between Lion Reef and the mainland a few miles away ran a current which set the ice moving smartly in all directions, but unfortunately we drew too much water to venture into those shallow lanes.
I took the opportunity afforded by our pause to examine the stem of the ship and found that by contact with the ice two of the brass stem-plates were gone and several bolts loosened in those that remained.
Whenever we were stationary in the ice, Murray, the oceanographer, would use his dredge. He had been doing this in fact all along the coast, ever since we were off Blossom Shoals. At this time heused a dredge which he had brought with him; later on he used dredges made by our engineers.
The dredge consisted of a rectangular frame, two feet by three, made of four iron rods two inches wide by half an inch thick, welded together at the corners, with a bag about two feet deep securely fastened to this framework. The bag was made of cotton twine in a two-and-a-half inch mesh; it narrowed towards the bottom. Sometimes cheese-cloth was placed inside the bag to catch the animalculæ. A rope was fastened to the middle of one side of the framework so that, when lowered to the bottom of the sea, the framework would maintain an upright position, with the bag extended out behind it.
When Murray got ready to use the dredge he would get over the rail of the ship, which was only four feet above the surface of the ice, go to the edge of a lead and find out the depth of the water by the hand lead-line; then he would lower the dredge, put the rope on his back and walk along the edge of the lead, dragging the dredge behind him. He could handle it alone up to a depth of twenty fathoms; beyond that he had to have help, which we all of us gladly gave. I do not believe that dredging was ever done in that part of the Arctic before. Before we got through we had brought up a good many specimens which were entirely unknownto Murray, and others, such as coral, which we had hardly expected to find in that neighborhood.
While we were tied up off Lion Reef, I sent out a boat to make soundings; the report was so promising that we started on our way again, on the morning of August 12, steaming through the loose ice and keeping as near shore as possible. The ice moved according to the direction and velocity of the wind, to which its irregularities afforded plenty of sail-like surfaces. The wind had been northwest, keeping the ice packed towards shore; it now veered round to the southwest and loosened the ice to the northeast, outside of the reef. We steamed along through the open water and because the ice near the shore was closely packed, we were driven farther off shore than I liked. We had to follow the open lanes, however, and go where they led.
About eightP. M.we were stopped by a large, unbroken sheet of ice. This was very similar to the ice which I have seen in Melville Bay on the west Greenland coast; it was part of the past season’s ice. Seldom over a foot thick, it was honeycombed with water-holes; theRooseveltcould have ploughed her way through it but theKarlukwas powerless to do so.
We were now half way across Camden Bay, aboutfifteen miles west of Manning Point, about where Collinson, in theEnterprise, had spent the winter of 1853-4. We had come about 225 miles from Point Barrow, considerably more than half the distance to Herschel Island. It seemed at the moment as if we should be able to get through for the rest of the way. As events proved, however, this was our farthest east, for the next day, August 13, the open water closed up astern, the ice came together all around us and held the ship fast. There was scarcely any wind and consequently no movement of the ice.
The next day conditions remained the same. We tried to force our way towards the land but failed and could do nothing but wait. For several days there came no appreciable change either in weather or in our position until on the eighteenth we had a heavy snowstorm all day, which was just what was needed to make assurance doubly sure; the snow formed a blanket on the ice and later on its melting and freezing cemented the ice snugly about the ship so that she was made almost an integral part of the floe itself. The weather was perfectly calm but so dull and hazy that for several days we could not see the shore. Finally on the twenty-first we had a fine, clear day and about thirty miles south of where we lay, could see the snow-capped summits of the Romanzoff and Franklin Mountains,the northernmost range of the Rockies, the backbone of the continent.
There was very little alteration in the ship’s position until August 26 when, with a light north wind, the ice moved a few miles to the westward, carrying us with it. The next day we had a heavy snowstorm with wind from the east and we moved still farther west; the next day we drifted westward again, and the next and the next, and for a good many days, sometimes a knot an hour, sometimes faster, parallel to the land but six or seven miles away from it. At times we could see lanes of open water, but they were always too far away for us to reach with our imprisoned vessel. Yet nearer the land the water was open and, so far as we could tell from where we were, no ship would have experienced much difficulty in making her way along there in either direction. If we had used all our dynamite we could have broken a pathway for about a quarter of a mile but no farther and, as the open water was much farther away than that, there was obviously no use in trying the experiment.
Meanwhile, by August 22, Stefansson had decided to send Beuchat and Jenness ashore, to make their way eastward and join the southern party in the event of our not getting any nearer Herschel Island. In fact, besides the two anthropologists,McKinlay and Wilkins, also, could properly be regarded as passengers aboard theKarluk; their apparatus, however, was too heavy for safe transportation to the shore over the ice as it then was, loose and shifting.
All hands busied themselves in getting Beuchat and Jenness ready for their journey. On account of the precarious nature of the young ice, however, which was making in the leads towards the land and between the older floes but was not yet altogether dependable, the start was not made until the twenty-ninth. They got away about elevenA. M.with one sledge and seven dogs and a supporting party consisting of Wilkins, McConnell and the doctor and three Eskimo, two of whom were to return to the ship with the sledge and dogs and the supporting party. On the sledge they carried a skin-boat in which Beuchat and Jenness might proceed to Herschel Island, where they would find plenty of food, whether theMary Sachsand theAlaskasucceeded in reaching there or not. The whole project went awry, however, because the party had gone scarcely a mile and a half from the ship when the skin-boat was damaged, as the sledge bumped along over the rough surface of the ice, and when Stefansson went out to investigate he ordered the whole party back to the ship again.