HAULING THE DREDGE“The dredging and soundings were both carried on through a hole in the ice, which we had made at the stern of the ship.”See page 49
HAULING THE DREDGE“The dredging and soundings were both carried on through a hole in the ice, which we had made at the stern of the ship.”See page 49
HAULING THE DREDGE
“The dredging and soundings were both carried on through a hole in the ice, which we had made at the stern of the ship.”See page 49
On the second and again on the third we caught glimpses of the land. On the third the same gale that destroyed part of the town of Nome sent us bowling along to the northwest. Occasionally we saw open water but it was always far away. The weather on the fourth and fifth was delightful, with the temperature up in the forties, and on the fifth we had a beautiful sunset. Mamen, Malloch and I went ski-jumping in the bright sunshine and had a wonderful afternoon of it.
We were now fast drifting to the northwest, off Point Barrow, getting outside the twenty-fathom curve. The farther north we drifted the deeper the water was becoming and the more varied in yield, for we kept up the dredging and now we began to get flora and fauna characteristic of the deep sea, instead of the specimens peculiar to the waters near shore. Our soundings were kept up constantly and showed that we were sliding off the continental shelf, so to speak, into the ocean depths. The dredging and soundings were both carried on through a hole in the ice, which we had made at the stern of the ship. Here we had an igloo—a snow-house—for protection.
Peary had given me the first stimulus to seekinformation in the Arctic; he had been the first to make me feel the fascination of all this sounding and dredging, mapping out the bed of the ocean, outlining the continental shelf. These things and the search for new land in latitudes where man has never set foot before are what appeal to me. Call it love of adventure if you will; it seems to me the life that ought to appeal to any man with red blood in his veins, for as long as there is a square mile of the old earth’s surface that is unexplored, man will want to seek out that spot and find out all about it and bring back word of what he finds. Some people call the search for the North Pole a sporting event; to me it represents the unconquerable aspiration of mankind to attain an ideal. OurKarlukdrift and its possibilities interested me keenly, for we were on the way to a vast region where man had never been; we were learning things about ocean currents and the influence of the winds and almost daily were bringing up strange specimens from the bottom of the sea. And I felt sure that come what might we would get back in safety to civilization.
For several days we continued our offshore drift without change, bearing sometimes due north, sometimes easterly and then again northwesterly until by the ninth we were about thirty-five milesfrom Point Barrow and drifting fast, too fast, in fact, to use the dredge. The depth of the water had by now increased to almost a hundred fathoms.
The afternoon of the ninth Mamen and I were out on our ski, when there came a sudden crack in the ice between us and the ship. Fortunately I was on the watch for just such an event and as soon as I saw the black streak of the open water on the white surface of the ice about a hundred yards away from the high rafter which formed our ski-jump, we started for the lead at top speed. The crack was about ten feet wide at first; the wind was blowing, the snow was falling fast and night was closing in. We had a dog with us and she ran along ahead of us to the lead. The edges of the ice at one point were only about three feet apart and after a wait of five or ten minutes we managed to bridge the gap and get across just in time, but the dog got on another section of ice which broke away and floated off with her.
When I got back to the ship I threw off my heavy ski shoes and went up into the crow’s nest. It was stormy and I could not see very far. The crack in the ice was about half a mile away and, as I could see, was closing up. When it closed I feared we should be in for trouble, for the ice was three or four feet thick, and if it should break up all the way down to the ship and get us mixed upin the floating fragments, it might crush the ship in an instant. So I set everybody at work on the jump. For some time we had been placing supplies overboard on a heavy floe not far from the ship and there we already had supplies for several months in case of emergency. When the crack closed up, the ice about 150 yards astern split at right angles into a lane of open water a couple of feet wide.
The thermometer was about zero and there was much condensation in the air, indicating the proximity of a good deal of open water. We had steam up and I decided that if conditions remained the same when daylight came the next morning, so that we could see what we were doing, I would try to get the ship out into the open water and back to the land. I stayed up all night but the next morning I found that all the leads had closed up and through the clear, frosty air no open water was visible in any direction. This proved to be the nearest the open water came to us in all our drift.