Adrift in the Arctic ice pack; from the history of the first U.S. Grinnell expedition in search of Sir John Franklin

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OUTING ADVENTURE LIBRARY

ADRIFT

IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

From the History of the First
U. S. Grinnell Expedition in
Search of Sir John Franklin

By ELISHA KENT KANE, M.D.

EDITED BY

HORACE KEPHART

NEW YORK
OUTING PUBLISHING COMPANY

MCMXVI

Copyright, 1915, by
OUTING PUBLISHING COMPANY

All rights reserved.

INTRODUCTION

IT was in the summer of 1845 that Sir
John Frankhn undertook his fourth
voyage into the Arctic regions, in
search of a northwest passage, and dis-
appeared forever in that icy waste.

Frankhn's two ships, the Erehus and the
Terror, were supposed to be provisioned for
three years. When this interval had passed
without word of the daring navigator there
was grave fear that he had met with disaster.
Then began an unparalleled series of search
and relief expeditions, public and private,
English and American: five separate ones
in 1848, three in 1849, ten in 1850, two in
1851, nine in 1852, five in 1853, two in 1854,
one in 1855, and one in 1857.

Among the earliest of these was one from
the United States, known as the first Grin-
nell expedition, which left New York in
May, 1848. Lady Franklin had appealed
to the President of the United States to

7

ivi317339

8 INTRODUCTION

enlist his countrymen as a "kindred people,
to join heart and hand in the enterprize of
snatching the lost navigators from a dreary
grave." Accordingly a bill was introduced
in Congress to fit out an expedition for this
purpose; but the process of legislation was
too slow to provide vessels and equipment in
the short time that was left for such a ven-
ture.

At this juncture a New York merchant,
Henry Grinnell, outfitted two of his own
vessels for the service and proffered them
gratuitously to our government. They
were at once accepted under a joint resolu-
tion of Congress, and the President was
authorized to detail officers and men from
the navy to man the ships.

This little squadron comprised the Ad-
vance, of 144 tons, and the Bescue, of 91
tons, carrying, respectively, seventeen and
sixteen officers and crew. The expedition
was under command of Lieut. Edwin J. De
Haven.

The senior medical officer was Dr. Elisha
Kent Kane, who was destined later (1853)
himself to lead a second Grinnell expedition

INTRODUCTION 9

on this same quest. In the present instance,
Dr. Kane states that "while bathing in the
tepid waters of the Gulf of Mexico" he re-
ceived a telegram from Washington detach-
ing him from the Coast Survey and order-
ing him to proceed forthwith to New York
for duty upon the Arctic expedition. Al-
though he made the overland trip of thirteen
hundred miles with all possible despatch, he
had only a fraction of a day left in New
York in which to equip himself for service
in the polar seas. It fell to him to be not
only chief surgeon and scientific observer of
the expedition, but also its historian.

In view of the elaborate scientific methods
of outfitting for arctic exploration in our
own day, it is interesting to contrast the
vessels and equipment hurriedly assembled
for a venture into the Far North at a time
when so little was known of that inhospit-
able region. Dr. Kane says: "It was not,
perhaps, to be expected that an expedition
equipped so hastily as ours, and with one
engrossing object, should have facilities for
observing very accurately, or go out of its
way to find matters for curious research.

10 INTRODUCTION

But even the routine of a national ship
might, I was confident, allow us to gather
something for the stock of general knowl-
edge. With the assistance of Professor
Loomis, I collected as I could some simple
instruments for thermal and magnetic reg-
istration, which would have been of use if
they had found their way on board. A
very few books for the dark hours of win-
ter, and a stock of coarse woolen clothing,
re-enforced by a magnificent robe of wolf-
skins, that had wandered down to me from
the snow-drifts of Utah, constituted my en-
tire outfit; and with these I made my re-
port to Commodore Salter at the Brooklyn
Xavy Yard.

"Almost within the shadow of the line-
of -battle ship No?'th Carolina, their hulls
completely hidden beneath a projecting
wharf, were two little hermaphrodite brigs.
Their spars had no man-of-war trigness;
their decks were choked with half-stowed
cargo; and for size, I felt as if I could
straddle from the main hatch to the bul-
warks.

"At this first si^ht of the Grinnell Ex-

INTRODUCTION 11

pedition, I confess that the fastidious ex-
perience of naval Hfe on board frigates and
corvettes made me look down on these hum-
ble vessels. They seemed to me more like
a couple of coasting schooners than a na-
tional squadron bound for a perilous and
distant sea. Many a time afterward I re-
called the short-sighted ignorance of these
first impressions, when some rude encounter
with the ice made comfort and dignity very
secondary thoughts.

"The Advance, my immediate home, had
been originally intended for the transport
of machinery. Her timbers were heavily
moulded, and her fastenings of the most
careful sort. She was fifty-three tons
larger than her consort, the Rescue; yet both
together barely equaled two hundred and
thirty-five tons.

"To navigate an ice-bound sea, speed,
though important, is much less so than
strength. Extreme power of resistance to
pressure must be combined with facility of
handling, adequate stowage, and a solidity
of frame that may encounter sudden con-
cussions fearlessly; and it seemed to both

12 INTRODUCTION

Mr. Grinnell and Lieutenant De Haven
that these quahties might be best embodied
in such small vessels as the Advance and
Rescue. It was, indeed, something like a
return to the dimensions of our predecessors
of the olden time; for the three vessels of
Frobisher summed up only seventy-five
tons, and Baffin's largest was ten tons less
in burden than the Rescue. As the vessels
of our expedition were more thoroughly
adapted, perhaps, for this dangerous serv-
ice than any that had been fitted out before
for the Arctic seas, I will describe them in
detail.

"Commencing with the outside: the hull
was literally double, a brig within a brig.
An outer sheathing of two and a half inch
oak was covered with a second of the same
material; and strips of heavy sheet-iron ex-
tended from the bows to the beam, as a
shield against the cutting action of the new
ice. The decks were double, made water-
tight by a packing of tarred felt between
them. The entire interior was lined,
ceiled, with cork; which, independently of
its low conducting poAver, was a valuable

INTRODUCTION 13

protection against the condensing moisture,
one of the greatest evils of the polar cli-
mate.

"The strengthening of her skeleton, her
wooden frame-work, was admirable. For-
ward, from kelson to deck, was a mass of
solid timber, clamped and dove-tailed with
nautical wisdom, for seven feet from the
cutwater; so that we could spare a foot or
two of our bows without springing a leak.
To prevent the ice from forcing in her sides,
she was built with an extra set of beams run-
ning athwart her length at intervals of four
feet, and so arranged as to ship and un-
ship at pleasure. From the Samson-posts,
strong radiating timbers, called shores, di-
verged in every direction; and oaken knees,
hanging and oblique, were added wherever
space permitted.

"Looking forward to the hampering ice
fields, our rudder was so constructed that
it could be taken on board and replaced
again in less than four minutes. Our winch,
capstan, and patent windlass were of the
best and newest construction.

"A little hurricane-house amidships con-

14 INTRODUCTION

tained the one galley that cooked for all
hands, and a large funnel of galvanized h'on
was connected with the chimney, in such a
way that the heat circulating round it might
supply us with melted snow. An armorer's-
forge, a full set of ice anchors, a couple of
well-built whale-boats, and three anthracite
stoves, made part of the outfit.

"In a word, every thing about the two
vessels bore the marks of intelligent fore-
sight and unsparing expenditure.

"With the governmental arrangements we
were not so fortunate. It seems to be in-
separable from national as well as corporate
administration, that it is less effective than
the action of individuals. Neither our own
navy nor that of Great Britain attains re-
sults so cheaply, promptly, or well, as the
commercial marine; and it is a fact, only
expressed from a sad conviction of its truth,
that, in spite of the disciplined intelligence
of many of our officers, the naval service of
the public is regarded among our merchant
brethren, and by the community they belong
to, as non-progressive and old-fashioned in
all that admits of comparison between the

INTRODUCTION 15

two. They excel us in equipment, and
speed, and substantial economy.

"I can not, then, say much in praise of
either the dispatch or excellence of our
strictly naval equipment. There were other
things, besides the diminutive size of our
brigs, to remind one of the days of the an-
cient mariners. Some that were matters of
serious vexation at the moment may be for-
gotten now, or remembered with a smile.
Our heterogeneous collection of obsolete old
carbines, with the impracticable ball-cart-
ridges that accompanied them, gave us many
a laugh before we got home. Thanks to
the incessant labors of our commander, and
the exhaustless liberality of Mr. Grinnell,
most of our deficiencies were made up, and
we effected our departure in time for the
navigation of Baffin's Bay.

"Our crews consisted of man-of-war's-men
of various climes and habitudes, with con-
stitutions most of them impaired by disease,
temporarily broken by the excesses of shore
life. But this original defect of material
was in a great degree counteracted by the
strict and judicious discipline of our execu-

16 INTRODUCTION

tive officers. The crews proved in the end
wilhng and rehable; and, in the midst of
trials which would have tested men of more
pretension, were never found to waver. I
record, in the commencement of this narra-
tive, how much respect and kindly feeling
I, as one of their little body, entertain for
their essential contribution to the ends of
the expedition."

Speaking of the quick transition from
harbor life and home associations to the dis-
comforts of arctic voyaging in these tiny
ships, he continues:

"The difference struck me, and not quite
pleasantly, as I climbed over straw and rub-
bish into the little peculium which was to
be my resting-place for so long a time.
The cabin, which made the homestead of
four human beings, was somewhat less in
dimensions than a penitentiary cell. There
was just room enough for two berths of six
feet each on a side; and the area between,
which is known to naval men as 'the country,'
seemed completely filled up with the hinged
table, the four camp-stools, and the lockers.
A hanging lamp, that creaked uneasily on

INTRODUCTION 17

its gimbals, illustrated through the mist
some long rows of crockery shelves and the
dripping step-ladder that led directly from
the wet deck above. Everything spoke
of cheerless discomfort and narrow re-
straint. . . .

"I now began, with an instinct of future
exigencies, to fortify my retreat. The only
spot I could call my own was the berth I
have spoken of before. It was a sort of
bunk — a right-angled excavation, of six feet
by two feet eight in horizontal dimensions,
let into the side of the vessel, with a height
of something less than a yard. My first
care was to keep water out, my second to
make it warm. A bundle of tacks, and a
few yards of India-rubber cloth, soon made
me an impenetrable casing over the entire
wood-work. Upon this were laid my Mor-
mon wolf-skin and a somewhat ostentatious
Astracan fur cloak, a relic of former travel.
Two little wooden shelves held my scanty
library; a third supported a reading lamp,
or, upon occasion, a Berzelius' argand, to be
lighted when the dampness made an in-
crease of heat necessary. My watch ticked

18 INTRODUCTION

from its particular nail, and a more noise-
less monitor, my thermometer, occupied
another. My ink-bottle was suspended,
pendulum fashion, from a hook, and to one
long string was fastened, like the ladle of a
street-pump, my entire toilet, a tooth-brush,
a comb, and a hair-brush.

"Now, when all these distributions had
been happily accomplished, and I crawled
in from the wet, and cold, and disorder of
without, through a slit in the India-rubber
cloth, to the very centre of my complicated
resources, it would be hard for any one to
realize the quantity of comfort which I felt
I had manufactured. My lamp burned
brightlj^ ; little or no water distilled from the
roof; my furs warmed me into satisfaction;
and I realized that I was sweating myself
out of my preliminary cold, and could tem-
per down at pleasure the abruptness of my
acclimation."

The expedition progressed northward
without sj^ecial incident until the 8th of
July, when, having passed Uppernavik,
"the jumping-off place of Arctic naviga-
tors," the two vessels became locked fast in

INTRODUCTION 19

the ice. Then began a heart-breaking task
of warjjing through the pack with ice-
anchor, cable and winch. It was "all
hands" at this heave and haul, from captain
to cook, and the doctor too. "We were
twenty-one days thus imprisoned, never
leaving a little circle of some six miles
radius." Then they struck open water-
leads, and made fair progress for sailing
vessels under such circumstances, but "how
often when retarded by baffling winds or
unfavorable leads, have I wished for a few
hours of steam I"

On August 18th they passed the ice bar-
rier of Baffin Bay, and bore away south-
westerly towards Lancaster Sound, in more
open water than they had seen for weeks.
Several British rescue squadrons were
known to be somewhere in these waters, in-
cluding a number of steamers, but De Haven
and his associates were ignorant of their
course and intended scheme of search.

"We had dreamed before this, and pleas-
antly enough, of fellowship with them in
our efforts, dividing between us the hazards
of the way, and perhaps in the long winter

20 INTRODUCTION

holding with them the cheery intercourse
of kindred sympathies. We waked now to
the probabiHties of passing the dark days
alone. Yet fairly on the way, an energetic
commander, a united ship's company, the
wind freshening, our well-tried little ice-
boat now groping her way like a blind man
through fog and bergs, and now dashing
on as if reckless of all but success — it was
impossible to repress a sentiment almost
akin to the so-called joyous excitement of
conflict.

"We were bidding good-by to 'ye goode
baye of old William Baffin'; and as we
looked round witli a farewell remembrance
upon the still water, the diminished ice-
bergs, and the constant sun which had
served us so long and faithfully, we felt
that the Bay had used us kindly."

On August 19th they fell in with two
of the British vessels, — and now begins the
interesting part of Kane's narrative: the
discovery of the site of Frankhn's first
winter encampment, then of three head-
stones marking the graves of men belong-
ing to his expedition, and finally the separa-

INTRODUCTION 21

tion of the American squadron from their
Enghsh aUies, the freezing-in of the two
ships, and their drifting helplessly in the ice
pack, month after month, through the long
Arctic night, where no vessel ever had win-
tered before — drifting "toward God knows
where!"

The following pages comprise chapters
XX to XLVI of Dr. Kane's work "The
U. S. Grinnell Expedition in search of Sir
John Franklin: a Personal Narrative"
(London and New York, 1854), omitting
nothing but some scientific observations that
do not add to the interest of the book as a
record of heroic adventure.

In this narrative Dr. Kane tells of the
first discovery of traces of the Franklin
expedition — the winter encampment on
Beechey Island, and the three graves. No
more was learned of the ill-starred naviga-
tors until 1854, when Dr. Rae, of the Hud-
son's Bay Company heard that a party of
white men had been seen, four winters be-
fore, on King William's Land, and that
their bodies had been afterwards found on
the mainland. From the Eskimos who

22 ADRIFT IN THE ICE FLOES

gave him this report he obtained various
rehcs of the Frankhn expedition that were
unquestionably authentic.

In 1859 numerous other relics were found,
including a paper on which was the follow-
ing memorandum. —

"25 April, 1848.— H. M. ships Terror and
Erebus were deserted on 22 April, 5 leagues
N.N.W. of this, having been beset since
12 Sept., 1846. The officers and crews,
consisting of 105 souls, under the command
of Captain F. R. M. Crozier, landed here
in lat. 69° 37' 42'' N., long. 98° 41' W. Sir
John Frankhn died on 11 June, 1847, and
the total loss by deaths in the expedition
has been to this date 9 officers and 15 men.

"And start on to-morrow, 26th, for
Back's Fish River."

Nothing further has ever been heard of
the discoverers of the northwest passage.
They vanished in the great white silence.
Horace Kephart.

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC
ICE PACK

CHAPTER I

*< A ^^^'^^ ^^' ^^^^ ^i^d ^°^-

/% tinued freshening, the aneroid
/ %^ falling two tenths in the night.
About eight I was called by
our master, with the news that a couple of
vessels were following in our wake. We
were shortening sail for our consort; and
by half past twelve, the larger stranger, the
Lady Franklin, came up along side of us.
A cordial greeting, such as those only know
who have been pelted for weeks in the sol-
itudes of Arctic ice — and we learned that
this was Captain Penny's squadron, bound
on the same pursuit as ourselves. A hur-
ried interchange of news followed. The ice
in INIelville Bay had bothered both parties

25

26 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

alike; Commodore Austin, with his steamer
tenders, was three days ago at Carey's
Islands, a group nearly as high as 77° north
latitude; the North Star, the missing pro-
vision transport of last summer, was safe
somewhere in Lancaster Sound, probably at
Leopold Island. For the rest, God speed!

"As she slowly forged ahead, there came
over the rough sea that good old English
hurra, which we inherit on our side the
water. 'Three cheers, hearty, with a will!'
indicating as much of brotherhood as sym-
pathy. 'Stand aloft, boys!' and we gave
back the greeting. One cheer more of ac-
knowledgment on each side, and the sister
flags separated, each on its errand of mercy.

"8 P.M. The breeze has freshened to a
gale. Fogs have closed round us, and we
are driving ahead again, with look-outs on
every side. We have no observation; but
by estimate we must have got into Lancas-
ter Sound.

"The sea is short and excessive. Every
thing on deck, even anchors and quarter-
boats, have 'fetched away,' and the little
cabin is half afloat. The Rescue is stagger-

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 27

ing under heavy sail astern of us. We are
making six or seven knots an hour. ISIur-
daugh is ahead, looking out for ice and
rocks; De Haven conning the ship.

"All at once a high mountain shore rises
before us, and a couple of isolated rocks
show themselves, not more than a quarter of
a mile ahead, white with breakers. Both
vessels are laid to."

The storm reminded me of a Mexican
"norther." It was not till the afternoon of
the next day that we were able to resume
our track, under a double-reefed top-sail,
stay-sail, and spencer. We were, of course,
without observation still, and could only
reckon that we had passed the Cunningham
Mountains and Cape Warrender.

About three o'clock in the morning of the
21st, another sail was reported ahead, a top-
sail schooner, towing after her what ap-
peared to be a launch, decked over.

"When I reached the deck, we were
nearly up to her, for we had shaken out our
reefs, and were driving before the wind,
shipping seas at every roU. The little
schooner was under a single close-reefed top-

28 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

sail, and seemed fluttering over the waves
like a crippled bird. Presently an old fel-
low, with a cloak tossed over his night gear,
appeared in the lee gangway, and saluted
with a voice that rose above the winds.

"It was the Felix, commanded by that
practical Ai'ctic veteran, Sir John Ross. I
shall never forget the heartiness with which
the hailing officer sang out, in the midst of
our dialogue, 'You and I are ahead of them
all.' It was so indeed. Austin, with two
vessels, was at Pond's Bay; Penny was
somewhere in the gale; and others of Aus-
tin's squadron were exploring the north side
of the Sound. The Felia? and the Advance
were on the lead.

"Before we separated, Sir John Ross
came on deck, and stood at the side of his
officer. He was a square-built man, ap-
parently veiy little stricken in years, and
well able to bear his part in the toils and
hazards of life. He has been wounded in
four several engagements — twice desper-
ately— and is scarred from head to foot.
He has conducted two Polar expeditions al-
ready, and performed in one of them the

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 29

unparalleled feat of wintering four years in
Ai'ctic snows. And here he is again, in a
flimsy cockle-shell, after contributing his
purse and his influence, embarked himself
in the crusade of search for a lost comrade.
We met him off Admiralty Inlet, just about
the spot at which he was picked up seventeen
years before."

Soon after midnight, the land became
visible on the north side of the Sound. We
had passed Cape Charles Yorke and Cape
Crawfurd, and were fanning along slug-
gishly with all the sail we could crowd for
Port Leopold.

It was the next day, however, before we
came in sight of the island, and it was nearly
spent when we found ourselves slowly ap-
proaching Whaler Point, the seat of the
harbor. Our way had been remarkably
clear of ice for some days, and we were
vexed to flnd, therefore, that a firm and
rugged barrier extended along the western
shore of the inlet, and apparently across the
entrance we were seeking.

It was a great relief to us to see, at half
past six in the evening, a top-sail schooner

30 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

working toward us through the ice. She
boarded us at ten, and proved to be Lady
Franklin's own search- vessel, the Prince Al-
bert.

This was a very pleasant meeting. Cap-
tain Forsyth, who commanded the Albert,
and Mr. Snow, who acted as a sort of ad-
jutant under him, were very agreeable gen-
tlemen. They spent some hours with us,
which ]Mr. Snow has remembered kindly in
the journal he has j)ublished since his re-
turn to England. Their little vessel was
much less perfectly fitted than ours to en-
counter the perils of the ice; but in one re-
spect at least their expedition resembled our
own. They had to rough it : to use a West-
ern phrase, they had no fancy fixings —
nothing but what a hasty outfit and a limited
purse could supply. They were now bound
for Cape Rennell, after which they pro-
posed making a sledge excursion over the
lower Boothian and Cockburne lands.

The North Star, they told us, had been
caught by the ice last season in the neighbor-
hood of our own first imprisonment, off the
Devil's Thumb. After a perilous drift, she

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 31

had succeeded in entering Wolstenholme
Sound, whence, after a tedious winter, she
had only recently arrived at Port Bowen.

They followed in our wake the next day
as we pushed through many streams of ice
across the strait. We sighted the shore
about five miles to the west of Cape Hurd
very closely; a miserable wilderness, rising
in terraces of broken-down limestone, ar-
ranged between the hills like a vast theatre.

On the 25th, still beating through the ice
off Radstock Bay, we discovered on Cape
Riley two cairns, one of them, the most con-
spicuous, with a flag-staff and ball. A
couple of hours after, we were near enough
to land. The cape itself is a low projecting
tongue of limestone, but at a short distance
behind it the cliff rises to the height of some
eight hundred feet. We found a tin canis-
ter within the larger cairn, containing the
information that Captain Ommanney had
been there two days before us, with the As-
sistance and Intrepid, belonging to Captain
Austin's squadron, and had discovered
traces of an encampment, and other indi-
cations "that some party belonging to her

32 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

Britannic majesty's service had been de-
tained at this spot." Similar traces, it was
added, had been found also on Beechy Is-
land, a projection on the channel side some
ten miles from Cape Riley.

Our consort, the Rescue, as we afterward
learned, had shared in this discovery, though
the British commander's inscription in the
cairn, as well as his official reports, might
lead perhaps to a different conclusion.
Captain Griffin, in fact, landed with Cap-
tain Ommanney, and the traces were reg-
istered while the two officers were in com-
pany.

I inspected these different traces very
carefully, and noted what I observed at the
moment. The appearances which connect
them with the story of Sir John Franklin
have been described by others; but there
may still be interest in a description of them
made while they were under my eye. I
transcribe it word for word from my jour-
nal.

"On a tongue of fossiliferous limestone,
fronting toward the west on a little inden-
tation of the water, and shielded from the

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 33

north by the precipitous cliffs, are five dis-
tinct remnants of habitation.

"Nearest the chffs, four circular mounds
or heapings-up of the crumbled limestone,
aided by larger stones placed at the outer
edge, as if to protect the leash of a tent.
Two larger stones, with an intei^val of two
feet, fronting the west, mark the places of
entrance.

"Several large square stones, so arranged
as to serve probably for a fire-place. These
have been tumbled over by parties before
us.

"More distant from the cliffs, yet in line
with the four already described, is a larger
inclosure ; the door facing south, and looking
toward the strait: this so-called door is
simply an entrance made of large stones
placed one above the other. The inclosure
itself triangular; its northern side about
eighteen inches high, built up of flat stones.
Some bird bones and one rib of a seal were
found exactly in the centre of this triangle,
as if a party had sat round it eating; and
the top of a preserved meat case, much
rusted, was found in the same place. I

34. ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

picked up a piece of canvas or duck on the
cliff side, well worn by the weather: the
sailors recognized it at once as the gore of
a pair of trowsers.

"A fifth circle is discernible nearer the
cliffs, which may have belonged to the same
party. It was less perfect than the others,
and seemed of an older date.

"On the beach, some twenty or thirty
yards from the triangular inclosure, were
several pieces of pine wood about four inches
long, painted green, and white, and black,
and, in one instance, puttied ; evidently parts
of a boat, and apparently collected as kin-
dling wood."

The indications were meagre, but the con-
clusion they led to was irresistible. They
could not be the work of Esquimaux: the
whole character of them contradicted it : and
the only European who could have visited
Cape Riley was Parry, twenty-eight years
before; and we knew from his journal that
he had not encamped here. Then, again,
Ommanney's discovery of like vestiges on
Beechy Island, just on the track of a party
moving in either direction between it and the

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 35

channel: all these speak of a land party from
Franklin's squadron.

Our commander resolved to press onward
along the eastern shore of Wellington Chan-
nel. We were under weigh in the early
morning of the 26th, and working along
with our consort toward Beechy — I drop
the "Island," for it is more strictly a penin-
sula or a promontory of limestone, as high
and abrupt as that at Cape Riley, connected
with what we call the main by a low isthmus.
Still further on we passed Cape Spencer;
then a fine bluff point, called by Parry
Point Innes ; and further on again, the trend
being to the east of north, we saw the
low tongue, Cape Bowden. Parry merely
sighted these points from a distance, so that
the shore line has never been traced. I
sketched it myself with some care; but the
running survey of this celebrated explorer
had left nothing to alter. To the north of
Cape Innes, though the coast retains the
same geognostical character, the bluff prom-
ontories subside into low hills, between
which the beach, composed of coarse silicious
limestone, sweeps in long curvilinear ter-

36 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

races. Measuring some of these rudely
afterward, I found that the elevation o;f
the highest plateau did not exceed forty
feet.

Our way northward was along an ice
channel close under the eastern shore, and
bounded on the other side by the ice-pack,
at a distance varying from a quarter of a
mile to a mile and three quarters. Off Cape
Spencer the way seemed more open, widen-
ing perhaps to two miles, and showing some-
thing like continued free water to the north
and west. Here we met Captain Penny,
with the Lady Franklin and Sophia. He
told us that the channel was completely shut
in ahead by a compact ice barrier, which
connected itself with that to the west, de-
scribing a horseshoe bend. He thought a
south wester was coming on, and counseled
us to prepare for the chances of an impact-
ment. The go-ahead determination which
characterized our commander made us test
the correctness of his advice. We pushed
on, tracked the horseshoe circuit of the ice
without finding an outlet, and were glad to

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 37

labor back again almost in the teeth of a
gale.

Captain Penny had occupied the time
more profitably. In company with Dr.
Goodsir, an enthusiastic explorer and highly
educated gentleman, whose brother was an
assistant surgeon on board the missing ves-
sels, he had been examining the shore. On
the ridge of limestone, between Cape Spen-
cer and Point Innes, they had come across
additional proofs that Sir John's party had
been here — very important these proofs as
extending the line along the shore over
which the party must have moved from Cape
Riley,

Among the articles they had found were
tin canisters, with the London maker's label ;
scraps of newspaper, bearing the date 1844;
a paper fragment, with the words "until
called" on it, seemingly part of a watch
order; and two other fragments, each with
the name of one of Franklin's officers wi'it-
ten on it in pencil. I annex a fac-simile of
one of these, the assistant surgeon of the
Terror. They told us, too, that among the

S8 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

articles found by Captain Penny's men was
a dredge, rudely fashioned of iron hoops
beat round, with spikes inserted in them,
and arranged for a long handle, as if to
fish up missing articles; besides some foot-
less stockings, tied up at the lower end to
serve as socks, an officer's pocket, velvet-
lined, torn off from the di-ess, &c., &c.; all
of which, they thought, spoke of a party that
had suffered wreck, and were moving east-
ward. Acting on this impression. Captain
Penny was about to proceed toward Baffin's
Bay, along the north shore of Lancaster
Sound, in the hope of encountering them,
or, more probably, their bleached remains.

For mj^self, looking only at the facts, and
carefully discarding every deduction that
might be prompted by sympathy rather than
reason, my journal reminds me that I did
not see in these signs the evidence of a lost
party. The party was evidently in motion ;
but it might be that it was a detachment,
engaged in making observations, or in ex-
ploring with a view to the operations of the
spring, while the ships were locked in win-
ter quarters at Cape Riley or Beechy,

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 39

which had returned on board before the
opening of the ice.

I may add, as not without some bearing
on the fortunes of this party, whatever may
have been its condition or purposes, that the
vacant water-spaces around us at this time
were teeming with animal Hfe. After pass-
ing Beechy, we saw seal disporting in great
flocks, rising out of the water as high as
their middle, like boys in swimming; the
white whale, the first we had seen, to the
extent of thirty-eight separate shoals; the
narwhal, or sea-unicorn; and, finally, that
marine pachyderm, the tusky walrus.
These last were always crowded on small
tongues of ice, whose purity they marred
not a little — grim-looking monsters, re-
minding me of the stage hobgoblins, some-
thing venerable and semi-Egyptian withal.
We passed so close as to have several shots
at them. They invariably rose after plung-
ing, and looked snortingly around, as if to
make fight. Polar bears were numerous be-
yond our previous experience, and the
Arctic fox and hare abounded. If we add
to these the crowding tenants of the air, the

40 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

Brent goose, which now came in great cunoid
flocks from the north and north by east,
the loons, the mollemokes, and the divers,
we may form an estimate of the means of
human subsistence in these seas.

CHAPTER II

ON" the 27th, the chances of this
narrow and capricious naviga-
tion had gathered five of the
searching vessels, under three
different commands, within the same quarter
of a mile — Sir John Ross', Penny's, and
our own. Both Ross and Penny had made
the effort to push through the sound to the
west, but found a great belt of ice, reach-
ing in an almost regular crescent from Leo-
pold's Island across to the northern shore,
about half a mile from the entrance of the
channel. Captain Ommanney, with the
Intrepid and Assistance, had been less for-
tunate. He had attempted to break his way
through the barrier, but it had closed on him,
and he was now fast, within fifteen miles
of us, to the west.

After breakfast, our commander and my-
self took a boat to visit the traces discovered
yesterday by Captain Penny. Taking the

41

42 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

Lady Franklin in our way, we met Sir John
Ross and Commander Phillips, and a con-
ference naturally took place upon the best
plans for concerted operations. I was very
much struck with the gallant disinterested-
ness of spirit which was shown by all the
officers in this discussion. Penny, an en-
ergetic, practical fellow, sketched out at
once a plan of action for each vessel of the
party. He himself would take the western
search; Ross should run over to Prince
Regent's Sound, communicate the news to
the Prince Albert, and so relieve that little
vessel from the now unnecessary perils of
her intended expedition; and we were to
press through the first openings in the ice
by Wellington Channel, to the north and
east.

It was wisely determined by brave old
Sir John that he would leave the Mary, his
tender of twelve tons, at a little inlet near
the point, to serve as a fallback in case we
should lose our vessels or become sealed up
in permanent ice, and De Haven and Penny
engaged their respective shares oflier outfit,
in the shape of some barrels of beef and

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 43

flour. Sir John Ross, I think, had just
left us to go on board his httle craft, and
I was still talking over our projects with
Captain Penny, when a messenger was rc'
ported, making all speed to us over the ice.

The news he brought was thrilling.
"Graves, Captain Penny! graves! Frank-
lin's winter quarters!" We were instantly
in motion. Captain De Haven, Captain
Penny, Commander Philhps, and myself,
joined by a party from the Rescue j hur-
ried on over the ice, and, scrambhng along
the loose and rugged slope that extends
from Beechy to the shore, came, after a
weary walk, to the crest of the isthmus.
Here, amid the sterile uniformity of snow
and slate, were the head-boards of three
graves, made after the old orthodox fashion
of gravestones at home. The mounds which
adjoined them were arranged with some
pretensions to symmetry, coped and de-
fended with limestone slabs. They occupied
a line facing toward Cape Riley, which was
distinctly visible across a little cove at the
distance of some four hundred yards.

The first, or that most to the southward.

44 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

is nearest to the front in the accompanying
sketch. Its inscription, cut in by a chisel,
ran thus;

"Sacred

to the

memory

of

W. Braine, R. M.,

H. M. S. Erebus.

Died April 3d, 1846,

aged 32 years.

'Choose ye this day whom ye will serve.'

Joshua, eh. xxiv., 15."

The second was:

"Sacred to the memory of

John Hartnell, A. B. of H. M. S.

Erebus,

aged 23 years.

'Thus saith the Lord, consider your ways.'

Haggai, i., 7."

The third and last of these memorials was
not quite so well finished as the others.
The mound was not of stone-work, but its
general appearance was more grave-like,
more like the sleeping-place of Christians
in happier lands. It was inscribed :

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 45

"Sacred

to

the memory

of

John Torrington,

who departed this life

January 1st, A.D. 1846,

on board of

H. M. ship Terror,

aged 20 years."

"Departed this life on hoard the Terror,
1st January, 1846!" Franklin's ships, then,
had not been wrecked when he occupied the
encampment at Beechy!

Two large stones were imbedded in the
friable hmestone a little to the left of these
sad records, and near them was a piece of
wood, more than a foot in diameter, and two
feet eight inches high, which had evidently
served for an anvil-block: the marks were
unmistakable. Near it again, but still more
to the east, and therefore nearer the beach,
was a large blackened space, covered with
coal cinders, iron nails, spikes, hinges, rings,
clearly the remains of the armorer's forge.
Still nearer the beach, but more to the

46 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

south, was the carpenter's shop, its marks
equally distinctive.

Leaving "the graves," and walking to-
ward Wellington Straits, about four hun-
dred yards, or perhaps less, we came to a
mound, or rather a series of mounds, which,
considering the Ai'ctic character of the sur-
face at this spot, must have been a work of
labor. It inclosed one nearly elhptical
area, and one other, which, though sepa-
rated from the first by a lesser mound, ap-
peared to be connected with it. The spaces
thus inclosed abounded in fragmentary re-
mains. Among them I saw a stocking with-
out a foot, sewed up at its edge, and a mit-
ten not so much the worse for use as to have
been without value to its owner. Shavings
of wood were strewed freely on the south-
ern side of the mound, as if they had been
collected there by the continued labor of
artificers, and not far from these, a few
hundred yards lower down, was the rem-
nant of a garden. Weighing all the signs
carefully, I had no doubt that this was
some central shore establishment, connected
with the squadron, and that the lesser area

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 47

was used as an observatory, for it had large
stones fixed as if to support instruments,
and the scanthng j)rops still stuck in the
frozen soil.

Travelling on about a quarter of a mile
further, and in the same direction, we came
upon a deposit of more than six hundred
preserved-meat cans, arranged in regular
order. They had been emptied, and were
now filled with Hmestone pebbles, perhaps
to serve as convenient ballast on boating ex-
peditions.

These were among the more obvious
vestiges of Sir John Franklin's party. The
minor indications about the ground were in-
numerable: fragments of canvas, rope,
cordage, sail-cloth, tarpaulins ; of casks, iron-
work, wood, rough and carved; of clothing,
such as a blanket lined by long stitches with
common cotton stuff, and made into a sort
of rude coat; paper in scraps, white, waste,
and journal; a small key; a few odds and
ends of brass-work, such as might be part of
the furniture of a locker; in a word, the
numberless reliquiae of a winter resting-
place. One of the papers, which I have pre-

48 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

served, has on it the notation of an astro-
nomical sight, worked out to Greenwich
time.

With all this, not a written memorandum,
or pointing cross, or even the vaguest intima-
tion of the condition or intentions of the
party. The traces found at Cape Riley and
Beechy were still more baffling. The cairn
was mounted on a high and conspicuous por-
tion of the shore, and evidently intended to
attract observation; but, though several
parties examined it, digging round it in
every direction, not a single particle of in-
formation could be gleaned. This is re-
markable; and for so able and practiced an
Artie commander as Sir John Franklin, an
incomprehensible omission.

In a narrow interval between the hills
which come down toward Beechy Island, the
searching parties of the Rescue and ^Ir.
Murdaugh of our own vessel found the
tracks of a sledge clearly defined, and un-
mistakable both as to character and direc-
tion. They pointed to the eastern shores
of Wellington Sound, in the same gen-
eral course with the traces discovered by

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 49

Penny between Cape Spencer and Point
Innes.

Similar traces were seen toward Cas-
well's Tower and Cape Riley, which gave
additional proofs of systematic journeyings.
They could be traced through the com-
minuted limestone shingle in the direction of
Cape Spencer; and at intervals further on
were scraps of paper, lucifer matches, and
even the cinders of the temporary fire. The
sledge parties must have been regularly or-
ganized, for their course had evidently been
the subject of a previous reconnoissance.
I observed their runner tracks not only in the
limestone crust, but upon some snow slopes
further to the north. It was starthng to see
the evidences of a travel nearly six years old,
preserved in intaglio on a material so per-
ishable.

The snows of the Arctic regions, by alter-
nations of congelation and thaw, acquire
sometimes an ice-like durability; but these
traces had been covered by the after-snows
of five winters. They pointed, like the
Sastrugi, or snow-waves of the Siberians,
to the marchers of the lost company.

50 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACE

Mr. Griffin, who performed a journej^ of
research along this coast toward the north,
found at intervals, almost to Cape Bowden,
traces of a passing party. A corked bottle,
quite empty, was among these. Reaching a
point beyond Cape Bowden, he discovered
the indentation or bay which now bears his
name, and on whose opposite shores the
coast was again seen.

It is clear to my own mind that a system-
atic reconnoissance was undertaken by
Frankhn of the upper waters of the Well-
ington, and that it had for its object an ex-
ploration in that direction as soon as the
ice would permit.

There were some features about this
deserted homestead inexpressibly touching.
The frozen trough of an old water channel
had served as the wash-house stream for the
crews of the lost squadron. The tubs, such
as Jack makes by sawing in half the beef
barrels, although no longer fed by the melted
snows, remained as the washers had left them
five years ago. The little garden, too: I
did not see it; but Lieutenant Osborn de-
scribes it as still showing the mosses and

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 51

anemones that were transplanted by its
farmers. A garden implies a purpose either
to remain or to return: he who makes it is
looking to the future. The same officer
found a pair of cashmere gloves, carefully
"laid out to dry, with two small stones upon
the palms to keep them from blowing away."
It would be wrong to measure the value of
these gloves by the price they could be
bought in Bond Street or Broadway. The
Arctic traveler they belonged to intended to
come back for them, and did not probably
forget them in his hurry.

The facts I have mentioned, almost all of
them, have been so ably analyzed already,
that I might be excused from venturing any
deductions of my own. But it was impossi-
ble to review the circumstances as we stood
upon the ground without forming an opin-
ion ; and such as mine was, it is perhaps best
that I should express it here.

In the first place, it is plain that Sir John
Franklin's consort, the Terror, wintered in
1845-6 at or near the promontory of Beechy ;
that at least part of her crew remained on
board of her; and that some of the crew of

52 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

the flag-ship, the Erebus, if not the ship
herself, were also there. It is also plain that
a part of one or both these crews was oc-
cupied during a portion of the winter in the
various pursuits of an organized squadron,
at an encampment on the isthmus I have de-
scribed, a position which commanded a full
view of Lancaster Sound to the east of south,
and of Welhngton Channel extending north.
It may be fairly inferred, also, that the gen-
eral health of the crews had not suffered
severely, three only having died out of a
hundred and thirty odd; and that in addi-
tion to the ordinary details of duty, they
were occupied in conducting and computing
astronomical observations, making sledges,
preparing their little anti-scorbutic garden
patches, and exploring the eastern shore of
the channel. Many facts that we ourselves
observed made it seem probable that Frank-
lin had not, in the first instance, been able
to prosecute his instructions for the Western
search; and the examinations made so fully
since by Captain Austin's officers have
proved that he never reached Cape Walker,
Banks' Land, Melville Island, Prince Re-

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 53

gent's Inlet, or any point of the sound con-
siderably to the west or southwest. The
whole story of our combined operations in
and about the channel shows that it is along
its eastern margin that the water-leads oc-
cur most frequently: natural causes of gen-
eral application may be assigned for this,
some of which will readily suggest them-
selves to the physicist ; but I have only to do
here with the recognized fact.

So far I think we proceed safely. The
rest is conjectural. Let us suppose the sea-
son for renewed progress to be approaching;
Franklin and his crews, with their vessels,
one or both, looking out anxiously from their
narrow isthmus for the first openmgs of the
ice. They come : a gale of wind has severed
the pack, and the drift begins. The first
clear water that would meet his eye would be
close to the shore on which he had his en-
campment. Would he wait till the continued
drift had made the navigation practicable
in Lancaster Sound, and then retrace his
steps to try the upper regions of Baffin's
Bay, which he could not reach without a long
circuit; or would he press to the north

54 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

through the open lead that lay before him?
Those who know Franklin's character, his
declared opinions, his determined purpose,
so well portrayed in the lately pubhshed
letters of one of his officers, will hardly think
the question difficult to answer: his sledges
had already pioneered the way. We, the
searchers, were ourselves tempted, by the in-
sidious openings to the north in Wellington
Channel, to push on in the hope that some
lucky chance might point us to an outlet
beyond. Might not the same temptation
have had its influence for Sir John Frank-
Hn? A careful and daring navigator, such
as he was, would not wait for the lead to
close. I can imagine the dispatch with
which the observatory would be dismantled,
the armorer's establishment broken up, and
the camp vacated. I can understand how
the preserved meat cans, not very valuable,
yet not worthless, might be left piled upon
the shore; how one man might leave his
mittens, another his blanket coat, and a third
hurry over the search for his lost key. And
if I were required to conjecture some ex-
planation of the empty signal cairn, I do not

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 55

know what I could refer it to but the ex-
citment attendant on just such a sudden
and unexpected release from a weary im-
prisonment, and the instant prospect of en-
ergetic and perilous adventure.

CHAPTER III

'' A ^^^'^^ 28. Strange enough,
/% during the night. Captain Aus-
/ ^ tin, of her majesty's search
squadron, with his flag-ship the
Resolute, entered the same httle indentation
in which five of us were moored before. His
steam-tender, the Pioneer, grounded off the
point of Beechy Island, and is now in sight,
canted over by the ice nearly to her beam
ends. He has come to us not of design, but
under the irresistible guidance of the ice.
We are now seven vessels within hailing dis-
tance, not counting Captain Ommanney's,
imbedded in the field to the westward.

"I called this morning on Sir John Ross,
and had a long talk with him. He said that,
as far back as 1847, anticipating the 'deten-
tion' of Sir John Franklin — I use his own
word — he had volunteered his services for
an expedition of retrieve, asking for the pur-
pose four small vessels, something like our

56

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 57

own ; but no one listened to him. Volunteer-
ing again in 1848, he was told that his
nephew's claim to the service had received a
recognition; whereupon his own was with-
drawn. 'I told Sir John,' said Ross, 'that
my own experience in these seas proved that
all these sounds and inlets may, by the ca-
price or even the routine of seasons, be closed
so as to prevent any egress, and that a miss-
ing or shut-off party must have some means
of falling back. It was thus I saved myself
from the abandoned Victory by a previously
constructed house for wintering, and a boat
for temporary refuge.' All this, he says, he
pressed on Sir John Franklin before he set
out, and he thinks that Melville Island is now
the seat of such a house-asylum. 'For, de-
pend upon it,' he added, 'Franklin will be
expecting some of us to be following on his
traces. Now, may it be that the party,
whose winter quarters we have discovered,
sent out only exploring detachments along
Wellington Sound in the spring, and then,
when themselves released, continued on to
the west, by Cape Hotham and Barrow's
Straits ?' I have given this extract from my

58 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

journal, though the theory it suggests has
since been disproved by Lieutenant M'CHn-
tock, because the tone and language of Sir
John Ross may be regarded as characteristic
of this manly old seaman.

"I next visited the Resolute. I shall not
here say how their perfect organization and
provision for winter contrasted with those
of our own little expedition. I had to shake
ofp a feeling almost of despondency when I
saw how much better fitted they were to
grapple with the grim enemy, Cold. Win-
ter, if we may judge of it by the clothing and
warming appliances of the British squadron,
must be something beyond our power to
cope with ; for, in comparison with them, we
have nothing, absolutely nothing.

"The officers received me, for I was alone,
with the cordiality of recognized brother-
hood. They are a gentlemanly, well-edu-
cated set of men, thoroughly up to the his-
tory of what has been done by others, and
full of personal resource. Among them I
was rejoiced to meet an old acquaintance.
Lieutenant Brown, whose admirably artistic
sketches I had seen in Haghe's lithotints, at

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 59

Mr. Grinnell's, before leaving New York.
When we were together last, it was among
the tropical jungles of Luzon, surrounded
by the palm, the cycas, and bamboo, in the
glowing extreme of vegetable exuberance:
here we are met once more, in the stinted re-
gion of lichen and mosses. He was then a
junior, under Sir Edward Belcher: I —
what I am yet. The lights and shadows of
a naval life are nowhere better, and, alas!
nowhere worse displayed, than in these re-
mote accidental greetings.

"Returning, I paid a visit to Penny's
vessels, and formed a very agreeable ac-
quaintance with the medical officer. Dr. R.
Anstruther Goodsir, a brother of assistant
surgeon Goodsir of Franklin's flag-ship.

"In commemoration of the gathering of
the searching squadrons within the little cove
of Beechy Point, Commodore Austin has
named it, very appropriately, Union Bay.
It is here the Mary is deposited as an asylum
to fall back upon in case of disaster.

"The sun is traveling rapidly to the south,
so that our recently glaring midnight is now
a twilight gloom. The coloring over the

60 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

hills at Point Innes this evening was sombre,
but in deep reds; and the sky had an in-
hospitable coldness. It made me thoughtful
to see the long shadows stretching out upon
the snow toward the isthmus of the Graves.

"The wind is from the north and west-
ward, and the ice is so driven in around us as
to grate and groan against the sides of our
little vessel. The masses, though small, are
very thick, and by the surging of the sea
have been rubbed as round as pebbles.
They make an abominable noise."

The remaining days of August were not
characterized by any incident of note. We
had the same alternations of progress and re-
treat through the ice as before, and with-
out sensibly advancing toward the western
shore, which it was now our object to reach.
The next extracts from my journal are of the
date of SeiDtember 3.

"After floating down, warping, to avoid
the loose ice, we finally cast off in compara-
tively open water, and began beating to-
ward Cape Spencer to get round the field.
Once there, we got along finely, sinking the
eastern shore by degrees, and nearing the

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 61

undelineated coasts of Cornwallis Island.
White whales, narwhals, seals — among them
the Phoca leonina with his puffed cheeks —
and two bears, were seen.

"The ice is tremendous, far ahead of any-
thing we have met with. The thickness of
the upraised tables is sometimes fourteen
feet; and the hummocks are so gi'ound and
distorted by the rude attrition of the floes,
that they rise up in cones like crushed sugar,
some of them forty feet high. But that the
queer life we are leading — a life of constant
exposure and excitement, and one that seems
more like the 'roughing it' of a land party
than the life of shipboard — has inured us to
the eccentric fancies of the ice, our position
would be a sleepless one.

"September 4, 2 a.m. Was awakened by
Captain De Haven to look at the ice: an im-
pressive sight. We were fast with three
anchors to the main floe; and now, though
the wind was still from the northward, and
therefore in opposition to the drift, the float-
ing masses under the action of the tide came
with a westward trend directly past us.
Fortunately, they were not borne down upon

62 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

the vessels ; but, as they went by in slow pro-
cession to the west, our sensations were, to
say the least, sensations. It was very grand
to see up-piled blocks twenty feet and more
above our heads, and to wonder whether this
fellow would strike our main-yard or clear
our stern. Some of the moving hummocks
were thirty feet high. They grazed us ; but
a little projection of the main field to wind-
ward shied them off.

"I killed to-day my first polar bear. We
made the animal on a large floe to the north-
ward while we were sighting the western
shores of Wellington, and of course could
not stop to shoot bears. But he took to the
water ahead of us, and came so near that we
fired at him from the bows of the vessel.
Mr. Lovell and myself fired so simultane-
ously, that we had to weigh the ball to de-
termine which had hit. My bullet struck
exactly in the ear, the mark I had aimed at,
for he had only his head above water. The
young ice was forming so rapidly around us
that it was hard work getting him on board.
I was one of the oarsmen, and sweated
rarely, with the thermometer at 25°.

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 63

"On the way back I succeeded in hitting
an enormous seal ; but, much to my mortifica-
tion, he sunk, after floating till we nearly
reached him.

"Without any organization, and with very
httle time for the hunt, the Advance now
counts upon her game hst two polar bears,
three seals, a single goose, and a fair table al-
lowance of loons, divers, and snipes. The
Rescue boasts of four bears, and, in addi-
tion to the small game, a couple of Arctic
hares. Our solitary goose was the Anas
bernicla, crowds of which now begin to fly
over the land and ice in cunoid streams to
the east of south. It was killed by Mr.
Murdaugh with a rifle, on the wing.

"How very much I miss my good home
assortment of hunting materials ! We have
not a decent gun on board; as for the rifle
I am now shooting, it is a flintlock concern,
and half the time hangs fire."

The next morning found me at work skin-
ning my bear, not a pleasant task with the
thermometer below the freezing point. He
was a noble specimen, larger than the larg-
est recorded by Parry, measuring eight feet

64 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

eight inches and three quarters from tip to
tip. I presented the skin, on my retm-n
home, to the Academy of Natural Sciences
at Philadelphia.

The carcass was larger than that of an
ordinary ox fatted for market. We esti-
mated his weight at nearly sixteen hundred
pounds. In build he was very soHd, and the
muscles of the arms and haunch fearfully
developed. I once before compared the
posterior aspect of the Arctic bear to an ele-
phant's. All my mess-mates used the same
comparison. The extreme roundness of his
back and haunches, with the columnar char-
acter of the legs, and the round expansion of
the feet, give you the impression of a small
elephant. The plantigrade base of support
overlapped by long hair heightens the re-
semblance. The head and neck, of course,
are excluded from the comparison.

At five in the afternoon we succeeded in
reaching within a quarter of a mile of the
shore off Barlow's Inlet, and made fast there
to the floe. This inlet is but a few miles
from Cape Hotham, and is marked on the
charts as a mere interruption of the coast

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 65

line. Parry, who named it, must have had
wonderfully favoring weather to sight so ac-
curately an insignificant cove. He was a
practiced hydrographer.

The limestone cliffs rise on each side,
forming stupendous piers gnarled by frost
degradation, between which is the entrance,
about a quarter of a mile wide. The mo-
ment our little vessel entered the shadow of
these cliffs, a quiet gloom took the place of
busthng movement. We ground our way
into the newly-formed ice, and, after making
a couple of ships' lengths, found ourselves
within a sort of cape of land floe, surrounded
by high hummocks and anchored bergs. It
was a melancholy spot; not one warm sun
tint; everything blank, repulsive sterility.

"September 6. The captain, Mr. Mur-
daugh, Mr. Carter, and myself started on a
walk of exploration. The distance between
the brig and the shore is not over three hun-
dred yards, but the travel was arduous.
The ice was eight and ten feet thick, studded
with broken bergs and hummocks. These
fragments were seldom larger than our
Rensselaer dining-room, some twenty feet

66 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

square, and, owing either to the rise and fall
of the tides or the piling action of storms,
deep crevices were formed around their
edges, partially masked by the snow which
had found its way into them, and by an icy
crust over the surface. Alternately jump-
ing these crevices and clambering up the
hummocks between them made it a danger-
ous walk. We had some narrow escapes.
Reaching the shore, we pushed forward
about a mile and a quarter to the head of the
inlet, and then crossed over on the ice to a
cairn that stood near it. We found noth-
ing but a communication from Captain
Ommanney, whose vessels we saw as we en-
tered the lead yesterday, informing the
Secretary of the Admiralty that he had been
off this place since the 24th, and that 'no
traces are to be found on Cornwallis Island
of the party under Sir John Franklin' — a
somewhat too confident assertion perhaps,
seeing that the island, if it be one, is more
than fifty miles across, and that the observa-
tions can hardly have extended beyond the
coast line.

"September 7. The spot at which we

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 67

have been Ij^ing is in front of Barlow's Inlet.
There is no barrier between it and our vessels
but the young ice, w^hich has now attained a
thickness of three inches. On the east we
have the drift plain of Wellington Channel,
impacted with floes, hummocks, and broken
bergs; and to the south we look out upon a
wild aggregation of enormous hummocks.
These hummocks are totally unlike anything
we saw in Baffin's Bay. They seem to have
been so disintegrated by the conflicting
forces that raised them as to have lost alto-
gether the character of tables. If hogs-
head upon hogshead of crushed sugar had
been emptied out at random, two or three
in one pile, and two or three ship loads in an-
other, and the summits of these irregular
heaps were covered over with a succession of
layers of snow, and the heaps themselves
multiphed in number indefinitely, and
crowded together in a disordered phalanx,
they would look a good deal like the hum-
mock field some twenty yards south of us.
These fearful masses are all anchored, sohd
hills, rising thirty feet above the level from
a bottom twenty-two feet below it.

68 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

"Our situation might be regarded as an
ugly one in some states of the wind, but for
the solid main floe to the north of us. This
projected from the cliff, which served as an
abutment for it ; and, after forming a sort of
cape outside of our position, extended with
a horseshoe sweep to the northward and east-
ward, as far as the eye could reach, following
the trend of the shore. It formed, of course,
a reliable breakwater. Commodore Aus-
tin's vessels were made fast to it some dis-
tance to the north and east of us.

"The barometer had given us, in the early
morning of the 4th, 29.90, since when it rose
steadily till the 5th, at 6 a.m., when it stood
30.38. For the next twenty-four hours it
fluctuated between .33 and .37 ; but at 6 a.m.
of the 6th, it again began to rise; by mid-
night, it had reached 30.44; and before ten
o'clock P.M. of the 7th, it was at the un-
wonted height of 30.68. At 2 p.m. the wind
had changed from S.S.E. to N.N.E., and
went on increasing to a gale.

"We were seated cosily around our little
table in the cabin, imagining our harbor of
land ice perfectly secure, when we were

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 69

startled by a crash. We rushed on deck
just in time to see the sohd floe to windward
part in the middle, liberate itself from its
attachment to the shore, and bear down upon
us with the full energy of the storm. Our
lee bristled ominously half a ship's length
from us, and to the east was the main drift.
The Rescue was first caught, nipped astern,
and lifted bodily out of water; fortu-
nately she withstood the pressure, and rising
till she snapped her cable, launched into open
water, crushing the young ice before her.
The Advance, by hard warping, drew a
little closer to the cove ; and, a moment after,
the ice drove by, just clearing our stern.
Commodore Austin's vessels were impris-
oned in the moving fragments, and carried
helplessly past us. In a very little while
they were some four miles off."

The summer was now leaving us rapidly.
The thermometer had been at 21° and 23°
for several nights, and scarcely rose above
32° in the daytime. Our httle harbor at
Barlow's Inlet was completely blocked in by
heavy masses; the new ice gave plenty of
sport to the skaters ; but on shipboard it was

70 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

uncomfortably cold. As yet we had no fires
below; and, after drawing around me the
India-rubber curtains of my berth, with my
lamp burning inside, I frequently wrote my
journal in a freezing temperature. "This
is not very cold, no doubt" — I quote from an
entry of the 8th — "not very cold to your
forty-five minus men of Arctic winters; but
to us poor devils from the zone of the lirio-
dendrons and peaches, it is rather cold for the
September month of water-melons. My
bear with his arsenic swabs is a solid lump,
and some birds that are waiting to be skinned
are absolutely rigid with frost."

In the afternoon of this day, the 8th, we
went to work, all hands, officers included, to
cut up the young ice and tow it out into the
current: once there, the drift carried it rap-
idly to the south. We cleared away in this
manner a space of some forty yards square,
and at five the next morning were rewarded
by being again under weigh. We were past
Cape Hotham by breakfast-time on the 9th,
and in the afternoon were beating to the west
in Lancaster Sound.

"The sound presented a novel spectacle

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 71

to us ; the young ice glazing it over, so as to
form a viscid sea of sludge and tichly-hend-
ers, from the northern shore to the pack, a
distance of at least ten miles. This was
mingled with the drift floes from Welling-
ton Channel; and in them, steaming away
manfully, were the Resolute and Pioneer.
The wind was dead ahead; yet, but for the
new ice, there was a clear sea to the west.
What, then, was our mortification, first, to
see our pack-bound neighbors force them-
selves from their prison and steam ahead
dead in the wind's eye, and, next, to be over-
hauled by Penny, and passed by both his
brigs. We are now the last of all the search-
ers, except perhaps old Sir John, who is
probably yet in Union Bay, or at least east
of the straits.

"The shores along which we are passing
are of the same configuration with the coast
to the east of Beechy Island ; the cliffs, how-
ever, are not so high, and their bluff appear-
ance is relieved occasionally by terraces and
shingle beach. The lithological characters
of the limestone appear to be the same.

"We are all together here, on a single

72 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

track but little wider than the Delaware or
Hudson. There is no getting out of it, for
the shore is on one side and the fixed ice
close on the other. All have the lead of us,
and we are working only to save a distance.
Ommanney must be near Melville by this
time: pleasant, very!

"Closing memoranda for the day: 1. I
have the rheumatism in my knees; 2. I left
a bag containing my dress suit of uniforms,
and, what is worse, my winter suit of furs,
and with them my double-barrel gun, on
board Austin's vessel. The gale of the 7th
has carried him and them out of sight.

''September 10. Unaccountable, most
unaccountable, the caprices of this ice-locked
region! Here we are again all together,
even Ommanney with the rest. The Meso-
lute. Intrepid, Assistance, Pioneer, Lady
Franklin, Sopliia, Advance, and Rescue;
Austin, Ommanney, Penny, and De Haven,
all anchored to the 'fast' off Griffith's Island.
The way to the west completely shut out."

CHAPTER IV

THE succeeding pages are very
little else than a transcript from
my journal. It would have been
easy to condense them into a more
attractive form; but they relate to the fur-
thest limits of our cruise, "long arum meta
Viarum" and some of the topics which they
embrace may perhaj^s invite that sort of
evidence which is best furnished by a con-
temporary record.

"September 11, Wednesday. Snow, light
and fleecy, covering the decks, and carried
by our clothes into our little cabin. The
moisture of the atmosphere condenses over
the beams, and trickles down over the lock-
ers and bedding. We are still alongside of
the fixed ice oif Griffith's Island, and the
British squadron under Commodore Austin
are clustered together within three hundred
yards of us. Penny, like an indefatigable
old trump, as he is, is out, pushing, working,

73

74 ADRIFT IN TPIE ARCTIC ICE PACK

groping in the fog. The sludge ice, that
had driven in around us and ahnost con-
gealed under our stern, is now by the ebb of
the tide, or at least its change, carried out
again, although the wind still sets toward the
floe.

"September 12, Thursday. We have had
a rough night. About 4 p.m., the heavy
snow which had covered our decks changed
to a driving drift ; the wind blew a gale from
the northwest, and the thermometer fell as
low as +16^. AU the squadron of search,
with the exception of Penny, were fastened
by ice-anchors to the main ice ; but the great
obscurity made us invisible to each other.

"At three the Rescue parted her cable's
hold, and was carried out to sea, leaving two
men, her boat, and her anchors behind. We
snapped our stern-cable, lost our anchor,
swung out, but fortunately held by the for-
ward line. All the English vessels were in
similar peril, the Pioneer being at one time
actually free; and Commodore Austin, who
in the Resolute occupied the head of the
line, was in momentary fear of coming down
upon us. Altogether I have seldom seen a

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 75

night of greater trial. The wind roared
over the snow floes, and every thing about
the vessel froze into heavy ice stalactites.
Had the main floe parted, we had been car-
ried down with the liberated ice. Fortu-
nately, every thing held; and here we are,
safe and sound. The Rescue was last seen
beating to windward against the gale, prob-
ably seeking a lee under Griffith's Island.
This morning the snow continues in the form
of a fine cutting drift, the water freezes
wherever it touches, and the thermometer
has been at no time above 17°.

''September 12, 10 p.m. Just from deck.
How ver}^ dismal every thing seems! The
snow is driven Hke sand upon a level beach,
lifted up in long curve lines, and then ob-
scuring the atmosphere with a white dark-
ness. The wind, too, is howling in a shrill
minor, singing across the hummock ridges.
The eight vessels are no longer here. The
Rescue is driven out to sea, and poor Penny
is probably to the southward. Five black
masses, however, their cordage defined by
rime and snow, are seen with their snouts
shoved into the shore of ice: cables, chains.

76 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

and anchors are covered feet below the drift,
and the ships adhere mysteriously, their
tackle completely invisible. Should any of
us break away, the gale would carry us into
streams of heavy floating ice; and our run-
ning rigging is so coated with icicles as to
make it impossible to work it. The ther-
mometer stands at 14°.

"At this temperature the young ice forms
in spite of the increasing movement of the
waves, stretching out from the floe in long,
zigzag lines of smoothness resembhng
watered silk. The loose ice seems to have
a southerly and easterly drift ; and, from the
increasing distance of Griffith's Island, seen
during occasional intervals, we are evidently
moving en masse to the south.

"Now when you remember that we are in
open sea, attached to precarious ice, and sur-
rounded by floating streams ; that the coast is
unknown, and the ice forming inshore, so as
to make harbors, if we knew of them, inac-
cessible, you may suppose that our position
is far from pleasant. One harbor was dis-
covered by a lieutenant of the Assistance
some days ago, and named Assistance Har-

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 77

bor, but that is out of the question ; the wind
is not only a gale, but ahead. Had we the
quarters of Capua before us, we should be
unable to reach them. It is a windward
shore.

"11 P.M. Captain De Haven reports ice
forming fast: extra anchors are out; ther-
mometer +8°. The British squadron, un-
der Austin, have fires in full blast: we are
without them still.

"12 M. In bed, reading or trying to read.
The gale has increased ; the floes are in upon
us from the eastward ; and it is evident that
we are all of us drifting bodily, God knows
where, for we have no means of taking ob-
servations.

"Seiotemher 13, 10 a.m. Found, on wak-
ing, that at about three this morning the
squadron commenced getting under weigh.
The rime-coated rigging was cleared; the
hawsers thashed;* the ice-clogged boats
hauled in; the steamers steamed, and off
went the rest of us as we might. This step
was not taken a whit too soon, if it be or-
dained that we are yet in time; for the

* So in the original. Evidently a misprint. — (Ed.)

78 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

stream-ice covers the entire horizon, and the
large floe or main which we have deserted is
barely separated from the drifting masses.
The Rescue is now the object of our search.
Could she be found, the captain has deter-
mined to turn his steps homeward.

"11 :20 A.M. We are working, i, e., beating
our way in the narrow leads intervening ir-
regularly between the main ice and the drift.
We have gained at least two miles to wind-
ward of Austin's squadron, who are unable,
in spite of steamers, to move along these
dangerous passages like ourselves. Our ob-
ject is to reach Griffith's Island, from which
we have drifted some fifteen miles with the
main ice, and then look out for our lost con-
sort.

"The lowest temperature last night was
+5°, but the wind makes it colder to sensa-
tion. We are grinding through newly-
formed ice three inches thick; the perfect
consolidation being prevented by its motion
and the wind. Even in the httle fireless
cabin in which I now write, water and coffee
are freezing, and the mercury stands at 29°.

"The navigation is certainly exciting. I

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 79

have never seen a description in my Arctic
readings of any thing like this. We are
literally running for our lives, surrounded
by the imminent hazards of sudden consolida-
tion in an open sea. All minor perils, nips,
humps, and sunken bergs are discarded; we
are staggering along under all sail, forcing
our way while we can. One thump, received
since I commenced writing, jerked the time-
keeper from our binnacle down the cabin
hatch, and, but for our strong bows, seven
and a half solid feet, would have stove us in.
Another time, we cleared a tongue of the
main pack by riding it down at eight knots.
Commodore Austin seems caught by the clos-
ing floes. This is really sharp work.

"4 P.M. We continued beating toward
Griffith's Island, till, by doubling a tongue
of ice, we were able to force our way. The
English seemed to watch our movements,
and almost to follow in our wake, till we
came to a comparatively open space, about
the area of Washington Square, where we
stood off and on, the ice being too close upon
the eastern end of Griffith's Island to permit
us to pass. Our companions in this little

80 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

vacancy were Captain Ommanney's Assist-
ance, Osborne's steam tender the Pioneer^,
and Kater's steamer the Intrepid. Com-
modore Austin's vessel was to the southward,
entangled in the moving ice, but momentar-
ily nearing the open leads.

"While thus boxing about on one of our
tacks, we neared the north edge of our little
opening, and were hailed by the Assistance
with the glad intelhgence of the Rescue close
under the island. Our captain, who was at
his usual post, conning the ship from the
foretop-sail yard, made her out at the same
time, and immediately determined upon bor-
ing the intervening ice. This was done suc-
cessfully, the brig bearing the hard knocks
nobly. Strange to say, the Enghsh vessels,
now joined by Austin, followed in our wake
— a compliment, certainly, to De Haven's
ice-mastership.

"We were no sooner through, than signal
was made to the Rescue to 'cast off,' and our
ensign was run up from the peak: the cap-
tain had determined upon attempting a re-
turn to the United States."

It could not be my office to discuss the

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 81

policy of this step, even if the question were
one of pohcy alone. But it was one of in-
structions. The Navy Department, imitat-
ing in this the Enghsh Board of Admiralty,
had, in its orders to our commander, marked
out to him the course of the expedition, and
had enjoined that, unless under special cir-
cumstances, he should "endeavor not to be
caught in the ice during the winter, but that
he should, after completing his examina-
tions for the season, make his escape, and
return to New York in the fall." In the
judgment of Commodore De Haven, these
special circumstances did not exist; and he
felt himself, therefore, controlled by the gen-
eral terms of the injunction. I believe that
there was but one feeling among the officers
of our little squadron, that of unmitigated
regret that we were no longer to co-operate
with our gallant associates under the sister
flag. Our intercourse with them had been
most cordial from the very first. We had
interchanged many courtesies, and I should
be sorry to think that there had not been
formed on both sides some enduring friend-
ships.

82 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

In a little while we had the Rescue in tow,
and were heading to the east. She had had
a fearful night of it after leaving us. She
beat about, short-handed, clogged with ice,
and with the thermometer at 8°. The snow
fell heavily, and the rigging was a solid, al-
most unmanageable lumj). Steering, or
rather beating, she made, on the evening of
the 12th, the southern edge of Griffith's
Island, and by good luck and excellent man-
agement succeeded in holding to the land
hummocks. She had split her rudder-post
so as to make her unworkable, and now we
have her in tow. An anchor with its fluke
snapped — her best bower ; and her little boat,
stove in by the ice, was cut adrift.

"We were now homeward bound, but a
saddened homeward bound for all of us.
The vessels of our gallant brethren soon lost
themselves in the mist, and we steered our
course with a fresh breeze for Cape Hotham.

"As we passed the sweep of coast between
Capes Martyr and Hotham, and were mak-
ing the chord of the curve, our captain called
my attention to a point of the coast line
about six miles off. On looking without a

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 83

glass, I distinctly saw the naked spars of a
couple of vessels. 'Brigs!' said I. 'Un-
doubtedly,' said De Haven ; and then both of
us simultaneously, 'Penny!' On looking
with the glass, the masts, yards, gaffs, every
thing but the bowsprits, were made out dis-
tinctly. Lovell was called and saw the same.
Murdaugh, who was half undressed, was
summoned ; and he, examining with the glass,
saw a third, which De Haven, after a look,
confirmed as a top-sail schooner, the Felio)
of old Sir John.

"We changed our course, ran in, and de-
termined to convince ourselves of their char-
acter, and perhaps to speak them. The fog,
however, closed around them. Still we
stood on. Presently, a flaw of wind drove
off the vapor; and upon eagerly gazing at
the spot, now less than three miles off, no
vessels were to be seen.

"I can hardly comment upon this strange
circumstance. It was a complete puzzle to
all of us. Refractive distortion plays
strange freaks in these Arctic solitudes; but
this could hardly be one of its illusions.
Four persons saw the same image with the

84 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

naked eye, and the glass confirmed the de-
tails. There was no disagreement. As
plainly as I see these letters did I see those
brigs; and although we supposed the Lady
Franklin and Sophia to be ice-caught at or
toward Cape Walker, I did not hesitate to
name them as the vessels before us. Ten
minutes of obscurity, we sailing directly to-
ward them, a sudden interval of brightness
— and they had passed away.

"Some large hummocks of grounded ice
were near them, and we try to convince our-
selves that they may have been closed in by
changes in our relative positions; but this is
hard to believe, for we should have seen their
upper spars above the ice. I gazed long and
attentively with our Fraiinhofer telescope,
at three miles' distance, but saw absolutely
no semblance of what a few minutes before
was so apparent."

We were obliged several times the next
day to bore through the young ice; for the
low temperature continued, and our wind
lulled under Cape Hotham. The night
gave us now three hours of complete dark-
ness. It was danger to run on, yet equally

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 85

danger to pause. Grim winter was follow-
ing close upon our heels; and even the cap-
tain, sanguine and fearless in emergency as
he always proved himself, as he saw the
tenacious fields of sludge and pancake thick-
ening around us, began to feel anxious.
Mine was a jumble of sensations. I had
been desirous to the last degree that we
might remain on the field of search, and
could hardly be dissatisfied at what prom-
ised to realize my wish. Yet I had hoped
that our wintering would be near our Eng-
lish friends, that in case of trouble or disease
we might mutually sustain each other. But
the interval of fifty miles between us, in
these inhospitable deserts, was as complete
a separation as an entire continent; and I
confess that I looked at the dark shadows
closing around Barlow's Inlet, the prison
from which we cut ourselves on the seventh,
just six days before, with feelings as sombre
as the landscape itself.

The sound of our vessel crunching her way
through the new ice is not easy to be de-
scribed. It was not like the grinding of the
old formed ice, nor was it the slushy scraping

86 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

of sludge. We may all of us remember, in
the skating frolics of early days, the peculiar
reverberating outcry of a pebble, as we
tossed it from us along the edges of an old
mill-dam, and heard it dying away in echoes
almost musical. Imagine such a tone as
this, combined with the whir of rapid motion,
and the rasping noise of close-grained sugar.
I was hstening to the sound in my little den,
after a sorrowful day, close upon zero, try-
ing to warm up my stiffened limbs. Pre-
sently it grew less, then increased, then
stopped, then went on again, but jerking
and irregular ; and then it waned, and waned,
and waned away to silence.

Down came the captain: "Doctor, the
ice has caught us: we are frozen up." On
went my furs at once. As I reached the
deck, the wind was there, blowing stiff, and
the sails were filled and puffing with it. It
was not yet dark enough to hide the smooth
surface of ice that filled up the horizon, hold-
ing the American expedition in search of Sir
John Franklin imbedded in its centre.
There we were, literally frozen tight in the
mid-channel of WelHngton's Straits.

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 87

"September 15. The change of tide, or,
rather, those diurnal changes in the move-
ment of the ice which seem to be indirectly
connected with it, gave us a little while be-
fore noon a partial opening in the solid ice
around us. We made by hard work about a
mile, and were then more fast than ever.
The ice alongside will now bear a man: the
wind, however, is hauling around to the west-
ward. With a strong northwester, there
might still be a hope for us.

"This afternoon, at 6h. 20m., a large
spheroidal mass was seen floating in the air
at an unknown distance to the north. It un-
dulated for a while over the ice-lined horizon
of Wellington Channel; and after a little
while, another, smaller than the first, became
visible a short distance below it. They re-
ceded with the wind from the southward and
eastward, but did not disappear for some
time. Captain De Haven at first thought
it a kite ; but, independently of the difficulty
of imagining a kite flying without a master,
and where no master could be, its outline and
movement convinced me it was a balloon.
The Resolute dispatched a courier balloon

0

88 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

on the 2d ; but that could never have survived
the storms of the past week. I therefore
suppose it must have been sent up by some
Enghsh vessel to the west of us.

"I make a formal note of this circum-
stance, trivial as it may be; for at first
Franklin rose to my mind, as possibly sig-
nalizing up Wellington Channel."

Cape Hotham was at this time nearly in
range, from our position, with the first head-
land to the west of it; and our captain esti-
mated that we were about thirty miles from
the eastern side of the strait. The balloon
was to leeward, nearly due north of us, more
so than could be referred to the course of
the wind as we observed it, supposing it to
have set out from any vessel of whose place
we were aware. It appeared to me, the
principal one, about two feet long by eight-
een inches broad; its appendage larger than
an ordinary dinner-plate. The incident in-
terested us much at the time, and I have not
seen any thing in the published journals of
the English searchers that explains it.

CHAPTER V

THE region, which ten days before
was teeming with animal life,
was now almost deserted. We
saw but one narwhal and a few
seal. The Ivory gull too, a solitary traveler,
occasionally flitted by us ; but the season had
evidently wrought its change.

Several flocks of the snow bunting had
passed over us while we were attached to
the main ice off Griffith's Island, and a single
raven was seen from the Rescue at her hold-
ing grounds. The Brent geese, however,
the dovekies, the divers, indeed all the
anatidge, the white whales, the walrus, the
bearded and the hirsute seal, the white bear,
whatever gave us life and incident, had van-
ished.

The following Sunday, the 15th, was sig-
nalized by the introduction of a bright new
"Cornelius" lard lamp into the cabin, a lux-

90 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

ury which I had often urged before, but
which the difficulties of opening the hold had
compelled the captain to deny us. The con-
densation of moisture had been excessive;
the beams had been sweating great drops,
and my bedding and bunk-boards bore the
look of having been exposed to a drizzhng
mist. The temperature had been below the
freezing point for a week before. The
lamp gave us the very comfortable warmth
of 44°, twelve degrees above congelation.
It was a luxury such as few but Ai'ctic
travelers can apprehend.

For some days after this, an obscurity of
fog and snow made it impossible to see more
than a few hundred yards from the ship.
This little area remained fast bound, the ice
bearing us readily, though a very slight mo-
tion against the sides of the vessel seemed to
show that it was not perfectly attached to
the shores. But as I stood on deck in the
afternoon of the 16th, watching the coast to
the east of us, as the clouds cleared away
for the first time, it struck me that its con-
figuration was unkno^vn to me. By-and-
by. Cape Beechy, the isthmus of the Graves,

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 91

loomed up ; and we then found that we were
a little to the north of Cape Bowden.

The next two (days this northward drift
continued without remission. The wind
blew strong from the southward and east-
ward, sometimes approaching to a gale ; but
the ice-pack around us retained its tenacity,
and increased rapidly in thickness.

Yet every now and then we could see that
at some short distance it was broken by small
pools of water, which would be effaced again,
soon after they were formed, by an external
pressure. At these times our vessels un-
derwent a nipping on a small scale. The
smoother ice-field that held us would be
driven in, pihng itself in miniature hum-
mocks about us, sometimes higher than our
decks, and much too near them to leave us a
sense of security against their further ad-
vance. The noises, too, of whining puppies
and swarming bees made part of these
demonstrations, much as when the heavier
masses were at work, but shriller perhaps,
and more clamorous.

I was aroused at midnight of the 16th by
one of these onsets of the enemy, crunching

92 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

and creaking against the ship's sides till the
masses ground themselves to powder. Our
vessel was trembling like an ague-fit under
the pressure; and when so pinched that she
could not vibrate any longer between the
driving and the stationary fields, making a
quick, liberating jump above them that
rattled the movables fore and aft. As it
wore on toward morning, the ice, now ten
inches thick, kept crowding upon us with
increased energy; and the whole of the 17th
was passed in a succession of conflicts with
it.

The 18th began with a nipping that prom-
ised more of danger. The banks of ice rose
one above another till they reached the line
of our bulwarks. This, too, continued
through the day, sometimes lulling for a
while into comparative repose, but recurring
after a few minutes of partial intermission.
While I was watching this angry contest of
the ice-tables, as they clashed together in
the darkness of early dawn, I saw for the
first time the luminous appearance, which
has been described by voyagers as attending
the collision of bergs. It was very marked ;

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 93

as decided a phosphorescence as that of the
fire-fly, or the fox-fire of the Virginia mea-
dows.

Still, amid all the tumult, our drift was
toward the north. From the bearings of the
coast, badly obtained through the fogs, it
was quite evident that we had passed be-
yond any thing recorded on the charts.
Cape Bowden, Parry's furthest headland,
was at least twenty-five miles south of us;
and our old landmarks. Cape Hotham and
Beechy, had entirely disappeared. Even
the high bluffs of Barlow's Inlet had gone.
I hardly know why it was so, but this inlet
had somehow or other been for me an object
of special aversion: the naked desolation of
its frost-bitten limestone, the cavernous re-
cess of its cliffs, the cheerlessness of its dark
shadows, had connected it, from the first day
I saw it, with some dimly-remembered feel-
ing of pain. But how glad we should all of
us have been, as we floated along in hopeless
isolation, to find a way open to its grim but
protecting barriers.

I return to my journal.

''September 19, Thursday. About five

94< ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

o'clock this morning the wind set in from
the northward and eastward ; but the ice was
tightly compacted, and for a while did not
budge. Presently, however, we could see
the water-pools extending their irregular
margins. Ahead of us, that is, still further
to the north, was ice apparently more solid
than the ten-inch field around us. It shot
up into larger hummocks and heavier
masses, and was evidently thicker and more
permanent. It had been for the past two
days not more than fifty yards ahead, and
we called it in the log the 'fixed ice.' By
breakfast-time this opened into two long
pools on our right, and one on the left, which
seemed to extend pretty well toward the
western shore. It was evident that we were
now drifting to the southward again.

"The sun, so long obscured, gave us to-day
a rough meridian altitude. Murdaugh, al-
ways active and efficient, had his artificial
horizon ready upon the ice, and gave us an
apjoroximate latitude. We were in 75° 20'
11'' north. A large cape and several smaller
headlands were seen, together with appar-
ently an inlet or harbor, all on the western

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 95

side. They remain unchristened. From
our mast-head, no imsitive land was visible
to the north. Tides we have not had the
means of observing. Our soundings on the
17th gave us bottom at 110 fathoms, nearly
in mid-channel.

''September 19, 11 :20 p.m. The wind con-
tinued all day from the northward and west-
ward, freshening gradually to a gale. The
barometer fell from 29.73 to 32, and our
maximum temperature was 26°. A heavy
fall of snow covered the deck.

''September 20. I have been keeping the
jSrst watch and anxiously observing the ice;
for I am no sailor, and in emergency can
only wake my comrades. The darkness is
now complete. The wind has changed
again. At three a.m. it set in from the
southward and eastward, increasing grad-
ually to a fresh gale. Perhaps it may be
the breaking up of the season, or some un-
usual premonition of stern winter; but cer-
tain it is that our experience of Lancaster
Sound has given us anything but tranquil-
lity of winds. We entered on the wings of
a storm; and ever since, with the exception

96 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

of about three days off Cape Riley, we have
had nothing but gales, rising arid falHng in
alternating series from the north to north-
ward and westward, and from the south to
southward and eastward. The day was as
usual ushered in with snow, and the ther-
mometer rose to the height of 29°; yet to
sensation it was cold. There is something
very queer about this discrepancy between
the thermometrical register and the effects
of heat. It thawed i^alpably to-day at 28° ;
and yet all complain of cold, even without
the influence of the wind.

"We are now, poor devils ! drifting north-
ward again. Creatures of habit, those who
were anxious have forgotten anxiety; glued
fast here in a moving mass, we eat, and
drink, and sleep, unmindful of the morrow.
It is ahnost beyond a doubt that, if we find
our way through the contingencies of this
Arctic autumn, we must spend our winter
in open sea. Many miles to the south.
Captain Back j)assed a memorable term of
vigil and exposure. Here, however, I do
not anticijDate such encounters with drifting
floes as are spoken of in Hudson's Bay.

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 97

The centre of greatest cold is too near us,
and the communication with open sea too
distant.

"I was in the act of writing the above,
when a starthng sensation, resembhng the
spring of a well-drawn bow, announced a
fresh movement. Running on deck, I found
it blowing a furious gale, and the ice again
in motion. I use the word motion inac-
curately. The field, of which we are a part,
is always in motion; that is, drifting with
wind or current. It is only when other ice
bears down upon our own, or our own ice
is borne in against other floes, that pressure
and resistance make us conscious of motion.

"The ice was again in motion. The great
expanse of recently-formed soHdity, already
bristling with hummocks, had up to this
moment resisted the enormous incidence of
a heavy gale. Suddenly, however, the pres-
sure increasing beyond its strength, it
yielded. The twang of a bow-string is the
only thing I can compare it to. In a single
instant the broad field was rent asunder,
cracked in every conceivable direction, tables
ground against tables, and masses piled over

98 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

masses. The sea seemed to be churning ice.

"By the time I had yoked my neck in
its serape, and got up upon deck, the ice had
piled up a couple of feet above our bul-
warks. In less than another minute it had
toppled over again, and we were floating
helplessly in a confused mass of broken frag-
ments. Fortunately the Rescue remained
fixed ; our hawser was fast to her stern, and
by it we were brought side by side again.
Night passed anxiously; i. e., slept in my
clothes, and dreamed of being presented to
Queen Victoria.

"September 21, Saturday. We have
drifted still more to the northward and east-
ward. An observation gave us latitude 75°
20' 38'' N. We are apparently not more
than seven miles from the shore. It is still
of the characteristic transition limestone,
very uninviting, snow-covered, and destitute ;
but we look at it longingly. It would be so
comforting to have landed a small depot of
provisions, in case of accident or impaction
further north.

"No snow until afternoon. Thermome-
ter, maximum 22°, minimum 19°, mean 20°

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 99

35^ Wind gentle, and now nearly calm,
from southward and eastward to southward.

"About tea-tune (21st), the sun suf-
ficiently low to give the effects of sunset, we
saw distinctly to the north by west a series of
hill-tops, apparently of the same configura-
tion with those around us. The trend of
the western coast extending northward
from the point opposite our vessel receded
westward, and a vacant space, either of un-
seen very low land or of water, separated it
from the Terra Nova, which we see north of
us. Whether this Grinnell Land, as our
captain has named it, be a continuation of
Cornwallis Island or a cape from a new
northernland, or a new direction of the east-
ern coast of North Devon, or a new island, I
am not prepared to say. We shall probably
know more of each other before long.

"Septemhei^ 22, Sunday. A cloudless
morning: no snow till afternoon. Our drift
during the night has been to the northward ;
and, except an occasional crack or pool, our
horizon was one mass of snow-covered ice.

"The beautifully clear sky with which the
day opened gave us another opportunity of

100 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

seeing the unvisited shores of Upper Well-
ington Sound. Our latitude by artificial
horizon was 75° 24' 21'' N., about sixty miles
from Cape Hotham. Cape Bowden, on the
eastern side, has disappeared; and on the
west, Advance Bluff, a dark, projecting
cape, from which we took sextant angles,
was seen bearing to the west of south. To
the northward and westward low land was
seen, having the appearance of an island,*
and mountain tops terminating the low strip
ahead. The trend of the shore on our left,
the western, is clearly to the westward since
leaving Advance Bluff. It is rolling, with
terraced shingle beach, and without bluffs.
It terminates, or apparently terminates, ab-
ruptly, thus:

after which comes a strip without visible
land, and then the mountain tops mentioned

*I have followed my journal literally. I find, however,
in my copy of the log-l)ook, below the entry of the watch-
officer which mentions this island, a note made by me at the
time: "I can see no island, but simply this prolongation
or tongue."

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 101

above. Beyond this western shore, distant
only seven miles, we see mountain tops, dis-
tant and very high, rising above the clouds.

"September 25, Wednesday. The wind
has changed, so that our helpless drift is now
again to the north. The day was compara-
tively free from snow; but not clear enough
to give us an observation, or to exhibit the
more distant coast-lines. We can see the
western shore very plainly covered with
snow, and stretching in rolling hills to the
north and west. A little indentation,
nearly opposite the day before yesterday, is
now in nearly the same phase — if any thing,
a little to the southward. We have there-
fore changed our position by drift not so
much as on the preceding days. The winds,
however, have been very light. Advance
Bluff is now shut in by 'Cape Rescue,' the
westernmost point yet discovered of Corn-
wallis Island. This shows that we are near-
ing the shore.

"Toward the north and a little to the west
is a permanent dark cloud, a line of stratus
with a cumulated thickening at the western
end. This is the same during sunshine and

102 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

snow-storm, night and day. It is thought
by Captain De Haven to be indicative of
open water. It may be that Cornwalhs
Island ends there, and that this is a con-
tinuation of the present channel trending to
the westward. Or this dark apj)earance
may be merely the highland clouds over the
mountains seen on Sunday; but De Haven
suggests that it is rather a vacant space, or
water free from ice ; the exemption being due
to the island and adjacent western shore (not
more than seven miles from it), acting as a
barrier to the northern drift of the present
channel."

CHAPTER VI

I AM reluctant to burden my pages with
the wild, but scarcely varied incidents
of our continued drift through Well-
ington Channel. We were yet to be
familiarized with the strife of the ice-tables,
now broken up into tumbhng masses, and
piling themselves in angry confusion against
our sides — now fixed in chaotic disarray by
the fields of new ice that imbedded them in a
single night — again, perhaps, opening in
treacherous pools, only to close round us
with a force that threatened to grind our
brigs to powder. I shall have occasion
enough to speak of these things hereafter.
I give now a few extracts from my journal;
some of which may perhaps have interest of
a different character, though they can not
escape the saddening monotony of the scenes
that were about us.

I begin with a partial break-up that oc-
curred on the 23d.

103

104 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

"September 23. How shall I describe to
you this pressure, its fearfulness and sub-
limity! Nothing that I have seen or read
of approaches it. The voices of the ice and
the heavy swash of the overturned hummock-
tables are at this moment dinning in my
ears. 'All hands' are on deck fighting our
grim enemy.

"Fourteen inches of solid ice thickness,
with some half dozen of snow, are, with the
slow uniform advance of a mighty propelling
power, driving in upon our vessel. As they
strike her, the semi-plastic mass is impressed
with a mould of her side, and then, urged on
by the force behind, slides upward, and rises
in great vertical tables. When these attain
their utmost height, still pressed on by
others, they topple over, and form a great
embankment of fallen tables. At the same
time, others take a downward direction, and
when pushed on, as in the other case, form a
similar pile underneath. The side on which
one or the other of these actions takes place
for the time, varies with the direction of the
force, the strength of the opposite or resist-
ing side, the inchnation of the vessel, and the

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 105

weight of the superincumbent mounds; and
as these conditions follow each other in vary-
ing succession, the vessel becomes perfectly
imbedded after a little while in crumbling
and fractured ice.

"Perhaps no vessel has ever been in this
position but our own. With matured ice,
nothing of iron or wood could resist such
pressure. As for the British vessels, their
size would make it next to impossible for
them to stand. Back's 'Winter' is the only
thing I have read of that reminds me of our
present j)redicament. No vessel has ever
been caught by winter in these waters.

"We are lifted bodily eighteen inches out
of water. The hummocks are reared up
around the ship, so as to rise in some cases a
couple of feet above our bulwarks — five feet
above our deck. They are very often ten
and twelve feet high. All hands are out,
laboring with picks and crowbars to overturn
the fragments that threaten to overwhelm
us. Add to this darkness, snow, cold, and
the absolute destitution of surrounding
shores.

"This uprearing of the ice is not a slow

106 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

work: it is jorogressive, but not slow. It
was only at 4 p. m. that nips began,
and now the entire plain is triangulated with
ice-barricades. Under the double influence
of sails and warping-hawsers, we have not
been able to budge a hair's-breadth. Yet,
imj)elled by this irresistible, bearing-down
floe-monster, we crush, grind, eat our way,
surrounded by the ruins of our progress. In
fourteen minutes we changed our position
80 feet, or 5.71 per minute.

"Sometimes the ice cracks with violence,
almost explosive, throughout the entire
length of the floe. Very grand this ! Some-
times the hummock masses, piled up like
crushed sugar around the ship, suddenly sink
into the sea, and then fresh mounds take
their place.

"Our little neighbor, the Rescue, is all this
time within twent}^ j^ards of us, resting upon
wedges of ice, and not subjected to move-
ment or pressure — a fact of interest, as it
shows how very small a difference of posi-
tion may determine the differing fate of two
vessels.

''September 24f. The ice is kinder; no

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 107

fresh movements; a little whining in the
morning, but since then undisturbed. The
ice, however, is influenced by the wind; for
open water-pools have formed — three
around the ship within eye distance. In one
of these, the seals made their appearance
toward noon ; no less than five disporting to-
gether among the sludge of the open water.
I started off on a perilous walk over the
ruined barricades of last night's commotion ;
and, after cooling myself for forty minutes
in an atmosphere ten degrees above zero,
came back without a shot. The condensed
moisture had so affected my powder that I
could not get my gun off.

"This condensation is now very trouble-
some, dripping down from our carlines, and
sweating over the roof and berth-boards.
When we open the hatchway, the steam rises
in clouds from the little cabin below.

"We have as yet no fires ; worse ! the state
of uncertainty in which we are placed makes
it impossible to resort to any winter arrange-
ments. Yet these lard lamps give us a tem-
perature of 46°, which to men hke ourselves,
used to constant out-door exercise, exposure.

108 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

and absence of artificial heat, is quite genial.
But for the moisture — that wretched, com-
fortless, rheumatic drawback — we would be
quite snug.

"Our captain is the best of sailors; but, in-
tent always on the primary objects and
duties of his cruise, he is apt to forget or
postpone a provident regard for those crea-
ture-comforts which have interest for others.
To-day, with the thermometer at 10°, we
for the first time commenced the manufac-
ture of stove-pipes. I need not say that the
cold metal played hob with the tinkers. If
they go on at the present rate, the pipes will
be nearly ready by next summer.

"September 26. The hummocks around
us still remain without apparent motion,
heaped up like snow-covered barriers of
street rioters. We are wedged in a huge
mass of tables, completely out of water, cra-
dled by ice. I wish it would give us an even
keel. We are eighteen inches higher on one
quarter than the other.

"The two large pools we observed yester-
day, one on each side of us, are now coated
by a thick film of ice. In this the poor seals

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 109

sometimes show themselves in groups of
half a dozen. They no longer sport about as
they did three weeks ago, but rise up to their
breasts through young ice, and gaze around
with curiosity-smitten countenances.

"The shyness of the seal is proverbial.
The Esquimaux, trained from earliest youth
to the pursuit of them, regard a successful
hunter as the great man of the settlement.
If not killed instantaneously, the seal sinks
and is lost. The day before yesterday, I
adopted the native plan of silent watching
beside a pool. Thus for a long time I was
exposed to a temperature of +8°; but no
shots within head-range offered ; and I knew
that, unless the spinal column or base of the
brain was entered by the ball, it would be
useless to waste our ah'eady scanty ammuni-
tion.

"To-day, however, I was more fortunate.
A fine young seal rose about forty yards
off, and I put the ball between the ear and
eye. A boat was run over the ice, and the
carcass secured. This is the second I have
killed with this villainous carbine: it will be
a valuable help to our sick. We are now

110 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

very fond of seal-meat. It is far better than
bear; and the fishiness, which at first dis-
turbed us, is no longer disagreeable. I sim-
ply skin them, retaining the blubber with the
pelt. The cold soon renders them solid.
My bear, although in a barrel, is as stiff and
hard as horn.

"Took a skate this morning over some
lakelets recently frozen over. The ice was
tenacious, but not strong enough for safety.
As I was moving along over the tickly-hend-
ers, my ice-pole drove a hole, and came very
near dropping through into the water.

"September 27. This evening the ther-
mometer gave 3° above zero. A bit of ice,
which I took into my mouth to suck, fast-
ened on to my tongue and carried away the
skin. When we open the cabin hatch now,
a cloud of steam, visible only as the two cur-
rents meet, gives evidence of the Arctic con-
densation.

"Afar off, skipping from hummock to
hummock, I saw a black fox. Poor deso-
late devil! what did he, so far from his
recorded home, seven miles from even the
naked snow-hills of this dreary wilderness?

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 111

In the night-time I heard him bark. They
set a trap for him; but I secretly placed a
bigger bait outside, without a snare-loop or
trigger. In the morning it was gone, and
the dead-fall had fallen upon no fox. How
the poor, hungry thing must have enjoj^ed
his supper ! half the guts, the spleen, and the
pluck of my seal.

"Lovell raised a swing; cold work, but
good exercise. He rigged it from the main
studding-sail boom. INIurdaugh and Carter
are building a snow-house. The doctor is
hard at work patching up materials for an
overland communication with the English
squadron — an enterprise fast becoming des-
perate. Yet, drifting as we are to unknown
regions north, it is of vast importance that
others should know of our position and pros-
pects."

Our position, however, at the end of Sep-
tember, thanks to the rapidly-increasing
cold, gave promise of a certain degree of
security and rest. The Advance had been
driven, by the superior momentum of the
floes that pressed us on one side, some two
hundred and fiftj^ feet into the mass of less

112 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

resisting floes on the other ; the Rescue mean-
while remaining stationary; and the two
vessels were fixed for a time on two adjacent
sides of a rectangle, and close to each other.
The unseen and varying energies of the ice
movements had occasionally modified the
position of each; but their relation to each
other continued almost unchanged.

We felt that we were fixed for the winter.
We arranged our rude embankments of ice
and snow around us, began to deposit our
stores within them, and got out our felt cov-
ering that was to serve as our winter roof.
The temperature was severe, ranging from
1°.5, and 4° to +10°; but the men worked
with the energy, and hope too, of pioneer
settlers, when building up their first home in
our Western forests.

The closing day of the month was sig-
nalized by a brilhant meteor, a modification
of the parhelion, the more interesting to us
because the first we had seen.

''October 1, Tuesday. To-day the work
of breaking hold commenced. The coal im-
mediately under the main hatch was passed

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 113

up in buckets, and some five tons piled upon
the ice. The quarter-boats were hauled
about twenty paces from our port-bow, and
the sails covered and stacked; in short, all
hands were at work preparing for the win-
ter. Little had we calculated the caprices
of Arctic ice.

"About ten o'clock a.m. a large crack
opened nearly east and west, running as far
as the eye could see, sometimes crossing the
ice-pools, and sometimes breaking along the
hummock ridges. The sun and moon will
be in conjunction on the 3d; we had notice,
therefore, that the spring tides are in ac-
tion.

"Captain Griffin had been dispatched with
Mr. Lovell before this, to establish on the
shore the site for a depot of provisions: at
one o'clock a signal was made to recall them.
At two P.M., seeing a seal, I ran out upon the
ice ; but losing him, was tempted to continue
on about a mile to the eastward. The wind,
which had been from the westward all the
morning, now shifted to the southward, and
the ice-tables began to be again in motion.

114 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

The humming of bees and upheaving hum-
mocks, together with exploding cracks,
warned me back to the vessel.

"At 3:20, while we were at dinner, com-
menting with some anxiety upon the condi-
tion of things without, that unmistakable
monitor, the 'young puppies f began. Run-
ning on deck, we found a large fissure, nearly
due north and south, in line with the Ad-
vance. A few minutes after, the entire floe
on our starboard side was moving, and the
ice breaking up in every direction.

"The emergency was startling enough.
All hands turned to, officers included. The
poor land party, returning at this moment,
tired and dinnerless, went to work with the
rest. Vreeland and myself worked like
horses. Before dark, every thing was on
board except the coal ; and of this, such were
the unwearied efforts of our crew, that we
lost but a ton or two.

"This ice-opening was instructive prac-
tically, because it taught those of us who did
not understand it before how capriciously
insecure was our position. It revealed

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 115

much, too, in relation to the action of the
ice.

"1. The first crack was nearly at right
angles to the axis of the channel; the subse-
quent ones crossed the first; the wind being
in the one case from the westward, and after-
ward changing to the southward.

"2. The next subject of note was the dis-
integration of the old floes. It took place
almost invariably at their original lines of
junction, well marked by the hummocky
ridges. This shows that the cementation
was imperfect after seventeen days of very
low temperature; a circumstance attributa-
ble, perhaps, to the massive character of the
up-piled tables, which protected the inner
portion of them from the air, and to the con-
stant infiltration (endosmose) of salt-water
at the abraded margins.

"3. The extent to which the work of super
and infra position had been carried during
the actions may be realized, when I say that
the floe-piece which separated from us to
starboard retained the exact impression of
the ship's side. There it was, with the gang-

116 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

way stairs of ice-block masonry, looking
down upon the dark water, and the useless
embankment embracing a sludgy ice-pool.

"We could see table after table, more
properly laj^er after layer, each not more
than seven inches thick, extending down for
more than twenty feet. Thus, it is highly
probable, may be formed many of those
enormous ice-tables, attributed by authors
to direct and uninterrupted congelation.

"The quantity of ice adhering to our port-
side must be enormous; for although the
starboard floe, in leaving us, parted a six-
inch hawser, it failed to budge us one inch
from the icy cradle in which we are set."

CHAPTER VII

THREE days after this entry the
thermometer had fallen to 11° be-
low zero. Our housings were not
yet fixed, and we had no fires be-
low; indeed, our position was so liable to
momentary and violent change that it would
have been impracticable to put up stoves.
Still, our lard-lamp in the cabin gave us a
temperature of +44°; and so completely
were our systems accommodated to the cir-
cumstances in which we were, that we should
have been quite satisfied but for the con-
densed moisture that dripped from every
thing about us. Our commander had al-
lowed me to place canvas gutters around the
hatchways, and from these we emptied every
day several tin cans full of water, that would
otherwise have been added to the slop on our
cabin floor. But the state of things was, on
the whole, exceedingly comfortless, and, to
those whom the scurvy had attacked, full of
in

118 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

peril. I remember once, when the lard-
lamp died out in the course of the night, the
mercury sunk in the cabin to 16°. It was
not till the 19th that we got up our stoves.

The adaptation of the human system to
varying temperatures struck me at this time
with great force. I had passed the three
winters before within the tropics — the last
on the plains of Mexico — yet I could now
watch patiently for hours together to get a
shot at seals, with the thermometer at +10°.
I wrote my journal in imaginary comfort
with a temperature of 40°, and was positively
distressed with heat when exercising on the
ice with the mercury at -|-19°.

I return to my diary.

''October 3. I write at midnight. Leav-
ing the deck, where I have been tramping
the cold out of my joints, I come below to
our little cabin. As I open the hatch, every
thing seems bathed in dirty milk. A cloud
of vapor gushes out at every chink, and, as
the cold air travels down, it is seen condens-
ing deeper and deeper. The thermometer
above is at 7° below zero.

"The brig and the ice around her are cov-

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 119

ered by a strange black obscurity — not a
mist, nor a haze, but a peculiar, waving, pal-
pable, unnatural darkness: it is the frost-
smoke of Arctic winters. Its range is very
low. Climbing to the yard-arm, some thirty
feet above the deck, I looked over a great
horizon of black smoke, and above me saw
the heaven without a blemish.

''October 4. The open pools can no
longer be called pools ; they are great rivers,
whose hummock-lined shores look dimly
through the haze. Contrasted with the pure
white snow, their waters are black even to
inkyness ; and the silent tides, undisturbed by
ripple or wash, pass beneath a pasty film of
constantly forming ice. The thermometer
is at 10°. Away from the ship, a long way,
I walked over the older ice to a spot where
the open river was as wide as the Delaware.
Here, after some crevice- jumping and
tickly -bender crossing, I set myself behind a
little rampart of hummocks, watching for
seals.

"As I watched, the smoke, the frost-
smoke, came down in wreaths, like the lam-
bent tongues of burning turpentine seen

120 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

without the blaze. I was soon enveloped in
crapy mist.

"To shoot seal, one must practice the
Esquimaux tactics of much patience and
complete immobility. It is no fun, I assure
you after full experience, to sit motionless
and noiseless as a statue, with a cold iron
musket in your hands, and the thermometer
10° below zero. But by-and-by I was re-
warded by seeing some overgrown Green-
land calves come within shot. I missed.
After another hour of cold expectation, they
came again. Very strange are these seal.
A countenance between the dog and the
mild African ape — an exj^ression so like that
of humanity, that it makes gun-murderers
hesitate. At last, at long shot, I hit one.
God forgive me !

"The ball did not kill outright. It was
out of range, struck too low, and entered the
lungs. The poor beast had risen breast-
high out of water, like the treading-water
swimmers among ourselves. He was thus
supported, looking about with curious, ex-
pectant eyes, when the ball entered his lungs.

"For a moment he oozed a little bright

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 121

blood from his mouth, and looked toward me
with a sort of startled reproachfulness.
Then he dipped; an instant after, he came
up still nearer, looked again, bled again, and
went down. A half instant afterward, he
came up flurriedly, looked about with
anguish in his eyes, for he was quite near me ;
but slowly he sunk, struggling feebly, rose
again, sunk again, struggled a very little
more. The thing was drowning in the ele-
ment of his sportive revels. He did drown
finally, and sunk ; and so I lost him.

"Have naturalists ever noticed the expres-
sion of this animal's phiz? Curiosity, con-
tentment, pain, reproach, despair, even resig-
nation I thought, I saw on this seal's face.

"About half an hour afterward, I killed
another. Scurvy and sea-life craving for
fresh meat led me to it ; but I shot him dead.

"On returning to the ship, I found one
toe frost-bitten — a tallow-looking dead
man's toe — which was restored to its original
ugly vitahty by snow-rubbing. Served me
right !

"Spent the afternoon in unsuccessful seal
stalking, and in rigging and contriving a

122 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

spring-gun for the Arctic foxes: a blood-
thirsty day. But we ate of fox to-day for
dinner ; and behold, and it was good.

''October 5, Saturday. The wind evi-
dently freshens up. The day has been bit-
terly cold. Although our lowest tempera-
ture was zero and — 1°, we felt it far more
than the low temperature of yesterday.
Our maximum was as high as 4° ; yet, with
this, it required active motion on deck to
keep one's self warm.

"At 12h. 55 m., we had an interval of
clear sunshine. The utmost, however, to
which it would raise one of the long register
Smithsonian thermometers was 7°. The air
was filled with bright particles of frozen
moisture, which glittered in the sunshine —
a shimmering of transparent dust.*

"At the same time, we had a second ex-
hibition of parhelia, not so vivid in prismatic
tints as that of the 30th of September, but
more complete. The sun was expanded in
a bright glare of intensely white light, and
was surrounded by two distinct concentric

* Under the microscope these again showed obscure modi-
fications of the hexagon.

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 123

circles, delicately tinted on their inner mar-
gins with the red of the spectrum. The
radius of the inner, as measured by the sex-
tant, was 22° 04'; that of the outer, 40° 15'.
The lowest portions of both were beneath
the horizon, and of course not seen.

"From the central disk proceeded four
radii, coincident with the vertical and the
horizontal diameters of the circles.

"Their visible points of intersection were
marked by bright parhelia; each parhelion
having its circumference well defined, but
compressed so as to have no resemblance
to the solar disk.

Six of these were visible at the same mo-
ment ; those of the outer circle being fainter
than the inner. Touching the upper circum-
ference of this outer circle was the arc of a
third, which extended toward the zenith.
Indeed, at one time I thought I saw a lumi-
nosity overhead, which may have corre-
sponded to its centre. The tints of this sup-
plemental circle were very bright. The
glowing atmosphere about the sun was very
striking.

"The strange openings in the water of a

124 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

few hours ago are now great rivers, lined by
banks of hummocks, and wreathed in frost
smoke. The continually increasing wind
from the northward explains this southern
drift of the ice, and with it these unwelcome
openings. We are stationary, and the de-
tached ice is leaving us.

"The strong floe of ice-table under ice-
table, and hummock upon hummock, makes
our position one of nearly complete solidity.
We are glued up in ice; and to liberate us,
some fearful disruption must take place.
Twenty-five feet of solid ice is no feeble ma-
trix, for a brig drawing but ten. Yet the
water is wider, and still widening around us ;
so that now we hold on — that is, our floe
holds on, to the great mass to the north of us,
like a little peninsular cape.

"To the south every thing is in drifting
motion — water, sludge, frost-smoke — but no
seals.

"We caught a poor httle fox to-day in a
dead-fall. We ate him as an anti-scorbutic.

"October 6, Sunday. A dismal day; the
wind howling, and the snow, fine as flour,
drifting into every chink and cranny. The

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 125

cold quite a nuisance, although the mercury
is up again to +6°. It is blowing a gale.
What if the floe, in which we are providen-
tially glued, should take it into its head to
break off, and carry us on a cruise before the
wind!

"8 P.M. Took a pole, and started off to
make a voyage of discovery around our floe.
After some weary walking over hummocks,
and some uncomfortable sousings in the
snow-dust, found that our cape has dwin-
dled to an isthmus. In the midst of snow
and haze, of course, I did not venture across
to the other ice.

"We look now anxiously at the gale —
turning in, clothes on, so as to be ready for
changes.

"12 Midnight. They report us adrift.
Wind, a gale from the northward and west-
ward. An odd cruise this! The American
expedition fast in a lump of ice about as big
as Washington Square, and driving, like the
shanty on a raft, before a howling gale.

''October 7, Monday. Going on deck this
morning, a new coast met my eyes. Our
little matrix of ice had floated at least twenty

1S6 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

miles to the south from yesterday's anchor-
age. The gale continues; but the day is
beautifully clear, and we have neared the
western coast enough to recognize the fea-
tures of the limestone cliffs, although many
a wrinkle of them is now pearl-powdered
with snow-drift.

"Prominent among these was Advance
Bluff ; and to the south of it, a great indenta-
tion in the limestone escarpment, which ran
back into a gray distance — a sort of gorge,
with a summer water-course. Further off.
Point Innes again, and the shingle beach of
'the Graves'; and a high bluff -like cape or
headland to the southward and westward,
which the captain supposes to be Barlow's
Inlet.

"10 P.M. Our master got an observation
this evening of a Aquila (circum-meridian
altitude), giving us a latitude of 74° 54'
07''. The seat of our late resting place was
in latitude 75° 24' 52" N. We have there-
fore voyaged 30 miles 45 seconds since this
new start. At this rate, should the wind
continue, another day will carry us again into
Lancaster Sound.

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 127

'"October 8. Still we drift. Barlow's
Inlet is nearly abreast of us, and Cape
Hotham seen distinctly. The broad, un-
terminated expanse of ice to the south is
Lancaster Sound, sixty miles distant when
we first began our prisoner's journey.
Thermometer at +8°.

"To-day seemed like a wave of the hand-
kerchief from our receding summer. Win-
ter is in every thing. Yet the skies came
back to us with warm ochres and pinks, and
the sun, albeit from a lowly altitude, shone
out in full brightness. It was a mockery of
warmth, however, scarcely worthy the un-
pretending sincerity of the great planet ; for
the mercury, exposed to the full radiance of
his deceitful glare, rose but two degrees:
from +7° to 9°. In spite of this, the day
was beautiful to remember, as a type of the
sort of thing which we once shared with the
world from which we are shut out ; a parting
picture, to think about during the long night.
These dark days, or rather the dark day,
will soon be on us. The noon shadows of
our long masts almost lose themselves in the
distance.

128 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

"A little white fox was caught alive in a
trap this morning. He was an astute-
visaged little scamp ; and although the chains
of captivity, made of spun-yarn and leather,
set hardly upon him, he could spare abun-
dant leisure for bear bones and snow. He
would drink no water. His cry resembled
the inter-paroxysmal yell of a very small boy
undergoing spanking. The note came with
an impulsive vehemence, that expressed not
only fear and pain, but a very tolerable spice
of anger and ill-temper."

He was soon reconciled, however. The
very next day he was tame enough to feed
from the hand, and had lost all that startled
wildness of look which is supposed to char-
acterize his tribe. He was evidently unused
to man, and without the educated instinct of
flight. Twice, when suffered to escape from
the vessel, he was caught in our traps the
same night. Indeed, the white foxes of this
region — we caught more than thirty of them
— seemed to look at us with more curiosity
than fear. They would come directly to the
ship's side ; and, though startled at first when
we fired at them, soon came back. They

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 129

even suffered us to approach them almost
within reach of the hand, ran around us, as
we gave the halloo, in a narrow circle, but
stopped as soon as we were still, and stared
us inquisitively in the face. One little fel-
low, when we let him loose on the ice after
keeping him prisoner for a day or two,
scampered back again incontinently to his
cubby-hole on the deck. There may be mat-
ter of reflection for the naturalist in this.
Has this animal no natural enemy but
famine and cold? The foxes ceased to visit
us soon after this, owing probably to the un-
certain ice between us and the shore: they
are shrewd ice-masters.

CHAPTER VIII

WE remained during the rest of
this month ice-cradled, and
drifting about near the outlet
of Wellington Chamiel. Oc-
casionally a strong southerly wind would set
us back again to the north, as far, perhaps as
Barlow's Inlet; but it was soon apparent
that the greater compactness of the barrier
that had come down after us, and the force
of some unknown current, were resisting
our progress in that direction. A northerly
wind, on the other hand, seemed to have no
counteracting influences. A little while
after it began to blow, open leads would
present themselves under our lee, and the floe
which imbedded us moved gradually and
without conflict through them toward the
south. Our thoughts turned irresistibly to
the broad expanse of Lancaster Sound,
which lay wild and rugged before us, and to
the increasing probability that it was to be

130

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK ISl

our field of trial during the long, dark win-
ter— perhaps our final home.

With this feeling came an increasing de-
sire to communicate with our late associates
of Union Bay. I had volunteered some
weeks before to make this traverse, and had
busied myself with arrangements to carry it
out. The Rescue s India-rubber boat was
to carry the party through the leads, and,
once at the shore, three men were to press
on with a light tent and a few days' provi-
sions. The project, impracticable perhaps
from the first, was foiled for a time by a
vexatious incident. I had made my tent of
thin cotton cloth, so that it weighed, when
completed, but fourteen pounds, soaking it
thoroughly in a composition of caoutchouc,
ether, and linseed oil, the last in quantity.
After it was finished and nearly dried, I
wrapped it up in a dry covering of coarse
muslin, and placed it for the night in a locked
closet, at some distance from the cook's
galley, where the temperature was between
80° and 90°. In the morning it was de-
stroyed. The wrapper was there, retaining
its form, and not discolored; but the outer

132 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

folds of the tent were smoking ; and, as I un-
rolled it, fold after fold showed more and
more marks of combustion, till at the centre
it was absolutely charred. There was
neither flame nor spark.

In a few days more the tumult of the ice-
fields had made all chance of reaching the
shore hopeless. But the meantime was not
passed without efforts.

"October 23. I started with a couple of
men on another attempt to reach the shore.
After five miles of walking, with recurring
alternations of climbing, leaping, rolling,
and soaking, we found that the ice had driven
out from the coast, and a black lane of open
water stopped our progress. This is the
seventh attempt to cross the ice, all meeting
with failure from the same cause. The mo-
tion of ice, influenced by winds, tides, and
currents, keeps constantly abrading the
shore-line. Any outward drift, of course,
makes an irregular lane of water, which a
single night converts into ice; the returning
floes heap this in tables one over another ; and
the next outward set carries off the floes
again, crowned with their new increment.

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 133

"The haze gathered around us about an
hour after starting, and the hummocks were
so covered with snow that the chasms often
received us middle deep. We walked five
hours and a half, makmg in all but eleven
miles; and even then were at least a mile
from the beach.

"At one portion of our route, the ice had
the crushed sugar character ; the lumps vary-
ing in size from a small cantaloupe to a
water-melon, but hard as frozen water at
zero ought to be. Over this stuff we walked
in tiptoe style — and a very miserable style
it was.

"At another place, for a mile and a half,
we trod on the fractured angles of upturned
ice. Call these curbstones ; toss them in mad
confusion, always taking care that their
edges shall be uppermost; dust them over
with flour cooled down to zero; and set a
poor wretch loose, in the centre of a misty
circle, to try for a pathway over them to
the shore!

"At another place, break-water stones,
great quarried masses of ice, let you up and
down, but down oftener than up. At an-

134, ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

other time, you travel over rounded dunes of
old seasoned hummock, covered with slip-
pery glaze. Again, it is over snow, recent
and soft, or snow, recent and sufficiently
crusty to bear you five paces and let you
through the sixth — a trial alike to temper
and legs.

"At last, to crown the delicice of our Arctic
walk, we come to a long meadow of recent
ice, just enough covered with snow to keep
you from sKpping, and just thin enough to
make it elastic as a polka floor. Over this,
with a fine bracing air, every nerve tingling
with the exercise, and the hoary rime whiten-
ing your beard, you walk with a delightful
sense of ease and enjoyment.

"One of my attendants had both ears
frost-bitten; the whole external cartilage
(Pinna) was of tallow, jaundiced. Snow-
rubbing set him right. I have ordered the
men to take ear-rings from their ears. Wil-
son, a Livournese, rejoiced in a couple of
barbaric pendules, doubtless of bad gold, but
good conducting power."

The indications of winter were still be-
coming more and more marked. On the

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 135

11th, the sun rose but 9° at meridian; on the
15th but 6° ; and on the 7th of November, at
the same hour, it ahuost rested on the hori-
zon. The dayhght, however, was sometimes
strangely beautiful. One day in particular,
the 8th, a rosy tint diffused itself over every
thing, shaded off a little at the zenith, but
passing down from pink to violet, and from
violet to an opalescent purple, that banded
the entire horizon.

The moon made its appearance on the 13th
of October. At first it was like a bonfu*e,
warming up the ice with a red glare; but
afterward, on the 15th, when it rose to the
height of 4°, it silvered the hummocks and
frozen leads, and gave a softened lustre to
the snow, through which our two little brigs
stood out in black and solitary contrast.
The stars seemed to have lost their twinkle,
and to shine with concentrated brightness
as if through gimlet-holes in the cobalt can-
opy. The frost-smoke scarcely left the field
of view. It generally hung in wreaths
around the horizon; but it sometimes took
eccentric forms; and one night, I remember,
it piled itself into a column at the west, and

136 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

Aquila flamed above it like a tall beacon-
light. We were glad to note these fanciful
resemblances to the aspects of a more kindly
region ; they withdrew us sometimes from the
sullen realities of the world that encompassed
us — ice, frost-smoke, and a threatening sky.

We had parhelia again more than once,
but developed imperfectly; a mass of in-
candescence 22° from the sun, with prismatic
coloring, but without the circular and radial
appearances that had characterized it before.
On the 27th, a partial paraselene was visible,
the first we observed — merely the limbs of
two broken arcs, destitute of prismatic tint,
stretching like circumflexes at about 23° dis-
tance on each side the moon ; the moon about
20° high, thermometer —10°, barometer 30.
55, atmosphere hazy. The sky clearing
shortly afterward, it shone out with increased
beauty for a while, but died away as the haze
disappeared.

The thermometer was now generally be-
low the zero point, sometimes rising for a
little while about noon a few degrees above
it, once only as high as +13°. When there
was no wind, even the lowest of its range was

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 137

quite bearable; and while we were exercis-
ing actively, it was difficult to believe that
our sensations could be so strikingly in con-
trast with the absolute temperature. But a
breeze, or a pause of motion till we could
raise the sextant to a star or make out some
changing phasis of the ice-field, never failed
to persuade us, and that feelingly, that the
mercury was honest. Night after night the
bed-clothes froze at our feet; and a poor
copy of the New York Herald, that lay at
the head of the captain's bunk, was glazed
with ice.

"Novemher 8. Tempted by the over-
arching beauty of the sky, I started off this
morning with Captain De Haven on a walk
of inspection shoreward. The open water,
frozen since October 2d, is now nearly two
feet thick, and at this low temperature
(—15°) it becomes hard and brittle as glass.
Wherever the nipping has caught two of the
floes, they have been driven with a force in-
conceivable one above the other, rising and
falling until they now form a ridge fifteen
or twenty feet high.

"The tension of the great field of ice over

138 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

which we passed must have been enormous.
It had a sensible curvature. On striking the
surface with a walking-pole, loud reports
issued like a pistol-shot, and lines of fissure
radiated from the point of impact. It
seemed as if the blow of an axe would sever
the keystone, and break up by a shock the
entire expanse. In one place the ice sud-
denly arched up like a bow while we were
looking at it, burst into fragments, collapsed
at the exterior margins of fracture, and by
the work of a moment created a long barrier
line of ruins ten feet high. Our position
was one of peril. We had crossed two miles
of ice. A change of tide relieved the strain,
and we returned.

"The nearest break-up to our homestead
floe is about one hundred and fifty yards off.
It is now to the south; though our position,
constantly changing, alters the bearing by
the hour. Very many of the masses that
compose it are as large as the grapery at
home, two hundred feet long perhaps, and
lifted up, barricade-fashion, as high as our
second story windows."

The next day our winter arrangements

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 139

were completed. They were simple enough,
and hardly worth describing in detail. A
housing of thick felt was drawn completely
over the deck, resting on a sort of ridge-
pole running fore and aft, and coming down
close at the sides. The rime and snow-drift
in an hour or two made it nearly impervious
to the weather. The cook's galley stood on
the kelson, under the main hatch; its stove-
pipe rising through the housing above, and
its funnel-shaped apparatus for melting
snow attached below. The bulkheads be-
tween cabin and forecastle had been re-
moved; and two stoves, one at each end of
the berth-deck, distributed their heat among
officers and seamen alike. We had of course
a community of aU manner of odors ; and as
our only direct ventilation was by the gang-
way, we had the certainty of a sufficient di-
versity of temperatures.

The exemption from gales, that has at-
tracted the notice of other travelers in this
region, had not yet been confirmed by our
experience. On the contrary, our approach
to Lancaster Sound, and the earlier part of
our drift after we entered it, were marked

140 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

by frequent storms. Some of these had all
the sublimity that could belong to a mingled
sense of danger and discomfort. They re-
minded me of the sand-storms of the Sahara.
"The fine particles of snow flew by us in a

STOVE IN COOK S GALLEY WITH APPARATUS FOR MELTING
SNOW.

continuous stream. When they met the un-
protected face, the sensation was like the
puncture of needles. Standing under the
lee of our brig, and watching the drift as it
scudded on the wings of the storm through

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 141

the interval between the two vessels, the lines
of sweeping snow were so unbroken that its
filaments seemed woven into a mysterious
tissue. Objects fifty yards off were invisi-
ble: no one could leave the vessels."

The month of November found us oscillat-
ing still with the winds and currents in the
neighborhood of Beechy Island. Helpless
as we were among the floating masses, we
began to look upon the floe that carried us
as a protecting barrier against the ap-
proaches of others less friendly; and as the
month advanced, and the chances increased
of our passing into the sound, our apprehen-
sions of being frozen up in the heart of the
ice-pack gave place to the opposite fear of
a continuous drift. We had seen enough,
and encountered enough of the angry strife
among the ice-floes in the channel, to assure
us of disaster if we should be forced to
mingle in the sterner conflicts of the older
ice-fields of the sound. Yet, as the new
fields continued forming about us, thicken-
ing gradually from inches to feet, and lock-
ing together the floes in one great amor-
phous expanse, we retained a hope to the last

142 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

that our island floe, thickening like the rest,
and piling its wall of hummocks around us,
would continue to ward us from attack, till
the all-j^ervading frost had made it a station-
ary part of the great winter covering of the
Arctic Sea. It encountered almost daily im-
mense hummocks, some of them impinging
against us while we were apparently at rest ;
some, apparently motionless, receiving the
impact from us. At such times our floe
would be deflected at an angle from its
normal course, or would rotate slowly round
its centre, and pass on — not, however, al-
ways in the same direction ; sometimes near-
ing the western shore, sometimes closing in
upon the beach of "the Graves," and some-
times fluctuating slowly to the northward.

But our general course was toward the
south and east. On the 17th we were fairly
in the sound. It welcomed us coldly. The
mercury stood for a while at —19°, and
sunk during the night to —27°.

The next day, however, a shift of wind,
gradually increasing in force, combined with
a tidal influence to drive us back to our old
position. The thermometer was at this time

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 143

lower than we had ever seen it, and the sky
seemed to sympathize with the temperature.
The moon had a sohd look, resting upon the
snowhills of Cape Riley, like a great viscid
globe of illumination. In the morning the
sky combined aU the tints of the spectrum in
regular zones, a broad band of orange gird-
ing the horizon with an almost uniform in-
tensity of color. The stars shone during the
entire day. At daybreak on the 18th, Leo-
pold's Island rose by refraction above the
ice, standing with its unmistakable outhne
clearly black against the orange sky; but it
went down as the sun neared the horizon, and
passed to the south of his low circuit. My
journal for the next two days shows the
degree of illumination at the different
hours.

"November 20, Wednesday. The winds
are unlike those encountered by Parry, our
only predecessor in this region at this season
of the year. It has been very providential,
and very unexpected for us, this predomi-
nance of breezes from the southward and
eastward. It has prevented our drifting into
the dreaded sound, there to be carried, if it

U4i ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

pleased Fortune, into Baffin's Bay by the
easterly current.

"We had a heavy gale from 2 p.m. of yes-
terday (19th) until this morning at 9 a.m.,
hauhng round from southeast to east-south-
east. After this last hour, it gradually died
away; and now, at 3 p.m., we have a gentle
breeze from the same quarter. The wind
has left the north since the 18th.

"Our temperature, which on the 18th gave
us —27°, the lowest we have yet recorded,
was at the close of the next day but —6°;
and to-day its extreme was —4°. Now, by
gradual elevation, it has reached zero.

"Zero once more, and a positive sensation
of warmth! There was no wind; and the
haze vapors so softened this once greatest
cold, that I walked about with bare hands
and sweating body.

"The daylight is hardly now worthy of the
name, according to the Philadelphia notions
of the blessing; but to us it is the last leaf of
the sibyl. Here is a little record of its in-
comings and outgoings.

"9 a.m. Breakfast over; furs on; deck
covered in with black felt, the frozen con-

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 145

densation patching it with large white wafers
of snow. A lantern makes it barety light
enough to walk. ~No red streak to the east :
one misty haze of visible darkness.

"10 A.M. A twilight gloom: can just see
the Azimuth, with its tripod stand, thirty
yards off on the ice. Snow whirhng in
drifts.

"11 A.M. Can read newspaper print by
going to open daylight, i. e., twilight — the
twilight of a foggy sunrise at home.

"12 M. Noonday. A streak of brown
red looms up above the mist to the south.
Save a Httle more light from the 'foggy sun-
rise' of 11 A.M., no great perceptible differ-
ence; yet I can now read the finest print
easily.

"1 P.M. Very decidedly more hazy than
at 11, the corresponding hour before merid-
ian. Can read with difficulty the newspaper
— London Illustrated News.

"2 P.M. A hazy darkness, but so com-
pounded with the fast-rising Hght of the dear
moon, that it is far lighter than the corre-
sponding hour before meridian.

"Day is over. Moonlight begins !

146 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

"This is a fair specimen of our usual day.
The occasional clear day, such as we had the
18th, is far lighter, and fuU of variety and
interest.

"November 21, Thursday. The day is
clear; but the moonhght, an absolute clair
de lune, so confounds itself with the day as
to make a merely solar register impossible.

"8 A.M. The whole atmosphere bathed in
pellucid clearness. The moon, like a lumi-
nous sjihere, not a circle, as with us, is away
up the straits in the northern sky. Not a
speck betokens sunrise.

"9 A.M. The southeastern horizon is
zoned with a mellow uniform band of light.
Nothing we have seen has its extension or
its uniformity. The visual angle is an un-
broken tint, rising from the ice with a raw
sienna, mellowing into pink, and softened
again into an orange yellow, which runs
sometimes through a gradation of green into
the clear blue sky. The moon absorbs all
perception of other light.

"10 A.M. The light of dawn begins to
mingle with the moonlight; I can not say
where or how, but I am conscious of an in-

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 147

terfering light. To the southward all is
orange, and red, and solar. To the north-
ward, from a cobalt sky of even tint, the
moon 'shineth down alone' — alone, save the
bright planet Satm-n to the northward, and
the broad zone of red sunrise at the south.

"11 A.M. Day uj)on us on one side, and
moon bright on the other: moonlight and
sunlight blend overhead. To the north and
south, each keeps its separate dominion. I
read the finest print readily.

"12 M. Walked out to see the ice. I
have no change of words left to describe
noonday. The sunlight zone of color was
more light and less bright, perhaps — and the
moon was more bright and less light, per-
haps; but both were there.

"1 P.M. The light hardly dimmed; but
the moon shines out so emulously, that it is
hard to measure the sunlight.

"2 P.M. It is evidently no longer day, al-
though the southwestern horizon is flared
with red streaks, and a softening of yellow
into the blue of heaven says that the sun is
somewhere below it. The moon has con-
fused the day; and coming as she does at

148 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

this commencement of our long night, I bless
her for the grateful service. I make my
four to six hours of daily walk, and hardly
miss the guidance of day.
"3 P.M. Moonlight!"

CHAPTER IX

*'^|^ ^OVEMBER 22. I walked
^^k I yesterday, and to-day again, to
I ^W the open water that separates
us from WeUington Channel.
It is a bold and rapid river, as broad as the
Delaware at Trenton or the Schuylkill at
Philadelphia, rolling wildly between dislo-
cated hummock crags, and whirlmg along
in its black current the abraded fragments of
its shores. Ice of recent growth had ce-
mented the gnarled masses about its margin
into a ragged wall some twenty feet high,
and perhaps thirty paces wide. I stood with
perfect safety on a tall, spire-like pinnacle,
and endeavored to trace its course. It could
be seen reaching from a remote point in the
southeastern part of the channel, and is
probably connected with the open shore
leads that stretch from Cape Riley past
Cape Spencer toward the further coasts of
North Devon. It passed about a mile and

149

150 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

a half to the northwest of our vessels, and
was lost in the distant icefields to the east.

"Returning with Captain De Haven, we
saw the recent prints of a bear and two cubs,
that had evidently been scenting our foot-
marks of the day before. The old bear was
not large, measuring by her tail only six
feet four inches; the young ones so small
as to surprise us, their track not much big-
ger than that of a Newfoundland dog. At
what breeding season were these cubs pro-
duced?

"I have been for some evenings giving
lectures on topics of popular science, the at-
mosphere, the barometer, &c., to the crew.
They are not a very intellectual audience,
but they listen with apparent interest, and
express themselves gratefully.

"November 25. Great clouds of dark va-
por were seen to the southward to-day, the
crape-wreaths of our first imprisonment.
This frost-smoke is an unfailing indication
of open water, and to us, poor prison-bound
vagrants, is suggestive of things not pleas-
ant to think about. It streamed away on
the wind in black drifts.

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 151

"Our daylight to-day was a mere name,
three and a half hours of meagre twilight.
I was struck for the first time with the
bleached faces of my mess-mates. The sun
left us finally only sixteen days ago; but
for some time before he had been very chary
of his effective rays; and our abiding-place
below has a smoky atmosphere of lamplit
uncomfortableness. No wonder we grow
pale with such a cosmetic. Seventy-seven
days more without a sunrise! twenty-six be-
fore we reach the solstitial point of greatest
darkness !

"The temperature continues singularly
mild. Parry, at Melville Island, had —47°
before this, twenty degrees lower than our
minimum; and even in the more southern
regions of Port Bowen and Prince Regent's
Straits, the cold was much greater. For
some days now, zero has not been an un-
common temperature; and to-day we are in
—14°, here far from unpleasantly cold.
May not much of this moderated intensity
of the weather be referred to the influence
of the open water around us?

"We are still in our old neighborhood.

152 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

at the brink of the channel, a mile or so
from Cape Riley, and both shores in view.

''November 28. The sunlight, a mere
band of red cloud; the day, a poor apology.
Walked eastward towai'd Beechy Island,
dimly seen. The ice river is clogged with
ground masses of granular ice: toward the
south it is more open.

"The wind to-day is getting stronger
from the west, with some northing, of all
winds the most to be feared : the north drives
us into Lancaster; the west comes in aid of
the current to keep us there, and speed us
back toward Baffin.

"Our thermometer does not fall below
—11°. The frost-smoke is all around us in
bistre-colored vapor. Can it be that we are
again detached, our floe independent alto-
gether of the field? We have heard noises
of grinding ice, distant, but bodingly dis-
tinct.

"In my walks for some days past, I have
been studying the topography of our ice-
island residence. Here are my elements:

"1. To the north; over broken ice and
edge-hummocks, that is to say, hummocks

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 153

formed at the margin of floes and afterward
cemented there, all of this season's growth.
Several large masses, resembling berg-ice;
one, the largest, twenty-seven feet high.
The water-lead margined by rude hum-
mocky crags trending to the westward and
southward from the southward and east-
ward, forming a rude, broken horseshoe.
Distance to water, one mile.

"2. To the south; over long floes of re-
cent ice, young snow-covered, and smooth,
with few indications of heavy pressure at
their junctions. Distance to open water,
glazed over with young ice, two miles : trend
of this lead east and west. The diameter
of the floe, north and south, is three miles
from water to water.

"3. To the east, i. e., northeast by east;
rough, mixed ice, with lines of recent heavy
hummocks. Thickness of ice, averaging
four feet to five feet eight inches; ice of
the early part of last August. Distance
to open river, one and three fourths to two
miles. Marks of recent action excessive
here; hummock banks massive; and tables
sometimes five feet thick, rising to a height

154 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

of eighteen feet. From the east and north-
east, the trend of the break is to the south-
ward at first, and some two miles below to
the westward.

"4. To the west; over the broken region
of varied ice, traveled over in my attempts
to reach Barlow's Inlet some days ago.
Distance to lead, one mile. Chasm very
irregular; but from the point I visited at
the north and east, trending nearly due west,
and pointing to the southward of Cape
Hotham.

"From all this it is clear enough that we
are a moving floe, comparatively isolated.
The only point of our circumscribed horizon
I have not visited, and where no frost-
smoke asserts the near proximity of water,
is the northwest. Whether on that side the
ice of Lancaster is blocked against us by
the easterly current, or whether the frost
has made our floe one more speck in the mas-
sive field, is the only question remaining.

''November 29. The doubt is gone. Our
floe, ice-cradle, safeguard, has been thrown
round. Its eastern margin is grinding its
way to the northward, and the west is al-

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 155

ready pointing to the south. Our bow is
to Baffin's Bay, and we are traveling to-
ward it. So far, ours has been a mysterious
journeying. For two months and more,
not a sail has fluttered from our frozen
spars; yet we have passed from Lancaster
Sound into the highest latitude of Welling-
ton Channel, one never attained before, and
have been borne back again ^^ast our point
of starting, along a capriciously varied line
of drift. Cape Riley is bearing, by com-
pass, S. J E., N.N.E. 4 E. (true) ; and
Beechy Head, by compass, S.E. J E., N. J
E. (true). Cape Hurd is visible to the
northward and eastward, and to the east are
the ice-clogged waters of Lancaster Sound.
"November 30. When I came on deck
this morning, the lanterns were burning at
ten o'clock, and the southern sky had not
even a trace of red. Our head had slewed
rather more to the southward; and off on
our starboard beam sundry dark lines on
the ice had a suspicious look. I walked to-
ward them with some of our officers. After
sundry groping tumbles, we came, sure
enough, upon open water, one hundred

156 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

yards to the south of the brig. Returning
on our track, and taking a new departure
toward the east — oj)en water again. Off to
the dim, hazy north — still open water. Off
to the hummock}^ west, feeling our way with
walking-poles — open water all round us.
Once more, then, we are launched on a little
ice-island, to float wherever God's mercy
may guide us.

"The India-rubber boat inflated, and a
few clothes stowed away, ready for a sudden
break out; and all hands turn in for the
niglit.

"December 1. There was a rude murmur
in the night, that mingled its tones of ad-
monition with the wind. But we are habit-
uated pretty thoroughly to sounds of this
sort, and they have ceased to disturb us.
Walking after breakfast toward the north-
east, to an ice-quarry, from which we have
obtained our fresh water of late, we found
that a water-crack we observed j^esterday
had undergone severe pressure during the
night, and that the action was still going
on. A low, hazy twilight just allowed us

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 157

to distinguish near objects. A level, snow-
covered surface was rising up in inclined
planes or rudely undulating curves. These,
breaking at their summits, fell off on each
side in masses of twenty tons' weight.
Tables of six feet in thickness by twenty of
perpendicular height, and some of them
fifteen yards in length, surging up into the
misty air, heaving, rolling, tottering, and
falling with a majestic deliberation worthy
of the forces that impelled them. When a
huge block would rise vertically, tremble for
a moment, and topple over, you heard the
heavy sough of the snow-padding that re-
ceived it; but this was only the deep bass
accompaniment to a wild, yet not unmusical
chorus. I can not attempt to describe the
sounds. There was the ringing clatter of
ice, made friable by the intense cold and
crumbhng under lateral force ; the low whine
which the ice gives out when we cut it at
right angles with a sharp knife, rising
sometimes into a shriek, or sinking to the
plaintive outcry of our night-hawk at home ;
the whirr of rapidly -urged machinery; the

158 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

hum of multitudes: and all these mingled
with tones that have no analogy among the
familiar ones of unadventurous life.

"So slowly and regularly did these masses
roll, rise, break, and fall, that, standing
upon a broad table, ice-pole in air, we rolled
when it rolled, rose when it rose, balanced
when it broke, and jumped as it fell. What
would our quiet people in brick houses say
to such a ride? Temperature at 30° below
zero.

"On deck; looming up in the very midst
of the haze, land! so high and close on our
port beam, that we felt like men under a
j)recipice. We could see the vertical crev-
ices in the limestone, the recesses contrast-
ing in black shadow. What land is this?
Is it the eastern line of Cape Riley, or have
we reached Cape Ricketts?

"There is one thing tolerably certain: the
Grinnell expedition is quite as hkely to be
searched for hereafter as to search. Poor
Sir John Franklin! this night drift is an
ugly omen.

"Do you remember, in the Spanish coast-
ing craft, down about Barcelona and the

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 159

Balearics, the queer little pictures of Saint
Nicholas we used to see pasted up over the
locker — a sort of mythic effigy, which the
owner looked upon pretty much as some of
our old commodores do the barometer, a
mysterious something, which he sneers at in
fair weather, but is sure, in the strong faith
of ignorance, to appeal to in foul! Well,
very much such a Saint Anthony have we
down in the cabin here, staring us always in
the face. Not a vermilion-daubed puerility,
with a glory in Dutch leaf stretching from
ear to ear; but a good, genuine, hearty rep-
resentative of English flesh and blood, a
mouth that speaks of strong energies as
well as a kindly heart, and an eye — the
other one is spoiled in the lithography — that
looks stern will. Many a time in the night
have I discoursed with him, as he looked
out on me from his gutta percha frame —
'Sir John Franklin; presented by his wife;'
and sometimes I have imagined how and
where I was yet to shake the glorious old
voyager by the hand. I see him now while
I am writing; his face is darkened by the
lamp-smoke that serves us for daylight and

160 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

air, and he seems almost disheartened. So
far as help and hope of it are afloat in this
little vessel, Sir John, well you may be!

"It is Sunday: we have had religious serv-
ice as usual, and after it that relic of effete
absurdity, the reading of the 'Rules and
Regulations.'

"We had the aurora about 7 p.m. The
thermometer at —33° and falling; barome-
ter, aneroid, 30°. 74; attached thermome-
ter, 86°. Wind steady, W.N.W. The
meteor resembled an illuminated cloud; il-
luminated, because seen against the deep
blue night sky; otherwise it resembled the
mackerel fleeces and mare's tails of our sum-
mer skies at home.

"It began toward the northwestern hori-
zon as an irregular flaring cloud, sometimes
sweeping out into wreaths of stratus; some-
times a condensed opaline nebulosity, rising
in a zone of clearly-defined whiteness, from
3° to 5° in breadth up to the zenith, and
then arching to the opposite horizon. This
zone resembled more a long line of white
cirro-stratus than the auroral light of the
systematic descriptions. There was no ap-

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 161

proach to coruscations, or even rectangular
deviations from the axis of the zone. When
it varied from a right line, its curvatures
were waving and irregular, such as might
be produced by wind, but having no relation
to the observed air-currents at the earth's
surface. It passed from the due northwest,
between the Pleiades and the Corona Bore-
alis; the star of greatest magnitude in the
latter of these constellations remaining in
the centre, although its waving curves some-
times reached the Pleiades. At the zenith,
its mean distance from the Polar Star was
7° south, and it passed down, increasing in
intensity, near Vega, in Lyra, to the south-
east.

"There was throughout the arc no marked
seat of greatest intensity. Around the Co-
rona of the north, its Hght was more dif-
fused. The zone appeared narrowed at the
zenith, and bright and clear, without marked
intermission, to the southeast. The frost-
smoke was in smoky banks to the northwest ;
but the aurora did not seem to be affected
by it, and the compass remained constant.

"December 2. Drifting down the sound.

162 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

Every thing getting ready for the chance
of a hurried good-by to our vessels. Pork,
and sugar, and bread put up in small bags
to fling on the ice. Every man his knap-
sack and change of clothing. Arms, bear-
knives, ammunition out on deck, and sledges
loaded. Yet this thermometer, at —30°,
tells us to stick to the ship while we can.

"This packing up of one's carpet-bag in
a hurry requires a mighty discreet memory.
I have often wondered that seamen in push-
ing off from a wreck left so many little
wants unprovided for; but I think I under-
stand it now. After bestowing away my
boots, with the rest of a walking wardrobe,
in a snugly-lashed bundle, I discovered by
accident that I had left my stockings be-
hind.

"4 P.M. Brooks comes down while we
are dining to say we are driving east like
a race-horse, and a crack ahead: 'All hands
on deck!' We had heard the grindings
last night, and our floe in the morning was
cut down to a diameter of three hundred
yards : we had little to spare of it. But the
new chasm is there, already fifteen feet

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 163

wide, and about twenty-five paces from our
bows, stretching across at right angles with
the old cleft of October the 2d.

"Our floe, released from its more bulky
portion, seems to be making rapidly toward
the shore. This, however, may be owing to
the separated mass having an opposite
motion, for the darkness is intense. Our
largest snow-house is carried away; the dis-
consolate little cupola, with its flag of red
bunting, should it survive the winter, may
puzzle conjectures for our English brethren.

"Mr. Griffin and myself walked through
the gloom to the seat of hummock action
abeam of the Rescue. A dark, hard walk:
no changes. The crack, noticed some time
ago as parallel to and alongside of the Res-
cue, has not opened. Her officers have
brought their private papers on board the
Advance, and such indispensable articles as
may be needed in case of her destruction.

"Our ship's head is toward a point of
land to the northeastward, but her position
changes so constantly that there is little use
of recording it. Caught a fox this morning ;
have now two on board.

164 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

"Our bearings, taken by azimuth com-
pass this morning at eleven, gave Cape
Hurd, S. by W. i W.; Western Bluff, of
Rigsby's Inlet, S.E. ^ S.; Table-hill of
Parry, S.E. by S. J S.; Cape Ricketts, E.
byN.

"Wind changed at 9 p.m. to N.N.W.;
thermometer, minimum, —26°; maximum,
22°; mean, 23° 82'.

''December 4, Wednesday. This morn-
ing showed us an interval of over two hun-
dred yards already covered with stiff ice:
so much for our chasm of last night! All
around us is a moving wreck of ice-fields.

"Our drift seems to have been to the west-
ward. We have certainly left the coast,
which yesterday seemed almost over us,
though it is still too near for good fellow-
ship.

"This is the first clear day — truly clear,
that we have had since my record of the
changing daylight. Compared with the
gloomy haziness of its predecessors, it was
cheering. The southern horizon was a zone
of red light; and although the clear blue
soon absorbed it, we could read small print

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 165

with a little effort at noonday by turning
the book to the south. The stars were
visible all the time, except where the hori-
zon was lighted up."

The next four days were full of excite-
ment and anxiety. One crack after another
passed across our floe, still reducing its
dimensions, and at one time bringing down
our vessel again to an even keel. An horn-
afterward, the chasms would close around
us with a sound like escaping steam.
Again they would open under some myste-
rious influence; a field of ice from two to
four inches thick would cover them; and
then, without an apparent change of causes,
the separated sides would come together with
an explosion like a mortar, crunching the
newly-formed field, and driving it headlong
in fragments for fifty feet upon the floe
till it piled against our bulwarks. Every
thing betokened a crisis. Sledges, boats,
packages of all sorts, were disposed in order ;
contingencies were met as they approached
by new delegations of duty; every man was
at work, officer and seaman alike; for neces-
sity, when it spares no one, is essentially

166 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

democratic, even on shipboard. The Res-
cue, crippled and thrown away from us to
the further side of a chasm, was deserted,
and her company consohdated with ours.
Our own brig groaned and quivered under
the pressure against her sides. I give my
diary for December 7.

''December 7, Saturday. The danger
which surrounds us is so immediate, that in

Dec. 6.

Dec.

ILLUSTRATING THE CHANGES IN THE POSITIONS OF THE
SHIPS FROM DAY TO DAY.

the bustle of preparation for emergency I
could not spend a moment upon my journal.
Now the little knapsack is made up again.

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 167

and the blanket sewed and strapped. The
httle home Bible at hand, and the ice-clothes
ready for a jump.

"The above is a rough idea of our last
three days' positions and changes.

"From this it is evident that a gradual
process of breaking up has taken place.
We are afloat.

"The ice, as I have sketched it, December
7, began to close at 11 a.m., and, at the same
time, the brig was driven toward the open
crack of December 4 (c). At 1 p.m. this
closed on us with fearful nipping.

"1 P.M. Ran on deck. The ice was com-
paratively quiescent when I attempted to
write; but it recommenced with a steady
pressure, which must soon prove irresistible.
It catches against a protruding tongue for-
ward, and is again temporarily arrested.

"4 P.M. Up from dinner — 'all hands!'
The ice came in, with the momentum before
mentioned as 'irresistible,' progressive and
grand. All expected to betake ourselves
sledgeless to the ice, for the open space
around the vessel barely admits of a foot-
board. The timbers, and even cross-beams

168 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

protected by shores, vibrated so as to com-
municate to you the pecuhar tremor of a
cotton-factory. Presently the stern of the
brig, by a succession of jerking leaps, be-
gan to rise, while her bows dipped toward
the last night's ice ahead. Everybody
looked to see her fall upon her beam-ends,
and rushed out upon the ice. After a few
anxious breath-compressed moments, our
nobly-strengthened little craft rose up upon
the encroaching floes bodily. Her dolphin-
striker struck the ice ahead; her bows began
to feel the pressure ; and thus lifted up upon
the solid tables, we have a temporary respite
again.

"Stores are now put out upon the ice, and
we await — time. Cape Fellfoot, S. by W.
J W. Remarkable perpendicular bluff,
S.S.E. Cape Hurd, E.N.E. | E., by com-
pass; Cape Hurd, N.W. by W. J W.
(true).

"We are at least fifty miles from Beechy
Island and Union Bay — about forty-five
miles from Leopold Harbor stores. Leo-
pold Harbor, or our more distant English
friends, about one hundred and twenty miles

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 169

off, are our only places of refuge. We are
daily, hourly, drifting further from both.
It is this nakedness of resources, even more
than perpetual darkness and unendurable
cold, that makes our position one of bitter-
ness. Drift a little westward ; thermometer
17°."

JMy journal does not tell the story; but
it is worth notipg, as it illustrates the seda;-
tive effect of a protracted succession of
hazards. Our brig had just mounted the
floe, and as we stood on the ice watching
her vibration, it seemed so certain that she
must come over on her beam-ends, that our
old boatswain, Brooks, called out to "stand
from under." At this moment it occurred
to one of the officers that the fires had not
been put out, and that the stores remaining
on board would be burned by the falling
of the stoves. Swinging himself back to the
deck, and rushing below, he found two per-
sons in the cabin; the officer who had been
relieved from watch-duty a few minutes be-
fore, quietly seated at the mess-table, and
the steward as quietly waiting on him.
"You are a meal ahead of me," he said;

170 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

"you didn't think I was going out upon
the ice without my dinner."

''December 8, Sunday, 8 p.m. This has
thus far been a day of rest. Our vessel,
lifted up upon the heavy ice, has borne with-
out injury a few fresh pressures. The wind
has been still from the eastward, and we
have drifted about six miles to the west-
ward again. This wind was almost a gale;
yet its influence upon the eastern drift is
barely able to produce this limited westing.
I now regard it as past a doubt, that should
we survive the collisions of the journey, we
must float into Baffin's Bay.

"A small auroral light was seen to the
northwest at 9 a.m., the second within two
days. Its axis was 16° W. of the magnetic
meridian. The mean temj^erature of the
day has been —12° 70\ Wind more gentle
from the eastward.

"Mr. Griffin, who is now the executive
officer of our consolidated squadron, has un-
dertaken a systematic drill of the crew. He
has mustered them for an ice-march, with
knajDsacks fitted to their backs, and sledge
equipments, just such as will be required

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 171

wKen the worst comes. Everything is
rigorously inspected; the provisions and
stores of all sorts are packed snug, and have
their places marked; and the men are in-
structed as to their course in the moment of
emergency.

"Here is a sketch of the present position
of our vessel. It looks extravagant, but it

is in truth the very opposite. Every thing
like locomotion on board is up and down
hill.

''December 9, Monday. Like its three
predecessors, clear; that is to say, for three
scanty hours of scanty twilight, you see the
skeleton shore cliffs, and the bright stars, a
little paled, but bright. The moon, a sec-
ond-quarter crescent, was for a while on the
northern and western horizon, distorted and
flaming like a crimson lamp.

172 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

"Last night, mounted as we are, the nip-
ping caused our timbers to complain sadly.
We had to send out parties to crow-bar
away the ice from our bowsprit. The bob-
stays were forced up and broken. Our floe
movement continued to the southeast, driv-
ing the heavy ice in upon the Rescue. She
rose up under the pressure, and is now sur-
rounded by hummock ruins like ourselves.
She is not more than fifty yards distant
from us, astern."

From this time to the 21st our drift was
without intermission. As one headland
after another defined itself against the hori-
zon, it was apparent that we were skirting
the northern coast of the sound. At first
this gave us some anxiety, when our floe,
pressing hard against the shore-ice as we
doubled some projecting point, threatened
to wreck us among its fragments. But as
we drew nearer to the outlet, and began to
compute the new hazards of entering Baffin's
Bay, this very circumstance became for us
an important ground of hope. Theory, as
well as the accounts of the whalers, made
the southeastern cape of Lancaster Sound

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 173

the seat of intense hummock action. The
greater the distance from that point, the
broader must be the curvature of the meet-
ing currents, and the less perilous the con-
flict of the ice-masses in their rotation.
There was, of course, no escape for us from
this encounter; and the only question was
of the degrees of hazard it must involve.

On the 19th, the tall, mural precipices to
the northward, and the cape in which they
terminated toward the east, convinced us
that we had almost reached the western
headland of Croker's Bay. We had drifted
one hundred and eleven miles since the be-
ginning of the month. Our course had been
without any cheering incident. There was
the same wretched succession of openings
and closings about our floe, somewhat dan-
gerous, but too uniform to be exciting; and
we had drilled with knapsack and sledge,
till we were almost martinets in our evolu-
tions on the ice. I group the few entries
of my journal that have any interest.

''December 11. Wind last night fierce
from the north; to-daj^ as fierce from the
west. It has carried us clear of the great

174 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

cape that stretches out east of Maxwell's
Bay, and that threatened us with the variety
of a lee shore. The Rescue has had another
trial: her stern-post is carried away, her
pintle and gudgeon wrenched off. A party
of officers and men are out, trying the ex-
periment of a night upon the ice, tented and
bag-bedded. I wish them luck ; but the ther-
mometer fifty-seven degrees below freezing
is unfavorable to a fete chainpetre,

"December^ 12. Every thing solid, and
looking as if it had always been so; yet, a
few days ago, I had this journal of mine
stitched up in its tarred canvas-bag, and
ready for a fling upon the ice four times in
the twenty-four hours. The floes have
stopped abrading each other, and are driv-
ing ahead right peacefully, with our brig
mounted on top: how far we are from the
edges, it is too dark to see.

"December 13. A little clearer than yes-
terday, but too dark to read small j^rint at
noon. Something like a long reach of land
looming up to southward: it can not be
Croker's Bay?

"All our mess took our tour of practice

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 175

to-day, with a sledge and four hundred
pounds of provender. Hard work, and
sweating abundantly; but we feel already
the good effects of this sort of exercise.
Thermometer at —11°.

"'December 14. A quiet day; the winds
at rest, and the stars twinkling through the
lazy sky as I never saw them before. The
moon, too, is in high heaven, almost a three-
quarter disk. She is a great comfort to us ;
her high northern declination makes her vis-
ible all the time. It looks strangely this
undying fortnight moon. The frost-smoke
is wreathing the red zone of our southern
horizon. It would be a good night-scene
for a painter.

"At 7 P.M. the thermometer rose from
-3° to -1°. At 10 o'clock it was -4°.
Its maximum was +10°, a temperature
mild and comfortable. The wind changed
from west by south to west by north, and
the ice and the drift are as yesterday.

"A poor bear, fired at last night by Mr.
Carter, was found this morning, about three
hundred yards from the ship, dead. He
was wedged between two slabs of ice, and

176 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

in his agony had rubbed his muzzle deep into
the frozen snow. Twice he had stopped to
lie down during his death-walk, marking
each place with a large puddle of blood,
which branched out over the floe like crim-
son-streaked marble. He measured eight
feet four inches from tip to tip. I killed a
fox; but missing his head, opened the large
arteries of the neck, and spoiled his pelt.
The temperature at the orifice of the ball
was -\-92°. The crew were at work till
eleven, leveling our rugged floe, and heap-
ing up snow against the sides of the brig.
The position of our vessel, high perched in
air, and dipping head foremost in a way
most Arctic and uncomfortable, makes the
protection of snow very desirable. We feel
the cold against her walls. The crew had
an hour of sledging, as well by way of exer-
cise as of preparation for their expected
trials.

"A point supposed to be Cape Crawfurd
bore, by compass, west. Our distance from
the north shore is about five miles."

CHAPTER X

I EMPLOYED the dreary intervals of
leisure that heralded our Christmas in
tracing some Flemish portraitures of
things about me. The scenes them-
selves had interest at the time for the parties
who figured in them; and I believe that is
reason enough, according to the practice of
modern academics, for submitting them to
the public eye. I copy them from my scrap-
book, expurgating only a little.

"We have almost reached the solstice; and
things are so quiet that I may as well, be-
fore I forget it, tell you something about the
cold in its sensible effects, and the way in
which as sensible people we met it.

"You will see, by turning to the early
part of my journal, that the season we now
look back upon as the perfection of summer
contrast to this outrageous winter was in
fact no summer at all. We had the young
ice forming round us in Baffin's Bay, and

177

178 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

were measuring snow-falls, while you were
sweating under your grass-cloth. Yet I re-
member it as a time of sunny recreation,
when we shot bears upon the floes, and were
scrambling merrily over glaciers and mur-
dering rotges * in the bright glare of our
daj^-midnight. Like a complaining brute, I
thought it cold then — I, who am blistered if
I touch a brass button or a ramrod without
a woolen mit.

"The cold came u]3on us gradually. The
first thing that really struck me was the
freezing up of our water-casks, the drip-
candle appearance of the bung-holes, and
our inability to lay the tin cup down for a
five-minutes' pause without having its con-
tents made solid. Next came the complete
inability to obtain drink without manufac-
turing it. For a long time we had collected
our water from the beautiful fresh pools of
the icebergs and floes ; now we had to quarry
out the blocks in flinty, glassy lumps, and
then melt it in tins for our daily drink.

"By-and-by the sludge which we passed
through as we traveled became pancakes and

* Little auk. Commonly spelled rotche.

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 179

snow-balls. We were glued up. Yet, even
as late as the 11th of September, I collected
a flowering Potentilla from Barlow's Inlet.
But now any thing moist or wet began to
strike me as something to be looked at — a
curious, out-of-the-way production, like the
bits of broken ice round a can of mint- julep.
Our decks became dry, and studded with
botryoidal lumps of dirty foot-trodden ice.
The rigging had nightly accumulations of
rime, and we learned to be careful about
coiled ropes and iron work. On the 4th of
October we had a mean temperature below
zero.

"By this time our little entering hatch-
way had become so complete a mass of ici-
cles, that we had to give it up, and resort to
our winter door-way. The opening of a
door was now the signal for a gush of smoke-
like vapor: every stove-pipe sent out clouds
of purple steam ; and a man's breath looked
like the firing of a pistol on a small scale.

"All our eatables became laughably con-
sohdated, and after different fashions, re-
quiring no small experience before we
learned to manage the peculiarities of their

180 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

changed condition. Thus, dried apples be-
came one solid breccial mass of impacted
angularities, a conglomerate of sliced chal-
cedony. Dried peaches the same. To get
these out of the barrel, or the barrel out of
them, was a matter imjjossible. We found,
after many trials, that the shortest and best
plan was to cut up both fruit and barrel
by repeated blows with a heavy axe, taking
the lumps below to thaw. Saur-kraut re-
sembled mica, or rather talcose slate. A
crowbar with chiseled edge extracted the
lamince badly; but it was perhaps the best
thing we could resort to.

"Sugar formed a very funny compound.
Take q. s. of cork raspings, and incorporate
therewith another q. s. of liquid gutta percha
or caoutchouc, and allow to harden: this ex-
temporaneous formula will give you the
brown sugar of our winter cruise. Extract
with the saw; nothing but the saw will suit.
Butter and lard, less changed, require a
heavy cold chisel and mallet. Their frac-
ture is conchoidal, with h^ematitic (iron-ore
pimpled) surface. Flour undergoes little

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 181

change, and molasses can at —28° be half
scooped, half cut by a stiff iron ladle.

"Pork and beef are rare specimens of
Florentine mosaic, emulating the lost art
of petrified visceral monstrosities seen at the
medical schools of Bologna and Milan : crow-
bar and handspike! for at —30° the axe can
hardly chip it. A barrel sawed in half, and
kept for two days in the caboose house at
+76°, was still as refractory as flint a few
inches below the surface. A similar bulk
of lamp oil, denuded of the staves, stood
like a yellow sandstone roller for a gravel
walk.

"Ices for the dessert come of course un-
bidden, in all imaginable and unimaginable
variety. I have tried my inventive powers
on some of them. A Roman punch, a good
deal stronger than the noblest Roman
ever tasted, forms readily at —20°. Some
sugared cranberries, with a little butter and
scalding water, and you have an impromptu
strawberry ice. Many a time at those
funny little jams, that we call in Philadel-
phia 'parties,' where the lady-hostess glides

182 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

with such nicely-regulated indifference
through the complex machinery she has
brought together, I have thought I noticed
her stolen glance of anxiety at the cooing
doves, whose icy bosoms were melting into
one upon the supper-table before their time.
We order these things better in the Arctic.
Such is the 'composition and fierce quality'
of our ices, that they are brought in served
on the shaft of a hickory broom ; a transfix-
ing rod, which we use as a stirrer first and
a fork afterward. So hard is this termina-
ting cylinder of ice, that it might serve as
a truncheon to knock down an ox. The
only difficult}^ is in the processes that fol-
low. It is the work of time and energy to
impress it with the carving-knife, and you
must handle your spoon deftly, or it fastens
to your tongue. One of our mess was
tempted the other day by the crystal trans-
parency of an icicle to break it in his mouth ;
one piece froze to his tongue, and two
others to his lips, and each carried off the
skin: the thermometer was at —28°.

"Thus much for our Arctic grub. I need
not say that our preserved meats would

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 183

make very fair cannon-balls, canister shot!

"Now let us start out upon a walk, clothed
in well-fashioned Arctic costume. The
thermometer is, say —25°, not lower, and
the wind blowing a royal breeze, but gently.

"Close the Hps the first minute or two,
and admit the air suspiciously through nos-
tril and mustache. Presently you breathe
in a dry, pungent, but gracious and agree-
able atmosphere. The beard, eyebrow, eye-
lashes, and the downy pubescence of the
ears, acquire a delicate, white, and perfectly-
enveloping cover of venerable hoar-frost.
The mustache and under lip form pendu-
lous beads of dangling ice. Put out your
tongue, and it instantly freezes to this icy
crusting, and a rapid effort and some hand
aid will be required to liberate it. The less
you talk, the better. Your chin has a trick
of freezing to your upper j aw by the luting
aid of your beard ; even my eyes have often
been so glued, as to show that even a wink
may be unsafe. As you walk on, you find
that the iron-work of your gun begins to
penetrate through two coats of woolen mit-
tens, with a sensation like hot water.

18J^ ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

"But we have been supposing your back
to the wind ; and if you are a good Arcticized
subject, a warm glow has already been fol-
lowed by a profuse sweat. Now turn about
and face the wind ; what a devil of a change !
how the atmospheres are wafted off! how
penetratingly the cold trickles down your
neck, and in at your j)ockets! Whew! a
jack-knife, heretofore, like Bob Sawyer's
apple, 'unpleasantly warm' in the breeches
pocket, has changed to something as cold
as ice and hot as fire: make your way back
to the ship! I was once caught three miles
off with a freshening wind, and at one time
feared that I would hardly see the brig
again. Morton, who accompanied me, had
his cheeks frozen, and I felt that lethargic
numbness mentioned in the story books.

"I will tell you what this feels like, for
I have been twice 'caught out.' Sleej)iness
is not the sensation. Have you ever re-
ceived the shocks of a magneto-electric
machine, and had the peculiar benumbing
sensation of 'can't let go,' extending up to
your elbow-joints? Deprive this of its
paroxysmal character; subdue, but diffuse it

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 185

over every part of the system, and you have
the so-called pleasurable feelings of incip-
ient freezing. It seems even to extend to
your brain. Its inertia is augmented ; every
thing about you seems of a ponderous sort;
and the whole amount of pleasure is in grati-
fying the disposition to remain at rest, and
spare yourself an encounter with these
latent resistances. This is, I suppose, the
pleasurable sleepiness of the story books.

"I could fill page after page with the
ludicrous miseries of our ship-board life.
We have two climates, hj^grometrically as
well as thermometrically at opposite ends of
the scale. A pocket-handkerchief, pocketed
fcelow in the region of stoves, comes up un-
changed. Go below again, and it becomes
moist, flaccid, and almost wet. Go on deck
again, and it resembles a shingle covered
with linen. I could pick my teeth with it.

"You are anxious to know how I manage
to stand this remorseless temperature. It
is a short story, and perhaps worth the tell-
ing. 'The Doctor' still retains three lux-
uries, remnants of better times — silk next
his skin, a tooth-brush for his teeth, and

186 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

white linen for his nose. Everything else
is Arctic and hairy — fur, fur, fur. The silk
is light and washable, needing neither the
clean dirt of starch nor the uncomfortable
trouble of flat-irons. It secures to me a
clean screen between my epidermoid and
seal-skin integuments.

"I try to be a practical man as to clothing
and the et ceteras of a traveler. All bag-
gage beyond the essential I regard as im-
pedimenta, and believe in the wisdom of
Titian Peale, who, when preparing for an
exploring tour around the world, pur-
chased— a tin cup. For the sake of poor
devils condemned to cold winters, I give in
detail my dress, the result of much trial,
and, I think, nearly perfect. Here it is,
from tip to toe.

"1. Feet. A pair of cotton socks (Lisle
thread) covered by a pair of ribbed woolen
stockings, rising above the knee and half
way up the thigh. Over these a pair of
Esquimaux water-proof boots, hned by a
sock of dog-skin, the hair inside; the leg of
dressed seal-hide; a sole with the edges
turned up, and crimped so as to form a

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 187

water-tight cup; the furred edge of a dog-
skin sock inserted as a Hning; and some
clean straw laid smoothly at the bottom,
which forms the elastic cushion on which
you tread.

"2. Legs. A pair of coarse woolen
drawers, and a pair of seal-skin breeks over
them, stitched with reindeer tendon.

"3. Chest. A jumper or short coat,
double, of seal-skin and reindeer fur. This
invaluable article I got at Disco on my fur
journey, obtaining a good number besides
for men and officers. It consists of an
inner-hooded shirt of reindeer-skin with the
hair inside, reaching as far as the upper
ridge of the hips, so as to allow free swing
to the legs, and fitting about the throat very
closely. It is drawn on like the shirt, and,
except at the neck, is perfectly loose and
unbinding.

"4. Head. Our people generally wear
fur caps. I wear an ear-ridge, a tiara, to
speak heroically, of wolf -skin. Excellent is
this Mormon fur! Leaving the entire poll
bare to the elements, it guards the ears and
forehead effectually: in any ordinary state

188 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

of the wind above —15°, I am not troubled
with the cold. Before I resorted to this,
my cap was full of frozen water, stiff and
uncomfortable, all the condensation turning
to ice the moment I uncovered. When the
weather is very cold, I u^ hood ; when colder,
say —40°, with a middling breeze — quite
cold enough, I assure you — I wear an
elastic silk night-cap in addition, one of a
pair forced on me by a certain brother of
mine as I was leaving New York, drawn
over my head and face, and lined with a
mask of wolf-skin. To prevent excessive
condensation, I cut only two eye-holes, and
leave a large aperture below the point of
the nose for talking and breathing. A
grim-looking object is this wolf -skin mask,
its openings lined with water-proof oiled
silk.

"The only changes in the above are a
pair of cloth pants for fur, when the ther-
mometer strays above —15°, and a pair of
heavy woolen wad-mail leggins, drawn over
my fur pants, and worn, stocking fashion,
within my boots, in windy weatlier, when we
get down to —30° or thereabouts. A long

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 189

waist-scarf, worn like the kummerbund of
the Hindoos, is a fine protection while walk-
ing, to keep the cold from intruding at the
pockets and waist: it consummates, as it
floats martially on the breeze, the grotesque
harmonies of my attire."

CHAPTER XI

'' ^1 — ^ ECEMBER 21, Saturday.
I ■ To-daj^ at noon we saw, dimly
I M looming up from the redness
of the southern horizon, a low
range of hills; among them some cones of
great height, mountains of a character dif-
fering from the naked table-lands of the
northern coast. The land on the other side
of Croker's Bay, with one high head-land,
supposed to be Cape Warrender, is in view.
From all of which it is clear that we are
drifting regularly on toward Baffin's Bay.

"An opening occurred last night in the
ice to the northward. It is not more than
a hundred yards from us, and it is already
seventy wide. It was explored for about
a mile in a northwest and southeast course.
Another of the same character is about half
a mile to the south of us.

"Our floe has now remained in peace for

190

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 191

nearly three weeks ; and, with the happy in-
difference of sailors' human nature, we are
beginning to forget the driving ice and the
groaning pressures which have perched us
thus upon a lump of drift. I look, however,
to the spring-tides for a renewal of the
trouble. The ice about us is apparently as
strong and solid as the slow growth of Wel-
lington Channel; but we know it to be re-
cent, and less able to withstand pressure.
Every thing now depends upon preserving
our vessel and stores. A breaking up must
take place, and for us the later in the spring
the better. At the present rate of progress,
we shall be in Baffin's Bay by the latter
end of January. There the daylight will
be with us again; most providentially, for
the icebergs are wi-etched enemies in dark-
ness. Thirty more days, and we may take
a noonday walk; forty-four, and the sun
comes back.

"Our men are hard at work preparing for
the Christmas theatre, the arrangements ex-
clusively their own. But to-morrow is a
day more welcome than Christmas — the
solstitial day of greatest darkness, from

192 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

which we may begin to date our returning
light. It makes a man feel badly to see
the faces around him bleaching into waxen
paleness. Until to-day, as a looking-glass
does not enter into an Arctic toilet, I thought
I was the exception, and out of delicacy said
nothing about it to my comrades. One of
them, introducing the toj)ic just now, told
me, with an utter unconsciousness of his own
ghostliness, that I was the palest of the
party. So it is, 'All men think all men,' &c.
Why, the good fellow is as white as a cut
potato!"

In truth, we were all of us at this time un-
dergoing changes unconsciously. The hazy
obscurity of the nights we had gone through
made them darker than the corresponding
nights of Parry. The complexions of my
comrades, and my own too, as I found soon
afterward, were toned down to a peculiar
waxy paleness. Our eyes were more re-
cessed, and strangely clear. Complaints of
shortness of breath became general. Our
appetite was almost ludicrously changed:
ham-fat frozen, and saur-kraut swimming in
olive-oil were favorites; yet we were uncon-

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 193

scious of any tendency toward the gross diet
of the Polar region. Most of my compan-
ions would not touch bear ; indeed, I was the
only one, except Captain De Haven, that
still ate it. Fox, on the other hand, was a
favorite. Things seemed to have changed
their taste, and our inclination for food was
at best very slight.

Worse than this, our complete solitude,
combined with permanent darkness, began
to affect our morale. Men became moping,
testy, and imaginative. In the morning,
dreams of the night — we could not help using
the term — were narrated. Some had visited
the naked shores of Cape Warrender, and
returned laden with water-melons. Others
had found Sir John Franklin in a beautiful
cove, lined by quintas and orange-trees.
Even Brooks, our hard-fisted, unimagina-
tive boatswain, told me, in confidence, of
having heard three strange groans out upon
the ice. He "thought it was a bear, but
could see nothing!" In a word, the health
of our little company was broken in upon.
It required strenuous and constant effort at
washing, diet, and exercise to keep the

194 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

scurvy at bay. Eight cases of scorbutic
gums were already upon my black-list.
One severe pneumonia left me in anxious
doubt as to its result. There was, however,
little bronchitis.

''December 22, Sunday. The solstice!
— the midnight of the year! It commences
with a new movement in the ice, the oj)en
lead of yesterday piling uj) into hummocks
on our port-beam. No harm done.

"The wind is from the west, increasing in
freshness since early in the morning. The
weather overcast ; even the moon unseen, and
no indications of our drift. We could not
read print, not even large newspaper type, at
noonday. We have been unable to leave
the ship unarmed for some time on account
of the bears. We remember the story of
poor Barentz, one of our early predecessors.
One of our crew, Blinn, a phlegmatic Dutch-
man, walked out to-day toward the lead, a
few hundred yards off, in search of a seal-
hole. Suddenly a seal rose close by him in
the sludge-ice : he raised his gun to fire ; and,
at the same instant, a large bear jumped
over the floe, and by a dive followed the seal.

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 195

Blinn's musket snapped. He was glad to
get on board again, and will remember his
volunteer hunt. Thermometer, minimum,
— 1 8 ° ; m aximum, — 6 ° . A beautiful parase-
lene yesterday !

''December 23, Monday. Perfect dark-
ness! Drift unknown. Winds nearly at
rest, with the exception of a little gasp from
the westward. Thermometer never below
-12°, nor above -7°.

''Deceviber 24, Tuesday. 'Through utter
darkness borne!'

''December 25. 'Y° Christmas of y'
Arctic cruisers!' Our Christmas passed
without a lack of the good things of this
life. 'Goodies' we had galore; but that best
of earthly blessings, the communion of loved
sympathies, these Arctic cruisers had not.
It was curious to observe the depressing in-
fluences of each man's home thoughts, and
absolutely saddening the effort of each man
to impose upon his neighbor and be very
boon and jolly. We joked incessantly, but
badly, and laughed incessantly, but badly
too; ate of good things, and drank up a
moiety of our Heidsiek; and then we sang

196 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

negro songs, wanting only tune, measure,
and harmony, but abounding in noise; and
after a closing bumper to Mr. Grinnell, ad-
journed with creditable jollity from table
to the theatre.

"It was on deck, of course, but veiled from
the sky by our felt covering. A large ship's
ensign, stretched from the caboose to the
bulwarks, was understood to hide the stage,
and certain meat-casks and candle-boxes
represented the parquet. The thermometer
gave us —6^ at first; but the favoring ele-
ments soon changed this to the more com-
fortable temperature of —4°.

"Never had I enjoj^ed the tawdry quack-
ery of the stage half so much. The theatre
has always been to me a wretched simula-
tion of realities ; and I have too little sympa-
thy with the unreal to find pleasure in it
long. Not so our Ai'ctic theatre : it was one
continual frolic from beginning to end.

"The 'Blue Devils:' God bless us! but
it was very, very funny. None knew their
parts, and the prompter could not read
glibly enough to do his office. Every thing,
whether jocose, or indignant, or common-

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 197

place, or pathetic, was delivered in a high-
tragedy monotone of despair; five words at
a time, or more or less, according to the
facilities of the prompting. Megrim, with
a pair of seal-skin boots, bestowed his gold
upon the gentle Annette; and Annette,
nearly six feet high, received it with masto-
donic grace. Annette was an Irishman
named Daly; and I might defy hmiian be-
ing to hear her, while balanced on the heel
of her boot, exclaim, in rich masculine
brogue, 'Och, feather!' without roaring.
Bruce took the Landlord, Benson was
James, and the gentle Annette and the
wealthy Megrim were taken by Messrs.
Daly and Johnson.

"After this followed the Star Spangled
Banner; then a complicated Marseillaise by
our French cook, Henri ; then a sailor's horn-
pipe by the diversely-talented Bruce ; the or-
chestra^— Stewart, playing out the intervals
on the Jew's-harp from the top of a lard-
cask. In fact, we were very happy fellows.
We had had a foot-race in the morning over
the midnight ice for three 2:)urses of a flannel
shirt each, and a splicing of the main-brace.

198 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

The day was night, the stars shining feebly
through the mist.

"But even here that kindly custom of
Christmas-gifting was not forgotten. I
found in my morning stocking a jack-knife,
symbolical of my altered looks, a piece of
Castile soap — this last article in great re-
quest— a Jew's-harp, and a string of beads!
On the other hand, I prescribed from the
medical stores two bottles of Cognac, to pro-
tect the mess from indigestion.* So passed
Christmas. Thermometer, minimum, —16°;
maximum, —7°. Wind west.

''December 26, Thursday. To-day, loom-
ing up high in the air, we catch a sight of
new unknown land. Of our drift, save by
analogy, we know nothing.

"'December 27, Friday. The shores of
this coast seem to have changed their scale.
At Cape Riley, as my sketches show, the
limestone rises in a mural face, based by a
deposit of detritus, which extends out in
tongues, indentations, and salient capes ; and

* An offense which I thus publicly acknowledge in ad-
vance of the court-martial, to which this illegal dispensation
of the public stores may subject me.

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 199

between these, a cemented shingle, full of
corallines and encrinites, forms a beach of
varying extent.

"Sometimes this beach is backed by rolling
dune-like hills of the scaly mountain hme-
stones; but after a mile or two of intermis-
sion, the high cliffs rise up again in abut-
ments, and continue unbroken until another
interval occurs. As we proceeded east, these
escarped masses became more buttress-like
and monumental, rising up into plateau-
topped masses, separated by chasms, which
seem mere ruptures in the continuous hill-
line. Now, however, a trace is seen in the
clouds indicative of distant land, higher,
more mountainous, rolling, and broken. It
may be the Cunninghame Mountains toward
Cape Warrender.

"The wind is quietly blowing from the
west, and the misty haze gives us barely a
vestige of daylight.

''December 28, Saturday. From my
very soul do I rejoice at the coming sun.
Evidences not to be mistaken convince me
that the health of our crew, never resting
upon a very sound basis, must sink under

200 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

the continued influences ^of darkness and
cold. The temperature and foulness of air
in the between-deck Tartarus can not be
amended, otherwise it would be my duty to
urge a change. Between the smoke of
lamps, the dry heat of stoves, and the fumes
of the galley, all of them unintermitting,
what wonder that we grow feeble. The
short race of Christmas-day knocked up all
our officers except Griffin. It pained me to
see my friend Lovell, our strongest man,
fainting with the exertion. The symptoms
of scurvy among the crew are still increas-
ing, and becoming more general. Faces
are growing pale; strong men pant for
breath upon ascending a ladder; and an in-
dolence akin to apathy seems to be creeping
over us. I long for the light. Dear, dear
sun, no wonder you are worshiped!

"Our drift is still eastward, with a slow
but unerring progress. The high land men-
tioned yesterday took, in spite of the obscur-
ing haze, a distinguishable outline. It is
not more than eight miles off, and so high
that, with its retiring flanks on either side,
it can be none other than the projecting

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 201

Cape Warrender. Its structure is unmis-
takably gneissoid. We have now left the
limestones.

"This cape is the great entering landmark
of the northern shores of Lancaster Sound.
Just one hundred days ago we passed it,
urged by the wings of the storm ; our errand
of mercy filling us with hope, and the gale
calling for our best energies. We were then
but a few hours from Baffin's Bay, and not
over twenty-four from the coast of Green-
land. How differently are we journeying
now!

"The Bay of Baffin, with its moving ice
and oj)posing icebergs, bathed in foggy
darkness and destitute of human fellowship
or habitable asylum, is before us ; and we, so
utterly helpless, hampered, and nonresistant,
must await the inevitable action of the ice.
This nearness to Cape Warrender makes us
feel that our silent marches have brought us
near to another conflict.

''December 29, Sunday. The drift shows
an indent of the cape now abaft our beam.
We are slowly making easting. The day
is one of the same obscure and dimmed fog

202 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

which for the past week has wrapped us in
darkness. The ice gives no change as yet:
the same great field of moving whiteness.

''December 30, Monday. By a compari-
son of our several days' positions, I find
that from the 18th to the 28th we have
drifted fifty-two miles and a half, something
over five miles a day. The winds during
this period have been from the westward,
constant though gentle; and our progress
has been of the same steady but gentle sort.
At this rate, we will in a few days more be
within the Baffin's Bay incognita.

* 'Looking round upon mj^ mess-mates with
that sort of scrutiny that belongs to my craft
and my position, I am startled at the traces,
moral and phj^sical, of our Arctic winter life.
Those who con it over theoretically can
hardly realize the operation of the host of
retarding influences that belong to a Polar
night. If I were asked to place in fore-
most rank the item that has been most try-
ing, it would be neither the perpetual cold,
nor the universal sameness, nor our complete
exclusion from the active world of our

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 203

brother men, but this constant and oppress-
ing gloom, this unvaried darkness.

"To-day was clear toward the south, so
that the blessing of light came to us more
largely than of late. I walked about a mile
on the recent lead, now frozen to a level
meandering lane. We see to the north the
Cunninghame Mountains of Cape War-
render, but can not make out our change of
position definitely. To the south, an out-
lined ridge of doubtful mountain land shows
itself high in the clouds ; probably a part of
the high ridges east of Admiralty Inlet.

"The thermometer fell at eight this morn-
ing to —21°. By noonday it gave us —26°
and -27°. It is now -22°. The wind is
gentle and cold, but not severe.

''December 31, Tuesday. The ending
day of 1850 ! So clear and beautiful is this
parting day, that I must take it as a happy
omen. Pellucid clearness, and a sky of deep
ultra-marine, brought back the remembrance
of daylight. I give the record of the day.

"9 A.M. The stars visible even to the
lesser groups; but a deep zone of Italian

204 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

pink rises from the south, and passes by pris-
matic gradations into the clear blue. The
outline of the shore to the northward is well
defined.

"10. The day is growing into clearness.
The thermometer is at twenty-seven degrees
below zero. Your lungs tingle pleasantly
as you draw it in.

"II. Can read ordinary over-sized print.
Started on a walk, the first time for twenty-
odd days. Saw the great lead, and traveled
it for a couple of miles, expanding into a
plain of recent ice.

"M. Passed noon on the ice. Can read
diamond type. Stars of the first magni-
tude only visible. Saturn magnificent!

"1 P.M. With difficulty read large type.
The clouds gathering in black stratus over
the red light to the south.

"2. The heavens studded with stars in
their groupings. Night is again over every
thing, although the minor stars are not yet
seen.

"Since the first of this month, we have
drifted in solitude one hundred and seventy
miles, skirting the northern shores of Lan-

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 205

caster Sound. Baffin's Bay is ahead of us,
its current setting strong toward the south.
What will be the result when the mighty
masses of these two Arctic seas come to-
gether!"

CHAPTER XII

1851, January 1, Wednesday. The first
day of 1851 set in cold, the ther-
mometer at —28°, and closing at —31°.
We celebrated it by an extra dinner,
a plumcake unfrosted for the occasion, and
a couple of our residuary bottles of wine.
But there was no joy in our merriment: we
were weary of the night, as those who watch
for the morning.

It was not till the 3d that the red southern
zone continued long enough to give us as-
surance of advancing day. Then, for at
least three hours, the twilight enabled us to
walk without stumbling. I had a feeling
of racy enjoyment as I found myself once
more away from the ship, ranging among the
floes, and watching the rivalry of day with
night in the zenith. There was the surnvai-d
horizon, with its evenly-distributed bands of
primitive colors, blending softly into the
clear blue overhead ; and then, by an almost

206

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 207

magic transition, night occupying the west-
ern sky. Stars of the first magnitude, and
a wandering planet here and there, shone
dimly near the debatable line; but a little
further on were all the stars in their glory.
The northern firmament had the familiar
beauty of a pure winter night at home. The
Pleiades glittered "like a swarm of fire-flies
tangled in a silver-braid," and the great stars
that hang about the heads of Orion and
Taurus were as intensely bright as if day was
not looking out upon them from the other
quarter of the sky. I had never seen night
and day dividing the hemisphere so beauti-
fully between them.

On the 8th we had, of course, our national
festivities, and remembered freshly the hero
who consecrated the day in our annals. The
evening brought the theatricals again, with
extempore interludes, and a hearty splicing
of the main-brace. It was something new,
and not thoroughly gladsome, this com-
memoration of the victory at New Orleans
under a Polar sky. There were men not
two hundred miles from us, now our part-
ners in a nobler contest, who had bled in this

208 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

very battle. But we made the best of the
occasion ; and if others some degrees further
to the south celebrated it more warmly, we
had the thermometer on our side, with its
—20°, a normal temperature for the "lauda-
tur et alget."

But the sun was now gradually coming up
toward the horizon: every day at meridian,
and for an hour before and after, we were
able to trace our progress eastward by some
known headland. We had passed Cape
Castlereagh and Cape Warrender in succes-
sion, and were close on the meridian of Cape
Osborn. The disruptions of the ice which
we had encountered so far, had always been
at the periods of spring-tide. The sun and
moon were in conjunction on the 21st of De-
cember; and, adopting Captain Parry's ob-
servation, that the greatest efflux was always
within five days after the new moon, we had
looked with some anxiety to the closing
weeks of that month. But they had gone
by without any unusual movement ; and there
needed only an equally kind visitation of the
January moon to give us our final struggle
with the Baffin's Bay ice by daylight.

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 209

Yet I had remarked that the southern
shore of Lancaster Sound extended much
further out to the eastward than the north-
ern did; and I had argued that we might
begin to feel the current of Baffin's Bay in
a very few days, though we were still con-
siderably to the west of a line drawn from
one cape to the other. The question re-
ceived its solution without waiting for the
moon.

I give from my journal our position in
the ice on the 11th of January:

"January 11, Saturday. The floe in
which we are now imbedded has been steadily
increasing in solidity for more than a month.
Since the 8th of December, not a fracture or
collision has occurred to mar its growth.
The eye can not embrace its extent. Even
from the mast-head you look over an un-
bounded expanse of naked ice, bristling with
contorted spires, and ridged by elevated axes
of hummocks. The land on either side rises
above our icy horizon; but to the east and
west, there is no such interception to our
winteryness.

"The brig remains as she was tossed at

SIO ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

our providential escape of last month, her
nose burrowing in the snow, and her stern
perched high above the rubbish. Walking
deck is an up and down hill work. She re-
tains, too, her list to starboard. Her bare
sides have been banked over again with
snow to increase the warmth, and a formida-
ble flight of nine ice-block steps admits us
to the door-way of her winter cover. The
stores, hastily thrown out from the vessel
when we expected her to go to pieces, are
still ujion the little remnant of old floe on
our port or northern side. The Rescue is
some hundred yards off to the south of east."
The next day things underwent a change.
The morning was a misty one, giving us just
light enough to make out objects that were
near the ship; the wind westerly, as it had
been for some time, freshening perhaps to a
breeze. The day went on quietly till noon,
when a sudden shock brought us all up to
the deck. Running out upon the ice, we
found that a crack had opened between us
and the Rescue, and was extending in a zig-
zag course from the northward and eastward
to the southward and westward. At one

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 211

o'clock it had become a chasm eight feet in
width; and as it continued to widen, we ob-
served a distinct undulation of the water
about its edges. At three, it had expanded
into a broad sheet of water, filmed over by
young ice, through which the portions of
the floe that bore our two vessels began to
move obliquely toward each other. Night
closed round us, with the chasm reduced to
forty yards and still narrowing; the Rescue
on her portbow, two hundred yards from
her late position; the wind increasing, and
the thermometer at —19°.

My journal for the next day was written
at broken intervals; but I give it without
change of form:

"Jarmary 13, 4 a.m. All hands have
been on deck since one o'clock, strapped and
harnessed for a farewell march. The water-
lane of j^esterday is covered by four-inch ice ;
the floes at its margin more than three feet
thick. These have been closing for some
time by a sliding, grinding movement, one
upon the other ; but every now and then com-
ing together more directly, the thinner ice
clattering between them, and marking their

212 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

new outline with hummock ridges. They
have been fairly in contact for the last hour:
we feel their pressure extending to us
through the elastic floe in which we are
cradled. There is a quivering, vibratory
hum about the timbers of the brig, and every
now and then a harsh rubbing creak along
her sides, hke waxed cork on a mahogany
table. The hummocks are driven to within
four feet of our counter, and stand there
looming fourteen feet high through the
darkness. It has been a horrible commotion
so far, with one wild, booming, agonized
note, made up of a thousand discords; and
now comes the deep stillness after it, the
mysterious ice-pulse, as if the energies were
gathering for another strife.

"6 J A.M. Another pulse! the vibration
greater than we have ever yet had it. If our
little brig had an animated centre of sensa-
tion, and some rude force had torn a nerve-
trunk, she could not feel it more — she fairly
shudders. Looking out to the north, this
ice seems to heave up slowly against the sky
in black hills ; and as we watch them rolling
toward us, the hills sink again, and a dis-

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 213

torted j)lain of rubbish melts before us into
the night. Ours is the contrast of utter
helplessness with illimitable power.

"9:50 A.M. Brooks and myself took ad-
vantage of the twilight at nine o'clock to
cross the hummocky fields to the Rescue. I
can not convey an impression of the altered
aspects of the floe. Our frozen lane has dis-
appeared, and along the hne of its recent
course the ice is heaped up in blocks, tables,
lumps, powder, and rubbish, often fifteen
feet high. Snow covered the decks of the
little vessel, and the disorder about it spoke
sadly of desertion. Foot-prints of foxes
were seen in every imaginable corner; and
near the little hatchway, where we had often
sat in comfortable good-fellowship, the
tracks of a large bear had broken the snow
crust in his efforts to get below.

"The Rescue has met the pressure upon
her portbow and fore-foot. Her bowsprit,
already maimed by her adventure off
Griffith's Island, is now completely forced
up, broken short off at the gammoning.
The ice, after nipping her severely, has piled
up round her three feet above the bulwarks.

214 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

We had looked to her as our first asylum of
retreat; but that is out of the question now;
she can not rise as we have done, and any
action that would peril us again must bear
her down or crush her laterally.

"The ice immediately about the Advance
is broken into small angular pieces, as if it
had been dashed against a crag of granite.
Our camp out on the floe, with its reserve
of provisions and a hundred things besides,
memorials of scenes we have gone through,
or api)liances and means for hazards ahead
of us, has been carried away bodily. My
noble specimen of the Arctic bear is floating,
with an escort of bread barrels, nearly half
a mile off.

"The thermometer records only — 17° ; but
it blows at times so very fiercely that I have
never felt it so cold: five men were frost-
bitten in the attempt to save our stores.

"9 P.M. We have had no renewal of the
pressure since half past six this morning.
We are turning in ; the wind blowing a fresh
breeze, weather misty, thermometer at
-23°."

The night brought no further change ; but

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 215

toward morning the cracks, that formed be-
fore this a sort of net-work all about the
vessel, began to open. The cause was not
apparent: the wind had lulled, and we saw
no movement of the floes. We had again
the same voices of complaint from the ship,
but they were much feebler than yesterday;
and in about an hour the ice broke up all
round her, leaving an open space of about a
foot to ])ort, indented with the mould of her
form. The brig was loose once more at the
sides; but she remained suspended by the
bows and stern from hummocks built up like
trestles, and canted forward still five feet
and a quarter out of level. Every thing
else was fairly afloat : even the India-rubber
boat, which during our troubles had found a
resting-place on a sound projection of the
floe close by us, had to be taken in.

This, I may say, was a fearful position;
but the thermometer, at a mean of —23°
and —24°, soon brought back the solid char-
acter of our floating raft. In less than two
days every thing about us was as firmly fixed
as ever. But the whole topography of the
ice was changed, and its new configuration

216 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

attested the violence of the elements it had
been exposed to. Nothing can be conceived
more completely embodying inhosj)itable
desolation. From mast-head the eye trav-
eled wearily over a broad champaigne of
modulating ice, crowned at its ridges with
broken masses, like breakers frozen as they
rolled toward the beach. Beyond these, you
lost by degrees the distinctions of surface.
It was a great plain, blotched by dark,
jagged shadows, and relieved only here and
there by a hill of upheaved rubbish. Still
further in the distance came an unvarying
uniformity of shade, cutting with saw-
toothed edge against a desolate skj^

Yet there needed no after-survey of the
ice-field to prove to us what majestic forces
had been at work upon it. At one time on
the 13th, the hummock-ridge astern ad-
vanced with a steady march upon the vessel.
Twice it rested, and advanced again — a
dense wall of ice, thirty feet broad at the
base and twelve feet high, tumbhng huge
fragments from its crest, yet increasing in
mass at each new effort. We had ceased to
hope ; when a merciful interposition arrested

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 217

it, so close against our counter that there was
scarcely room for a man to pass between.
Half a minute of progress more, and it
would have buried us all. As we drifted
along five months afterward, this stupendous
memento of controlling power was still
hanging over our stern. The sketch at the
head of the next chapter represents its ap-
pearance at the close of the month.

THE ADVANCE, FEBKUAEY, 1851.

CHAPTER XIII

WE had lost all indications of a
shore, and had obviously passed
within the influences of Baffin's
Bay. We were on the meri-
dian of 75° ; yet, though the recent commo-
tions could be referred to nothing else but
the conflict of the twd currents, we had made
very little southing, if any, and had seen no
bergs. But on the 14th the wind edged
round a little more to the nortliward, and at
six o'clock in the morning of the 15th we

218

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 219

could hear a squeezing noise among the ice-
fields in that direction. By this time we had
become learned interpreters of the ice-
voices. Of course, we renewed our prepara-
tions for whatever might be coming. Every
man arranged his knapsack and blanket-
bag over again with the practiced discretion
of an expert. Our extra clothing sledge,
carefully rei)acked, was made free on deck.
The India-rubber boat, only useful in this
solid waste for crossing occasional chasms,
was launched out upon the ice for the third
time. Our former depots on the floe had
fared so badly that we were reluctant to risk
another ; but our stores were ready to be got
out at the moment.*

Now began, with every one after his own

* I have avoided speaking of my brother ofl&cers. From
myself, a subordinate, only accidentally recording their ex-
ertions, it would be out of place; yet I should speak the
sentiment of all on board were I to recognize how much we
owed to our executive officer, Mr. Griffin. All our systema-
tized preparation for the contingencies which threatened us,
the sledges, the knapsacks, the daily training, and the pro-
vision depots, were due to him. Our commander, then so
ill with scurvy that we feared for his recover}*, was com-
pelled to delegate to his second in command many executive
duties which he would otherwise have taken on himself.

220 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

fashion, the discussion what was best to be
done in case of a wreck. Should we try our
fortunes for the while on board the Rescue?
She would probably be the first to go, and
could hardly hope for a more protracted fate
than her consort. Or should we try for the
shore, and what shore? Admiralty Inlet,
or Pond's Bay, or the River Clyde? We
have no reason to suj^pose the Esquimaux
are accessible on the coast in winter; and if
they are, the}^ can not have provisions for
such a hungry re-enforcement as ours; be-
sides, the chance of reaching land from the
drift-field through the broken ice between
them is slender at the best for men worn
down and sick; much more if they should
attempt to carry two months' stores along
with them. There was only one other re-
sort, to camp out on the floe, if it should
kindly offer us a foothold, and then move as
best we might from one failing homestead to
another, like a band of Arabs in the desert.
Happily, Captain De Haven was spared the
necessity of choosing between the alterna-
tives : the ice-storm did not reach us.

''January 15. The moon is now nearly

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 221

fuU. Her light mingles so with the twilight
of the sun that the stars are quite sobered
down. Walking out at 4 p.m., with the
thermometer at —24°, to find, if I could, the
cause of a sound a good deal like that of the
surf, I was startled by a noise like a quarry
blast, explosive and momentary, followed
by a clatter like broken glass. Some ten
minutes afterward, it was repeated, and a
dark smoke-like vapor rose up in the moon-
light from the same quarter. These things
keep us on the qui vive.

''January 16. In the course of a tramp
to-day about noon, the thermometer stand-
ing at —18°, I came across a wonderful in-
stance of the yielding elasticity of ice under
intense pressure. About two hundred yards
from the brig, on her starboard quarter,
was an unbroken plain of level ice, which be-
fore our recent break-up used to form one of
my daily walks. It measured one hundred
and thirtj^ paces in its longer diameter and
eighty-five in its shorter, and its thickness I
ascertained this morning was over five feet.
I found in crossing it to-day that the surface
presented a uniform curve, a segment whose

222 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

versed sine could not have been less than
eight feet, abutted on each side by a barri-
cade of rubbish. It strikes me that the de-
hiscence, lady's slipper or Rupert's drop
fashion, of such tensely-compressed floes,
must be the cause of the loud explosions we
have heard lately. At —30° or —40° the
ice is as friable and brittle as glass itself ; be-
sides, one of those yesterday was followed by
a ringing clatter.

"January 18. The extreme stillness, and
the facihty with which sound travels over
these Polar ice-plains, make us err a good
deal in our estimates of distance at night. I
went out to-day with Dr. Vreeland in search
of a violent disruption of the ice, which our
look-outs declared they had heard at the
very side of the brig. We had some diffi-
culty in finding it: it was the closing of a
fissure considerably more than half a mile
off.

"As we were returning we noticed some
additional results of the ice action of the
13th. Among them was a table of ice, four
feet thick, eighteen long, and fifteen broad,
so curved without destroying its integrity as

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 223

to form a well-arched bridge across a water
chasm. It had evidently reared up high in
air, and then, topphng over, bent into its
present form — a marked instance of the
semi-solid or viscous character which forms

m

■^

AN ICE-BRIDGE FORMED BY PRESSURE.

the basis of Professor Forbes's glacial
theory. It is not, however, the first extreme
change of form that I have noticed in ap-
parently matured ice at a low temperature:
its plasticity at +32° must be much greater.
"Observations by meridian altitudes of
Saturn and Aldebaran give us to-day a lati-
tude of 73° 47' north. Yesterday we were
at 73° 5\ This progress to the south is
shown also by the bearing of the Walter
Bathurst coast in the neighborhood of

224 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

Possession Bay. We are fully inside of
Baffin's Bay, and with the wind at north-
west. There are some signs of ice trouble
ahead; a crack has been gradually opening
toward our quarter, and has got within eight
hundred yards of us."

The day after this the crack approached
us till it was only about three hundred yards
off, and then began closing again, with the
usual accompanying phenomena. The ice
between it and us was apparently quiescent;
but our ship quivered and jumped under the
transmitted pressure. Soon after, in the
midst of a heavy snow-drift, and with a tem-
perature of —30°, another crack showed it-
self close upon our cut-water. The shocks
which reached us during these commotions
are noted in the log-book as "apparently lift-
ing the vessel aft:" the feehng was, indeed,
not unlike that which has been observed dur-
ing an earthquake, immediately before and
sometimes during a vibration.

"January 20. The ice sounded last night
like some one hammering a nail against the
ship's side, clicking at regular intervals.
Another crack on the other side of the Res-

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 225

cuCj now showing open water, was perhaps
the cause.

"We ah-eady begin to experience the
change in our axis of drift. The changes
of the wind and the currents of Baffin's Bay
have impressed the great system which sur-
rounds us with a marked progress to the
south.

"Throughout last night, and until nine
o'clock this morning, a column of illumina-
tion depended from the moon. Viewing it
obliquely, its penciled raj^s could be seen
reaching nearly to the horizon; while in its
direct aspect a manifest but intermitting in-
terval was apparent. It struck me as an
illustration, perhaps, of Sir John Herschell's
remark when observing the Pleiades, that the
centre of the retina is not the seat of gi'cat-
est sensibility.

"Our snow-water has been infected for the
past month by a very perceptible flavor and
odor of musk, to such a degree sometimes
that we could hardly drink it. After many
attempts to find out its cause, and at least
as many philosophical disquisitions to ac-
count for it without one, I accidentally saw

226 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

to-day a group of foxes on the floes about
our brig, who resoked our doubts by an il-
lustration altogether sim^Dle and natural.

"January 22. On reaching the deck at
half past eight this morning, after my usual
sleepless night in the murky den below, I
found the horizon free from cloud stratus,
and the feeble foreshadowings of day bath-
ing the snow with a neutral tint. By nine
we could see to walk; and as late as five in
the afternoon, the refracted twilights hung
about the western sky. How delicious is
this sensation of coming day! In less than
a fortnight the great planet will be hfted by
the bountiful refraction of the Arctic circle
into clear eye presence.

"I long for day. The anomalous host of
evils which hang about this vegetation in
darkness are showing themselves in all their
forms. ]My scurvy patients, those I mean
on the sick-list, with all the care that it is
possible to give them, are perhaps no worse ;
but pains in the joints, rheumatisms, coughs,
loss of appetite, and general debility, extend
over the whole company. Fifteen pounds
of food per diem are consumed reluctantly

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 227

now, where thirty-two were taken with ap-
petite on the 20th of October. We are a
ghastly set of pale faces, and none paler
than myself. I find it a labor to carry my
carbine. My fingers cling together in an
ill-adjusted lolexus, like the toes in a tight
boot, and my long beard is becoming as
rough and rugged as Humphrey of Glos-
ter's in the play.

"12 M. The thermometer keeps steadily
at —20°, but to-day is the coldest I have ever
felt. It blows a j'oung gale. Brooks and
myself have been flying kites. The wind
was like prickling needles, and the snow
smoked over the moving drifts.

"I am struck more and more with the evi-
dences of gigantic force in the phases of our
frozen ijedragal. Returning from a chase
after an imaginary bear, we came across,
yesterday, a suspended hummock, so impos-
ing in its form, that, half frozen as we were,
we stopped to measure it. It was a single
table of massive ice, supported upon a pile
of rubbish, and inclined about 15° to the
horizon. Its length was ninety-one feet six
inches, its breadth fifty-one feet, and its

^28 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

average solid thickness eight feet. At its
lower end it was seven feet above the level of
the adjacent floe; at its upper, twenty-seven.
The weight of such a mass, allowing 113
lbs. to the cubic foot, would be 1883 tons. I
almost begin to reahze Baron Wrangell's
account of the hummocks on the coast of
Siberia. We have here, perhaps, some five
hundred fathoms of water : the six, or twelve,
or twentj^ fathoms of slimj^ mud, that he
speaks of as forming the inchned plane of
the shore, must facilitate very much the up-
heaval of ice-tables.

"10 P.M. The wind has freshened to a
gale of the first order, and it howls outside
like the dog-chorus of outer Constanti-
nople. But cheerless as these heavy winds
are in all out-of-the-way, undefended places,
it is only when they announce or accompany
a change of direction that we fear them. So
stable and so elastic withal is the cementing
effect of the cold here, that the strongest
gales do not break up the ice after it has
been once set in the line of the wind. On the
other hand, a trifling breeze, if it deviates a

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 229

very few points from the axis of the last set,
puts every thing into commotion.

"January 23. The gale of last night sub-
sided into the usual quiet but fresh westerly
breeze, sometimes inclining to the W.N.W.
To-day is very clear ; the stars, except one or
two of the northern magnates, invisible at
noonday; and two or three well-marked
crimson lines streaking the dawning zone
above the sun. The hills around Walter
Bathurst and Possession Bay, the entering
southern headlands of Lancaster Sound,
have sunk in the distance. Two summits,
bearing southwest by west, probably belong-
ing to Possession Mount, are all that re-
mains of the coast. We are more than fifty
miles from land, and still drifting rapidly to
the east. To the southwest, by compass
(true S.E. J E.), little volumes of smoke
have been rising; but after a tolerably long
walk, I could not find any further signs of
the open water. We are now in latitude
73° 10^

"The daylight is very sensibly longer: the
moon was quite joyous with its little crim-

^30 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

son flocculi ; and five, or even five and a half
hours afterward, when we looked toward the
day quarter, instead of a grim blackness, or,
as we had it more recently, a stain of Indian-
red, we saw the pale bluish light, so grate-
fully familiar at home."

The appearances which heralded the sun s
return had a degree of interest for us which
it is not easy to express in words. I have
referred more than once already to the ef-
fects of the long-continued night on the
health of our crowded ship's company. It
was even more painful to notice its influence
on their temper and spirits. Among the
officers this was less observable. Our mess
seemed determined, come what might, to
maintain toward each other that honest
courtesy of manner, which those who have
sailed on long voyages together know to be
the rarest and most difficult proof of mutual
respect. There were of course seasons when
each had his home thoughts, and revolved
perhaps the growing probabihties that some
other Arctic search party might seek in vain
hereafter for a memorial of our own; yet
these were never topics of conversation. I

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 231

do not remember to have been saddened by
a boding word during all the trials of our
cruise.

With the men, however, it was different.
More deficient in the resources of education,
and less restrained by conventional usages
or the principle of honor from communicat-
ing to each other what they felt, all sym-
pathized in the imaginary terrors which
each one conjured up. The wild voices of
the ice and wind, the strange sounds that
issued from the ship, the hummocks burst-
ing up without an apparent cause through
the darkness, the cracks and the dark rush-
ing water that filled them, the distorted won-
der-workings of refraction; in a word, all
that could stimulate, or sicken, or oppress
the fancy, was a day and nightmare dream
for the forecastle.

We were called up one evening by the
deck-watch to see for ourselves a "ball of
fire floating up and down above the ice-
field." It was there sure enough, a disk of
reddish flame, varying a little in its out-
line, and flickering in the horizon like a re-
volving light at a distance. I was at first

232 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

as much puzzled as the men ; but glancing at
Orion, I soon saw that it was nothing else
than our old dog-star friend, bright Sirius,
come back to us. Refraction had raised
him above the hills, so as to bring him to
view a little sooner than we expected. His
color was rather more lurid than when he
left us, and the refraction, besides distorting
his outline, seemed to have given him the
same oblateness or horizontal expansion
which we observe in the disks of the larger
planets when nearing the horizon.

For some days the sun-clouds at the south
had been changing their character. Their
edges became better defined, their extremi-
ties dentated, their color deeper as well as
warmer; and from the spaces between the
lines of stratus burst out a blaze of glory,
typical of the longed-for sun. He came at
last: it was on the 29th. My journal must
tell the story of his welcoming, at the hazard
of its seeming extravagance: I am content
that they shall criticise it who have drifted
for more than twelve weeks under the night
of a Polar sky.

"January 29. Going on deck after

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 233

breakfast at eight this morning, I found the
dawning far advanced. The whole vault
was bedewed with the coming day; and, ex-
cept Capella, the stars were gone. The
southern horizon was clear. We were cer-
tain to see the sun, after an absence of
eighty-six days. It had been arranged on
board that all hands should give him three
cheers for a gi-eeting; but I was in no mood
to join the sallow-visaged party. I took
my gun, and walked over the ice about a
mile away from the ship to a solitary spot,
where a great big hummock almost hemmed
me in, opening only to the south. There,
Parsee fashion, I drank in the rosy light,
and watched the horns of the crescent ex-
tending themselves round toward the north.
There was hardly a breath of wind, with
the thermometer at only —19°, and it was
easy, therefore, to keep warm by walking
gently up and down. I thought over and
named aloud every one of our little circle,
F. and M., T. and P., B. and J., and our
dear, bright little W.; wondered a while
whether there were not some more to be re-
membered, and called up one friend or rela-

23J^ ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

tive after another, but always came back to
the circle I began with. My thoughts were
torpid, not worth the writing down; but I
was not strong, and they affected me. It
was not good 'Polar practice.'

"Very soon the deep crimson blush,
lightening into a focus of incandescent white,
showed me that the hour Avas close at hand.
Mounting upon a crag, I saw the crews of
our one ship formed in line upon the ice.
My mind was still tracing the familiar chain
of home affections, and the chances that this
one or the other of its links might be broken
already. I bethought me of the Sortes
Virgilianee of my school-boy days: I took
a piece of candle paper pasteboard, cut it
with my bowie-knife into a little carbine
target, and on one side of this marked all our
names in pencil, and on the other a little star.
Presently the sun came : never, till the grave-
sod or the ice covers me, may I forego this
blessing of blessings again! I looked at
him thankfully with a great globus in my
throat. Then came the shout from the shii?
— three shouts — cheering the sun. I fixed
my little star-target to the floe, walked

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 235

backward till it became nearly invisible ; and
then, just as the completed orb fluttered
upon the horizon, fii'ed my 'salutf I cut
JM in half, and knocked the T out of Tom.
They shall di'aw lots for it if ever I get
home ; for many, many years may come and
go again before the shot of an American rifle
signalizes in the winter of Baffin's Bay the
conjunction of sunrise, noonday, and sunset.

"The first indications of dawn to-day were
at forty-five minutes past five. By seven
the twihght was nearly sufficient to guide a
walking party over the floes. I have de-
scribed the phenomena at eight. At nine
the deck-lantern was doused. By llh. 14m.
or 15m. those on board had the first glimpses
of the sun. At 5 p.m. we had the dim twi-
light of evening.

"Our thermometric records on board ship
can not be relied on. I mention the fact for
the benefit of those who may hereafter con-
sult them. My wooden-cased Pike ther-
mometer, hung to a stanchion on the north-
ern beam of the brig, gave at noonday — 19° ;
exposed to the sun's rays on the southern,
—14-°. The observation repeated at 12h.

236 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

30m., gave —20° for the northern, and —15°
for the southern side; the difference in each
case being five degrees. The same ther-
mometer, carefully exposed about a hundred
yards from the ship, gave at noon, on the
north and windward side, —21°; on the
south, exposed to the sun, —18°; and at
thirty minutes afterward (nearly), on the
north, -20° 5'; toward the sun, -16°. The
difference in these last observations of 3° in
the first and 4° 5' in the second was owing
unmistakably to the effect of the solar rays.
The ship's record for the same hours was
simply -19° and -18°. The fact is, that
there is always a varying difference of two
to five degi^ees of temperature between the
lee and weather sides of the brig; the quarter
of the wind and its intensity, the state of our
fires, the open or shut hatches, and other
minor circumstances, determining what the
difference shall be at a particular time.

"January 30. The crew determined to
celebrate 'El regi-esado del sol,' which, ac-
cording to old Costa, our Mahonese seaman,
was a more holy day than Christmas or All-
Saints. Mr. Bruce, the diversely talented,

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 237

favored us with a new line of theatrical ex-
hibition, a divertissemefit of domestic com-
position, 'The Countryman's first Visit to
Town;' followed by a pantomime. I copy
the play-bill from the original as it was
tacked against the main-mast:

ARCTIC THEATRE

To be performed^ on the night of Thursday, the
30th day of January, the Comic Play of the Country-
man. After which, a Pantomime.

To begin with
A Song By R. Bruce.

THE COUNTRYMAN.

Countryman R. Baggs.

Landlady C. Berry.

Servant T. Dunning,

PANTOMIME.

Harlequin James Johnson.

Old Man R. Bruce.

Rejected Lover A. Canot.

Columbine James Smith.

Doors to be opened at 8 o'clock. Curtain to rise a quarter
past 8 punctually.

No admittance to Children; and no Ladies admitted with-
out an escort.

Stage Manager,

S. BENJAMIN.

The strictest order will be observed both inside and outside.

238 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

We sat down as usual on the preserved-
meat boxes, which were placed on deck,
ready strapped and becketed (nautice for
trunk-handled) for flinging out upon the
ice. The affair was altogether creditable,
however, and everybody enjoyed it. Here
is an outline of the pantomime, after the
manner of the newspapers. An old man
(Mr. Bruce) possessed mysterious, semi-
magical, and wholly comical influence over
a rejected lover (M. Auguste Canot, ship's
cook), and Columbine (Mr. Smith) exer-
cised the same over the old man. Harlequin
(Mr. Johnson), however, by the aid of a
split-shingle w^and and the charms of his
"motley wear," secures the affections of
Columbine, cajoles the old man, persecutes
the forlorn lover, and carries off the prize
of love; the fair Columbine, who had been
industriously chewing tobacco, and twirling
on the heel of her boot to keep herself warm,
giving him a sentimental kiss as she left the
stage. A still more sentimental song, sung
in seal-skin breeks and a ''norivester," and a
potation all round of hot-spiced rum toddy,
concluded the entertainments.

CHAPTER XIV

ON the 2d of February the sun rose
up in full disk at a quarter be-
fore eleven. The atmosphere was
clear, but filled with minute
spiculae. The cold was becoming more in-
tense: our ship thermometers stood at —32°,
my spirit standard at —34°, and my mer-
curial at —38°. The ice that had formed
between the floes since our break-up of
January 12th was already twenty-seven
inches thick, and was increasing at the rate
of five inches in the twenty-four hours. The
floes crackled under the intense frost, and
we heard loud explosions around us, which
one of our seamen, who had seen land serv-
ice in Mexico, compared very aptly to the
sound of a musket fired in an empty town.
The 6th was still colder. At seven in the
evening my spirit standard was at —40°.
The day, however, had been graced with
some hours of sunshine, and we worked and

239

240 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

played football out on the ice till we were
many of us in a profuse perspiration. The
next morning my mercurial thermometer
had frozen, leaving its parting record at
— 42° ; and at half j)ast eight one of the spirit
standards indicated the same point. Up to
this period, it was our lowest temperature.
The frozen mercury resembled in appear-
ance lead, recently chilled after melting.
You could cut the thinner edges easily
enough with a penknife; but where it was
heaped up, nearer the centre of the solid
mass, it was tenacious and resisting. I
wished to examine it under the microscope,
but was unable to procure a fractured sur-
face.

Between six and eight o'clock in the
evening of the 2d, we had a magnificent
though nearly colorless exhibition of the
aurora; and on the 7th, at lOh. 20m. a.m.,
the southern sky presented the appearance
of a day aurora attending on the sun. The
observations which I made of these two
phenomena may be the subject of a distinct
chapter; I will only say here, that it was
difficult to doubt their identity of character

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 241

or cause. We had several displays of the
paraselene, too, in the earlier days of the
month, and an almost constant deposition of
crystalhne specks, which covered our decks
with a sort of hoar-frost. The rate of this
deposition on the vessel was about a quarter
of an inch in six hours; but in an ice-basin
on the floes, surrounded by hmiimocks, and
thus protected from the wind, I found it
nine inches deep.

When accumulated in this manner, it
might, on a hurried inspection, be con-
founded with snow; but it differs as the dew
does from rain. It is directly connected
with radiation, and is most copious under a
clear sky. Snow itself, the flaky snow of a
clouded atmosphere, has not been noticed by
us when the temperature was lower than
-8° or at most -10°. Our last snow-fall
was on the 1st of February and the day pre-
ceding. It began with the thermometer at
— 1°, and continued after it had sunk to
— 9° ; but it had ceased some time before it
reached —13°.

''February 9. To-day we had a sky of
serene purity, and all hands went out for a

^42 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

sanitary game of romps in the cold light.
Presently three suns came to greet us —
strange Ai'ctic parhelia — and a great golden
cross of yellow brightness uniting them in
one system. Under the glare of these we
played foot-ball.

"At meridian we made a rough horizon of
the ice, and found ourselves in latitude about
72° 16'. At this time another marvel rose
before us — Land. The monster was to the
W.S.W., in the shape of two round-topped
hills, lifted up for the time into our field of
view. An hour or two later, while the day
was waning, these hills became mountains,
and then a line of truncated cones, the
spectre of some distant coast. Looking a
few minutes later out of the little door in our
felt house, the port gangway of the log-
book, to where for this last fortnight a bleak
sameness of snow has been stretching to the
far north, we saw a couple of icebergs stand-
ing alone in the sky, and at their shadowy
tops their phantom repetitions inverted.
By this time the mountains also had become
twain, and the long line of resurrected coast
was duplicated in the clouds. A stratum of

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 243

false horizon separated the two sets of im-
ages.

"We have been now for many months
without seeing the icebergs. They were
beautiful objects, monuments of power,
when we met them on the coast of Green-
land, floating along on a liquid sea. Now
they admonish us only of our helplessness
and of perils before us. We should be glad
to keep them in the clouds.

"The sun begins to make himself felt,
though as yet feebly enough. My large
spirit thermometer, in the shade of a hum-
mock some hundred yards from the brig,
gave us at noon —21° 5\ and on the sunny
side of the same hummock —12°. The same
thermometer, before a blackboard exposed to
the sun, was at —7°. Twenty minutes later,
the thermometer at the blackboard rose to
+2°, and twenty minutes later still it was at
—2°. The ice formed within the twenty-
four hours in the fire-hole measured four
and a quarter inches; three quarters of an
inch less than our measurements of it a week
ago. A thermometer plunged two feet deep
in a bank of light snow-drift indicated —12°.

£4i ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

''February 10. A hazy day; with moon-
light, and a drizzhng fall of broken spiculse
following it. Mr. Murdaugh obtained ob-
servations for meridian altitude and time-
sights of Aldebaran: our latitude is 72° 19',
our longitude 68° 55'. The winds have
been unfavorable to the rapidity of our
drift, which has been reduced in its rate
since our observation on the 29th of Jan-
uary from five and a quarter to four miles
a day. It may be that our approach to the
narrower parts of the bay and the increased
cold together have been disturbing causes in
the movement of the great pack; but the
wind has been the most important in its in-
fluence.

"To look at the completely unbroken area
which shows itself from our mast-head, mo-
tion would be the last idea suggested. In
Lancaster Sound the changing phases of
the coast gave us a feeling of progress,
movement, drift — that sensation of change
so pleasing to one's incomprehensible moral
machinery. But here, with this circle of
impenetrable passive solidity everywhere
around us, it is hard to realize that we move.

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 245

But for the stars, my convictions of rest
would be absolute. Yet we have thus trav-
eled upward of three hundred miles. I shall
not soon forget this inevitable march, with
its alternations of gloomy silence and fierce
disruptions.

"Fehruai'D 11, Wednesday. Day very
hazy, and nothing to interrupt its monotony.
It requires an effort to bear up against this
solemn transit of unvarying time.

"I will show you how I spend one of these
days — that is, all of them. It is the only
palliation I can oifer for my meagreness of
incident. As for the study we used to talk
about — even you, terrible worker as you are,
could not study in the Arctic regions.

"Within a little area, whose cubic con-
tents are less than father's library, you
have the entire abiding-place of thirty-three
heavily-clad men. Of these I am one.
Three stoves and a cooking galley, four
Argand and three bear-fat lamps burn with
the constancy of a vestal shrine. Damp
furs, soiled woolens, cast-off boots, sick men,
cookery, tobacco-smoke, and digestion are
compounding their effluvia around and

246 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

within me. Hour by hour, and day after
day, without even a bunk to retire to or a
blanket-curtain to hide me, this and these
make up the reahty of my home.

"Outside, grim death, in the shape of
—40°, is trying — most foohshly, I think — to
chill the energy of these his allies. My bed-
ding lies upon the bare deck, right under the
hatch. A thermometer, placed at the head of
my cot, gives a mean temperature of 64° ; at
my feet, under the hatchway, +16° to —4°
— ice at my feet, vapor at my head. The
sleeping-bunks aft range from 70° to 93°;
those forward, regulated by the medical of-
ficer, from 60° to 65°.

"We rise, the crew at six bells, seven
o'clock, and the officers at seven bells, half
an hour later. Thus comports himself your
brother. He sits up in the midst of his
blankets, and drinks a glass of cold water;
eyes, nose, and mouth chippy with lamp-
black and undue evaporation. Oh! how
comforting this water is! That over, a tin-
basin, in its turn, is brought round by ^lor-
ton, mush-like with snow; and in this mix-
ture, by the aid of a hard towel, with a daily

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 2i7

regularity that knows no intermission, he
goes over his entire skeleton, frictionizing.

"This done, comes the dressing — the two
pairs of stockings, the three under-shirts,
the fur outer robing, and the seal-skin boots ;
and then, with a hurried cough of disgust
and semi-suffocation, he is on deck. There
the air, pure and sharply cold, now about
26° or 30°, last week 40° below zero, braces
you up like peach and honey in a Virginia
fog, or a tass of mountain dew in the High-
lands. Then to breakfast. Here are the
mess, with the fresh smell of overnight un-
disturbed, and on our table gi'iddle cakes
of Indian meal, hominy, and mackerel: with
hot coffee and good appetites, we fall to
manfully.

"Breakfast over, on go the furs again;
and we escape from the accumulating fumes
of 'servants' hall,' walking the floes, or
climbing to the tops, till we are frozen
enough to go below again. One hour spent
now in an attempt at study — vainly enough,
poor devil! But he does try, and what little
he does is done then. By half past ten our
entire little band of officers are out upon the

248 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

floes for a bout at anti-scorbutic exercise,
a game of romps: first foot-ball, at which
we kick till our legs ache; next sliding, at
which we slide until we can slide no more:
then off, with carbine on shoulder, and Henri
as satellite, on an ice-tramp.

"Coming back, dinner lags at two. Then
for the afternoon — God spare the man who
can with unscathed nose stand the effluvium.
But night follows soon, and with it the sad-
dening question. What has the day achieved ?
And then we stretch ourselves out under the
hatches, and sleep to the music of our thirty
odd room-mates.

''February 14, Friday. A glorious day,
with the sun from nine to half past two.
Three bergs seen by refraction. The mer-
cury rose to +2° over a black surface turned
toward the sun. To-day the usual foot-
ball.

"Our Arctic theatre gave us to-night 'The
]Mysteries and Miseries of New York,' fol-
lowed by a pantomime. The sitting tem-
perature was —20° ; that outside, —36° ; be-
hind the scenes, —25°. A flat-iron used by
the delicate ^liss Jem Smith gave the novel

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 249

theatrical effect of burning by cold. Poor
Jem suffered so much in her bare sleeves
and hands, that whenever the iron touched
she winced. Cold merriment; but it con-
cluded with hotchpot and songs.

"February 15, Saturday. Another glor-
ious day; the sun visible from 9 a.m. to
3 P.M., and embanked during the remaining
time. Much to our surprise, at the moment
of setting, a startling ridge of mountain
peaks rose into sight to the westward.
Their distance, as estimated by the latest
charts, was no less than 76 miles.

"' February 22, Saturday. 'Some things
can be done as well as others:' so at least
Sam Patch said, when he scrambled up after
his jump at Niagara. I walked myself into
a comfortable perspiration this morning,
with the thermometer at —42°, seventy-four
degrees below the freezing point. My walk
was a long one. When about three miles
from the brig, a breeze sprang up: it was
very gentle ; but instantly the sensation came
upon me of intense cold. My beard, coated
before with massive icicles, seemed to bristle
with increased stiffness. Henri, who walked

250 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

ahead, began to suffer: his nose was tallow
white. Before we had rubbed it into cir-
culation, my own was in the same condition ;
and an unfortunate hole in the back of my
mitten stung Hke a burning coal. We are
so accustomed to cold that I did not suffer
during our walk back, though it was more
than an hour of hummock crossing.

"The sensation most unendurable of these
extremely low temperatures is a pain be-
tween the eyes and over the forehead. This
is quite severe. It reminded me of a feel-
ing which I have had from over-large quan-
tities of ice-cream or ice-water, held against
the roof of the mouth. I reached the brig
in a fine glow of warmth, having skated,
slid, and made the most of my time in the
open air.

"An increased disposition to scurvy shows
itself. Last week twelve cases of scorbutic
gums were noted at my daily inspections.
In addition to these, I have two cases of
swelled limbs and extravasated blotches,
with others less severely marked, from the
same obstinate disease. The officers too, the
captain, Mr. Lovell, and JNIr. Murdaugh,

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 251

complain of stiff and painful joints and
limbs, with diarrhoea and impaired appetite :
the doctor like the rest. At my recommen-
dation, the captain has ordered an increased
allowance of fresh food, to the amount of
two complete extra daily rations per man,
with potatoes, saur-kraut, and stewed ap-
ples; and we have enjoined more active and
continued daily exercise, more complete air-
ing of bedding, &c. I have commenced the
use of nitro-muriatic acid, as in syphilitic
and mercurial cases, by external friction.

"The state of health among us gives me
great anxiety, and not a little hard work.
Quinine, the salts of iron, &c., &c., are in
full requisition. For the first time I am
without a hospital steward.

"It is Washington's birth-day, when
'hearts should be glad ;' but we have no wine
for the dinner-table, and are too sick for
artificial merriment without it. Our crew,
however, good patriotic wretches, got up a
theatrical preformance, 'The Irish At-
torney ;' Pierce O'Hara taken by the admir-
able Bruce, our Crichton. The ship's ther-
mometer outside was at —46°. Inside,

252 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

among audience and actors, by aid of lungs,
lamps, and housings, we got as high as 30^
below zero, only sixty-two below the freez-
ing point! probably the lowest atmospheric
record of a theatrical rei^resentation.

"It was a strange thing altogether. The
condensation was so excessive that we could
barely see the performers: they walked in
a cloud of vapor. Any extra vehemence of
delivery was accomjDanied by volumes of
smoke. The hands steamed. When an ex-
cited Thespian took off his hat, it smoked
like a dish of potatoes. When he stood ex-
pectant, musing a rej^ly, the vapor wreathed
in little curls from his neck. This was
thirty degrees lower than the lowest of
Parry's North Georgian performances.

"February 23, Sunday. Mist comes back
to us. After our past week of glorious sun-
shine, this return to murkiness is far from
pleasing. But it might be worse : one month
ago, and a day like this would have made
our winter-stricken hearts bound with glad-
ness.

"Caught a cold last night in attending
the theatre. A cold here means a sudden

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 253

malaise, with insufferable aches in back and
joints, hot eyes, and fevered skin. We all
have them, coming and going, short-lived
and long-lived: they leave their mark too.
This Arctic work brings extra years \i\)on
a man. A fresh wind makes the cold very
unbearable. In walking to-day, my beard
and mustache became one solid mass of ice.
I inadvertently put out my tongue, and it
instantty froze fast to my lip. This being
nothing new, costing only a smart pull and
a bleeding abrasion afterward, I put up my
mittened hands to 'blow hot' and thaw the
unruly member from its imprisonment. In-
stead of succeeding, my mitten was itself
a mass of ice in a moment: it fastened on
the upper side of my tongue, and flattened
it out like a batter-cake between the two
disks of a hot griddle. It required all my
care, with the bare hands, to release it, and
that not without laceration.

"February 25. A murky day. Two
hundred and forty-four fathoms of line gave
no bottom at the air-hole. Scurvy getting
ahead. Began using the remnant of our
fetid bear's meat: nasty physic, but we will

254 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

try it. It is colder to-day, with the wind
and fog at —15°, than a few days ago at
—46°. Wind south by east: sun not seen.

"February 26, Wednesday. The sun
came back again with such vigor, that my
spirit standard rose over black to +14° ; my
glass — cased, to +35°. The difference be-
tween shade and sunshine is 30°: a ther-
mometer freely suspended in shade and in
sun gave —32° and —2°. Black surfaces
begin to scale off their snowy covering, not
by thawing attended by moisture, but with
a manifest diminution in the tenacity and
adhesiveness of the snow. We observe
these indications of returning heat closely.

"The scurvy has at last fairly extended
to our own little body, the officers. Pains
in the limbs, and deep-seated soreness of the
bones, seem to be its most common demon-
stration. The complaint is of 'a sort of
tired feeling,' or as if 'they had had a beat-
ing.' Our usual supper, the saur-kraut,
has become excessively popular. Even the
abused bear is not quite as bad as it was.

"The crew have been snow-rubbing their
blankets. The snow is so fine and sand-

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 255

like, that under these low Arctic tempera-
tures it acts mechanically, and is an effectual
cleanser. Withal, if you beat it well out
of the tissue, it is not a damp application.
The only trouble is that, on taking the bed-
ding below, the condensation covers it with
dew-drops. With drying-lines on the lower
decks, the resort would be excellent.

"The setting sun, now fast approaching
the home quarter of setting suns, the west,
gave us again the spectral land about Cape
Adair, eighty miles off.

"Sirius is beautifully resplendent on the
meridian. What a fine exhibition it is!
As it rises from the banked horizon, it gives
us nightly freaks of terrestrial refraction.
Its colors are blue, crimson, and white; its
shapes oval, hour-glass, rhomboid, and
square. Sometimes it is extingiiished ; some-
times flashing into sudden life : it looks very
like a revolving light.

"To-day, in putting my hand inside my
reindeer hood, I felt a something move.
The something had a crepitating, insectine
wriggle. Now, at home and everywhere
else, without being a nervous man as to in-

256 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

sects — for I have eaten locusts In Sennaar
and bats in Dahomey — I rather disHke the
crawl of centipede or slime of snail. Here,
with an emotion hard to describe, surprise,
pleasure, and a don't-know-why wonder-
ment, I caught my bug gently between
thumb and finger.

"An air insect would be, in this dreary
waste of cold, an impossibility greater than
the diamond in the snow-drift. Save a seal
and a fox, nothing sharing our principle of
vitality has greeted us for months. The
teeming myriads of life which characterized
the Arctic summer have gone. The anatidse
are clamoring in the great bays and water-
courses of the middle south. The gulls
have sought the regions of open water.
The colymbi and auks are lining the north-
ern coasts of my own dear home. The
croaking raven, dark bird of winter, clings
to the in-shore deserts. The tern are far
away, and so, thank Heaven, are the mos-
quitoes. There are no bugs in the blankets,
no nits in the hair, no maggots in the cheese.
No specks of life glitter in the sunshine, no

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 257

sounds of it float upon the air. We are
without a single sign, a single instinct of
living thing.

"If now, with the thermometer eighty de-
grees below the freezing point, and the new
sun casting a cold gray sheen upon the snow,
you leave the thirty-one, to whom you are
the thirty-second, and walk out upon the ice
away off — so far that no click of hammer
nor drone of voice places you in relation
with that little outside world — then you will
know how I felt when I caught that 'creep-
ing wonder' on my reindeer hood. It was a
frozen feather.

''February 27, Thursday. An aurora
passing through the zenith, east and west,
at 3h. 30m. this morning. What little wind
we have is coming feebly from the west and
southwest. The thermometer has traveled
from —40° to —31°, and the sun is out
again in benign lustre. A difference of 27°,
due to his influence, was evident as early as
lOh. 20m., viz.: Green's spirit standard
gave, in shade, — 33° ; over black surface, in
sunshine, —7° and —6°. At noonday, the

258 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

same thermometer gave +2°. My glass —
cased, hot-house like, — gave the pleasant de-
ception of +40°.

"Still the scurvy increases. I am down
myself to-day with all the premonitories.
It is strangely depressing: a concentrated
'fresh cold' pain extends searchingly from
top to toe. I am so stiff that it is only by
an effort that I can walk the deck, and that
limpingly. Once out on the floes, my en-
ergies excited and my blood warmed by ex-
ercise, I can tramp away freely ; back again,
I stiffen.

"Walked with our other cook, Auguste
Canot. Queer changes these Frenchmen
see! Canot's father, a captain in the
French army, was shot while serving with
Oudinot, beneath the infernal 'barricades'
of Rome — Canot the younger looking on.
A few months after, the son had figm-ed
upon the list of condemned for the affair
at Lyons, and was a fugitive emigre to the
United States. The same sergeant-major,
Canot, is now cooking salt junk in Baffin's
Bay. His confrere J the modest but gifted
Henri, although a worse soldier, is a better

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 259

cook. He first saw ice among the glaciers
of La Tour. He has scuUionized at the
'Trots Freres/ and pla3^ed chef to a London
club-house. He passed through this latter
ordeal, strange to say, unscathed; and, but
for an amorous temperament, might be now
at Delmonico's, upon good wages and bad
Bordeaux. Henri is a boy of talent, pen-
sive by temperament, and withal ambitious.
Were it not for the somewhat unequal dis-
tribution of two molars and an incisor, his
entire stock of teeth, he would be an insuf-
ferable coxcomb. As it is, he treats his
infirmity with amiable, if not philosophic
contempt. He made me this morning an
idea of white bear's liver, a la brochette.
The idea was good, the liver hippuric and
detestable. Henri prides himself upon that
most difficult simplicity, the filet. He pre-
pares thus a sea-gull a merveille.

''February 28, Friday. The most win-
tery-looking day I have ever seen. The
winds have been let loose, and the cheering
novelty of a northwester breaks in on our
calm. The drifting snow either rises like
smoke from the levels, or whirls away in

260 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

wreaths from the hummocks. The atmos-
phere has an opaHne ashy look; in the midst
of which, hke a huge girasole, flashes the
round sun. The clouds are of a sort seldom
seen, except in the conceptions of adventur-
ous artists, quite undefinable, and out of the
line of nature, defying Howard's nomencla-
ture. They are blocked out in square,
stormy masses, against a pearly, misty
blue — harsh, abrupt, repulsive, quite out of
keeping with the kindly lightness of things
belonging to the sky."

The lowest tem^Dcrature we recorded dur-
ing the cruise was on the 22d of this month,
when the ship's thermometer gave us —46° ;
my offship spirit, —52°; and my own self-
registering instruments, purchased from
Green, placed on a hummock removed from
the vessels, —53°, as the mean of two in-
struments. This may be taken as the true
record of our lowest absolute temperature.

Cold as it was, our mid-day exercise was
never interrupted, unless by wind and drift
storms. We felt the necessity of active ex-
ercise; and although the effort was accom-
panied with pains in the joints, sometimes

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 261

hardly bearable, we managed, both officers
and crew, to obtam at least three hours a
day. The exercise consisted of foot-ball
and sHding, followed by regular games of
romps, leap-frog, and tumbling in the snow.
By shoveling away near the vessel, we ob-
tained a fine bare surface of fresh ice, ex-
tremely glib and durable. On this we con-
structed a skating-ground and admirable
slides. I walked regularly over the floes,
although the snows were nearly impassable.

With all this, aided by hosts of hygienic
resources, feeble certainly, but still the best
at my command, scurvy advanced steadily.
This fearful disease, so often warded off
when in a direct attack, now exhibited itself
in a cachexy, a depraved condition of system
sad to encounter. Pains, diffuse, and non-
locatable, were combined with an apathy
and lassitude which resisted all attempts at
healthy excitement.

These, of course, were not confined to the
crew alone: out of twenty-four men, but
five were without ulcerated gums and
blotched limbs; and of these five, strange
to say, four were cooks and stewards. All

262 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

the officers were assailed. Old pains were
renewed, old wounds opened; even old
bruises and sj)rains, received at barely-
remembered periods back, came to us like
dreams. Our commander, certainly the
finest constitution among us, was assailed
like the rest. In a few days purpuric ex-
travasations aj)peared on his legs, and a
dysentery enfeebled him to an extent far
from safe. An old wound of my own be-
came discolored, and, curious to say, painful
only at such points of old suppuration,
three in number, as had been relieved by the
knife. The seats of a couple of abscess-
like openings were entirely unaffected and
free from pain.

The close of the month found this state
of things on the increase, and the strength
of the party still waning.

THE RESCUE IN HER ICE-DOCK.

CHAPTER XV

OUR brig was still resting on her
cradle, and her consort on the floe
a short distance off, when the
first month of spring came to
greet us. We had passed the latitude of
72°.

To prepare for our closing struggle with
the ice-fields, or at least divide its hazards,
it was determined to refit the Rescue. To
get at her hull, a pit was sunk in the ice
around her, large enough for four men to
work in at a time, and eight feet deep, so
as to expose her stern, and leave only eight-

263

264 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

een inches of the keel imbedded. This
novel dry-dock answered perfectly. The
hull was inspected, and the work of re-
pair was pressed so assiduously, that in three
days the stern-post was in its place, and the
new bowsprit ready for shipping. We had
now the chances of two ships again in case
of disaster.

Since the middle of February the felt
housing of our vessel had shown a disposi-
tion to throw off its snowy crust. There
was an apparent recession, or, rather, want
of adhesion about it, that spoke of change.
But it was not till the 7th of :March that
we witnessed an actual thaw. On the black
planking of the brig's quarter, in full sun
glare, the snow began to move, and fell,
leaving a moist stain. This was either
evaporated or frozen instantly; but still it
had been there, unequivocal moisture. A
sledge, too, alongside the vessel, kept laden
to meet emergencies, with a black felt cover,
gave on its southern side a warm impres-
sion to the unmittened hand; and several
drops of water rolled from its mounting of
snow, and formed in minute icicles.

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 265

With these cheering signs of returning
warmth came a sensible improvement in my
cases of scurvy. I ascribed it in a great
degree to the free use of saur-kraut and
lime-juice, and to the constant exercise
which was enforced as part of our sanitary
discipline. But I attributed it also to the
employment of hydrochloric acid, applied
externally w^ith friction, and taken inter-
nally as a tonic. The idea of this remedy,
hitherto, so far as I know, unused in scurvy,
occurred to me from its effects in cachectic
cases of mercurial syphilis. I am, I fear,
heterodox almost to infidelity as to the direct
action of remedies, and rarely allow myself
to claim a sequence as a result ; but, accord-
ing to the accepted dialectics of the profes-
sion, the Acid, chlorohyd. dilut. may be rec-
onmiended as singularly adapted to certain
stages of scorbutus.

The gi-eat difficulty that every one has
encountered in treating this disease is in the
reluctance of the patient to rouse himself
so as to excite the system by cheerful, glow-
ing exercise, and in the case of seamen, to
control their diet. My ingenuity was often

^m ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

taxed for expedients to counteract these pre-
dispositions. Some that I resorted to were
ludicrous enough.

James Stewart, with purpuric blotches
and a stiff knee, had to wag his leg half an
hour by the dial, opposite a formidable mag-
net, each wag accompanied by a shampooing
knead. Stewart had faith; the muscular
action, which I had enjoined so often in-
effectually, was brought about by a bit of
steel and a smearing of red sealing-wax.
They cured him.

Another, remarkable for a dirty person,
of well used-up capillary surface, a hard
case — one of a class scarcely ever seen by
any but navy doctors — sponged freely and
regularlj^ from head to foot in water colored
brown by coffee, and made acid with vine-
gar. His gums improved at once. He
would never have washed with aqiia fontana.

Another set of fellows adhered pertina-
ciously to their salt junk and hard tack,
ship bread and beef. These conservative
gentlemen gave me much trouble by repel-
ling vegetable food. The scurvy was play-
ing the very deuce with them, when the

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 267

bright idea occurred to me of converting
the rejected delicacies into an abominable
doctor-stuff. It was an appeal to their
spirit of martyrdom: they became heroes.
Three times a day did these high-spirited
fellows drink a wine glass of olive-oil and
lime-juice, followed by raw potato and saur-
kraut, pounded with molasses into a dam-
nable electuary. They ate nobly, and got
well.

But the causes of scurvy were relaxing
their energies only for the time. Before
the month was out, the disease had come
back with renewed and even exacerbated
virulence. Some of its phases were curious.
The joint of Captain De Haven's second
finger became the seat of severe pain, ac-
companied by a distinct tubercle cartilagin-
ous to the touch. It exactly recalled, he
said, the appearance and feehng of the part
for some months after it had been hurt by
a schoolmaster's ruler twenty-five years be-
fore. One of the crew had his tongue com-
pletely excoriated. Another, who had lost
a molar tooth seven years ago, spit from the
cavity a conoidal wedge: I had no chance

268 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

of examining it by the microscope; but an
impression of the cavity in wax showed the
sides perfectly smooth, and the vertex in-
tersected by hnes of ossification. I have
spoken akeady of my lance mark in the
groin: it had been healed some three years;
but it now threatened suppuration again
wherever it bore the marks of the surgeon's
knife.

We had unfortunately almost exhausted
our supply of antiscorbutic drinks, and were
driven to the manufacture of substitutes not
always the most palatable. One of them,
which served at least as a vehicle for lime-
juice and muriate of iron, was, however, a
recognized exception. It was a beer, of
which a remnant of dried peaches and some
raisins, with barley and brown sugar, formed
the fermenting basis. The men drank it in
most liberal quantities.

On the 10th we had an exhibition of the
day aurora again, less brilliant than the one
I have described a few pages back, but quite
well marked. It was followed at night by
the paraselene. Another atmospheric dis-

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 269

play, which occurred a few days afterward,
attracted more notice.

"31 arch 13. Again a day of bright sun-
shine, but to my feelings colder than our
lowest temperatures. The thermometer
stood at —24° in the shade at noon, and the
wind was very light. Yet there was a cut-
ting asperity about it that made your face
tingle — a sensation as if evaporation was go-
ing on under the skin — quite a painful one.
At four in the afternoon the atmosphere was
studded with glistening particles. I have
never seen them so manifest and so numer-
ous. Our slide, a polished surface of clear
ice, became clouded in a few minutes, and
before five o'clock it was perfectly white.
The microscope gave me the same broken
hexagonal prisms, mixed with tables closely
resembling the snow-crystal. A haze sur-
rounded the horizon, rising for some six de-
grees in a bronzed purple bank ; after which
it gradually blended with the sky, a clear
blue, undisturbed by cirri.

"Accompanying this redundancy of at-
mospheric spiculse was a parhelion of re-

270 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

markable intensity. There was no halo
round the sun, and no vertical or horizon-
tal column; but at the distance of 22° 04'
from the sun's centre were three solar im-
ages, one on each side, and the other im-
mediately above the sun. This latter image
was intensely luminous, but not prismatic;
the others had the rudiments of an arc,
highly colored, the red upon the inner mar-
gin. The haze rose as high as these hori-
zontal images ; and the arc, which in so short
a segment presented no visible curvature,
expanded as it descended, so as to form an
elongated pyramid or column, the prismatic
tints increasing in intensity as they ap-
proached the horizon. The effect of this
was that of two illuminated beacons or rain-
bow towers, the sun blazing between them.
As we stood a little way off on the ice, it was
very beautiful to see the brig, with its spars
and rigging cutting like tracery against the
central light, with these prismatic structures
on each side, capped by a spectral sun."

Two evenings later, the parhelia gave us
another spectacle of interest. Two mock
suns, which had accompanied the sun below

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 271

the horizon, sent up an illuminated and
colored arc some eight or ten degrees in
height. Midway rose a brush-like column
of crimson (baryta) light. A series of
flame-colored strata, alternating with an in-
comprehensible black cloud, was so com-
l^letely eclipsed by the vertical column, that
it seemed to cut its way without a diminution
of its brightness. The whole atmosphere
was as warmly tinted as in the evenings of
IMelville Bay.

Indeed, from the beginning of the month,
the skies had undergone a sensible change
of aspect. Instead of the heavy-banked or
linear stratus about the horizon, and the
light, cold cirri above, we were getting back
to something like the fall skies of our own
climate, the misty bands of morning becom-
ing fleecy as the day wore on, and taking
the marbled or mackerel character before
they blended with the western skies.

I am tempted to apologize, once for all,
for the imperfect character of these obser-
vations. Our stock of instruments on board
was scanty at the best, and the routine ob-
servances of a ship of war do not favor the

272 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

prosecution of merely scientific researches.
We had no actinometer to mark the daily
increments of solar radiation: om' thermom-
eters were generally of rude construction,
and were not so placed as to give the Iiigh-
est value to their results ; and an entry which
I find in my journal explains why my
barometrical records were so few.

''March 12. To-day, for the first time
during the cruise, I had the pleasure of see-
ing our mountain barometer released from
its stowage, and an attempt made to com-
pare it with our aneroids. Before we be-
gan our drift to the north, when we had no
fires below to give us a constant^ vibrating
temperature, and the aneroid of the Rescue
had not come into the over-crowded cabin
of our vessel to divide the formalities of reg-
istration with our own, it might have been
well to make a careful comparison of the two
with those of the British vessels, and with
our mountain barometer also. The index
error of this instrument on its zero point
could have been adjusted then by reference
to others that were just from Greenwich,
and it would have been practicable, perhaps,

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 273

to give something of increased value to our
log-book records of the atmospheric pres-
sure. Under all the circumstances, I have
not thought it necessary to transfer them to
my journal."

As the middle of March approached, our
drift became gradually slower, until we al-
most reached a state of rest. For several
days we advanced at an average rate of
scarcely half a mile a day. We were at
this time some seventy miles east of Caj)e
Adair, our nearest Greenland shore being
somewhere between Upper Navik and
Disco; and the idea of encountering the final
break-up among the closely-impacted masses
that surrounded us, or of being carried back
to the north by some inopportune counter-
current, was far from pleasant. But our
log-line, in an attempt at soundings, showed
still a marked under-draught toward the
south ; and in a few days more we were mov-
ing southward again with increased velocity.

The 19th gave us a change of scene. I
was aroused from mj^ morning sleej) by the
familiar voice of Mr. Murdaugh, as he hur-
ried along the half -deck: "Ice opening" —

274 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

"Open leads off our starboard quarter" —
"Frost-smoke all around us !" Five minutes
afterward, Henri had been summoned from
the galley ; and, carbine in hand, I was tum-
bling over the hummocks.

After a heavy walk of half a mile, sure
enough there it was — the open lead — stretch-
ing with its film of forming ice far in a
narrowing perspective to the east and west.
Balboa himself never looked out upon an
ocean with more grateful feelings than I did
upon this open chasm, the first inbreak upon
complete solidity which we had known since
the 15th of January. It was a breach in
our prison-walls. The undulatory move-
ment of the mercury and the varied appear-
ance of the clouds were now explained. Al-
though only discovered this morning, the
rupture must have been going on for days,
perhaps a week. Our winds had favored
the separation of cracks into wide channels;
but how such changes could have taken place
puzzled me.

The ice, as shown by my measurements,
was from four to eight feet; and even now,
when I recall the fearful sounds which ac-

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 275

companied the Lancaster Sound commo-
tions, I can hardly reaHze that such exten-
sive chasms should have been formed almost
in silence. We could only guess what had
been the extent of our ice-field at this time.
Baffin's Bay was nearly three hundred miles
across, and the field ma}^ have been twice
as long in the other direction. Perhaps the
wave action of a heavy sea, great sub-
glacial billows, unfelt at our fast-cemented
little vessel, may have broken the tables
without the crash and tumult of a collision.
The lead where I first reached it, to the
southeast of our brig, was nearly three hun-
dred yards across; not, however, three hun-
dred yards of open water, but a separation
between the two sides of the original floe of
about that distance. The sides still showed
their clean-edged fracture, diversified by
drift and hummock, and rising above the in-
tervening level, like the banks of a tideless
river, margined by new ice and crusted with
efflorescing snow. But at its further or
southern side, a long strip, narrow and very
black, gave evidence of open water. In
this, surrounded by exhaling mist and frost-

276 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

smoke, were our old friends, the seal ; grave,
hirsute-looking fellows, who rose out of the
water breast-high, and gazed upon us with
the curious faces of old times. Near them
was a solitary dovekie, dressed in its gray
winter plumage, the first bird I had seen
for days; here, too, had crossed the tracks
of a bear.

All this was very cheering. To see some-
thing, no matter what, checkering the waste
of white snow, was like a shady grove to
men sun-tired in a prairie; but to see life
again — life, tenanting the desolate air and
inhospitable sea — was a spring of water in
the desert. My old hostihty to gun-murder
was forgotten. I wasted, of course, some
small remnant of poetic sympathy with
fellow-life thus springing up out of the wil-
derness; but then, in the midst of my sym-
pathies, came the destructive instinct which
longed to make it subservient to my wants.
The scurvy, the scurvy patients, myself
among the rest ! — ^but the seal and the dove-
kies kept themselves out of shot.

At this lead we saw the recent frost-
smoke within a few yards of us in pointed

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 277

tongues of vapor: further off, the long,
wreathy brown clouds were rising. I never
before, not even in Wellington Channel,
saw this phenomenon in greater perfection:
in Welhngton it was an interesting, some-
times a gloomy feature; here it was impos-
ing. As far back as the twelfth, we had
caught glimpses of brown vapor in this very
direction: we now learned to look upon it
in certain phases as an unerring indication
of open water, and wondered that w^e did
not so regard it earlier.

The chasms were not limited to the long
lead before us. They extended to the east
and west indefinitely; and were intersected
by transverse fissures, which so met each
other as completely to surround our vessels.
From this circuit the frost-smoke was rising.
The thermometer stood at —20°, fifty-two
degrees below the freezing point in the
shade; but the sun was shining brilliantly,
raising the mercury to +10°. Under these
circumstances, theoretically so favorable,
this Arctic phenomenon became the most
prominent feature in the scene.

As I stood upon a tall knob of hummock.

278 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

the entire horizon seemed to be sending up,
exhahng a bronzine smoke — not the lambent,
smoky wreaths which I have compared to
burning turpentine, but a pecuhar russet
brown smoke, tongued and wreathy when
near, but at a distance roUing in cumulated
masses. These seemed to cling at their
bases to the surface from which they rose,
like the discharges of artillery over water,
or a locomotive steaming over a cold, wet
meadow. They were wafted by the wind,
so as to drive them out in lines two or three
hundred yards long; but they clung tena-
ciously to the water and young ice, giving
us a varying but always narrow horizon of
smoke. The Rescue was enveloped with
the heavy, sooty clouds of repeated broad-
sides. If I had seen the flashing of guns
or the glimmer of burning prairie-grass, I
should have been less impressed ; so strange,
very strange, was this ordinary attendant on
conflagration rolling in the midst of our
winteriness.

EFFECT OF FROST-SMOKE.

CHAPTER XVI

M

<'T^ /fARCH 20. Thursday, the
20th of March, opens with
a gale, a regular gale. On
reaching deck after break-
fast, I found the wind from the southeast,
the thermometer at zero, and rising. These
southeast storms are looked upon as having
an important influence on the ice. They
are always warm, and by the sea which they
excite at the southern margin of the pack,
have a great effect in breaking the floes.
JNIr. Olrik told me that they were anxiously
looked for on the Greenland coast as pre-
cursors of open water. The date of the
southeast gale last year, at Uppernavik, was
April 25th. Our thermometer gave +5°
at noonday, +7° at one, and +8° at three
o'clock !

"This is the heaviest storm we have had
since entering Lancaster Sound, exactly
seven months and a day ago. The snow is

279*

280 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

whirled in such quantities, that our thick
felt housing seems as if of gauze: it not
only covers our decks, but drives into our
clothes like fine dust or flour. A plated
thermometer was invisible fourteen feet
from the eye : from the distance of ten paces
off on our quarter, a white opacity covers
every thing, the compass-stand, fox-traps,
and all beyond: the Rescue, of course, is
completely hidden. This heavy snow-drift
exceeds any thing that I had conceived, al-
though many of my Arctic English friends
had discoursed to me eloquently about their
perils and discomforts. As to facing it in
a stationary position, nothing human could ;
for a man would be buried in ten minutes.
Even in reaching our little Tusculum, we
tumble up to our middle, in places where
a few minutes before the very ice was laid
bare. The entire topography of our ice is
changing constantly.

"7 P.M. 'The wind is howling.' Our
mess begin to talk again of sleeping in boots,
and the other luxuries of Lancaster Sound.
For my own part, better, far better this,
with the spicy tingling of a crisis, than the

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 281

corroding, scurvy-engendering sameness of
the past two months. Every moment now
is full of expectation.

"March 21. The wind changed this
morning to the westward, and by daylight
was blowing freshly. After breakfast,
Murdaugh and myself started on a tramp
to the 'open water,' to see the effects of the
gale. The drift was beyond conception;
sufficient, in many places, to have covered
up our whole ship's company. The wind
made it as cold at —5° as I have seen it
at —30°, and the fine snow pelted our faces;
but the surface was frozen so hard tlfat we
walked over the crust, and in a little over
half an hour we reached the lead.

"Planting a signal pole, with a red silk
handkerchief as a mark, and taking compass-
bearings to guide us back again, we began
to look around us. Our expectations of
hummock action were agreeably disap-
pointed. We thought that the storm would
have driven the ice from the southward, and
that the change of wind would have mar-
shaled opposing floes to meet it. But it
was not so. Even the young, marginal ice,

^82 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

though warped, was unbroken. The pres-
sure had evidently taken place, but with
little effect. After the gigantic upheavings
of Lancaster Sound, excited by winds much
weaker, no wonder I was surprised. Upon
thinking it over, I came to the conclusion
that the absence of a j^oint d'aypui, either
of land or land-ice, was the cause of these
diminished actions. We were now in a
great sea, surrounded by consolidated floes,
and away from salient capes or shore-bound
ice. The pressure was diffused throughout
a greater mass, without points of special or
even unequal resistance. If this reasoning
holds, we will not experience the exxiected
tumult until we drift into a region where
forces are more in opposition; perhaps not
until we reach the contraction of Davis'
Straits.

"The young ice margin of this open lead
had the appearance of a beautiful wave-
flattened sand beach. The lead itself had
opened so far that its opposite shores were
barely visible. The wind checked the im-
mediate formation of new ice; and, to our
inexpressible joy, there, ghttering in the

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 283

cold sunlight, were little rippling waves.
So long have we been pent up by this
wretched circle of unchanging snow, that I
make myself ridiculous by talking of trifles,
with which you, milk- drinking, sun-basking,
melted-water-seeing people at home can
have no sympathy. In spite of the winds
and the snow-drift, I could hear the babbling
of these waves as they laughed in their tem-
porary freedom.

"March 22, Saturday. I started again
for the ice-openings. There had evidently
been a good deal of commotion in the night ;
but nothing so violent as to negative my yes-
terday's conclusions. Still there were hum-
mocks of young tables, and some ugly twists
of the beach line; and matters had not yet
settled themselves into rest. As the great
floe on which I stood traveled, under the in-
fluence of the west wind, obliquely eastward,
I heard once more the familiar sounds of
our nodes Lancastriance. The grating of
nutmegs, the cork rubbing of old-fashioned
tables, the young puppies, and the bee-hives ;
all these were back again; but we missed
pleasantly the wailing, the howling, the clat-

284 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

tering, the exploding din, which used to
come to us through the darkness. The
pulse-like interval was there too, hke a
breathing- time ; but the dayhght modified
every thing, my feelings most of all. They
became almost pleasant, as I listened, after
a lullaby fashion, to the bees and puppies;
and something very like gratitude came over
me, as I thought of the uncertain gloom or
palpable midnight which accompanied a few
weeks ago the 'voices of the ice.' The ther-
mometer was 21° below zero, and the wind
blowing: naturally enough, my nose became
a tallow nose in the midst of my reverie.
So I rubbed the nose, blew the nose, buffeted
my armpits until my fingers tingled, and
then started off on a tramp.

"Seal were seen, curious as usual, but in-
dulging in the weakness afar off. Presently
two poor winter-mated little divers met my
meat-seeking senses. One of these I killed
with my rifle, covetously regretting that my
one ball could not align his mate. This was
the first game we had obtained since the
fall: he was divided, poor fellow, between
two of my scurvy j)atients. In getting this

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 285

bird out, I came very near getting myself
in ; and that, when a ducking means a freez-
ing, is no fun.

"10 P.M. To-night finds me knocked up.
Be it known, that after crawhng on my
belly, not like the wisest of animals, for two
hours, I came nearly within shot of a week's
fresh meat. The fresh meat dived, first
shaking his whisker tentacles at my discon-
solate beard, leaving me half frozen and
wholly discontented. Fool-like, after the
long walk back, the warming, the drying,
and the feeding, I returned by the other
long walk to the ice-openings, tramped for
two hours, saw nothing but frost-smoke, and
came back again, dinnerless, with legs quak-
ing, and spirits wholly out of tune.

"Our drift to-day, at meridian, was in the
neighborhood of 9 miles; our latitude was
71° 9' 18''.

''March 23, Sunday. After divine serv-
ice, started for the ice-openings. We are
now in the centre of an area, which we es-
timated roughly as four miles from north to
south, and a little more east and west. On
reaching what was yesterday's sea-beach, I

286 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

was forced to recant in a measure my con-
victions as to the force of the opposing floes.
Yesterday's beach existed no longer; it was
swallowed up, crushed, crumbled, sub-
merged, or uplifted in long ridges of broken
ice.

"The actions were still in progress, and
fast intruding upon the solid old ice which
is our homestead. The ice-tables now crum-
bling into hummocks were from eight to
fourteen inches thick, generally ten. Not
even in Lancaster Sound did the destruction
of surface go on more rapidly. The wind
was a moderate breeze from the northwest,
and the floes were advancing on each other
at a rate of a knot and a half an hour, build-
ing up hummock tables along their Hue of
collision. Several rose in a few minutes to
a height of ten or twelve feet. I have be-
come so accustomed to these glacial erup-
tions, that I mounted the upheaving ice, and
rode upon the fragments — an amusement I
could hardly have practiced safely before I
had studied their changes.

"The snow-covered level upon which

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 287

Brooks and myself were walking was about
thirty paces wide, between the older ice on
one side and the encroaching hummock-line
on the other. Upon our return, after a
walk of a short half mile, we found our foot-
steps obliterated, and the hummock-line
Vv ithin a few yards of this older ice. Things
are changing rapidly.

"A new crack was reported at one o'clock,
about the third of a mile from our ship ; and
the bearings of the sun showed that our
brig had, for the first time since entering
Baffin's Bay, rotated considerably to the
northward. Here were two subjects for ex-
amination. So, as soon as dinner was over,
I started with Davis and WilHe, two of my
scurvy henchmen, on a walk to the open-
ings. Reaching the recent crack, we found
the ice five feet four inches thick, and the
black water, in a clear streak a foot wide,
running to the east and west.* I had often
read of Esquimaux being carried off by the
separation of these great floes; but, know-

* This direction, transverse to the long axis of Baflto's
Bav, seems to be that of most of our fissures.

^88 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

ing that our guns could caU assistance from
the brig, we jumped over and hurried on.
We were weU paid.

"The hunamockings of this morning had
ceased; the wind so gentle as hardly to be
perce]3tible : the lead before me was an open
river of water, and in it were narwhals
{M. monoceros) y in groups of five or six,
rolling over and over, after the manner of
the dolphin tribe. They were near me; so
near that I could see their checkered backs,
and enjoy the rich coloring that decorates
them. The horn, that monodontal process
which gives them their name of sea-unicorn,
was perfectly examinable. Rising in a
spirally indented cone, this beautiful ap-
pendage appeared sometimes eight and ten
feet out of water; one especially, whose tall
curvetings astonished my body-guard. I
never saw a more graceful, striking, and
beautiful exhibition than the unrestrained
play of these narwhals.* In the same oj)en

* I have seen many of these fish since, but never under
such circumstances. I stood on a ledge of hummock within
short gunshot. The animals were entirely unapprehensive.
The non-symmetrical character of the "horn" (an unduly
developed tooth, say the naturalists) was not seen; and as

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 289

water, almost in company with the narwhals,
were white whales {Delijhinopterus albicans,
or Beluga: these cetacea have so many
names, they puzzle me), and seal besides.

"I was tempted to stay too long. The
wind sprang up suddenly. The floe began
to move. I thought of the crack between
me and the ship, and started off. The walk-
ing, however, was very heavy, and my scurvy
patients stiff in the extensors. By the time
I reached the crack, it had opened into a
chasm, and a river as broad as the Wis-
sahiccon ran between me and our ship.
After some little anxiety — not much — I saw
our captain ordering a party to our relief.
The sledges soon appeared, dragged by a
willing party; the India rubber boat was
lowered into the lead, and the party ferried
over. So ends this last trip to these ice-
openings.

"It is evident that these gradual crack-
formings and chasm-openings, with the hum-
mocking and other attendant actions, are

this long lance-like process played about at a constantly
varying angle, it reminded me of the mast of some sunken
boat swayed by the waves.

290 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

but preludes to a complete breaking up.
Our previous observations show that the dis-
ruption of these large areas can not be ef-
fected suddenly. It is a gradual process;
so gradual, even in Lancaster Sound, as
to allow time for personal escape, although
the vessel be a victim.

"From the 12th of January, the date of
our last break-up, down to the present move-
ment, is two months. The intense cold,
with feeble winds and the absence of impact
or collisions, have kept up the integrity of
this great pack. I think it may reasonably
be doubted whether it will now close again
before our liberation or destruction. The
excessive thickness of the tables, the wave
and tidal actions, the mildening tempera-
ture, and the probable continuance of winds,
all point to this. We have already a system
of fissures within a third of a mile of us;
and a continued augmentation of their num-
ber must soon place us in a centre of com-
motion. It is pleasant by one's ice-experi-
ence to anticipate the state of things: and
now that the battle is coming on again, I
make a record of these reasoned expecta-

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 291

tions, to show you hereafter how well I am
reasoning.

"One thing more: the days have stolen
upon us — longer, and longer, and longer,
until now the long twilight lets me read on
deck as late as eight p.m. In fact, the sun's
greatest dej^ression below the horizon is now
18°, the limit of theoretical twilight.

''March 26, Wednesday. The same pe-
cuhar crisping or crackling sound, which I
noted on the 2d of February, was heard this
morning in every direction. This sound, as
the 'noise accompanying the aurora,' has
been attributed by Wrangell and others,
ourselves among the rest, to changes of at-
mospheric temperature acting upon the
crust of the snow. We heard it most dis-
tinctly between seven and eight a.m., when
the solar ray should begin to affect the snow.
The mercury stood at —27° at five, rising
to —19° by nine a.m., and attaining a maxi-
mum of -2° by noonday. But this is not
to be regarded as indicating the tempera-
ture of the snow surface. The snow, when
horizontal, according to all my observations,
differs but little in temperature from the at-

^92 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

mosphere, owing probably to its oblique re-
ception of the solar ray; while the snow-
coverings of the hummocks and angular floe-
tables, which receive the rays at right angles,
show by repeated trials a marked augmenta-
tion. I venture, therefore, to refer this pe-
culiar crisping sound to the unequal con-
traction and dilatation of these unequally
presenting surfaces, not to a sudden change
of atmospheric temperature acting upon the
snow.

"To-day we saw a couple of icebergs look-
ing up in the far south.

''March 27, Thursday. The sun shone
out, but not as yesterday. The little cirrous
clouds interfere with its brightness, and af-
fect very percej)tibly its warmth. To the
eye, however, the day is undimmed.

"The wind, which we watch closely as
the index of our ice-changes, our leading
variety, came out at seven in the evening
from the northward ; and with it came a rise
of black frost-smoke to the south, shownig
that the old ice-opening had gaped again.
I had started before this at half past five,
with old Blinn, my faithful satellite, for a

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 293

bright plain, glittering in the low sunshine
some three miles to the west, a new direction.
We did not get back till eight.

"Let me make a picture for you without
a jot of fancy about it, and you may get H.
to put it into colors if he can. The sun was
low, very low; and his long, slanting beams,
of curious indescribable purple, fell upon old
BUnn and myself as we sat on a crag of ice
which overhung the sea. The chasm was
perhaps a mile wide, and the opposite ice-
shores were so painted by the glories of the
sunshine, that they appeared hke streaks of
flame, licking continuous water. The place
to which we had worked ourselves had been
subjected to forces which no one could real-
ize, so chaotic, and enormous, and incompre-
hensible were they. A line of old floe, eight
feet thick and four miles long, had been
powdered into a pedragal of crushed sugar,
rising up in great efflorescing knobs fifteen
and twenty feet high; and from amid these,
like crystal rocks from the foam of a catar-
act, came transparent tables of blue ice,
floating, as it were, on unsubstantial white-
ness. Some of these blocks measured eight

294 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

feet in thickness by twenty-two long, and of
indeterminate depth, one side being obhquely
buried in the mass. On one of these tables,
that stretched out hke a glass spear-point,
directly over the water, were straddled your
brother and his companion. Underneath us
the narwhals were passing almost witliin
pole-reach. As they rolled over, much after
the fashion of our own porpoises, I could see
the markings of their backs, and the great
suction of their jaws throwing the water
into eddies. Seal, breast-high, were tread-
ing water with their horizontal tails, and the
white whale was blowing purple sprays into
the palpable sunshine.

"March 23, Friday. I visited the west-
ern opening of yesterday. The sea has
dwindled to a narrow lane, flanked by the
heavy hummocks, whose rupture formed the
sides. Although the aperture was so dis-
tant yesterday that I could barely see the
further banks, here and there dotting the
horizon, it has now closed with such nice
adaptation of its line of fracture, that, but
for a few yards of lateral deviation, this
'yesternight sea' would be nothing but a

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 295

crack in the ice-field. The area of filmy
ice that was between the edges of the lead
had been thrust under the floe, thus aiding
the process of re-cementation. These ice-
actions are very complicated and various.

"Retracing my steps by a long circuit to
the southward, I came to a spot where,
without any apparent axis of fracture
(chasm), the ice presented all the phenom-
ena of table-hummocks. It was very old
and thick, at least nine feet in solid depth.
About a little circle of a hundred yards
diameter, it had been thrown up into vari-
ously-presenting surfaces, with a marked
bearing toward a focus of greatest energy
and accumulation, presenting an appearance
almost eruptive. The crushed fragments
exuding and falling over, and rolling down
toward the level ice, so as to cover it for feet
in depth with powdery, granulated rubbish !

CHAPTER XVII

MY journal for the closing days
of March and the early one of
April is full of varying drifts
and alternating temperatures.
Still, it seemed as if, by some gradual though
scarcely explicable process, the work of our
extrication was going on. Sometimes the
wind would come to us from the southeast
— the breaking-up wind as we called it, be-
cause as it subsided the reaction of the floes
developed itself in fissures; but more fre-
quently from the north, expediting our
course to a more genial latitude. The floes
themselves were, however, much more mas-
sive and gnarled than any we had seen be-
fore: every party that left the vessel for an
ice-tramp came back Avith exaggerated im-
pressions of the mighty energies that had
hurled them together. We felt that it
would have been impossible for any organ-

296

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 297

ized structure of wood and metal to resist
such Maelstroms of solid ice as had left these
memorials around us, and looked forward
with scarcely pleasurable anticipations to the
equivalent forces that might be required to
obliterate them. Some extracts from my
journal may show how far other causes were
in the mean time operating our release.

''April 7, Monday. For the last fort-
night the ice has been perceptibly moist at
the surface. The open crack near our brig
to the south has now been closed for nearly
a fortnight; yet the snow which covers it is
quite slushy. The trodden paths around
our ship are in muddy pulp, adhering to the
boots. All this can hardly be the direct in-
fluence of the sun upon the surface ; for the
thermometer seldom exceeds +16°, and is
more generally below +10° at noonday.
Yet this temperature has an evident in-
fluence upon the status of the ice, increas-
ing its peraieability, and permitting some
changes analogous to thawing, but which I
can not explain. May it be that the crys-
talline structure of the ice is undergoing
some modification, that increases its capilar-

298 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

ity, or develops an action like the endosmose
and exosmose!

"It is a mere puzzle, of course, for we
have not data enough to make it a question.
Yet there is another like it that I can not
help setting down. Can it be that our ther-
mometers, so notorious in this Polar region
for their imperfect coincidence with 'sensa-
tions of cold,' are equally fallacious as meas-
ures of absolute increments or decrements
of sensible caloric? It will not do, I sup-
pose, to admit such a supposition; yet the
marvels which come constantly before me
may almost justify it. You know that I
am no heat-maker. Well, my winter trials,
as you may imagine, have not increased my
vital energies. Suppose me, then, as you
knew me when I left New York. For the
past week I have almost lived in the open air
— genial, soft, bland, and to sensation just
cool enough to be pleasantly tonic. I walk
moderately, and am in comfortable, glowing
warmth. I walk over the hummocks or ice
floes, and am oppressed with perspiration
and lassitude. This at a temperature of
zero in the shade, and +11° in the sun! I

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 299

can not realize it. To-day the thermometer
gave -|-10° in the shade of the ship, obviously
affected not a little by radiation, +34° in the
sun over the ship's painted side, -f-13° by
my own observation of an instrument sus-
pended at a distance from the ship, and un-
der the same circumstances in the shade,
zero! Yet the day seemed spring-like and
delicious. The early breezes (8 a.m.) from
the southeast came with a sensation of reviv-
ing coolness, although to their warmth we
perhaps owed our sensations of pleasant heat.
While I am writing, the skaters come in to
say that 'it is too warm to skate:' yet the sun
is low, and my shade thermometer gives
some ten degrees below the point of freez-
ing.

"I have often alluded to this discrepancy
between our feelings and the recorded tem-
perature. I have read of the same thing in
the Arctic voyages, with a reference to con-
trast for the explanation. But I never until
to-day realized so fully that we were warmed
from within by a mysterious, and, I must be-
lieve, unknown system of functional com-
pensation. I wish Liebig could make a

300 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

Polar voyage ! As you feel open- windowed
at the first breaking-in day of spring, with
your thermometers at vernal 60°, so feel I
with the thermometer at zero!

''April 10, Thursday, 2 p.m. The south-
easter blows on with steady endurance. It
is now east by south; a snow-storm remind-
ing me of home, so soft and flalc^, drifting
every where; and the thermometer rising
steadily to +32° at noonday. Once more at
the freezing point! it seems hard to realize.
The decks are wet, the housing dripping, the
snow adhesive and slushy.

"9 P.M. The gale continues. Our ther-
mometer outside at a maximum of +33°.
Every thing wet, warm, and summer-like.

"I have a story to tell — a foolish adven-
ture; but I was ennuied past all bearing.
Walking the deck, beast-like, in our damp
cage, it occurred to me that I would climb
the rigging. Climb the rigging I did; and,
by a glimpse between the long wreaths of
drift, saw Water! The temptation was a
sore one: I yielded to it, came down from
my perch, donned mj^ sealskin, shouldered
my carbine, and walked off with my face to-

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 301

ward the wonder. None of the crew would
accompany me: my messmates did not vol-
unteer: so I was alone.

"It was a walk to be remembered. Snow
up to the neck ; drift moist and blinding ; and
a gale, luckily not a cold one, in my face.
But after a mile of such promenading as no
other region can boast of, I reached the
water at last. Water it was ; dark, surging
water; no pellicles of glazing ice; no sludgy
streams of pancake; but the liquid element
itself, such as we saw last summer, and you
see every day, stretching out as broad as the
Delaware, and in contrast with the snow at
its margin as black as Styx.

"I took a good look at it, and turned to
come back. The wind had wiped out my
footsteps : all within the horizon was a waste
of sleet. I had neither compass nor signal
pole to show me the way ; but I kept the gale
behind me, and waded onward. I do not
know how far I might have traveled before
reaching the vessel; but I had buffeted the
elements quite long enough to content me,
when I heard Captain Griffin hailing me
through the drift. He had been uneasy at

'302 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

my stay, and was out in search of me. We
took a new departure together, wxre blo^\Ti
over a few times, and tumbled over, no mat-
ter how often ; but we hit the ships to a notch.

"This crack is the old transverse one from
northeast to southwest, off the Rescue s port
beam. The gale, with such a temperature,
must be achieving much upon the ice to the
southward. It can hardly reach men so im-
bedded as we are ; but it may so break up the
southern edge of the pack as to give us a
ready drift, should we have a favoring wind.
As it is, we are undoubtedly flicking it to
the north again.

"April 15. The sun perceptibly warmer,
and the indications of thaw unequivocal.
To guard as far as we can against the chance
of the two vessels being separated among
the floes when the general break-up comes,
we began a trench to-day from one to the
other. It goes down through the snow to
the solid ice ; and we are going to strew rock-
salt in it, remembering that even a slight
scratch on the surface will determine the
line of fracture. We will try it at any rate,
even across the entire floe to the present seat

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 303

of hummocking at the open water, though
it is a distance of nearly or quite two miles.
We are looking to our approaching disrup-
tion with absorbing interest; and whether
our theories are good or bad, they give us
something to think and talk about. Our
ice-cutting machine belongs to the same fam-
ily. We finished it to-day, and it will be
tested to-morrow.

"The ice in the neighborhood of the fire-
hole is wet and overflowed. It seems to be
depressed below the water-level. The snow
has piled up some seven or eight feet high
on the vessel's side, and this, with the radiat-
ing heat, may possibly explain this depres-
sion. But I am strongly inchned to believe
in endosmotic actions in the ice.

"Apiil 16. To-day the salting continues.
The men call it our spring-seed sowing. On
board the Fescue, a party are at work pre-
paring for the return to her. The ice-cut-
ting machine proves a failure.

"This afternoon a solitary snow-bunting
was seen flitting around our vessel. The
last time we saw this little animal was at
Griffith's Island, in the midst of the terrible

304 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

storm which we were sharing with our Eng-
lish brethren. Goodsir saw the same bird
on the 13th, in latitude 54° ; but he was not
at Winter Island till the 27th. Since then,
the little family have made their migratory
journey, and are now on their way again to
these Polar seas. They breed seldom or
never south of 62°, and linger late among
the Northern snows. This poor little wan-
derer was an estray from his fellows. He
paused at the treasures which surrounded
our ship, refreshed himself from our dirt
pile, and then flew away again on his weary
journey.

"April 17. A memorable day. We put
out our cabin lamps, and are henceforward
content with daylight, like the rest of the
world. Our latitude is 69° 52'; om- longi-
tude, 63° 03'.

"This afternoon, while walking deck, this
endless deck, with IMurdaugh, we discovered
a bear walking tranquilly alongside, nearly
within gunshot. We have lost so manj^ op-
portunities by the bustle and ignorance of
a universal chase, that I crawled out to at-
tack him alone. To my sorrow, the bi-ute,

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 305

who had been gazing at the ship dog-fashion
and curious, turned tail. He was out of
range for my carbine, but I gave him the
ball as he ran in his right hind-quarter. He
fell at once, and I thought him secure; but
rising instantly, he turned upon his wounded
haunch, and, very much as a dog does at a
bee-sting, bit spasmodically at the wound.
For a little while he spun round, biting the
bloody spot with a short, probing nip; and
then, before I could reload my piece, started
off at a limping but rapid gait. I mention
this movement on account of the very cu-
rious fact which follows. The animal had
found the ball, seized it between the incisors,
and eoctracted it. The bullet is now in my
possession, distinctly marked by his teeth.

"After a very tedious and harassing pur-
suit, I came uj) to him at the young ice.
He stood upon the brink of the lead. I was
within long shot, and about to make prep-
arations for a more deliberate and certain
aim, when he took to the water, and then
to the opposite young ice, bleeding and
dropping every few yards.

"Joined by Daly, a bold, bull-headed

306 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

Irishman, I crossed by a circuitous channel,
and then took to the young ice myself, and
tried to run him down. It was very excit-
ing; and I fear I was not as prudent as I
ought to have been; for a dense fog had
gathered around us, and the young floe, level
as the sea which it covered, was but two
nights old. The bear f eU several times ; and
at last, poor fellow, dragged himself by his
fore feet, trailing his hind quarters over the
incrusted snow, so as to leave a long black
imprint stained by blood.

"The fog was getting more and more
dense, and the frail ice — we were now walk-
ing, as it were, over the sea itself — bent un-
der us so much, that I, like a prudent man,
ordered a return. This chase cost us at least
ten miles of journey, part of it at an Indian
trot. We dripped like men in a steam bath.

"April 20, Sunday. Daly started with a
company of sailors after the wounded bear.
They walked, by their own account, six miles
before they found him. He was unable to
retreat — stood at bay; and the fools were
so scared at his 'growhngs' and his 'bloody

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 307

tongue,' that they returned without daring
to attack him.

"April 21, Monday. I have more than
common cause for thankfulness. A mere
accident kept me from starting last night to
secure our bear. Had I done so, I would
probably have spared you reading more of
my journal. The ice over which we traveled
so carelessly on Saturday has become, by a
sudden movement, a mass of floating rub-
bish. An open river, broader than the Dela-
ware, is now between the old ice and the
nearest part of the new, over which I walked
on the 19th more than three miles.

"In the walk of this morning, which star-
tled me with the change, I saw for the first
time a seal upon the ice. This looks veiy
summer-like. He was not accessible to our
guns. To-day, for the first time too, the
gulls were flying over the renovated water.
Coming back we saw fresh bear tracks.
How wonderful is the adaptation which en-
ables a quadruped, to us associated insepa-
rably with a land existence, thus to inhabit an
ice-covered ocean. We are at least eighty

308 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

miles from the nearest land, Cape Kater;
and channels innmnerable must intervene
between us and terra firma. Yet this ma-
jestic animal, dependent upon his own pred-
atory resources alone, and, defying cold as
well as hunger, guided by a superb instinct,
confides himself to these solitary, unstable
ice-fields.

"Parry, in his adventurous Polar effort,
found these animals at the most northern
limit of recorded observation. Wrangell
had them as companions on his first Asiatic
journey over the Polar ocean. Navigators
have found them also floating upon berg and
floe far out in open sea; and here we have
them in a region some seventy miles from the
nearest stable ice. They have seldom, or,
as far as my readings go, never — if we ex-
cept Parry's Spitzbergen experience — been
seen so far from land. In the great ma-
jority of cases, they seem to have been ac-
cidentally caught and carried adrift on dis-
engaged ice-floes. In this way they travel
to Iceland ; and it may have been so perhaps
with the Spitzbergen instances. Others
have been reported thirty miles from shore

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 309

in this bay. I myself noticed them fifty
miles from the Greenland coast last July.

"There is something very grand about this
tawny savage; never leaving this utter des-
titution, this frigid inhospitableness — cou-
pling in May, and bringing forth in Christ-
mas time — a gestation carried on all of it be-
low zero, more than half of it in Arctic dark-
ness— living in perpetual snow, and depend-
ent for life upon a never-ending activity —
using the frozen water as a raft to traverse
the open seas, that the water unfrozen may
yield him the means of life. No time for
hibernation has this Polar tiger: his life is
one great winter."

CHAPTER XVIII

A

" A PJ^II^ 22. The past week has
been one of dismantling, rub-
bish-creating, ship-cleaning tor-
ment. First, bull's-eyes were
inserted in the deck ; and the black felt hous-
ing, so comfortable in the winter darkness,
but that now shut out the sunlight like a
great pall, was triced up fore and aft, re-
maining only amidships. Next, the Besciie,
with her new bowsprit in, received her crew
and officers. They slept on board last night
for the first time, but still walk over the ice
to their meals.

"Wlien I saw the little brig through the
darkness, on the afternoon of the 13th of
January, moving slowly past us and losing
herself in the gloom, while sounds like artil-
lery mingled with the shrieking, howling,
and crashing of the ice, as the great ridges
rose and fell — and when the India-rubber
boat was launched, and the men took their

310

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 311

knapsacks, and old Brooks called out to us
to get out of the way of the rigging, believ-
ing the brig about to topple over — I did not
think there would be a spring-time for the
Rescue.

"We are now in the midst of those intes-
tine changes which characterize the house-
cleanings at home. The disgusting lamps
have done smoking, the hatches are allowed
to look out at the sun, and the galley, with
its perpetual odors, is banished to the hur-
ricane-house on deck. That peculiar inter-
space between the coal and the 'purser's
slops,' so dark and full of head-bmnping
beams, exults in the full glare of day.
What ri wonderful hole we have been exist-
ing in! It, the half-deck, as it is called on
board ship, is three feet six inches high, by
fourteen feet long and seventeen broad.
On it, forgetful of precedence and rank, our
bedding separated from the loose planking
by a canvas cot frame, slept Murdaugh,
Vreeland, Brooks, De Haven, two cooks,
and Dr. Kane. The last-named came on
board last, and found, though he is not a
very large man, a sufficiently narrow kennel

312 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

between the companion-ladder and the din-
ner-table. Our clothing, as it now wel-
comed the sun, was black with lamp-soot;
the beams above fringed, and festooned, and
wreathed with the same. My bed-coverings,
frozen over the feet in the winter, are bathed
with inky water. But all this is to be re-
moved to-day; and we go back to the lux-
uries of bunks, and daylight, and a long
breath.

"The day was bright and sunny. I
walked out to the open water. Marks of
commotion, hummock ridges, and chasms.
A new feature was the thaw. Heretofore
I could stand upon the brink of the cleanly-
separated fissures, and look down u23on the
bleak water as securely as from a quartz
rock. To-day eveiy thing around (pshaw!
the snow and ice, I mean; we have no things
here) was wet and crumbling. The snow
covered deceitfully some very dangerous
cracks: in one of these I sunk neck deep.
My carbine caught across it, and Holmes
pulled me out.

"We are very anxious to obtain fresh
meat for the invalids. Indeed, our longing

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 313

for something fresh is itself a disease. To-
day a tantahzing seal kept me prostrate
upon the slushy ice for an hour and a half.
In spite of all my seal craft, the prime secret
of which is patience, I could not draw him
into gunshot. With the characteristic curi-
osity of his tribe, the poor animal would rise
breast high to inspect my fur cap. Pres-
ently a whale spouted, and off he went.

"The decks are clear! the barrels stowed
away below, the fore-peak restored, the old
bunks reoccupied, and my messmates snooz-
ing away as in old times, a fire burning in the
stove, and lard lamps flaming away vigor-
ously upon my paper. Daylight still finds
its way down the hatch, although it is eleven
o'clock.

''April 24, Thursday. The snow falls in
loose, flaky, home feathers. The decks are
wet, and the misty air has the peculiar
ground-glass translucency which I noticed
last summer. When I came up before
breakfast to look around, the thermometer
gave +32°, the familiar temperatm-e of old
times: to me it was warm and sultry.

"The season of summer, if not now upon

314 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

us, is close at hand. It seems but yester-
day that we hailed the dawning daj^ and
burned oui- fingers in the frozen mercury;
now we have a summer snow-storm at 32°.

"This little table will show you how
stealthily and how rapidly summer has
trampled down winter:

Mean temperature for week ending March 14th,
—23° 94'.

Mean temperature for week ending March 21st,
— 9° 07'; gain, 14° 87'.

Mean temperature for ^v^ek ending March 28th,
— 16° 90'; loss, 7° 83'.

Mean temperature for week ending April 4th, — 4°
31'; gain, 12° 39'.

Mean temperature for week ending April 11th, +8°
59'; gain, 12° 90'.

Mean temperature for week ending April 18th,
+9° 55'; gain, 0° 55' .

Mean temperature for five days ending April 23d,
+ 14° 56'; gain, 5° 01'.

"Changes show themselves in the config-
uration of the snow surfaces. The hum-
mocks seem already to have diminished by
evaporation. They are less angular, and
blend in rounder hues with the snow drifts.
Night has gone. I see still at midnight the

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 315

circumpolar stars, and Jupiter, in his
splendor, on the eastern sky ; but I can read
at midnight.

"April 25, Friday. Walked to open
water to the northeast. The snow is melted
through the crust. I sink up to my knees.
Saw the tracks of a fox, very recent. The
little fellow had come from the direction of
the poor wounded bear, now cut off from us
by the broken ice, swimming the lead at its
narrowest crossing, some fifteen paces. So
long as his patron could have supi)lied him
with food, the little j^arasite would not have
left him. It may be that the bear has per-
ished from inabihty to hunt for both.

"Saw a right whale! Saw also a large
flock of geese at 9 a.m., winging their way
to the northward, and flying very low.
They were so irregular in their order of
flight, that I would have taken them for
ducks — the Somateria; but my messmates
say geese.

"April 26, Saturday. One of the changes
which we must expect has brought back to
us comparative winter. Yesterday gave us
a noonday and morning temperature of

316 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

+28^ It is now (10 p.m.) -9°. It was
—7° at noonday, with a bright, clear sun-
shine. The change is due to a northerly
wind. It has blown steadily throughout the
day from northwest by north. We hope
much from it in the way of drift. Our lat-
itude was 69° 40' 42'' N.; our longitude, 63°
08' 46" W.

"The wind change has given us no new
ruptures. Indeed, it seems to have shut up
the environing 'leads' around us. This may
be a good preface to a squeeze ; for I can see
no water from the mast-head.

"The stars at midnight remind me of our
Lancaster Sound noondays. The peculiar
zone of fairly blended light, stretching over
an amplitude of some seventy degrees — the
colors red, Indian red, Italian pink, with
the yellows; and then a light cobalt, gradu-
ally deepening into intense indigo as it
reaches the northern horizon.

''April 27, Sunday. The cold increases,
and our northwest wind continues. The
day's observation gives us 69° 35' 50", so
that we still go south encouragingly, though
slowly. This big floe is so solid, that some

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 317

of us are beginning to fear it may resist the
pressure, and not break up in the bay ; leav-
ing us to the thaws of summer and the
stormy winds of September before our im-
prisonment ceases. The apprehension has
no mirth in it.

"Walked to the open water to the north-
ward, nearly ahead of us. The leads were
so frozen over as to bear me. Looking
across the level, letting my eyes wander from
tussock to tussock of entangled floe-ice, as
they had grouiDed themselves in freezing, I
heard the blowing of a narwhal, followed by
the peculiar swash of squeezing ice. A
short walk showed me some six or eight con-
ical elevations, forced upward upon the re-
centty-formed ice, evidently by a force pro-
truding from beneath. While looking at
these, the sounds, though seemingly further
off, increased to such a degree that I w^as
convinced the ice was in action, and started
off to double a cape of hummocks and see
the commotion. Our steward, Morton, a
shrewd, observant fellow, who was with me,
suddenly called out, 'Look here, sir — here!'

"Each of these httle cones was steaming

318 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

like the salices or mud-volcanoes of Mexico,
the broken ice on top vibrating, and every
now and then tumbling, as if by some pul-
satory movement below. Presentl}^, in one
concerted diapason, a group of narwhals,
imj)risoned by the congelation of the open-
ing,* s^DOuted their release, scattering spray
and snow in every direction. I was not more
than three yards from the nearest cone; yet
I could see nothing of the animal except this
jet.

"The noise was so great that I could
hardly make the steward hear me. It had,
moreover, more of voice mingled with its
sibilant 'blow' than I had ever heard — a dis-
tinct and somewhat metallic tone, thrown
out impulsively, and yet with the crescendo
and diminuendo of an expiration. Accord-
ing to the views of some systematic natural-
ists, the cetacea have, strictly speaking, no
voice. This opinion admits of much modifi-
cation. The white whale in Welhngton
Sound whistled while submerged and swim-

* I found afterward from the Danes that they assemble iii
this way when extensh^e areas are frozen. Mr. Moldrup,
of Godhaven, mentions fifty being killed at one of these
congregations.

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 319

ming under our brig; and, in the present
singular case, the ejaculatory character of
the tone sounded hke a gigantic bark.*

"'May 1, Thursday. A httle before ten
this morning, the sun showed ahnost half its
disk above the snow horizon, with his usual
apf)anage of pearly opals and mellowed fire
displayed about the southern heavens. At
noon I walked out in the full glare, twenty-
five degrees above the freezing-point on my
face, and about as many below it on my back
— a May-day frolic in the snow! The crisp
covering, over wliich I used to skim along a
few weeks ago, broke through with me at
every step. It was just strong enough to
tantalize and deceive. Never, in the warm-
est days of summer harvest-time, have I felt
the heat so much as on this Arctic May-day ;
and yet no life, no organization carried me
back to the spring-time of reviving nature.

* On this occasion, I heard the white whale singing under
water — a peculiar note between the whistle and the Tyrolean
yodel. Our men compared it to the Jew's-harp. Once, off
Cape James, it was so loud that we heard it in the cabin,
as if proceeding from the cable-tier. I have often, in my
walks over the ice-openings, been startled by the resem-
blance between the sudden spout of a near narwhal and the
bark of an animal.

320 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

Even the tinnitus of the idle ear, that inner
droning that sings to you in the silent sun-
shine at home, was wanting. In fact, the
silentness was so complete, and the reflec-
tion from the snow so excessive, though I had
a gi'een rag over my face, that when I got
far away, and out of sight of every thing
but the interminable ice, it made me feel as
if the world I left you in and the world about
me were not exactly parts of the same planet.

"And so I traveled back to my sick men.
God bless us ! here are old Blinn, and Carter,
and Wilson, all on my list for fainting spells :
the same scurvy syncope our officers com-
plain of. Caj)tain Griffin fainted dead
away, and Lovell complains of strange feel-
ings. We need fresh food sorely. I
hardly think any organized expedition to
these regions was ever so completely de-
prived of anti-scorbutic diet as we are at this
time.

"Midnight. My old scurvy symptoms, it
may be, that keep me from sleeping. But
I write by the light of the sun ; and it really
seems to me that there is a something about
this persistent day antagonistic to sleep.

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 321

The idea thrust itself upon me last summer.
Thinking the fact over afterward, I re-
ferred it to habit, acting unphilosophically,
as it is apt to do; and concluded that my
sleeplessness was not connected directly with
the augmented or continued light. But this
is not so. I neither get to sleep so easily nor
sleep as long, nor, indeed, do I seem to need
the same quantity of sleep as when we had
the alternation of light and darkness. On
the other hand, I think our long Arctic night
solicited a more than common ration of the
same restorative blessing, though my journal
has shown you that our waking energies dur-
ing that period were not so heavily taxed
as to require more than their usual intermis-
sion."

The day after this entry superadded the
visitation of snow blindness to our trials.
Four of the party were attacked severely,
myself among the rest; so severely, indeed,
as to make it impossible for me to write, and,
what was much more important in the estima-
tion of our scurvy patients, impossible for me
to hunt. The brief notes which were made in
my journal by the kindness of a brother of-

322 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

ficer speak of our sensible approach toward
a final disengagement from the ice-field.
Though the winds were generally from the
southwest, our drift tended very plainly to
the south: in one day, we reduced our lati-
tude eighteen miles, passing at the same time
nearly a degree of longitude, twenty-two
miles to the east. The ice, too, was becom-
ing more infiltrated, and the heavy snow-
banks that surrounded our vessel were sat-
urated with water. Spring was doing its
office.

,1

CUTTING OUTj BIAY, 1851.

46

O

CHAPTER XIX

N the 11th, I was well enough, or
imprudent enough, to attempt a
seal hunt. Our mean tempera-
ture had sunk to 19° 5\ and the
snow-crust was strong enough to bear. A
gale had swept away the loose, fleecy drifts
of the fortnight before, exposing the familiar
surface of the older snow. I walked over
it as I did in April.

"Reaching the seat of the open water to

323

3245 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

the northward, I found it closed by young
ice, an extensive surface frail and unsafe.
About a quarter of a mile from the edge of
the old floe, almost in the centre of this re-
cent lead, was a seal. The temptations of
the flesh were too much for me : I ventured
the ice, crawled on my belly, and reached
long-shot distance.

"The animal thus laboriously stalked was
large; a hirsute, bearded fellow, with the
true plantigrade countenance. All his
senses were devoted to enjoyment: he wal-
lowed in the sludge, stretched out in the sun-
shine, played \^^ith his flijDpers, lying on his
back, much as a heavy horse does in a skin-
loosening roU. I rose to fire — and down he
went. An unseen hole had received him: a
lesson for future occasions. This hole was
critically circular, beveled from the under
surface, and symmetrically embanked round
with the pulpacious material which he had
excavated from the ice.

"Crawling back less actively than I had
approached, my carbine arm broke through,
carrying my gun and it up to the shoulder.
It was very well, all things considered, that

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 325

my body did not follow ; for I was on a very
rotten shell, and nearly two miles from the
brigs, alone.

"Wednesday, 12. For the last fortnight,
our ice-saw, under ^lurdaugh's supervision,
has been hard at work. To-day we have a
trench opened to our gangway.

"The ice shows the advancing season. It
is no longer splintery and quartz-like, spawl-
ing off under the axe in dangerous little
chips ; but sodden, infiltrated ice, such as we
see in our ice-houses. The water has got
into its centre, and the crow-bars, after the
sawing out, break it readily up for hauling
upon the field. The process is this : First,
we cut two parallel tracks, four feet asunder,
through six and five feet ice, with a ten-foot
saw; then lozenged diagonals; then straps
(ropes) are passed around the fragments,
and a block and line, nautice jigger, or
watch tackle, made fast to the bowsprit,
hauls the lumps upon the floe, where they
are broken up by the ice bars. A formid-
able barricade of dirty ice, about the size and
shape of gneiss building stones, is already in-
closing our vessel. Many a poor fellow has

326 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

had an involuntary slide-bath into the freez-
ing mixture alongside; but in most cases
without unj^leasant consequences."

I remember only one serious exception.
It was that of our heroine of the Thespian
corps, Jim Smith. The mimediate result
for him was an attack of scurv^^, so marked,
yet so blended with the active symptoms be-
longing to arthritic disease, as to incline me
to an opinion for the time that there may be
such a thing as acute scur\y, or a sudden in-
flammatory sthenic action, whose character-
istics are scorbutic. He had immediately
stitch, dyspnoea, pains in the back and joints,
and in the alveolar and extensor muscles,
just as in his previous attacks of scurvy, but
without fever. The day after, he was so dis-
tressed by his stitch, that I feared pleuritis.
On looking at his shins, I found large pur-
puric blotches, which were not there a week
before. I commenced the anti-scorbutic tyr-
anny at once; and the next morning his
gums bled freely, his pains left him, and he
took his place again at the ice-saw.

"Several laridge flew about us: I heard
them to-day for the second time — pleasant

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 327

tones, with all their discord. Do you re-
member the skylark's song, 'a dropping
from the sky,' in the 'Ancient Mariner'? I
thought of it this morning when the gulls
screeched over our motionless brig.

''Maij 18, Sunday. First, of late, in my
daily records is this glorious wind, still from
the northwest, fresh and steady. It is, as
is every thing else for that matter, a God-
send. To-day's observation places us but
thirty-two miles from Cape Searle, and
seventy from Cape Walsingham, the abut-
ting gates of Davis' Straits, where the chan-
nel is at its narrowest, and where our im-
prisonment ought to end.

"This welcome wind- visitor is still fresh-
ening: it is not perpetrating, I hope, an ex-
tra brilliancy before its conge.

"I found to-day a rough caricature draw-
ing by one of the men : some of the mess call
it a portrait of myself. By-the-way, sup-
pose I tell you of my latest rig? Here it
is. A long musket on shoulder ; a bear knife
in the leg of the left boot ; a rim of wolfskin
around my head, leaving the bare scalp with
its liairs' open to the breeze; rough Guern-

328 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

sey frock, overlined by a red flannel shirt,
in honor of the day on which thou shalt do
no labor; legs in sailor
pants of pilot cloth, slop-
shop cut; feet in seal-
liide socks or buskins,
of Esquimaux fabric
and Esquimaux smell;
a pair of crimson wool-
en mittens, which com-
menced their career as
a neck comforter; and
a little green rag, the
snow veil, fluttering over
a weather-beaten face:
place all this, for want
of a better lay figure, on
your brother of the Arctic squadron.

"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 un-
couth, snobby, and withal, shabby- looking
set of varlets. Uillustre Bertrand would
be a Beau Brummel alongside of us. We
are shabby, because we have worn out all

DR. KANE IN ARCTIC RIG.

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 329

our flimsy wardrobes, and have of late re-
sorted 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 mj^ 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, cloth-
ing ourselves cap-a-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 cut-
ting five pairs of stockings out of one ham-
mock blanket — a thing hitherto deemed im-
possible— is altogether my own. In the ab-
stract 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 this

330 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

matter here: it might, perhaps, be out of
place; perhaps, too, attributed in some de-
gree to that personal vanity almost insepa-
rable from invention. I will tell you, how-
ever, that this discovered type, this radical
nucleus, is the 'bag.' Thus a bag, or a
couple of parallelogramic planes sewed to-
gether, 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 confei*vas.

'Ail this is a digression, perhaps; yet I
am not the first traveler whose breeches have
figured in his diary of wonders: j^ou remem-
ber the geometrical artist of Laputa who re-
enforced the wardrobe of Mr. Gulliver.
But to retm-n to less ambitious topics. The
birds, in spite of the increasing wind, fly
over in numbers, all seeking the mysterious
north. "V^Hiat is there at this unreached pole
to attract and sustain such hordes of migra-
tory life? Since the day before yesterday.

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 331

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 fore-
noon and early morning. The guillemots,
also, are not so numerous as they were two
days ago; but from to-day we date the re-
appearance of the little auk. This deh-
cious little j)ilgrim 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.

''May 19, Monday. Jim Smith, little
Jim Smith, reported 'Land.' We have be-
come so accustomed to this great sameness
of snow, that it was hard to realize at first

332 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

the 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.

"May 20, 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, opal-
escent 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. Sev-
eral of the officers and men shared the visi-
tation, Captain De Haven more severely
than any of us. ]\Iy next quotation from
my journal dates of the 24th.

"May 24, Saturday. The ship shows

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 333

signs of change, grating a little in her icy
cradle, and rising at least nine inches for-
ward. 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, meas-
uring 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 pur-
pose a screw jack is to be applied aft, and
strong purchases on the ice ahead. The ex-
periment 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.

"10 P.M. The effort failed, as no doubt
it ought to have done : we must wait for the

334 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

great break-up to give us an even keel.
From the mast-head we can see encroach-
ments 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 Caj)e Walsingham.

''May 25, Sundaj^ Howling a perfect
gale; drift impenetrable. By some provi-
dential interference the wind returned last
night to its old quarter, the northwest, a di-
rection corresponding with the trend of the
shore. It is undoubtedly di'iving us fast to
the southward, and is, of all quarters, that
most favorable to a passage without disrup-
tion. Once past Cape Walsingham, the ex-
pansion 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 jour-
ney. So at least we argue.

"And just so, it may be, others have ar-

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 335

gued before us about chances of escape that
never came: there is a cycle even in the his-
tory of adventure. It makes me sad some-
times when I think of the fruitless labors
of the men who in the very olden times har-
assed 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 tlie heart-burn-
ings and the failures, the famishings and the
freezings, the silent, unrecorded transits of
'y^ Arctic 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 hun-
dred 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 his-
tories of this very shore. The Cape of God's

336 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

Mercy is ahead of us to the west, as it was
ahead of the man who named it. The Meta
Incognita, fm'ther 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

"f^ ■ ^HE storm broke in the early
■ morning hours. We have
B drifted more than sixteen miles
since Saturday. The true bear-
ing 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 chrono-
meters, placed us but four miles north of
Exeter Bay. Either, then, the protruding
cape is not Walsingham, or our chronome-
ters are at fault. This latter is probably
the case; for if the coast hne be correctly
laid down on the charts, the true bearing
cited above, projected from our present par-
allel 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 character

337

S38 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

of 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 precipi-
tous, 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 cul-
minating points are not numerous : the high-
est. Mount Raleigh, is, by my vague esti-
mate, about fifteen hundred feet high.

"May 27. 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 Ra-
leigh, 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 the Rescue measured a base upon
the ice to-day, and attempted trigonometri-
cal measurements with sextant angles.
They make Cape Walsingham seven miles
distant, and the height of the peak at the

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 339

cape fifteen hundred feet. Our observation
places us in latitude 66° 42' W; our longi-
tude by time sights, at 5h. 43m. p.m., was
60° 54'. According to the Admiralty chart,
this plants us high and dry among the moun-
tains 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, whj'' have we no
squeezing and coimnotion at this narrow
strait? Can it be that the ice to the west-
ward 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 in-
shore currents, more rapid, have carried
down the in-shore ice before us, thus widen-

340 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

ing the pathway for us? It is certainly very
puzzhng to find ourselves, at the narrowest
passage, close into the land ; and no commo-
tion, no disturbance. On the contrary, from
the mast-head abundant open water meets
the eye; and could we escape from our im-
prisoning, but — thankfully I say it — pro-
tecting floe, we might soon be moving in
open seas.

''3Iay 28, 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 in-shore fields. The Rescue,
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 !

"31 ay 29, Thursday. I have just been
witnessing one of the oddest of Ai'ctic
freaks. We were all of us engaged in trac-
ing out the rugged indentations on Mount
Raleigh, as the fioe was rolling our vessels
slowly along past Cape Walsingham, when,
at five o'clock in the afternoon — the ther-

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 341

mometer at 27°, the barometer at 30.31, and
the atmosphere of the usual pearly opales-
cence— the C£L])tain, sweeping shoreward
with his glass, saw a large pyramidal hum-
mock, with a well-defined figure projecting
in front of it, evidently animated and mov-
ing. Murdaugh, looking afterward, de-
clared it 'a man.' I saw it next, a large hu-
man figure, covered with a cloak, and mo-
tionless. 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 fol-
lowed. The size made us at once reject the
bird idea : the shape, too, w^as 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 remove

342 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

our only doubt, whether the 'Rescues' might
not be playing us a trick.

"Whatever it was, it either did not per-
ceive us approaching, or was willing to avoid
us; for it kept itself hidden behind a crag.
Reaching, however, the spot where it had
stood, w^e 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 lit-
tle 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 ver-
tical 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
one P.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 su-

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 343

perb tenacity 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 hiss-
ing 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 excep-
tion, 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 eight p.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.

''May 30. The seal are out upon the ice,
one of the most certain signs of summer.

344 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

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
solitaiy, but keenly alive always to the en-
jojinent of the sunshine. I have often
crawled within fair eye-shot, and, seated be-
hind 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 flij^pers, and
stretches his neck in a manner almost dog-
like. This maneuver, even during appar-
ently complete silence, is repeated every few
minutes. He next commences with his hind
or horizontal flippers and tail a most singu-
lar 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, col-
lapsing, curling, wagging; then a luxurious.

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 345

basking rest, with his face toward the sun
and his tail to his hole. Presently he wad-
dles 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 liis 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 de-
scends head foremost.

"I have watched so many without success,
that to-night I determined to try the Esqui-
maux 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 at-
tempt 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 fish-
ing, that it ought to be reserved for the Pis-
cators of our Schuylkill Club.

346 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

"The walk over the snow to-night was
very dehghtful. The opalescence, so pain-
ful to the eyes, had given place to a clear at-
mosphere; and the low sun was full of rich
coloring. Land, too, that pleasing repre-
sentative 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 en-
tire, though we plunged almost knee-deep in
water below it. This you will easily under-
stand 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-com-
pacted snow, and, forming a pasty substra-
tum, 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.

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 347

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 Baume's
hydrometers and the test of the nitrate of sil-
ver. 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 be-
low twelve, salt-water paste. On the other
hand, all my observations, and I have made a
great many, prove to me that cold, if in-
tense enough, will, by its unaided action, in-
defjendent of percolation, solar heat, depend-
ing position, or even depth of ice, produce
from salt water a fresh, pure, and drinkable
element.

"May 31, Saturday. Walked to-night
to the southward in search of seal : found the
ice in motion, and had some difficulty in get-
ting back. Wind from southward, and
freshening, after a day of nearly perfect
calm. The drift is somewhat to the east-

348 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

ward. 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 ad-
juncts that have grown up around it in more
recent freezings. A bird's-eye view from
the mast-head, corrected by my walks, en-
ables 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 tempera-
ture had been visibly acting upon the ice,
softening down its rough angles, and reduc-
ing 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 experi-

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 349

enced in ninety-nine days. The hundredth
gave us a complete range of dreary, snow-
covered hills ; but to men whose last recollec-
tions 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 ludi-
crous under different circumstances: every
cranny, every wrinkle spoke to us of move-
ment, of a relation with the shut-out world.
Our drift which brought us this blessed va-
riety 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 east-
ward.

For the last four days of the month we
were at the margin of the Arctic circle, al-
ternating within and without it. We
passed to the south of it on the 30th, to re-
cross it on the 31st with an accidental drift
to the northward. We were experiencing
at this time the rapid transition of seasons

350 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

which characterizes this climate. The mean
of the preceding month, April, had been
+7° 96'; that of May was 20° 22'— a dif-
ference 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 un-
der the deep, perpetual frosts of winter.
Cold there seemed a tangible, palpable some-
thing, which we could guard against or con-
trol 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 ther-
mometer explain much of this ; but it was im-
possible 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 visi-

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 351

tors. Crowds of little snow-birds (Ember-
iza and Plectrophanes) , with white breasts
and jetty coverts, were attracted by the gar-
bage 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 anatinse, represented by the eiders
(Somateria), followed by two of the uria
genus, the grylle and the alke. We recog-
nized the latter as our little fat friend of last
summer, and gave him treatment accord-
ingly. I shot thirty-three in one day, which
my mess-mates made up to sixty.

The characteristic disease of May was the
snowblindness, 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 a

352 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

modification of the character of the ray.
The slightest automatic movement varied, of
course, the sentient surface affected by the
impression.

TOPOGRAPH \ i OE, 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

UNE 1. 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 in-
crease in numbers and in confidence. It is
delightful to hear their sweet jargon.

353

J

354 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

They alight on the decks, and come unhesi-
tatingly to our very feet. These dear little
Fringillides have e\'idently never visited
Cliristian lands.

"June 3. The day misty and obscure : no
land in sight from aloft; and no change ap-
j)arent 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 oppres-
sive glare. The thawed condition of the
marginal ice made the walk difficult, and
forced us at last to give it up. But, climb-
ing 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.

''June 4. Yesterday over again. But
the water is coming nearer us. As we stand

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 355

on deck, we can see the black and open chan-
nel-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, how-
ever, be a mere isthmus.

"June 5, Thursday. We notice again
this morning the movement in the trench
alongside. The floating scum of rubbish ad-
vances 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 measure-
ment than we had made before, gave us yes-
terday, between our height aft and depres-
sion 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. The BREAK-UP AT last! a little
after five this afternoon, Mr. Griffin left us
for the Rescue, after making a short visit.
He had hardly gone before I heard a hail
and its answer, both of them in a tone of

356 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

more 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 feel-
ings when, midway between the two vessels,
we saw Griffin with the ice separating be-
fore 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 httle 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 Grif-
fin'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 everj^ direction.

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 357

"All this was at half past five. At six I
took a bird's-eye sketch from aloft. Many

BIKD'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.

of the fissures were already some twenty
paces across. Conflicting forces were at
work every where; one round-house moving

358 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

here, another in an opposite direction, the
two vessels parting company. Since the
night of our Lancaster Sound commotion,
months ago, the Rescue had not changed her
bearing: she was ah-eady 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 re-
peated pressures, had glued themselves to-
gether 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 tri-
angular fragment of 14 by 22 paces. This
berg-like fragment, reduced as it was, con-
tinued its close adhesion. Its buoyancy was
so great, that it acted like a camel, retain-
ing the brig's stern high in the air, her bows

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 359

thrown down toward the water. We are
so at this moment, 10 p.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 pur-
poses 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 disin-
tegration— was evidently the sea-swell set-
ting from the southeast. This sweU had
given us minor manifestations of its exist-
ence as far back as the 1st of June.
Whether it was increased without, or our
floe made more accessible to it by the drift-
ing away of other and protecting floes, I can
not say. This, however, was clear, that the
great undulations propagated by wave ac-

360 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

tion caused our disruption. The i^roof 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 b}^ 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 apparenth^ solid surface,
by long association as unjdelding 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 ad-
vancing wave.

A hummock hill, about midwaj^ between
us and the Rescue, gave me an opportunity
of measuring rudely the height of the swell.
It rose till it covered her quarter boat ; sink-

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 361

ing again 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 thick-
ness, which have been forced down by pres-
sure, 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 honey-
combed and cellular, water-sodden and in

369. ADRIrT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

rounded bowlders, rising from the dej)ths
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, voyag-
ing again to the upper world. Once be-
tween the gaping edges of the lead, they ef-
fectually prevent the closing. They are
about us in everj^ direction, interposed be-
tween 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 curi-
osity, 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 bat-
tering-ram. This ingenious method of
pounding us out of our tenacious cradle sub-
jects us to a regular succession of hea\'y
shocks, which would startle a man not used
to ice navigation. At the time I write, 11
P.M., we have been nearly three hours sub-
jected to this banging without any apparent
impression. To-morrow we will, if not Hb-

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 363

erated, apply the saw ; and then again to the
warps !

"11:20 P.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 postjDoned it because I hap-
pened to get absorbed in a book."

........^^,_ ., ,..MMMMm\'..

TOPOGRAPHY OF FLOE, JUNE 5.

PKOFILK OF floe; PORT SIDE.

CHAPTER XXII

*' Itr UNE 6. 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 trans-
parent 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 fis-
sures.

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 365

"7 P.M. The position of things contin-
ues unchanged. Our ice-saw with great
lahor buried its length in the floe, reaching
nearly to our stern; but the submerged ma-
terial is so thick that it has little or no effect.
Wedging, by billets of wood between her
sides and the mounding ice, was equally in-
effectual. Gunpowder would perhaps re-
lease us; but that we can not spare.

"I tried to measure the depth of this in-
veterate 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 star-
board, 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 won-
der it lifts up our little craft bodily. I have
made my drawings of it with all topograph-
ical accuracy.

"The wind has been hauhng round from

366 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

the 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.

"10 P.M. The ship is covered with can-
vas: she stands motionless amid the ice, al-
though 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 can-
vas, 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 ! Re-
member that the old man of Sinbad stiU
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.

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 367

"12 Midnight. Still advancing, dragging
behind us this pertinacious mass. We have
butted several times against j)rojecting
floes, but it is as unmoved as solid rock.
Very foggy: Rescue not visible. Ther-
mometer 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 associa-
tions, 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
j)ut us into comparatively open water.

''June 7, 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.

368 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

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 effi-
cacy of wedges.

"Toward evening the Rescue made sail,
and forced her way slowly through the frag-
ments. By eight p.m. she was snugly se-
cured 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 bot-
tom on the port side, had broken off, cutting
the triangle in half, and leaving the crew
behind floating and separated from the ship.

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 369

All that now confined us was the mass (a)
which remained on her starboard quarter.
This descended some twentj^^ or more feet,
embracing our keel, and by its size sustain-
ing us in our perched condition. We had
settled but nine inches in consequence of our
partial disengagement.

"Looking from the taifrail down the stern-
post, we can now see the position of this por-
tion of our brig distinctly. A strip of her
false keel has been forced from its attach-
ments, 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.

"June 8, 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 went

370 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

down upon the fragment, which was still ad-
hering to our starboard side. He had
hardly rested his weight upon it, when, with
certain hurried, scarcely premonitorj^ grind-
ings, it cleared itself. He had barely time
to scramble up the brig's side, tearing his
nails in the effort, before, with crash and tur-
moil, it tumbled up to the surface, letting
us down once more into clear water. \Vlien
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.

"9 P.M. At 1 o'clock P.M. the wind fresh-
ened 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 6 p.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. The Rescue is not visible.

"From the heavy floe to which we are se-
cured we obtained fresh thawed water. This

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 371

is 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 re-
gions of Wellington, or the North Baffin's
Straits. This ice, though pure and beauti-
ful, 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 fiftj^ yards long by four hun-
dred 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, look-
ing down into its pure depths, beautiful be-
yond description. It forms part of a gi'eat
field, miles in circumference, as similar co-
aptating fragments are seen in every direc-
tion; the great swell of the 5th having no
doubt destroyed its integrity. From what
great winter basin comes this colossal ice?"

CHAPTER XXIII

WE continued our progress
through a labyrinth of ice,
sometimes running into a berg,
or grazing against its edge so
close as to carry away a spar or stave a quar-
ter-boat, but still making our way across to
the Greenland shore. The sea was studded
with low bergs and water-washed floes,
wearing the fantastic forms which had sur-
prised us the year before. Some were both
comphcated and graceful, supported gener-

372

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 373

ally by peduncular bases, which gave them
a curious aspect of fragility. This was evi-
dently due to the action of the waves at the
water-line,
aided by the
warmth of the .-^^^^^^^MM.
atmosphere. ^
If we suppose te
a nearly sym- "- ^_
metrical lump
of ice, floating with that stable equilibrium
which belongs to its excessive submergence,
the atmosphere, which has now a tem-
perature as high as 64° in the sunshine,
will gradually round off
and crease the edges, and
at the same time will melt
the portions of the mass
which are above water.
Its buoyancy increasing
as its weight is reduced,
the berg will now rise
slowly, presenting a suc-
cession of new surfaces to the abrasion of the
waves; and thus we shall have the familiar
mushroom or fungoid appearance wliich is

374 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

shown in many of the plates illustrating i^e-
cuhar berg forms.

The process continuing under all the
modifications of wave action, while the op-
posing face of the berg varies with every
change of its gravitating centre, w^e may
have eccentric resemblances to animated
things sculptured in the ice, and at other
times forms of classic symmetry, or the frets
and garniture of mediaeval art.

Our sail through this fanciful archipelago
was a most uncomfortable one. Our stoves
had been taken down; and the scurvy, ex-
aggerated by the increased exposure to
damp, began again to bear hard upon us.
We devoured eagerly the seal, of which, by
good fortune, we had several re-enforce-
ments; but as the excitements of peril de-
clined, the energies of the men seemed to
relax more and more; and I had reason to
fear that we should not be able to resume our
search effectively, until the health of our
party had undergone a tedious renovation.

It had been determined by our commander
that we should refresh at Whale Fish Is-
lands, and then hasten back to Melville Bay,

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 375

the North Water, Lancaster Sound, and
WeUington Channel; and certainly there
was no one on board who did not enter heart
and soul into the scheme. It was in pur-
suance of it that we were now bending our
course to the east.

The circumstances that surrounded us, the
daily incidents, our destination and purpose,
were the same as when approaching the Suk-
kertoppen a year before. There were the
same majestic fleets of bergs, the same le-
gions of birds of the same varieties, the same
anxious look-out, and rapid conning, and
feiirlesG encounter of ice-fields. Every thing
was unchanged, except the glowing confi-
dence cf young health at the outset of ad-
venture. We had taken our seasoning: the
experience of a winter's drift had quieted
some of our enthusiasm. But we felt, as
veterans at the close of a camj)aign, that with
recruited strength we should be better fitted
for the service than ever. All, therefore,
looked at the well-remembered cliffs, that
hung over Kronprinsen, with the sentiment
of men approaching home for the time, and
its needed welcomes.

376 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

We reached them on the 16th. Mr.
Murdaugh, and myself, and four men, and
three bottles of rum, were dispatched to com-
municate with the shore. As we rowed in
to the landing-place, the great dikes of in-
jected syenite stood out red and warm
against the cold gray gneiss, and the moss
gullies met us like familiar grass-plots. Es-
quimaux crowded the rocks, and dogs
barked, and children yelled. A few lusty
pulls, and after nine months of drift, and
toil, and scurvy, we were once more on terra
firma.

God forgive me the revulsion of unthank-
f ulness ! I ought to have dilated with grat-
itude for my lot.

Winter had been severe. The season
lagged. The birds had not yet begun to
breed. Faces were worn, and forms bent.
Every body was coughing. In one hut, a
summer lodge of reindeer and seal skins, was
a dead child. It was many months since I
had looked at a corpse. The poor little
thing had been for once washed clean, and
looked cheerful. The father leaned over
it weeping, for it was a boy; and two little

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 377

sisters were making lamentation in a most
natural and savage way.

I gave the corjjse a string of blue beads,
and bought a pair of seal-skin boots for
twenty-five cents ; and we rowed back to the
brig. In a very little while we were under
sail for Godhaven.

We were but five days recruiting at God-
haven. It was a shorter stay than we had
expected; but we were all of us too anxious
to regain the searching ground to complain.
We made the most of it, of course. We ate
inordinately of eider, and codfish, and seal,
to say nothing of a hideous-looking toad fish,
a JLepo dog aster, that insisted on patroniz-
ing our pork-baited lines; chewed bitter
herbs, too, of every sort we could get ; drank
largely of the smallest of small-beer; and
danced with the natives, teaching them the
polka, and learning the pee-oo-too-ka in re-
turn. But on the 22d, by six o'clock in the
morning, we were working our way again to
the north.

We passed the hills of Disco in review,
with their terraced summits, simulating the
Ghauts of Hindostan; the green-stone cliffs

378 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACE

round Omenak's Fiord, the great dockyard
of bergs ; and Cape Cranstoun, around which
they were clustered hke a fleet waiting for
convoy. They were of majestic propor-
tions; and as we wound our way tortuously
among them, one after another would come
into the field of view, like a temple set to

AN ICE CATHEDRAL.

be the terminus of a vista. At one time we
had the whole Acropolis looking down upon
us in silver; at another, our Philadelphia
copy of the Parthenon, the monumental
Bank of the United States, stood out alone.
Then, again, some venerable cathedral, with
its deep vaults and hoary belfries, would

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 379

spread itself across the sky ; or perhaps some
wild combination of architectural impos-
sibilities.

We moved so slowly that I had time to
sketch several of these dreamy fabrics. The
one which is engraved on the opposite page

THE GROTTO IX THE BERG.

was an irregular quadrangle, projected at
the extremity of a series of ice-structures,
like the promontory that ends an isthmus:
it was crowned with ramparts turreted by
fractures ; and at the water-line a great bar-
reled arch went back into a cavern, that

380 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

might have fabled as the haunt of sea-kings
or smugglers. Another, much smaller, but
still of magnificent size, had been excavated
by the waves into a deep grotto ; and the light
reflected from the bay against its transpar-
ent sides and roofs colored them with a blue
too superb for imitation by the brush or
pencil.

In the morning of the 24th we made the
pack ; more to the south, therefore, than last
year. It appeared at first like a firm neck,
extending out among heavy bergs well into
Haroe Island; and remembering our last
year's experience, we moved cautiously. But
after a while, our captain, now perhaps the
best ice-master afloat, determined on bor-
ing. The dolphin-striker was triced up, the
boats were taken on board, and the old
sounds of conning the helm began again.
This time we were lucky. In four hours we
were through the tongue of the pack, and
out in nearly an open sea.

We did not move long, however, before
the navigation became embarrassed. The
ice between Cape Lawson and Storoe was
too compact to be wedged aside; and after

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 381

some rude encounters with the floes, and a
narrow escape from a reef of rocks which
Captain Graah's charts do not mention, we
found ourselves, on the 25th, nearly embayed
by the noble headlands off Ovinde Oerme.
The ice, in a horseshoe curve, completely
shut us in to the north, and the tongue of
the pack we had come through lay between
us and the sea. The wind had left us. We
were drifting listlessly in a glassy sea that
reflected the green-stone terraces and strange
pyramidal masses of its romantic shores.

We amused ourselves killing seals. There
must have been hundreds of them of all va-
rieties playing about us. Generally they
were to be seen paddling about alone, but
sometimes in groups, like a party of school-
boys frolicking in the Schuylkill. One of
their favorite sports was "treading water,"
rising breast-high, keeping up a boisterous,
indefatigable splashing, and stretching out
their necks, as if to pry into the condition of
things aboard ship. We compared their be-
havior to that of the timorous but curious na-
tives, when the Europeans first met them in
the waters of America; and in our inter-

382 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

course with them, conformed accurately to
the Spanish precedent.

Occasionally only we obeyed our "mani-
fest destiny" with reluctance. Some of the
younger of these poor sea-dogs had over-
much of the honest expression of their land
brethren: the truncation of the muzzle in
others, with no external ear showing behind
it, set their faces in almost perfect and hu-
man-like oval. "WTien one of these would
come up out of the water near us, and, rais-
ing his head and shoulders, that stooped like
those of a hooded Esquimaux, gaze steadily
at us with his liquid eye, then diving, come
up a little nearer and stare again; so draw-
ing nearer and nearer, diving and rising al-
ternately, till he came within musket range;
it sometimes went hard to salute him with
a bullet.

We shot, among others, a very large beast
(P. harhata), lying upon a floating piece of
ice. The captain's ball went through his
heart; and my own, equally deadly, wuthin
a few inches of it ; but the unwieldy creature
continued struggling to reach the water, un-
til a shot from Mr. Lovell, close upon him,

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 383

drove a musket-ball through his head. He
measured eight feet from tip to tip, five feet
eleven inches in his greatest circumference,
and five feet six inches in girth behind the
fore-flippers. His carcass was a shapeless
cylinder, terminating in an awkward knob
to represent the head.

We lost two seals by sinking. Hitherto,
when killed on the instant by perforation of
the brain or spinal marrow, they had invari-
ably floated. But the rule does not hold al-
ways. I wounded one so as to carry away
the crown of his skull, and Captain De
Haven gave him a second shot from within
a few yards directly through his head, and
yet we lost him. As the balls struck, he dis-
charged, almost explosively, a quantity of
air, and went down like a loon. The whal-
ers say, wound your seals; but my own ex-
perience is, that, if they are fat, it is best to
kill them at once. A Danish boy, who had
joined us by stealth at Disco, told us that the
animal's sinking was a proof that he had no
blubber. He was probably right: we cer-
tainly did not secure any that were in good
condition.

38i ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

The next day gave us excitement of a
different sort. We had been lying in the
young ice-field, close under the southeast
shore of Storoe, with the current setting
strong toward it, and a grim array of bergs
to the west of us. It was an ugly position;
but we were fairly entangled, and there was
no escape. Early in the morning, the wind
freshened, and blew in toward the island;
the ice piling against the rocky precipice
under our lee, and opening in broken masses
to windward. The Rescue managed to
make fast to a crag between us and the shore,
but our ice-anchors missed. At four in the
afternoon we were within rifle-shot of the
land, and still drifting; the wind a gale, and
the sea-swell coming in heavily.

We stopped, of course, or there would
have been an end of my journal. But for
some hours things looked squally enough.
Our soundings had become small by degrees
and beautifully less, till they were down to
thirteen feet; and the black wall looked so
near that you could have hit it with a fil-
bert. It could not have been fifty yards off,
when we brought up on some grounded floe-

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 385

pieces. By eleven, our warps had headed us
to windward, and our bow was off shore.
For once, at least, we owed our safety to the
ice.

The Rescue followed a few hours after;
and we took the direction of the pack to-
gether to the N.N.W. By the next day at
noon we were within twenty-three miles of
Uppernavik, but a belt of ice lay between.
We anchored to a berg, and for two days
waited patiently for an opening.

My messmates in the mean time went off
on a hunt to a flat, rocky ledge, that showed
itself inshore, and I amused myself with a
tramp on the ice-island to which we were
fast. I had for company a noble Esqui-
maux slut, that Governor Moldrup had en-
abled me to get at Disco, and a dog of the
same breed belonging to Mr. Lovell. I do
not know what has become of Hosky, as
Mr. Lovell named his favorite ; but my poor
Disco fell a martyr to our Philadelphia
climate and his Arctic costume together,
some three days after we got home.

I had a quiet day's walk. My compan-
ions rambled with evident glee over the peaks

586 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

and ravines of their familiar element. It
was a magnificent pile of frost-work. But
these crystal palaces of the ice, like every
thing else under this northern sky, deceive
one strangely in their apparent size. We

ICE BOULDERS.

thought, when we anchored, that the berg
was a small one; yet we coursed more than
the third of a mile in almost a direct line be-
fore we reached its further edece.

The pure surfaces which we traveled over
were studded with irregular blocks of ice,
evidently once detached and cemented on

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 3^87

again. They varied in size and shape from
a boy's playing-marble to a haystack; and
by their interesting distribution suggested
most obtrusively the question of ahnost every
Arctic traveler, how such fragments find
their place on the plateau surfaces of the
icebergs. I had answered the question for
myself before; but I was glad to be con-
iu-med by the observations I made in the
course of this excursion. When first the
mass separates from the land-berg or gla-
cier, it is accompanied by a large quantity
of disengaged fragments, with all varieties
of detritus ; and during the alternate risings
and sinkings that follow the fall into the sea,
a great deal of this is caught by the emerg-
ing surface of the berg, and adheres to it.
I noticed valleys, where the subsequent roll
had rounded the masses, and grouped them
into something resembling bowlder-drift. I
had seen similar valleys in some of the large
bergs of Duneira Bay, supplying a bed for
temporary water-streams, in which the
bowlders were beautifully rounded, and ar-
ranged in true moraine fashion.

Off Storoe, a white fox (C lagopus)

"j.

388 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

came to us on the loose ice: his legs and the
tip of his tail were black. He was the first
we had seen on the Greenland coast.

He was followed the next day by a party
of Esquimaux, who visited us from Proven,
dragging their kayacks and themselves over
seven miles of the pack, and then paddling
merrily on board. For two glasses of rum
and a sorry ration of salt-pork, they kept
turning somersets by the dozen, making their
egg-shell skiffs revolve sideways by a touch
of the paddle, and hardly disappearing un-
der the water before they were heads up
again, and at the gangway to swallow their
reward.

The inshore ice opened on the thirtieth,
and toward evening we left the hospitable
moorage of our iceberg, and made for the
low, rounded rocks, which the Hosky pointed
out to us as the seat of the settlement. The
boats were out to tow us clear of the floating
rubbish, as the light and variable winds made
their help necessary, and we were slowly ap-
proaching our anchorage, when a rough
yawl boarded us. She brought a pleasant
company, Unas the schoolmaster and parish

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 389

priest, Louisa his sister, the gentle Amalia,
Louisa's cousin, and some others of humbler
note.

The baptismal waters had but superficially
regenerated these savages: their deport-
ment, at least, did not conform to our nicest
canons. For the first five minutes, to be
sure, the ladies kept their faces close cov-
ered with their hands, only withdrawing them
to blow their noses, which they did in the
most primitive and picturesque manner.
But their modesty thus assured, they felt
that it needed no further illustration. They
volunteered a dance, avowed to us confiden-
tially that they had educated tastes —
Amalia that she smoked, Louisa that she tol-
erated the more enlivening liquids, and both
that their exercise in the open air had made
a slight refection altogether acceptable.
Hospitality is the virtue of these wild re-
gions: our hard tack, and cranberries, and
rum were in requisition at once.

It is not for the host to tell tales of his
after-dinner company. But the truth of
history may be satisfied without an intima-
tion that our guests paid niggard honors to

890 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

the jolly god of a milder clime. The veriest
prince, of bottle memories, would not have
quarreled with their heel-taps. * * *

We were inside the rocky islands of
Proven harbor as our watches told us that
another day had begun. The time was
come for parting. The ladies shed a few
kindly tears as we handed them to the stern-
seats: their learned kinsman took a recum-
bent position below the thwarts, which fa-
vored a continuance of his nap ; and the rest
of the party were bestowed with seaman-
like address — aU but one unfortunate gen-
tleman, who, having protracted his festive
devotions longer than usual, had resolved
not to "go home till morning."

The case was a difficult one ; but there was
no help for it. As the sailors passed him to
the bottom of the boat, and again out upon
the beach, he made the air vocal with his in-
dignant outcries. The dogs — I have told
you of the dogs of these settlements, how
they welcomed our first arrival — joined their
music with his. The Provenese came chat-
tering out into the cold, like chickens startled
from their roost. The governor was roused

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 391

by the uproar. And in the midst of it all,
our little weather-beaten flotilla ran up the
first American flag that had been seen in
the port of Proven.

CHAPTER XXIV

THE port of Proven is securely shel-
tered by its monster hills. But
they can not be said to smile a wel-
come upon the navigator. A smil-
ing country, like a smiling face, needs some
provision of fleshly integuments; and no
earthly covering masks the grinning rocks
of Proven. They look as if the process of
crumbling, and wrinkling, and splitting, and
splintering had been at work on them since
the first Arctic frost succeeded the last meta-
morphic fire; and even now great ledges are
wedged off from the hillsides by the ice, and
roll clattering down the slopes into the very
midst of the settlement.

Summer comes slowly upon Proven.
When we arrived, the slopes of the hills were
heavily patched with snow, and the surface,
where it showed itself, was frozen dry. The
water-line was toothed with fangs of broken
ice, which scraped against the beach as the

392

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 393

tides rose and fell; and an iceberg somehow
or other had found its way into the little
port. It was a harmless lump, too deep
sunk to float into dangerous nearness; and
its spire rose pleasantly, like a village
church.

"July 3. I am writing in the 'Hosky'
House of Cristiansen. Cristiansen is the
Danish governor of Proven, and this house
of Cristiansen is the House of Proven. Its
owner is a simple and shrewd old Dane, hale
and vigorous, thirty-one of whose sixty-four
winters have been spent within the Arctic
circle, north of 70° N. Lord in his lonely
region — his four sons and five subordinates,
oihnen, the only white faces about him, ex-
cept when he visits Uppernavik — the good
old man has the satisfaction of knowing no
superior. His habits are three fourths Es-
quimaux, one-eighth Danish, and the re-
mainder Provenish, or peculiarly his own.
His wife is a half-breed, and his family, in
language and aspect, completely Esquimaux.

"When the long, dark winter comes, he
exchanges books with his friend the priest of
Uppernavik. 'The Dantz Penning Maga-

394 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

zin,' and 'The History of the Unitas Fra-
trum,' take the place of certain well-
thumbed, ancient, sentimental novels; and
sometimes the priest comes in person to ten-
ant the 'spare room,' which makes it very
pleasant, 'for we talk Danish.'

"Except this spare room, which elsewhere
would be called the loft of the house, its
only apartment is the one in which I am.
And here eat, and drink, and cook, and
sleep, and live, not only Cristiansen and all
his descendants, but his wife's mother, and
her children, grandchildren, and great-
grandchildren who are growing up about her.
It is fifteen feet broad by sixteen long, with
just height enough for a grenadier, without
his cap, to stand erect, and not touch the
beams. The frame of the house is of Nor-
way pine coated with tar, with its inter-
spaces caulked with moss and small window-
panes inserted in a deep casing of wood.

"The most striking decorative feature is
a kdge or shelf of pine plank, of varying
width, which runs round three of its sides.
Its capacity is wonderful. It is the sofa and
bed, on which the entire united family find

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 395

room to loll and sleep ; and upon it now are
huddled, besides a navy doctor and his writ-
ing board, one ink bottle, sundry articles of
food and refreshment, one sleeping child,
one lot of babies not in the least asleep, one
canary-bird cage with its exotic and most
sorrowful httle prisoner, and an infinite va-
riety of other articles too tedious to mention,
comprising seal-skins, boots, bottles, jump-
ers, glasses, crockery both of kitchen and
nursery, coffee-pots, dog-skin socks, canvas
pillows, an eider-down comforter, and a sick
bitch with a youthful family of whining pup-
pies.

"Una, the second daughter, has been sick
and under treatment; and she is now hard
at work with her sisters, Anna, Sara, and
Cristina, on a tribute of gratitude to her doc-
tor. They have been busy all the morning
whipping and stitching the seal-skins with
reindeer tendon thread. My present is to
be a complete suit of ladies' apparel, made
of the richest seal-skin, according to the
standard mode of Proven, which may always
be presumed to be the 'latest winter fash-
ion.' It is a really elegant dress. To some

396 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

the unmentionables might savor of mascu-
larity; but having seen something of a more
polite society, my feminine associations are
not restricted to petticoats. Extremes meet
in the Esquimaux of Greenland and Ama-
zons of Paris.

"The large family is a happy one: so small
a home could not tolerate a quarrelsome
mess. The sons, the men Cristiansens, brave
and stalwart fellows, practiced in the kayack,
and the sledge, and the whale-net, adroit
with the harpoon and expert with the rifle,
are constant at the chase, and bring home
their spoil, with the honest pride becoming
good providers of their household. And the
women, in their nursing, cooking, tailoring,
and housekeeping, are, I suppose, faithful
enough. But what favorable impression
that the mind gets through other channels
can contend against the information of the
nose! Organ of the aristocracy, critic and
magister morum of all civilization, censor
that heeds neither argument nor remon-
strance— the nose, alas! it bids me record,
that to all their possible godliness cleanliness
is not superadded.

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 397

"During the short summer of daylight —
it is one of the many apparent vestiges,
among this people, of ancient nomadic hab-
its— the whole family gather joyously in the
summer's lodge, a tent of seal or reindeer
skin, pitched out of doors. Then the room
has its annual ventilation, and its cooking
and chamber furniture are less liable to be
confounded. For the winter the arrange-
ment is this : on three sides of the room, close
by the ledge I have spoken of, stand as many
large pans of porous steatite or serpentine,
elevated on slight wooden tripods. These,
filled with seal-blubber, and garnished vnth
moss round the edge to serve as a wick, unite
the functions of chandelier and stove. They
who quarrel with an ill-trimmed lamp at
home should be disciplined by one of them.
Each boils its half -gallon kettle of coffee in
twenty minutes, and smokes — like a small
chimney on fii'e ; and the three bum together.
There is no flue, or fire-place, or opening of
escape.

"On the remaining side of the room stand
a valued table and three chairs; and with
these, like a buhl cabinet or fancy etagere,

398 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

conspicuous in its modest comer, a tub. It
is the steeping- tub for curing skins. Its con-
tents require active fermentation to fit them
for their office; and, to judge from the odor,
the process had been going on successfully."

We warped out to sea again on the after-
noon of the third, with our friend the cooper
for pilot; the entire settlement turning out
upon the rocks to wish us good-by, and re-
maining there till they looked in the distance
like a herd of seal. But we found no open-
ing in the pack, and came back again to
Proven on the fourth, not sorry, as the
weather was thickening, to pass our festival
inside the little port.

Our celebration was of the primitive order.
We saluted the town with one of the largest
balanced stones, which we rolled down from
the cliff above; and made an egg-nogg of
eider eggs; and the men had a Hosky ball;
and, in a word, we all did our best to make
the day differ from other days — which at-
tempt failed. Still, God iever bless the
fourth !

The sixth was Sunday, and we attended
church in the morning at the schoolmaster's.

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK 399

The service consisted of a long-winded hymn,
and a longer winded sermon, in the Esqui-
maux— surely the longest of long-winded
languages. The congregation were some
two dozen men and women, not counting
our party.

We put to sea in the afternoon. The
weather was soft and warm on shore; but
outside it was perfectly delightful: no wind
— the streams of ice beyond enforcing a most
perfect calm upon the water ; the thermome-
ter in the sunshine frequently as high as
76°, and never sinking below 30° in the
shade. I basked on deck all night, sleeping
in the sun.

And such a night! I saw the moon at
midnight, while the sun was slanting along
the tinted horizon, and duplicated by reflec-
tion from the water below it : the dark bergs
to seaward had outlines of silver; and two
wild cataracts on the shore-side were falling
from ice-backed cliffs twelve hundred feet
into the sea.

July 7. I was awakened from my
dreamy sleep to receive the visits of a
couple of boats that were working slowly to

400 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

us through the floes. An English face —
two English faces — twelve English faces:
what a happy sight! We had had no one
but ourselves to speak our own tongue to for
three hundred days, and were as glad to lis-
ten to it as if we had been serving out the
time in the penitentiary of silence at Auburn
or Sing-Sing. Their broad North Briton
was music. It was not the offensive dialect
of the provincial Englishman, with the af-
fectation of speaking his language correctly;
but a strong and m^nly home-brew of the
best language in the world for words of sin-
cere and hearty good-will. They had to
turn up their noses at our seal's-liver break-
fast; but, when they heard of our winter
trials, they stuffed down the seal without
tasting it. I felt sorry after they were off,
that I had not taken their names down every
one.

The whaling vessels to which they returned
were in the freer water outside the shore
stream, the Jane O'Boness, Captain John
Walker; and the Pacific, Captain Patterson.
These gentlemen boarded us as soon as we
got through the ice to them. They thought

ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC IGE PACK 401

our escape miraculous ; and it was some time
before they found words to congratulate us.
*'Augh!" and "Wonderful!" with a peculiar
interchange of looks, was all they said.

These burned children dread the fire ; and
their conversation opened our eyes to dan-
gers we had gone through half unconsciously.
Few masters in the whaling trade but have
at some time suffered wreck. Two seasons
ago, this veteran Patterson saw his ship
thrust bodily through another, and then the
transfixed and transfixing vessels were both
eaten up together by the gi-eedy floes. He
stepped from the last remnant of his buried
sail on to the hummocks: "And that's a'
that e'e ha' seen o' her!"

They left us newspapers, potatoes, tur-
nips, eggs, and fresh beef enough to eat out
every taint of scurvy! They took letters
from us for home, and cheered ship when we
parted. I must not soon forget the Pacific
and Jane O'Boness.

(Editor's note.) The next day they
made Uppernavik. July and a good part of
August were spent in a vain endeavor to re-
turn to Lancaster Sound and complete their

402 ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE PACK

explorations in Wellington Channel; but
the ships were so beset with floes and ice-
bergs that this project had to be abandoned.
On August 21st the expedition headed
homeward, and it arrived in New York on
September 30, 1851.

THE END

OUTING
ADVENTURE
LIBRARY

Edited by Horace Kephart

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1. IN THE OLD WEST, by George Frederick
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the best that could be hoped by the man who went to sea was hard-
ship and man's-sized work.

3» CAPTIVES AMONG THE INDIANS. First of all

is the story of Captain James Smith, who was captured by the Dela-
wares at the time of Braddock's defeat, was adopted into the tribe,
and for four years lived as an Indian, hunting with them, studying
their habits, and learning their point of view. Then there is the
story of Father Bressani who felt the tortures of the Iroquois, of
Mary Rowlandson who was among the human spoils of King
Philip's war, and of Mercy Harbison who suflfered in the red flood
that followed St. Clair's defeat. All are personal records made by
the actors themselves in those days when the Indian was constantly
at our forefathers's doors.

4. FIRST THROUGH THE GRAND CANYON, by

Major John Wesley Powell. Major PoweU was an officer in the
Union Army who lost an arm at Shiloh. In spite of this four years
after the Tvar he organized an expedition which explored the Grand
Canyon of the Colorado in boats — the first to make this journey. His
story has been lost for years in the oblivion of a scientific report.
It is here rescued and presented as a record of one of the great
personal exploring feats, fitted to rank with the exploits of Pike,
Lewis and Clark, and Mackenzie.

5. ADRIFT IN THE ARCTIC ICE-PACK, By

Elisha Kent Kane, M. D. Out of the many expeditions that
went north in search of Sir John Franklin over fifty years ago, it fell
to the lot of one, financed by a New York merchant, to spend an
Arctic winter drifting aimlessly in the grip of the Polar ice in Lan-
caster Sound. The surgeon of the expedition kept a careful diary
and out of that record told the first complete story of a Far Northern
winter. That story is here presented, shorn of the purely scientific
data and stripped to the personal exploits and adventures of the
author and the other members of the crew.

LOAN DEPT.

LD2tA-20rri-3,'73
(Q8677b10)476-A-31

General Library .
University of California
Berkeley

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