Chapter IX

"_NOVEMBER_ 22. I walked yesterday, and to-day again, to the open water that separates us from Wellington Channel. It is a bold and rapid river, as broad as the Delaware at Trenton or the Schuylkill at Philadelphia, rolling wildly between dislocated hummock crags, and whirling along in its black current the abraded fragments of its shores. Ice of recent growth had cemented 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 a half to the northwest of our vessels, and was lost in the distant ice-fields 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 footmarks 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 bigger than that of a Newfoundland dog. At what breeding season were these cubs produced?

"I have been for some evenings giving lectures on topics of popular science, the atmosphere, 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 vapor 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 pleasant to think about. It streamed away on the wind in black drifts.

"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 before 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 uncommon 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, 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 toward 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 altogether of the field? We have heard noises of grinding ice, distant, but bodingly distinct.

"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 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 hummocky crags trending to the westward and southward from the southward and eastward, forming a rude, broken horseshoe. Distance to water, one mile.

"2. To the south; over long floes of recent 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 of eighteen feet. From the east and northeast, the trend of the break is to the southward 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 massive 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 already pointing to the south. Our bow is to Baffin's Bay, and we are traveling toward 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 Wellington Channel, one never attained before, and have been borne back again past our point of starting, along a capriciously varied line of drift. Cape Riley is bearing, by compass, S. 1/2 E., N.N.E. 1/2 E. (true); and Beechy Head, by compass, S.E. 1/2 E., N. 1/2 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 toward them with some of our officers. After sundry groping tumbles, we came, sure enough, upon open water, one hundred yards to the south of the brig. Returning on our track, and taking a new departure toward the east--open water again. Off to the dim, hazy north--still open water. Off to the hummocky 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 night.

"_December_ 1. There was a rude murmur in the night, that mingled its tones of admonition with the wind. But we are habituated pretty thoroughly to sounds of this sort, and they have ceased to disturb us. Walking after breakfast toward the northeast, to an ice-quarry, from which we have obtained our fresh water of late, we found that a water-crack we observed yesterday had undergone severe pressure during the night, and that the action was still going on. A low, hazy twilight just allowed us 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 received 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 crumbling 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 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 precipice. We could see the vertical crevices in the limestone, the recesses contrasting 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 likely 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 coasting craft, down about Barcelona and the Balearies, 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 representative 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 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 service 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; barometer, aneroid, 30°. 74; attached thermometer, 86°. Wind steady, W.N.W. The meteor resembled an illuminated cloud; illuminated, because seen against the deep blue night sky; otherwise it resembled the mackerel fleeces and mare's tails of our summer skies at home.

"It began toward the northwestern horizon as an irregular flaring cloud, sometimes sweeping out into wreaths of stratus; sometimes 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 approach 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 Borealis; the star of greatest magnitude in the latter of these constellations remaining in the centre, although its waving curves sometimes 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 southeast.

"There was throughout the arc no marked seat of greatest intensity. Around the Corona of the north, its light was more diffused. 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. 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 knapsack 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 pushing off from a wreck left so many little wants unprovided for; but I think I understand 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 behind.

"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 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 disconsolate 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 _Rescue_, 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.

"Our bearings, taken by azimuth compass this morning at eleven, gave Cape Hurd, S. by W. 1/4 W.; Western Bluff, of Rigsby's Inlet, S.E. 1/4 S.; Table-hill of Parry, S.E. by S. 1/2 S.; Cape Ricketts, E. by N.

"Wind changed at 9 P.M. to N.N.W.; thermometer, minimum, -26°; maximum, 22°; mean, 23° 82'.

"_December_ 4, Wednesday. This morning showed us an interval of over two hundred 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 westward. We have certainly left the coast, which yesterday seemed almost over us, though it is still too near for good fellowship.

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

The next four days were full of excitement 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 hour afterward, the chasms would close around us with a sound like escaping steam. Again they would open under some mysterious 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 necessity, when it spares no one, is essentially democratic, even on shipboard. The _Rescue_, crippled and thrown away from us to the further side of a chasm, was deserted, and her company consolidated with ours. Our own brig groaned and quivered under the pressure against her sides. I give my diary for December 7.

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

"_December_ 7, Saturday. The danger which surrounds us is so immediate, that in the bustle of preparation for emergency I could not spend a moment upon my journal. Now the little knapsack is made up again, and the blanket sewed and strapped. The little 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 comparatively quiescent when I attempted to write; but it recommenced with a steady pressure, which must soon prove irresistible. It catches against a protruding tongue forward, 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 protected by shores, vibrated so as to communicate to you the peculiar tremor of a cotton-factory. Presently the stern of the brig, by a succession of jerking leaps, began 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. 1/4 W. Remarkable perpendicular bluff, S.S.E. Cape Hurd, E.N.E. 1/2 E., by compass; Cape Hurd, N.W. by W. 1/2 W. (true).

"We are at least fifty miles from Beechy Island and Union Bay--about forty-five miles from Leopold Harbor stores. Leopold Harbor, or our more distant English friends, about one hundred and twenty miles 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 bitterness. Drift a little westward; thermometer 17°."

My journal does not tell the story; but it is worth noting, as it illustrates the sedative 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 persons in the cabin; the officer who had been relieved from watch-duty a few minutes before, quietly seated at the mess-table, and the steward as quietly waiting on him. "You are a meal ahead of me," he said; "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 without injury a few fresh pressures. The wind has been still from the eastward, and we have drifted about six miles to the westward 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 temperature 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 undertaken a systematic drill of the crew. He has mustered them for an ice-march, with knapsacks fitted to their backs, and sledge equipments, just such as will be required when 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 instructed 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 second-quarter crescent, was for a while on the northern and western horizon, distorted and flaming like a crimson lamp.

"Last night, mounted as we are, the nipping caused our timbers to complain sadly. We had to send out parties to crowbar away the ice from our bowsprit. The bob-stays were forced up and broken. Our floe movement continued to the southeast, driving the heavy ice in upon the _Rescue_. She rose up under the pressure, and is now surrounded 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 horizon, 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 the seat of intense hummock action. The greater the distance from that point, the broader must be the curvature of the meeting currents, and the less perilous the conflict 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 beginning 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 dangerous, but too uniform to be exciting; and we had drilled with knapsack and sledge, till we were almost martinets in our evolutions 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-day as fierce from the west. It has carried us clear of the great 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 experiment of a night upon the ice, tented and bag-bedded. I wish them luck; but the thermometer fifty-seven degrees below freezing is unfavorable to a _fête chainpêtre_.

"_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 driving 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 yesterday, but too dark to read small print 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 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 visible 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 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 crimson-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 heaping 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 exercise 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."