Chapter X

I EMPLOYED the dreary intervals of leisure that heralded our Christmas in tracing some Flemish portraitures of things about me. The scenes themselves 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 scrapbook, expurgating only a little.

"We have almost reached the solstice; and things are so quiet that I may as well, before 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 were measuring snow-falls, while you were sweating under your grass-cloth. Yet I remember it as a time of sunny recreation, when we shot bears upon the floes, and were scrambling merrily over glaciers and murdering rotges[D] in the bright glare of our day-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 mitt.

[D] Little auk. Commonly spelled rotche.

"The cold came upon 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 contents made solid. Next came the complete inability to obtain drink without manufacturing 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 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 hatchway had become so complete a mass of icicles, 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 consolidated, and after different fashions, requiring no small experience before we learned to manage the peculiarities of their changed condition. Thus, dried apples became one solid breccial mass of impacted angularities, a conglomerate of sliced chalcedony. Dried peaches the same. To get these out of the barrel, or the barrel out of them, was a matter impossible. 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 resembled mica, or rather talcose slate. A crowbar with chiseled edge extracted the _laminæ_ 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 extemporaneous 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 fracture is conchoidal, with hæmatitic (iron-ore pimpled) surface. Flour undergoes little 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: crowbar 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 unbidden, 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 Philadelphia 'parties,' where the lady-hostess glides 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 transfixing rod, which we use as a stirrer first and a fork afterward. So hard is this terminating cylinder of ice, that it might serve as a truncheon to knock down an ox. The only difficulty is in the processes that follow. 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 transparency 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 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 lips the first minute or two, and admit the air suspiciously through nostril and mustache. Presently you breathe in a dry, pungent, but gracious and agreeable 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 pendulous 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 jaw 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 mittens, with a sensation like hot water.

"But we have been supposing your back to the wind; and if you are a good Arcticized subject, a warm glow has already been followed 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 pockets! 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.' Sleepiness is not the sensation. Have you ever received 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 over every part of the system, and you have the so-called pleasurable feelings of incipient 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 gratifying 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 shipboard life. We have two climates, hygrometrically as well as thermometrically at opposite ends of the scale. A pocket-handkerchief, pocketed below in the region of stoves, comes up unchanged. 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 telling. 'The Doctor' still retains three luxuries, remnants of better times--silk next his skin, a tooth-brush for his teeth, and 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 baggage beyond the essential I regard as _impedimenta_, and believe in the wisdom of Titian Peale, who, when preparing for an exploring tour around the world, purchased--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, lined 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 water-tight cup; the furred edge of a dog-skin sock inserted as a lining; 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 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 up 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 thermometer 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 weather, when we get down to -30° or thereabouts. A long waist-scarf, worn like the kummerbund of the Hindoos, is a fine protection while walking, 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."