Chapter XIV

ON the 2d of February the sun rose up in full disk at a quarter before eleven. The atmosphere was clear, but filled with minute spiculæ. The cold was becoming more intense: our ship thermometers stood at -32°, my spirit standard at -34°, and my mercurial 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 service 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 played foot-ball 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 past eight one of the spirit standards indicated the same point. Up to this period, it was our lowest temperature. The frozen mercury resembled in appearance 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 surface.

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 10h. 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 or cause. We had several displays of the paraselene, too, in the earlier days of the month, and an almost constant deposition of crystalline 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 hummocks, and thus protected from the wind, I found it nine inches deep.

When accumulated in this manner, it might, on a hurried inspection, be confounded 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 preceding. 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 sanitary game of romps in the cold light. Presently three suns came to greet us--strange Arctic 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 standing 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 false horizon separated the two sets of images.

"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 Greenland, 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 hummock 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°.

"_February_ 10. A hazy day; with moon-light, and a drizzling fall of broken spiculæ following it. Mr. Murdaugh obtained observations 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 January 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 influence.

"To look at the completely unbroken area which shows itself from our mast-head, motion 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. But for the stars, my convictions of rest would be absolute. Yet we have thus traveled upward of three hundred miles. I shall not soon forget this inevitable march, with its alternations of gloomy silence and fierce disruptions.

"_February_ 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 offer 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 contents 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 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 reality of my home.

"Outside, grim death, in the shape of -40°, is trying--most foolishly, I think--to chill the energy of these his allies. My bedding 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 officer, 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 Morton, mush-like with snow; and in this mixture, by the aid of a hard towel, with a daily 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 Highlands. Then to breakfast. Here are the mess, with the fresh smell of overnight undisturbed, and on our table griddle 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 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 saddening 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 mercury 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,' followed by a pantomime. The sitting temperature was -20°; that outside, -36°; behind the scenes, -25°. A flat-iron used by the delicate Miss Jem Smith gave the novel 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 concluded with hotchpot and songs.

"_February_ 15, Saturday. Another glorious 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 ahead, began to suffer: his nose was tallow white. Before we had rubbed it into circulation, my own was in the same condition; and an unfortunate hole in the back of my mitten stung like 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 between the eyes and over the forehead. This is quite severe. It reminded me of a feeling which I have had from over-large quantities 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 Mr. Murdaugh, complain of stiff and painful joints and limbs, with diarrhoea and impaired appetite: the doctor like the rest. At my recommendation, 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 apples; and we have enjoined more active and continued daily exercise, more complete airing 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 performance, 'The Irish Attorney;' Pierce O'Hara taken by the admirable Bruce, our Crichton. The ship's thermometer outside was at -46°. Inside, among audience and actors, by aid of lungs, lamps, and housings, we got as high as 30° below zero, only sixty-two below the freezing point! probably the lowest atmospheric record of a theatrical representation.

"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 accompanied by volumes of smoke. The hands steamed. When an excited Thespian took off his hat, it smoked like a dish of potatoes. When he stood expectant, musing a reply, 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 sunshine, 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 gladness.

"Caught a cold last night in attending the theatre. A cold here means a sudden _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 upon 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 instantly 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. Instead 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 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 between shade and sunshine is 30°: a thermometer 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 demonstration. The complaint is of 'a sort of tired feeling,' or as if 'they had had a beating.' 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-like, that under these low Arctic temperatures 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 bedding 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 extinguished; sometimes 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 insects--for I have eaten locusts In Sennaar and bats in Dahomey--I rather dislike the crawl of centipede or slime of snail. Here, with an emotion hard to describe, surprise, pleasure, and a don't-know-why wonderment, 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 anatidæ 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 northern coasts of my own dear home. The croaking raven, dark bird of winter, clings to the inshore deserts. The tern are far away, and so, thank Heaven, are the mosquitoes. 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 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 degrees 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 'creeping 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 10h. 20m., viz.: Green's spirit standard gave, in shade,-33°; over black surface, in sunshine, -7° and -6°. At noonday, the same thermometer gave +2°. My glass--cased, hot-house like,--gave the pleasant deception 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 energies excited and my blood warmed by exercise, 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 figured upon the list of condemned for the affair at Lyons, and was a fugitive _emigré_ to the United States. The same sergeant-major, Canot, is now cooking salt junk in Baffin's Bay. His _confrère_, the modest but gifted Henri, although a worse soldier, is a better cook. He first saw ice among the glaciers of La Tour. He has scullionized at the '_Trois Frères_/ and played _chêf_ 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, pensive by temperament, and withal ambitious. Were it not for the somewhat unequal distribution of two molars and an incisor, his entire stock of teeth, he would be an insufferable 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, _à la brochette_. The idea was good, the liver hippuric and detestable. Henri prides himself upon that most difficult simplicity, the _filet_. He prepares thus a sea-gull _à merveille_.

"_February_ 28, Friday. The most wintery-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 wreaths from the hummocks. The atmosphere has an opaline ashy look; in the midst of which, like a huge girasole, flashes the round sun. The clouds are of a sort seldom seen, except in the conceptions of adventurous artists, quite undefinable, and out of the line of nature, defying Howard's nomenclature. 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 temperature we recorded during 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 instruments. 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 exercise; and although the effort was accompanied with pains in the joints, sometimes hardly bearable, we managed, both officers and crew, to obtain at least three hours a day. The exercise consisted of foot-ball and sliding, followed by regular games of romps, leap-frog, and tumbling in the snow. By shoveling away near the vessel, we obtained a fine bare surface of fresh ice, extremely glib and durable. On this we constructed 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 the officers were assailed. Old pains were renewed, old wounds opened; even old bruises and sprains, 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 extravasations appeared on his legs, and a dysentery enfeebled him to an extent far from safe. An old wound of my own became 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.