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 eighteen inches of the keel imbedded. This novel dry-dock answered perfectly. The hull was inspected, and the work of repair 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 disposition 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 impression to the unmittened hand; and several drops of water rolled from its mounting of snow, and formed in minute icicles.

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 with friction, and taken internally 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, according to the accepted dialectics of the profession, the _Acid. chlorohyd. dilut._ may be recommended as singularly adapted to certain stages of scorbutus.

The great 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, glowing exercise, and in the case of seamen, to control their diet. My ingenuity was often taxed for expedients to counteract these predispositions. 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 magnet, each wag accompanied by a shampooing knead. Stewart had faith; the muscular action, which I had enjoined so often ineffectually, 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 regularly from head to foot in water colored brown by coffee, and made acid with vinegar. His gums improved at once. He would never have washed with _aqua fontana_.

Another set of fellows adhered pertinaciously to their salt junk and hard tack, ship bread and beef. These conservative gentlemen gave me much trouble by repelling vegetable food. The scurvy was playing the very deuce with them, when the 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 damnable 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, accompanied by a distinct tubercle cartilaginous to the touch. It exactly recalled, he said, the appearance and feeling of the part for some months after it had been hurt by a schoolmaster's ruler twenty-five years before. One of the crew had his tongue completely excoriated. Another, who had lost a molar tooth seven years ago, spit from the cavity a conoidal wedge: I had no chance of examining it by the microscope; but an impression of the cavity in wax showed the sides perfectly smooth, and the vertex intersected by lines of ossification. I have spoken already 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 anti-scorbutic 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 display, which occurred a few days afterward, attracted more notice.

"_March_ 13. Again a day of bright sunshine, 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 cutting asperity about it that made your face tingle--a sensation as if evaporation was going 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 numerous. 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 surrounded the horizon, rising for some six degrees in a bronzed purple bank; after which it gradually blended with the sky, a clear blue, undisturbed by cirri.

"Accompanying this redundancy of atmospheric spiculæ was a parhelion of remarkable intensity. There was no halo round the sun, and no vertical or horizontal column; but at the distance of 22° 04' from the sun's centre were three solar images, one on each side, and the other immediately 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 margin. The haze rose as high as these horizontal 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 approached the horizon. The effect of this was that of two illuminated beacons or rainbow 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 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 incomprehensible black cloud, was so completely 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 Melville 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 becoming 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 observations. Our stock of instruments on board was scanty at the best, and the routine observances of a ship of war do not favor the prosecution of merely scientific researches. We had no actinometer to mark the daily increments of solar radiation: om' thermometers were generally of rude construction, and were not so placed as to give the highest 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 seeing our mountain barometer released from its stowage, and an attempt made to compare it with our aneroids. Before we began our drift to the north, when we had no fires below to give us a constantly vibrating temperature, and the aneroid of the _Rescue_ had not come into the over-crowded cabin of our vessel to divide the formalities of registration 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, to give something of increased value to our log-book records of the atmospheric pressure. 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 almost 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 Cape 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 moving southward again with increased velocity.

The 19th gave us a change of scene. I was aroused from my morning sleep by the familiar voice of Mr. Murdaugh, as he hurried along the half-deck: "Ice opening"--"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 tumbling over the hummocks.

After a heavy walk of half a mile, sure enough there it was--the open lead--stretching 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 movement of the mercury and the varied appearance of the clouds were now explained. Although 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 accompanied the Lancaster Sound commotions, I can hardly realize that such extensive 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 may have been twice as long in the other direction. Perhaps the wave action of a heavy sea, great subglacial 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 hundred yards across; not, however, three hundred 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 intervening 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-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 something, 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 hostility to gun-murder was forgotten. I wasted, of course, some small remnant of poetic sympathy with fellow-life thus springing up out of the wilderness; but then, in the midst of my sympathies, 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 dovekies kept themselves out of shot.

At this lead we saw the recent frost-smoke within a few yards of us in pointed 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 Wellington it was an interesting, sometimes a gloomy feature; here it was imposing. 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 we 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, the entire horizon seemed to be sending up, exhaling a bronzine smoke--not the lambent, smoky wreaths which I have compared to burning turpentine, but a peculiar russet brown smoke, tongued and wreathy when near, but at a distance rolling 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 tenaciously 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.