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, because as it subsided the reaction of the floes developed itself in fissures; but more frequently from the north, expediting our course to a more genial latitude. The floes themselves were, however, much more massive and gnarled than any we had seen before: every party that left the vessel for an ice-tramp came back with exaggerated impressions of the mighty energies that had hurled them together. We felt that it would have been impossible for any organized 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 fortnight 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 influence 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 influence upon the status of the ice, increasing its permeability, and permitting some changes analogous to thawing, but which I can not explain. May it be that the crystalline structure of the ice is undergoing some modification, that increases its capillarity, 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 thermometers, so notorious in this Polar region for their imperfect coincidence with 'sensations of cold,' are equally fallacious as measures of absolute increments or decrements of sensible caloric? It will not do, I suppose, 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 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, +13° by my own observation of an instrument suspended at a distance from the ship, and under 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 reviving 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 freezing.

"I have often alluded to this discrepancy between our feelings and the recorded temperature. I have read of the same thing in the Arctic voyages, with a reference to contrast for the explanation. But I never until to-day realized so fully that we were warmed from within by a mysterious, and, I must believe, unknown system of functional compensation. I wish Liebig could make a 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 reminding me of home, so soft and flaky, 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 thermometer outside at a maximum of +33°. Every thing wet, warm, and summer-like.

"I have a story to tell--a foolish adventure; 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 my seal-skin, shouldered my carbine, and walked off with my face toward the wonder. None of the crew would accompany me: my mess-mates did not volunteer: 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 my stay, and was out in search of me. We took a new departure together, were blown over a few times, and tumbled over, no matter 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 imbedded 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 of hummocking at the open water, though it is a distance of nearly or quite two miles. We are looking to our approaching disruption 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 family. 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 radiating heat, may possibly explain this depression. But I am strongly inclined to believe in endosmotic actions in the ice.

"_April_ 16. To-day the salting continues. The men call it our spring-seed sowing. On board the _Rescue_, a party are at work preparing for the return to her. The ice-cutting 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 storm which we were sharing with our English 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 wanderer 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'; our longitude, 63° 03'.

"This afternoon, while walking deck, this endless deck, with Murdaugh, we discovered a bear walking tranquilly alongside, nearly within gunshot. We have lost so many opportunities by the bustle and ignorance of a universal chase, that I crawled out to attack him alone. To my sorrow, the brute, 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 curious fact which follows. The animal had found the ball, seized it between the incisors, and _extracted it_. The bullet is now in my possession, distinctly marked by his teeth.

"After a very tedious and harassing pursuit, I came up to him at the young ice. He stood upon the brink of the lead. I was within long shot, and about to make preparations 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 Irishman, I crossed by a circuitous channel, and then took to the young ice myself, and tried to run him down. It was very exciting; 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 fell 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 walking, as it were, over the sea itself--bent under 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 'growlings' and his 'bloody 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 rubbish. An open river, broader than the Delaware, 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 startled me with the change, I saw for the first time a seal upon the ice. This looks very 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 enables a quadruped, to us associated inseparably with a land existence, thus to inhabit an ice-covered ocean. We are at least eighty miles from the nearest land, Cape Kater; and channels innumerable must intervene between us and terra firma. Yet this majestic animal, dependent upon his own predatory 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 except Parry's Spitzbergen experience--been seen so far from land. In the great majority of cases, they seem to have been accidentally caught and carried adrift on disengaged 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 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 destitution, this frigid inhospitableness--coupling in May, and bringing forth in Christmas time--a gestation carried on all of it below zero, more than half of it in Arctic darkness--living in perpetual snow, and dependent 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."