Chapter XVIII

"_APRIL_ 22. The past week has been one of dismantling, rubbish-creating, ship-cleaning torment. First, bull's-eyes were inserted in the deck; and the black felt housing, so comfortable in the winter darkness, but that now shut out the sunlight like a great pall, was triced up fore and aft, remaining only amidships. Next, the _Rescue_, with her new bowsprit in, received her crew and officers. They slept on board last night for the first time, but still walk over the ice to their meals.

"When I saw the little brig through the darkness, on the afternoon of the 13th of January, moving slowly past us and losing herself in the gloom, while sounds like artillery mingled with the shrieking, howling, and crashing of the ice, as the great ridges rose and fell--and when the India-rubber boat was launched, and the men took their knapsacks, and old Brooks called out to us to get out of the way of the rigging, believing the brig about to topple over--I did not think there would be a spring-time for the _Rescue_.

"We are now in the midst of those intestine changes which characterize the house-cleanings at home. The disgusting lamps have done smoking, the hatches are allowed to look out at the sun, and the galley, with its perpetual odors, is banished to the hurricane-house on deck. That peculiar interspace between the coal and the 'purser's slops,' so dark and full of head-bumping beams, exults in the full glare of day. What a wonderful hole we have been existing in! It, the half-deck, as it is called on board ship, is three feet six inches high, by fourteen feet long and seventeen broad. On it, forgetful of precedence and rank, our bedding separated from the loose planking by a canvas cot frame, slept Murdaugh, Vreeland, Brooks, De Haven, two cooks, and Dr. Kane. The last-named came on board last, and found, though he is not a very large man, a sufficiently narrow kennel between the companion-ladder and the dinner-table. Our clothing, as it now welcomed the sun, was black with lamp-soot; the beams above fringed, and festooned, and wreathed with the same. My bed-coverings, frozen over the feet in the winter, are bathed with inky water. But all this is to be removed to-day; and we go back to the luxuries of bunks, and daylight, and a long breath.

"The day was bright and sunny. I walked out to the open water. Marks of commotion, hummock ridges, and chasms. A new feature was the thaw. Heretofore I could stand upon the brink of the cleanly-separated fissures, and look down upon the bleak water as securely as from a quartz rock. To-day every thing around (pshaw! the snow and ice, I mean; we have no _things_ here) was wet and crumbling. The snow covered deceitfully some very dangerous cracks: in one of these I sunk neck deep. My carbine caught across it, and Holmes pulled me out.

"We are very anxious to obtain fresh meat for the invalids. Indeed, our longing for something fresh is itself a disease. To-day a tantalizing seal kept me prostrate upon the slushy ice for an hour and a half. In spite of all my seal craft, the prime secret of which is patience, I could not draw him into gunshot. With the characteristic curiosity of his tribe, the poor animal would rise breast high to inspect my fur cap. Presently a whale spouted, and off he went.

"The decks are clear! the barrels stowed away below, the fore-peak restored, the old bunks reoccupied, and my mess-mates snoozing away as in old times, a fire burning in the stove, and lard lamps flaming away vigorously upon my paper. Daylight still finds its way down the hatch, although it is eleven o'clock.

"_April_ 24, Thursday. The snow falls in loose, flaky, home feathers. The decks are wet, and the misty air has the peculiar ground-glass translucency which I noticed last summer. When I came up before breakfast to look around, the thermometer gave +32°, the familiar temperature of old times: to me it was warm and sultry.

"The season of summer, if not now upon us, is close at hand. It seems but yesterday that we hailed the dawning day and burned our fingers in the frozen mercury; now we have a summer snow-storm at 32°.

"This little table will show you how stealthily and how rapidly summer has trampled down winter:

Mean temperature for week ending March 14th,
-23° 94'.

Mean temperature for week ending March 21st,
-9° 07'; gain, 14° 87'.

Mean temperature for week ending March 28th,
-16° 90'; loss, 7° 83'.

Mean temperature for week ending April 4th,
-4° 31'; gain, 12° 39'.

Mean temperature for week ending April 11th,
+8° 59'; gain, 12° 90'.

Mean temperature for week ending April 18th,
+9° 55'; gain, 0° 55'.

Mean temperature for five days ending April 23d,
+14° 56'; gain, 5° 01'.

"Changes show themselves in the configuration of the snow surfaces. The hummocks seem already to have diminished by evaporation. They are less angular, and blend in rounder hues with the snow drifts. Night has gone. I see still at midnight the circumpolar stars, and Jupiter, in his splendor, on the eastern sky; but I can read at midnight.

"_April_ 25, Friday. Walked to open water to the northeast. The snow is melted through the crust. I sink up to my knees. Saw the tracks of a fox, very recent. The little fellow had come from the direction of the poor wounded bear, now cut off from us by the broken ice, swimming the lead at its narrowest crossing, some fifteen paces. So long as his patron could have supplied him with food, the little parasite would not have left him. It may be that the bear has perished from inability to hunt for both.

"Saw a right whale! Saw also a large flock of geese at 9 A.M., winging their way to the northward, and flying very low. They were so irregular in their order of flight, that I would have taken them for ducks--the _Somateria_; but my mess-mates say geese.

"_April_ 26, Saturday. One of the changes which we must expect has brought back to us comparative winter. Yesterday gave us a noonday and morning temperature of +28°. It is now (10 P.M.) -9°. It was -7° at noonday, with a bright, clear sunshine. The change is due to a northerly wind. It has blown steadily throughout the day from northwest by north. We hope much from it in the way of drift. Our latitude was 69° 40' 42" N.; our longitude, 63° 08' 46" W.

"The wind change has given us no new ruptures. Indeed, it seems to have shut up the environing 'leads' around us. This may be a good preface to a squeeze; for I can see no water from the mast-head.

"The stars at midnight remind me of our Lancaster Sound noondays. The peculiar zone of fairly blended light, stretching over an amplitude of some seventy degrees--the colors red, Indian red, Italian pink, with the yellows; and then a light cobalt, gradually deepening into intense indigo as it reaches the northern horizon.

"_April_ 27, Sunday. The cold increases, and our northwest wind continues. The day's observation gives us 69° 35' 50", so that we still go south encouragingly, though slowly. This big floe is so solid, that some of us are beginning to fear it may resist the pressure, and not break up in the bay; leaving us to the thaws of summer and the stormy winds of September before our imprisonment ceases. The apprehension has no mirth in it.

"Walked to the open water to the northward, nearly ahead of us. The leads were so frozen over as to bear me. Looking across the level, letting my eyes wander from tussock to tussock of entangled floe-ice, as they had grouped themselves in freezing, I heard the blowing of a narwhal, followed by the peculiar swash of squeezing ice. A short walk showed me some six or eight conical elevations, forced upward upon the recently-formed ice, evidently by a force protruding from beneath. While looking at these, the sounds, though seemingly further off, increased to such a degree that I was convinced the ice was in action, and started off to double a cape of hummocks and see the commotion. Our steward, Morton, a shrewd, observant fellow, who was with me, suddenly called out, 'Look here, sir--here!'

"Each of these little cones was steaming like the salices or mud-volcanoes of Mexico, the broken ice on top vibrating, and every now and then tumbling, as if by some pulsatory movement below. Presently, in one concerted diapason, a group of narwhals, imprisoned by the congelation of the opening,[I] spouted their release, scattering spray and snow in every direction. I was not more than three yards from the nearest cone; yet I could see nothing of the animal except this jet.

[I] I found afterward from the Danes that they assemble in this way when extensive areas are frozen. Mr. Moldrup, of Godhaven, mentions fifty being killed at one of these congregations.

"The noise was so great that I could hardly make the steward hear me. It had, moreover, more of voice mingled with its sibilant 'blow' than I had ever heard--a distinct and somewhat metallic tone, thrown out impulsively, and yet with the crescendo and diminuendo of an expiration. According to the views of some systematic naturalists, the cetacea have, strictly speaking, no voice. This opinion admits of much modification. The white whale in Wellington Sound whistled while submerged and swimming under our brig; and, in the present singular case, the ejaculatory character of the tone sounded like a gigantic bark.[J]

[J] On this occasion, I heard the white whale singing under water--a peculiar note between the whistle and the Tyrolean yodel. Our men compared it to the Jew's-harp. Once, off Cape James, it was so loud that we heard it in the cabin, as if proceeding from the cable-tier. I have often, in my walks over the ice-openings, been startled by the resemblance between the sudden spout of a near narwhal and the bark of an animal.

"_May_ 1, Thursday. A little before ten this morning, the sun showed almost half its disk above the snow horizon, with his usual appanage of pearly opals and mellowed fire displayed about the southern heavens. At noon I walked out in the full glare, twenty-five degrees above the freezing-point on my face, and about as many below it on my back--a May-day frolic in the snow! The crisp covering, over which I used to skim along a few weeks ago, broke through with me at every step. It was just strong enough to tantalize and deceive. Never, in the warmest days of summer harvest-time, have I felt the heat so much as on this Arctic May-day; and yet no life, no organization carried me back to the spring-time of reviving nature. Even the tinnitus of the idle ear, that inner droning that sings to you in the silent sunshine at home, was wanting. In fact, the silentness was so complete, and the reflection from the snow so excessive, though I had a green rag over my face, that when I got far away, and out of sight of every thing but the interminable ice, it made me feel as if the world I left you in and the world about me were not exactly parts of the same planet.

"And so I traveled back to my sick men. God bless us! here are old Blinn, and Carter, and Wilson, all on my list for fainting spells: the same scurvy syncope our officers complain of. Captain Griffin fainted dead away, and Lovell complains of strange feelings. We need fresh food sorely. I hardly think any organized expedition to these regions was ever so completely deprived of anti-scorbutic diet as we are at this time.

"Midnight. My old scurvy symptoms, it may be, that keep me from sleeping. But I write by the light of the sun; and it really seems to me that there is a something about this persistent day antagonistic to sleep. The idea thrust itself upon me last summer. Thinking the fact over afterward, I referred it to habit, acting unphilosophically, as it is apt to do; and concluded that my sleeplessness was not connected directly with the augmented or continued light. But this is not so. I neither get to sleep so easily nor sleep as long, nor, indeed, do I seem to need the same quantity of sleep as when we had the alternation of light and darkness. On the other hand, I think our long Arctic night solicited a more than common ration of the same restorative blessing, though my journal has shown you that our waking energies during that period were not so heavily taxed as to require more than their usual intermission."

The day after this entry superadded the visitation of snow blindness to our trials. Four of the party were attacked severely, myself among the rest; so severely, indeed, as to make it impossible for me to write, and, what was much more important in the estimation of our scurvy patients, impossible for me to hunt. The brief notes which were made in my journal by the kindness of a brother officer speak of our sensible approach toward a final disengagement from the ice-field. Though the winds were generally from the southwest, our drift tended very plainly to the south: in one day, we reduced our latitude eighteen miles, passing at the same time nearly a degree of longitude, twenty-two miles to the east. The ice, too, was becoming more infiltrated, and the heavy snow-banks that surrounded our vessel were saturated with water. Spring was doing its office.