Chapter XIX

"ON the 11th, I was well enough, or imprudent enough, to attempt a seal hunt. Our mean temperature had sunk to 19° 5\ and the snow-crust was strong enough to bear. A gale had swept away the loose, fleecy drifts of the fortnight before, exposing the familiar surface of the older snow. I walked over it as I did in April.

"Reaching the seat of the open water to the northward, I found it closed by young ice, an extensive surface frail and unsafe. About a quarter of a mile from the edge of the old floe, almost in the centre of this recent lead, was a seal. The temptations of the flesh were too much for me: I ventured the ice, crawled on my belly, and reached long-shot distance.

"The animal thus laboriously stalked was large; a hirsute, bearded fellow, with the true plantigrade countenance. All his senses were devoted to enjoyment: he wallowed in the sludge, stretched out in the sunshine, played with his flippers, lying on his back, much as a heavy horse does in a skin-loosening roll. I rose to fire--and down he went. An unseen hole had received him: a lesson for future occasions. This hole was critically circular, beveled from the under surface, and symmetrically embanked round with the pulpacious material which he had excavated from the ice.

"Crawling back less actively than I had approached, my carbine arm broke through, carrying my gun and it up to the shoulder. It was very well, all things considered, that my body did not follow; for I was on a very rotten shell, and nearly two miles from the brigs, alone.

"Wednesday, 12. For the last fortnight, our ice-saw, under Murdaugh's supervision, has been hard at work. To-day we have a trench opened to our gangway.

"The ice shows the advancing season. It is no longer splintery and quartz-like, spawling off under the axe in dangerous little chips; but sodden, infiltrated ice, such as we see in our ice-houses. The water has got into its centre, and the crowbars, after the sawing out, break it readily up for hauling upon the field. The process is this: First, we cut two parallel tracks, four feet asunder, through six and five feet ice, with a ten-foot saw; then lozenged diagonals; then straps (ropes) are passed around the fragments, and a block and line, _nautice_ jigger, or watch tackle, made fast to the bowsprit, hauls the lumps upon the floe, where they are broken up by the ice bars. A formidable barricade of dirty ice, about the size and shape of gneiss building stones, is already inclosing our vessel. Many a poor fellow has had an involuntary slide-bath into the freezing mixture alongside; but in most cases without unpleasant consequences."

I remember only one serious exception. It was that of our heroine of the Thespian corps, Jim Smith. The immediate result for him was an attack of scurvy, so marked, yet so blended with the active symptoms belonging to arthritic disease, as to incline me to an opinion for the time that there may be such a thing as acute scurvy, or a sudden inflammatory sthenic action, whose characteristics are scorbutic. He had immediately stitch, dyspnoea, pains in the back and joints, and in the alveolar and extensor muscles, just as in his previous attacks of scurvy, but without fever. The day after, he was so distressed by his stitch, that I feared pleuritis. On looking at his shins, I found large purpuric blotches, which were not there a week before. I commenced the anti-scorbutic tyranny at once; and the next morning his gums bled freely, his pains left him, and he took his place again at the ice-saw.

"Several laridæ flew about us: I heard them to-day for the second time--pleasant tones, with all their discord. Do you remember the skylark's song, 'a dropping from the sky,' in the 'Ancient Mariner'? I thought of it this morning when the gulls screeched over our motionless brig.

"_May_ 18, Sunday. First, of late, in my daily records is this glorious wind, still from the northwest, fresh and steady. It is, as is every thing else for that matter, a Godsend. To-day's observation places us but thirty-two miles from Cape Searle, and seventy from Cape Walsingham, the abutting gates of Davis' Straits, where the channel is at its narrowest, and where our imprisonment ought to end.

"This welcome wind-visitor is still freshening: it is not perpetrating, I hope, an extra brilliancy before its _congé_.

"I found to-day a rough caricature drawing by one of the men: some of the mess call it a portrait of myself. By-the-way, suppose I tell you of my latest rig? Here it is. A long musket on shoulder; a bear-knife in the leg of the left boot; a rim of wolf-skin around my head, leaving the bare scalp with its '_hairs_' open to the breeze; rough Guernsey frock, overlined by a red flannel shirt, in honor of the day on which thou shalt do no labor; legs in sailor pants of pilot cloth, slop-shop cut; feet in seal-hide socks or buskins, of Esquimaux fabric and Esquimaux smell; a pair of crimson woolen mittens, which commenced their career as a neck comforter; and a little green rag, the snow veil, fluttering over a weather-beaten face: place all this, for want of a better lay figure, on your brother of the Arctic squadron.

"With a delicacy which may possibly do me discredit, I have never before alluded to the garniture of my outer man. I may as well tell the truth at once. We are an uncouth, snobby, and withal, shabby-looking set of varlets. _L'illustre_ Bertrand would be a Beau Brummel alongside of us. We are shabby, because we have worn out all our flimsy wardrobes, and have of late resorted to domestic tailorization. We are snobby, because our advance in the new art does not yet extend to the picturesque or well-fitting. I wish some of my soda-water-in-the-morning club friends could see me perspiring over a pair of pants, dorcassing a defunct sock. We do our own sewing, clothing ourselves cap-à-pie; and it astonishes me, looking back upon my dark period of previous ignorance, to feel how much I have learned. I wonder whether your friend the Philadelphia D'Orsay knows how to adjust with a ruler and a lump of soap the seat of a pair of breeches?

"Why, I have even made discoveries in--I forget the Greek word for it--the art which made George the Fourth so famous. Thus a method, adopted by our mess, of cutting five pairs of stockings out of one hammock blanket--a thing hitherto deemed impossible--is altogether my own. In the abstract or speculative part of the profession, I claim to be the first who has reduced all vestiture to a primitive form--an integral particle, as it were. I can't dwell on this matter here: it might, perhaps, be out of place; perhaps, too, attributed in some degree to that personal vanity almost inseparable from invention. I will tell you, however, that this discovered type, this radical nucleus, is the 'bag.' Thus a bag, or a couple of parallelogramic planes sewed together, makes the covering of the trunk. Similar bags of scarcely varied proportion cover the arms; ditto the legs; ditto the hands; ditto the head: thus going on, bags, bags, bags, even to the fingers; a cytoblastic operation, having interesting analogies with the mycelium of the fungus or the saccine vegetation of the confervas.

"All this is a digression, perhaps; yet I am not the first traveler whose breeches have figured in his diary of wonders: you remember the geometrical artist of Laputa who re-enforced the wardrobe of Mr. Gulliver. But to return to less ambitious topics. The birds, in spite of the increasing wind, fly over in numbers, all seeking the mysterious north. What is there at this unreached pole to attract and sustain such hordes of migratory life? Since the day before yesterday, the 16th, we can not be on deck at any hour, night or day--they are one now--without seeing small bodies, rather groups than flocks, on their way to the unknown feeding or breeding grounds. Toward the west the field of a telescope is constantly crossed by these detachments. The ducks are now scarce: in fact, they have been few from the beginning. Geese are seen only in the forenoon and early morning. The guillemots, also, are not so numerous as they were two days ago; but from to-day we date the reappearance of the little auk. This delicious little pilgrim is now on his way to his far north breeding grounds. Toward the open lead the groups fly low, sometimes doubtless pausing to refresh. At the water's edge I shot five, the first game of the season; and most valuable they were to our scurvy men. If this snow blindness permits me, I hope to-morrow to prove myself a more lucky sportsman.

"_May_ 19, Monday. Jim Smith, little Jim Smith, reported 'Land.' We have become so accustomed to this great sameness of snow, that it was hard to realize at first the magnitude of our drift. Our last land was the spectral elevation upreared in the sunset sky of the 9th of February. The land itself must have been eighty miles off. Our drift, although now not absolutely fixed by observation, has probably carried us to within forty miles, perhaps thirty, of Cape Searle. Land it certainly is, shadowy, high, snow-covered, and strange. It is ninety-nine days since we looked at the refracted tops of the Lancaster Bay headlands, our last land.

"_May_ 20, Tuesday. So snow-blind that I can barely see to write. A gauzy film floats between me and every thing else. I have been walking twelve miles upon the ice. No sun, but a peculiar misty, opalescent glare. I bagged thirty-three auks; but my snow-blindness avenges them."

For some days after this entry my snow-blindness unfitted me for active duty. Several of the officers and men shared the visitation, Captain De Haven more severely than any of us. My next quotation from my journal dates of the 24th.

"_May_ 24, Saturday. The ship shows signs of change, grating a little in her icy cradle, and rising at least nine inches forward. The work of removing the ice goes on painfully, but constantly. The blocks are now hoisted with winch and capstan by a purchase from the fore-yard; the saw, of course, pioneering. The blocks when taken out resemble great break-water stones, measuring sometimes eight by six feet.

"Thus far, by persevering labor, we have cut a four-feet wide trench to our starboard gangway, a little vacant pool of six yards by three in our bows, and a second trench now reaching amidships of our fore-chains.

"The difference of level between the deck at our bows and stern is still five feet three inches. It is proposed to launch the brig, as it were, from her ice-ways. To this purpose a screw jack is to be applied aft, and strong purchases on the ice ahead. The experiment will take place this afternoon. We have now been five months and a half, since the seventh of December, living on an inclined plane of about one foot in sixteen.

"10 P.M. The effort failed, as no doubt it ought to have done: we must wait for the great break-up to give us an even keel. From the mast-head we can see encroachments all around. The plains, over which I chased the bear and shot at auks, are now water. The floe is reduced to its old winter dimensions, three miles in one diameter, five in the other. We have not yet reached the narrow passage; and the wind, now from the southward, seems to be holding us back. Strange as it sounds, we are in hopes of a break-up at Cape Walsingham.

"_May_ 25, Sunday Howling a perfect gale; drift impenetrable. By some providential interference the wind returned last night to its old quarter, the northwest, a direction corresponding with the trend of the shore. It is undoubtedly driving us fast to the southward, and is, of all quarters, that most favorable to a passage without disruption. Once past Cape Walsingham, the expansion of the bay is sudden and extensive. If, then, our floe maintains its integrity through the strait, the relief from pressure may allow us to continue our drifting journey. So at least we argue.

"And just so, it may be, others have argued before us about chances of escape that never came: there is a cycle even in the history of adventure. It makes me sad sometimes when I think of the fruitless labors of the men who in the very olden times harassed themselves with these perplexing seas. There have been Sir John Franklins before, and searchers too, who in searching shared the fate of those they sought after. It is good food for thought here, while I am of and among them, to recall the heart-burnings and the failures, the famishings and the freezings, the silent, unrecorded transits of 'y{e} Arctic voyageres.'

"Mount Raleigh, named by sturdy old John Davis 'a brave mount, the cliffes whereof were as orient as golde,' shows itself still, not so glittering as he saw it two hundred and sixty-five years ago, but a 'brave mount' notwithstanding. No Christian eyes have ever gazed in May time on its ice-defended slope, except our own. Yet there it stands, as imperishable as the name it bears.

"I could fill my journal with the little histories of this very shore. The Cape of God's Mercy is ahead of us to the west, as it was ahead of the man who named it. The Meta Incognita, further on, is still as unknown as in the days of Frobisher. We have passed, by the inevitable coercion of ice, from the highest regions of Arctic exploration, the lands of Parry, and Ross, and Franklin, to the lowest, the seats of the early search for Cathay, the lands of Cabot, and Davis, and Baffin, the graves of Cortereal, and Gilbert, and Hudson--all seekers after shadows. Men still seek Cathay."