Chapter XX

"THE storm broke in the early morning hours. We have drifted more than sixteen miles since Saturday. The true bearing of the prominent cape we supposed to be Cape Walsingham was found by solar distance to be S. 63° W.; while our observed position, by meridian altitude and chronometers, placed us but four miles north of Exeter Bay. Either, then, the protruding cape is not Walsingham, or our chronometers are at fault. This latter is probably the case; for if the coast line be correctly laid down on the charts, the true bearing cited above, projected from our present parallel of latitude, would place us thirty-six miles from the cape. More likely this than so near Exeter.

"Our latitude is about 66° 51', a very few miles north of the projecting headland, the western Gades of our strait. The character of the land is rugged and inhospitable. Ridges, offsetting from the higher range, project in spurs laterally, creviced and water-worn, but to seaward escarped and bluff. Some of these are mural and precipitous, of commanding height. The main range does not retire very far from the sea; it seems to follow the trend of the peninsula, and most probably on the Greenland shore is but the abutment of a plateau. Its culminating points are not numerous: the highest. Mount Raleigh, is, by my vague estimate, about fifteen hundred feet high.

"_May_ 27. The land is very near to the eye; but in these regions we have learned to distrust ocular measurements of distance. Though we see every wrinkle, even to the crows' feet, on the cheeks of Mount Raleigh, I remember last year, on the west coast of Greenland, we saw almost under our nose land that was thirty-five miles off. A party from the _Rescue_ measured a base upon the ice to-day, and attempted trigonometrical measurements with sextant angles. They make Cape Walsingham seven miles distant, and the height of the peak at the cape fifteen hundred feet. Our observation places us in latitude 66° 42' W; our longitude by time sights, at 5h. 43m. P.M., was 60° 54'. According to the Admiralty chart, this plants us high and dry among the mountains of Cape Walsingham.

"It is evident that our rate of drift has increased. The northwest winds carried us forward eight miles a day while near the strait--a speed only equaled in a few of the early days of our escape from Lancaster Sound. What has become of all the ice that used to be intervening between us and the shore? At one time we had a distance of ninety miles: we are now close upon the coast. What has become of it? If it moves at the same rate as we do, why have we no squeezing and commotion at this narrow strait? Can it be that the ice to the westward of us has been more or less fixed to the land floe, and that we have been drifting down in a race-course, as it were, an ice-river whose banks were this same shore ice? Or is it, as Murdaugh suggests, that the inshore currents, more rapid, have carried down the inshore ice before us, thus widening the pathway for us? It is certainly very puzzling to find ourselves, at the narrowest passage, close into the land; and no commotion, no disturbance. On the contrary, from the mast-head abundant open water meets the eye; and could we escape from our imprisoning, but--thankfully I say it--protecting floe, we might soon be moving in open seas.

"_May_ 28, Wednesday. The fact of the day is the rotation of our floe. In spite of its irregular shape, it has rotated a complete circle within the past twenty-four hours. It is still turning at the same rate, wheeling us down along the inshore fields. The _Rescue_, early this morning, was between us and the land: the evening before, the same land was astern of us. Strange that no rupture takes place!

"_May_ 29, Thursday. I have just been witnessing one of the oddest of Arctic freaks. We were all of us engaged in tracing out the rugged indentations on Mount Raleigh, as the floe was rolling our vessels slowly along past Cape Walsingham, when, at five o'clock in the afternoon--the thermometer at 27°, the barometer at 30.31, and the atmosphere of the usual pearly opalescence--the captain, sweeping shoreward with his glass, saw a large pyramidal hummock, with a well-defined figure projecting in front of it, evidently animated and moving. Murdaugh, looking afterward, declared it 'a man.' I saw it next, a large human figure, covered with a cloak, and motionless. Murdaugh took the glass again, and holding it to his eye, suddenly exclaimed, 'It moves:' 'it spreads out its arms;' 'it is a gigantic bird!'

"The hummock was within a mile of us. The words were hardly uttered before the object had disappeared, and the white snow was without a speck. A discussion followed. The size made us at once reject the bird idea: the shape, too, was that of a cloak-covered man; the motion, as if he had opened his mantle-covered arms. Convinced that it was a human being, an Esquimaux astray upon the ice, Murdaugh and myself started off, nearing the hummock with hearts full of expectation. The traces on the soft snow would soon solve the mystery, and remove our only doubt, whether the 'Rescues' might not be playing us a trick.

"Whatever it was, it either did not perceive us approaching, or was willing to avoid us; for it kept itself hidden behind a crag. Reaching, however, the spot where it had stood, we found traces, coprolitic and recent, of a bird; footprints, as a learned professor would have said, of certain familiar animal processes, exaggerated and dignified by those of refraction.

"On returning to the brig, the watchers told us that we had been ourselves curiously distorted; and that, when perched on the little icy crag we had gone to scrutinize, we lengthened vertically into gigantic forms. The position of the bird, probably a glaucous gull, had been breast toward the brig: a vertical enlargement, with the white body and moving wings, explained the phenomenon.

"The 'Rescues' had a very large bear hovering around them all this morning. At one P.M. he came within reach of a carefully-prepared ambush, receiving four out of a half dozen balls, a number soon increased to nine. You may have some idea of the superb tenacity of life of this beast, when I tell you that he ran, thus perforated, with his skull broken and his shoulder shivered. He even attempted a charge, uttering a hissing sound, ejaculated by sudden impulse, like the 'blowing of a whale,' to use Captain Griffin's comparison. He measured eight feet five inches, only three inches less than my own big trophy, which, with one exception, is the largest recorded in the stories of the Polar American hunt. What a glorious feed for the scurvy-stricken ships!

"To-day, for the first time, we had a tide, made evident by the changing phases of the shore. We made southing in the forenoon: now, at half past eight P.M., the alignment of the hills shows a northward drift. The ice is unchanged: our floe is rotating from west to south, against the sun, but not equably. We crossed the Arctic circle at some unknown hour this forenoon. To the eye every thing is as before; yet it cheats one into pleasant thoughts. I do not wish to see a midnight sun again.

"_May_ 30. The seal are out upon the ice, one of the most certain signs of summer. They are few In number, and very cautious. We notice that they invariably select an open floe for their hole, and that they never leave it more than a few lengths. Their alertness is probably due to their vigilant enemy, the bear. Sometimes you will see them frolicking together like a parcel of swimming school-boys; sometimes they are solitary, but keenly alive always to the enjoyment of the sunshine. I have often crawled within fair eye-shot, and, seated behind a concealing lump of ice, watched their movements.

"The first act of a seal, after emerging, is a careful survey of his limited horizon. For this purpose he rises on his fore flippers, and stretches his neck in a manner almost dog-like. This maneuver, even during apparently complete silence, is repeated every few minutes. He next commences with his hind or horizontal flippers and tail a most singular movement, allied to sweeping; brushing nervously, as if either to rub something from himself or from beneath him. Then comes a complete series of attitudes, stretching, collapsing, curling, wagging; then a luxurious, basking rest, with his face toward the sun and his tail to his hole. Presently he waddles off about two of his own awkward lengths from his retreat, and begins to roll over and over, pawing on the most ludicrous manner into the empty air, stretching and rubbing his glossy hide like a horse. He then recommences his vigil, basking in the sun with uneasy alertness for hours. At the slightest advance, up goes the prying head. One searching glance; and, wheeling on his tail as on a pivot, he is at his hole, and descends head foremost.

"I have watched so many without success, that to-night I determined to try the Esquimaux plan--patience and a snow-screen. This latter, the easier portion of the formula, I have just returned from completing; it was a mile's walk and an hour's snow-shoveling. The other, the patience, I attempt to-morrow, 'squat like a toad' on the ice for an unknown series of hours, with the sun blistering my nose, and blinking my eyes the while; a sort of sport so much like fishing, that it ought to be reserved for the Piscators of our Schuylkill Club.

"The walk over the snow to-night was very delightful. The opalescence, so painful to the eyes, had given place to a clear atmosphere; and the low sun was full of rich coloring. Land, too, that pleasing representative of the world we are cut off from, was refracted into grotesque knolls and long spires.

"The surface of the floes shows more and more the thawing influence of our sun, now half as high at meridian as in the torrid zone! The immediate surface to-day was often entire, though we plunged almost knee-deep in water below it. This you will easily understand when I tell you that the thermometer in the sun gave, for four successive hours to-day, a mean of nearly 80°. The surface thaw percolates through the loosely-compacted snow, and, forming a pasty substratum, is protected from re-freezing by the very snow through which it has descended. Our mean temperature of late has varied but little between 25° and 27° for any twenty-four hours.

"The infiltration of saline water through the ice assists the process of disintegration. The water formed by surface or sun thaw is, by the peculiar endosmitic action which I believe I have mentioned elsewhere, at once rendered salt, as was evident from Baumé's hydrometers and the test of the nitrate of silver. The surface crust bore me readily this evening at a temperature of 21° and 19°, giving no evidences of thaw. Beneath, for two inches, it was crisp and fresh. As I tried it lower, cutting carefully with my bear-knife, it became spongy and brackish; at eight inches markedly so; and at and below twelve, salt-water paste. On the other hand, all my observations, and I have made a great many, prove to me that cold, if intense enough, will, by its unaided action, independent of percolation, solar heat, depending position, or even depth of ice, produce from salt water a fresh, pure, and drinkable element.

"_May_ 31, Saturday. Walked to-night to the southward in search of seal: found the ice in motion, and had some difficulty in getting back. Wind from southward, and freshening, after a day of nearly perfect calm. The drift is somewhat to the eastward. The tables were heaping up actively, and the chewing process of demolition was in full energy among them. I have some hope that the action may extend itself to the core of our veteran floe-circle; but for the present it is confined to those peripheral adjuncts that have grown up around it in more recent freezings. A bird's-eye view from the mast-head, corrected by my walks, enables me to map out its present shape with considerable accuracy."

The "month of roses" closed on us without adventure; but its last ten days were full of monitory changes. The increased temperature had been visibly acting upon the ice, softening down its rough angles, and reducing bowlders to mere knobs on the surface; its weary monotony becoming every day only more disgusting. From the 1st to the 19th we had drifted almost a hundred miles, and had been expecting daily to make the eastern shore, when land was reported ahead. It proved to be the Highlands around Cape Searle, about thirty-five miles off.

It was the first inbreak upon our desolate circle of ice and water that we had experienced in ninety-nine days. The hundredth gave us a complete range of dreary, snow-covered hills; but to men whose last recollections of terra firma were connected with the refracted spectres that followed us eighty miles from shore, just one hundred days since, the solid certainty of mountain ridges was inexpressibly grateful. We studied their phases, as we drew nearer to them, with an intentness which would have been ludicrous under different circumstances: every cranny, every wrinkle spoke to us of movement, of a relation with the shut-out world. Our drift which brought us this blessed variety was favored by an unusual prevalence of northwesterly winds. We made in the thirty-one days of May one hundred and ninety odd miles to the southward and eastward.

For the last four days of the month we were at the margin of the Arctic circle, alternating within and without it. We passed to the south of it on the 30th, to recross it on the 31st with an accidental drift to the northward. We were experiencing at this time the rapid transition of seasons which characterizes this climate. The mean of the preceding month, April, had been +7° 96'; that of May was 20° 22'--a difference of nearly twelve degrees. At the same time, there was a chilliness about the weather, an uncomfortable rawness, both in April and May, which we had not known under the deep, perpetual frosts of winter. Cold there seemed a tangible, palpable something, which we could guard against or control by clothing and exercise; while warmth, as an opposite condition, was realizable and apparent. But here, in temperatures which at some hours were really oppressing, 60° to 80° in the sun, and with a Polar altitude of 45°, one half the equatorial maximum, we had the anomaly of absolute discomfort from cold. I know that hygrometric conditions and extreme daily fluctuations of the thermometer explain much of this; but it was impossible for me to avoid thinking at the time that there must also be a physiological cause more powerful than either.

I have alluded in my journal to the return of the birds. They were most welcome visitors. Crowds of little snow-birds (_Emberiza_ and _Plectrophanes_), with white breasts and jetty coverts, were attracted by the garbage which the thaw had reproduced around us, and twittered from pile to pile, chirping sweet music over their unexpected store-house. Some of the larger birds, too, were with us, returning to the mysterious North; the anatinæ, represented by the eiders (_Somateria_), followed by two of the uria genus, the grylle and the alke. We recognized the latter as our little fat friend of last summer, and gave him treatment accordingly. I shot thirty-three in one day, which my mess-mates made up to sixty.

The characteristic disease of May was the snow-blindness, severe and acute, leaving with some of us a disturbed, uncertain state of vision far from pleasing. The remedy most effective was darkness. A disk of hard wood, with a simple slit, admitting a narrow pencil of light, we found a better protection than the goggle or colored lens; the increased sensibility of the retina seeming to require a diminution of the quantity rather than a modification of the character of the ray. The slightest automatic movement varied, of course, the sentient surface affected by the impression.