Chapter XXI

A. Advance. B B. Shorter diameter, 314 miles. R. Rescue. CC. Longer diameter, 51/2 miles. Distance between the vessels, 500 yards.]

"_JUNE_ 1. June opens on us warm. Our mean temperature to-day has been above the freezing point, 34°; our lowest only 29°; and at 11 this morning it rose to 40°. The snow-birds increase in numbers and in confidence. It is delightful to hear their sweet jargon. They alight on the decks, and come unhesitatingly to our very feet. These dear little Fringillides have evidently never visited Christian lands.

"_June_ 3. The day misty and obscure: no land in sight from aloft; and no change apparent in the floe. But we notice a distinct undulation in the ice trenches alongside, caused probably by some propagated swell.

"I walked out at night between 9 and 11 o'clock in search of open water. We had the full light of day, but without its oppressive glare. The thawed condition of the marginal ice made the walk difficult, and forced us at last to give it up. But, climbing to the top of a hummock, we could see the bay rolling its almost summer waves close under our view. It was a grand sight, but more saddening than grand. It seems like our cup of Tantalus; we are never to reach it. And while we are floating close upon it, the season is advancing; and if we are ever to aid our brothers in the search, we should even now be hurrying back.

"_June_ 4. Yesterday over again. But the water is coming nearer us. As we stand on deck, we can see the black and open channel-way on every side of us, except off our port quarter: it is useless to talk of points of the compass; our floe rotates so constantly from right to left, as to make them useless in description. To port, the extent of ice baffles the eye, even from aloft; it must, however, be a mere isthmus.

"_June_ 5, Thursday. We notice again this morning the movement in the trench alongside. The floating scum of rubbish advances and recedes with a regularity that can only be due to some equable undulation from without to the north. We continue perched up, just as we were after our great lift of last December. A more careful measurement than we had made before, gave us yesterday, between our height aft and depression forward, a difference of level of 6 feet 4 inches. This inclination tells in a length of 83 feet--about one in thirteen.

"P.M. The break-up at last! a little after five this afternoon, Mr. Griffin left us for the _Rescue_, after making a short visit. He had hardly gone before I heard a hail and its answer, both of them in a tone of more excitement than we had been used to for some time past; and the next moment, the cry, 'Ice cracking ahead!'

"Murdaugh and myself reached the deck just in time to see De Haven crossing our gangway. We followed. Imagine our feelings when, midway between the two vessels, we saw Griffin with the ice separating before him, and at the same instant found a crack tracing its way between us, and the water spinning up to the surface. 'Stick by the floe. Good-by! What news for home?' said he. One jump across the chasm, a hearty God-bless-you shake of the hand, a long jump back, and a little river divided our party.

"Griffin made his way along one fissure and over another. We followed a lead that was open to our starboard beam, each man for himself. In half a minute or less came the outcry, 'She's breaking out: all hands aboard!' and within ten minutes from Griffin's first hail, while we were yet scrambling into our little Ark of Refuge, the whole area about us was divided by irregular chasms in every direction.

A. Advance. D. Floe adhering to the Advance. R. Rescue. C. Path between brigs before break-up. H H. Hummocks.]

"All this was at half past five. At six I took a bird's-eye sketch from aloft. Many of the fissures were already some twenty paces across. Conflicting forces were at work every where; one round-house moving here, another in an opposite direction, the two vessels parting company. Since the night of our Lancaster Sound commotion, months ago, the _Rescue_ had not changed her bearing: she was already on our port-beam. Every thing was changed.

"Our brig, however, had not yet found an even keel. The enormous masses of ice, thrust under her stern by the action of repeated pressures, had glued themselves together so completely, that we remained cradled in a mass of ice exceeding twenty-five feet in solid depth. Many of these tables were liberated by the swell, and rose majestically from their recesses, striking the ship, and then escaping above the surface for a moment, with a sudden vault.

"To add to the novelty of our situation, two cracks coming together obliquely, met a few yards astern of us, cleaving through the heavy ice, and leaving us attached to a triangular fragment of 14 by 22 paces. This berg-like fragment, reduced as it was, continued its close adhesion. Its buoyancy was so great, that it acted like a camel, retaining the brig's stern high in the air, her bows thrown down toward the water. We are so at this moment, 10 P.M."

All hands were in the mean time actively at work. The floe had been to us terra firma so long that we had applied it to all the purposes of land. Clothes and clothes' lines, sledges, preserved meats, kindling wood and planking, were now all bundled on board. The artificial horizon, which had stood for eight months upon a little ice-pedestal, was barely saved; and I had to work hard to get one of my few remaining thermometers from a neighboring hummock.

The cause of this sudden disruption--I mean the immediate cause, for the summer influences had prepared the floe for disintegration--was evidently the sea-swell setting from the southeast. This swell had given us minor manifestations of its existence as far back as the 1st of June. Whether it was increased without, or our floe made more accessible to it by the drifting away of other and protecting floes, I can not say. This, however, was clear, that the great undulations propagated by wave action caused our disruption. The proof of this I shall not forget.

Standing on our little deck, and looking out on the floe, we had the strange spectacle of an undulating solidity, a propagated wave borne in swell-like ridges, as if our ice was a carpet shaken by Titans. I can not convey the effect of this sublime spectacle. The ice, broken into polyhedric masses, gave at a few hundred yards no indications to the eye of the lines of separation; besides which, the infiltration of salt water had no doubt increased the plasticity of the material. Imagine, then, this apparently solid surface, by long association as unyielding to us as the shore, taking suddenly upon itself the functions of fluidity, another condition of matter. It absolutely produced something like the nausea of sea-sickness to see the swell of the ice, rising, and falling, and bending, transmitting with pliant facility the advancing wave.

A hummock hill, about midway between us and the _Rescue_, gave me an opportunity of measuring rudely the height of the swell. It rose till it covered her quarter boat; sinking again till I could see the side of the brig down to her water-line, an interval of five feet at least.

"As we walk along the edge of the open fissures, we see a wonderful variety in the thickness of the ice. Our apparently level surface is, in fact, a mosaic work of ices, frozen at separate periods, and tesselated by the several changes or disruptions which we have undergone. Thus I can see the tables under our stern extending down at least twenty-five feet: adjoining this is ice of four feet; next comes a field of six feet; and then hummock ridges, with tables choked below, so as to give an apparent depth of twenty.

"The 'calves' also, of which a great many have now risen to the surface, are worthy of note. These singular masses are evidently fragments of tables, of every degree of thickness, which have been forced down by pressure, and afterward, by some change in the temperature of the water, or by wave and tidal actions, have been liberated again from the floe, and find their way upward wherever an opening permits. We saw them honeycombed and cellular, water-sodden and in rounded bowlders, rising from the depths of the sea. Their density, so near that of the liquid in which they were submerged, made this rise slow and impressive. We could see them many fathoms below, voyaging again to the upper world. Once between the gaping edges of the lead, they effectually prevent the closing. They are about us in every direction, interposed between the fields.

"The appendage which sustains our brig has a good deal of this character. I will try to make an exact drawing of it as a curiosity, if it hangs on to us much longer. Its buoyancy indicates great submerged mass. A strong cable and ice anchor have been carried to a floe on our starboard bow, and the swell drives it upon us like a great battering-ram. This ingenious method of pounding us out of our tenacious cradle subjects us to a regular succession of heavy shocks, which would startle a man not used to ice navigation. At the time I write, 11 P.M., we have been nearly three hours subjected to this banging without any apparent impression. To-morrow we will, if not liberated, apply the saw; and then again to the warps!

"11:20 P.M. In the midst of fragments, few more than a hundred yards in length, nearly all much smaller. Between them are zigzag leads of open water. Astern of us is an expansion of some fifty yards across; ahead, a winding creek, wider than our brig. Thus closes the day.

"One thing more: a thought of gratitude before I turn in. This journal shows that I have been in the daily habit of taking long, solitary walks upon the ice, miles from the ship. Suppose this rupture to have come entirely without forewarning! I had greased my boots for a walk a few hours before the change, and only postponed it because I happened to get absorbed in a book."