Chapter XXIII

WE continued our progress through a labyrinth of ice, sometimes running into a berg, or grazing against its edge so close as to carry away a spar or stave a quarter-boat, but still making our way across to the Greenland shore. The sea was studded with low bergs and water-washed floes, wearing the fantastic forms which had surprised us the year before. Some were both complicated and graceful, supported generally by peduncular bases, which gave them a curious aspect of fragility. This was evidently due to the action of the waves at the water-line, aided by the warmth of the atmosphere.

If we suppose a nearly symmetrical lump of ice, floating with that stable equilibrium which belongs to its excessive submergence, the atmosphere, which has now a temperature as high as 64° in the sunshine, will gradually round off and crease the edges, and at the same time will melt the portions of the mass which are above water. Its buoyancy increasing as its weight is reduced, the berg will now rise slowly, presenting a succession of new surfaces to the abrasion of the waves; and thus we shall have the familiar mushroom or fungoid appearance which is shown in many of the plates illustrating peculiar berg forms.

The process continuing under all the modifications of wave action, while the opposing face of the berg varies with every change of its gravitating centre, we may have eccentric resemblances to animated things sculptured in the ice, and at other times forms of classic symmetry, or the frets and garniture of mediæval art.

Our sail through this fanciful archipelago was a most uncomfortable one. Our stoves had been taken down; and the scurvy, exaggerated by the increased exposure to damp, began again to bear hard upon us. We devoured eagerly the seal, of which, by good fortune, we had several re-enforcements; but as the excitements of peril declined, the energies of the men seemed to relax more and more; and I had reason to fear that we should not be able to resume our search effectively, until the health of our party had undergone a tedious renovation.

It had been determined by our commander that we should refresh at Whale Fish Islands, and then hasten back to Melville Bay, the North Water, Lancaster Sound, and Wellington Channel; and certainly there was no one on board who did not enter heart and soul into the scheme. It was in pursuance of it that we were now bending our course to the east.

The circumstances that surrounded us, the daily incidents, our destination and purpose, were the same as when approaching the Sukkertoppen a year before. There were the same majestic fleets of bergs, the same legions of birds of the same varieties, the same anxious look-out, and rapid conning, and fearless encounter of ice-fields. Every thing was unchanged, except the glowing confidence of young health at the outset of adventure. We had taken our seasoning: the experience of a winter's drift had quieted some of our enthusiasm. But we felt, as veterans at the close of a campaign, that with recruited strength we should be better fitted for the service than ever. All, therefore, looked at the well-remembered cliffs, that hung over Kronprinsen, with the sentiment of men approaching home for the time, and its needed welcomes.

We reached them on the 16th. Mr. Murdaugh, and myself, and four men, and three bottles of rum, were dispatched to communicate with the shore. As we rowed in to the landing-place, the great dikes of injected syenite stood out red and warm against the cold gray gneiss, and the moss gullies met us like familiar grass-plots. Esquimaux crowded the rocks, and dogs barked, and children yelled. A few lusty pulls, and after nine months of drift, and toil, and scurvy, we were once more on terra firma.

God forgive me the revulsion of unthankfulness! I ought to have dilated with gratitude for my lot.

Winter had been severe. The season lagged. The birds had not yet begun to breed. Faces were worn, and forms bent. Every body was coughing. In one hut, a summer lodge of reindeer and seal skins, was a dead child. It was many months since I had looked at a corpse. The poor little thing had been for once washed clean, and looked cheerful. The father leaned over it weeping, for it was a boy; and two little sisters were making lamentation in a most natural and savage way.

I gave the corpse a string of blue beads, and bought a pair of seal-skin boots for twenty-five cents; and we rowed back to the brig. In a very little while we were under sail for Godhaven.

We were but five days recruiting at Godhaven. It was a shorter stay than we had expected; but we were all of us too anxious to regain the searching ground to complain. We made the most of it, of course. We ate inordinately of eider, and codfish, and seal, to say nothing of a hideous-looking toad fish, a _Lepodogaster_, that insisted on patronizing our pork-baited lines; chewed bitter herbs, too, of every sort we could get; drank largely of the smallest of small-beer; and danced with the natives, teaching them the polka, and learning the pee-oo-too-ka in return. But on the 22d, by six o'clock in the morning, we were working our way again to the north.

We passed the hills of Disco in review, with their terraced summits, simulating the Ghauts of Hindostan; the green-stone cliffs round Omenak's Fiord, the great dockyard of bergs; and Cape Cranstoun, around which they were clustered like a fleet waiting for convoy. They were of majestic proportions; and as we wound our way tortuously among them, one after another would come into the field of view, like a temple set to be the terminus of a vista. At one time we had the whole Acropolis looking down upon us in silver; at another, our Philadelphia copy of the Parthenon, the monumental Bank of the United States, stood out alone. Then, again, some venerable cathedral, with its deep vaults and hoary belfries, would spread itself across the sky; or perhaps some wild combination of architectural impossibilities.

We moved so slowly that I had time to sketch several of these dreamy fabrics. The one which is engraved on the opposite page was an irregular quadrangle, projected at the extremity of a series of ice-structures, like the promontory that ends an isthmus: it was crowned with ramparts turreted by fractures; and at the water-line a great barreled arch went back into a cavern, that might have fabled as the haunt of sea-kings or smugglers. Another, much smaller, but still of magnificent size, had been excavated by the waves into a deep grotto; and the light reflected from the bay against its transparent sides and roofs colored them with a blue too superb for imitation by the brush or pencil.

In the morning of the 24th we made the pack; more to the south, therefore, than last year. It appeared at first like a firm neck, extending out among heavy bergs well into Haroë Island; and remembering our last year's experience, we moved cautiously. But after a while, our captain, now perhaps the best ice-master afloat, determined on boring. The dolphin-striker was triced up, the boats were taken on board, and the old sounds of conning the helm began again. This time we were lucky. In four hours we were through the tongue of the pack, and out in nearly an open sea.

We did not move long, however, before the navigation became embarrassed. The ice between Cape Lawson and Storoë was too compact to be wedged aside; and after some rude encounters with the floes, and a narrow escape from a reef of rocks which Captain Graah's charts do not mention, we found ourselves, on the 25th, nearly embayed by the noble headlands off Ovinde Oerme. The ice, in a horseshoe curve, completely shut us in to the north, and the tongue of the pack we had come through lay between us and the sea. The wind had left us. We were drifting listlessly in a glassy sea that reflected the green-stone terraces and strange pyramidal masses of its romantic shores.

We amused ourselves killing seals. There must have been hundreds of them of all varieties playing about us. Generally they were to be seen paddling about alone, but sometimes in groups, like a party of school-boys frolicking in the Schuylkill. One of their favorite sports was "treading water," rising breast-high, keeping up a boisterous, indefatigable splashing, and stretching out their necks, as if to pry into the condition of things aboard ship. We compared their behavior to that of the timorous but curious natives, when the Europeans first met them in the waters of America; and in our intercourse with them, conformed accurately to the Spanish precedent.

Occasionally only we obeyed our "manifest destiny" with reluctance. Some of the younger of these poor sea-dogs had overmuch of the honest expression of their land brethren: the truncation of the muzzle in others, with no external ear showing behind it, set their faces in almost perfect and human-like oval. When one of these would come up out of the water near us, and, raising his head and shoulders, that stooped like those of a hooded Esquimaux, gaze steadily at us with his liquid eye, then diving, come up a little nearer and stare again; so drawing nearer and nearer, diving and rising alternately, till he came within musket range; it sometimes went hard to salute him with a bullet.

We shot, among others, a very large beast (_P. barbata_), lying upon a floating piece of ice. The captain's ball went through his heart; and my own, equally deadly, within a few inches of it; but the unwieldy creature continued struggling to reach the water, until a shot from Mr. Lovell, close upon him, drove a musket-ball through his head. He measured eight feet from tip to tip, five feet eleven inches in his greatest circumference, and five feet six inches in girth behind the fore-flippers. His carcass was a shapeless cylinder, terminating in an awkward knob to represent the head.

We lost two seals by sinking. Hitherto, when killed on the instant by perforation of the brain or spinal marrow, they had invariably floated. But the rule does not hold always. I wounded one so as to carry away the crown of his skull, and Captain De Haven gave him a second shot from within a few yards directly through his head, and yet we lost him. As the balls struck, he discharged, almost explosively, a quantity of air, and went down like a loon. The whalers say, wound your seals; but my own experience is, that, if they are fat, it is best to kill them at once. A Danish boy, who had joined us by stealth at Disco, told us that the animal's sinking was a proof that he had no blubber. He was probably right: we certainly did not secure any that were in good condition.

The next day gave us excitement of a different sort. We had been lying in the young ice-field, close under the southeast shore of Storoë, with the current setting strong toward it, and a grim array of bergs to the west of us. It was an ugly position; but we were fairly entangled, and there was no escape. Early in the morning, the wind freshened, and blew in toward the island; the ice piling against the rocky precipice under our lee, and opening in broken masses to windward. The _Rescue_ managed to make fast to a crag between us and the shore, but our ice-anchors missed. At four in the afternoon we were within rifle-shot of the land, and still drifting; the wind a gale, and the sea-swell coming in heavily.

We stopped, of course, or there would have been an end of my journal. But for some hours things looked squally enough. Our soundings had become small by degrees and beautifully less, till they were down to thirteen feet; and the black wall looked so near that you could have hit it with a filbert. It could not have been fifty yards off, when we brought up on some grounded floe-pieces. By eleven, our warps had headed us to windward, and our bow was off shore. For once, at least, we owed our safety to the ice.

The _Rescue_ followed a few hours after; and we took the direction of the pack together to the N.N.W. By the next day at noon we were within twenty-three miles of Uppernavik, but a belt of ice lay between. We anchored to a berg, and for two days waited patiently for an opening.

My mess-mates in the mean time went off on a hunt to a flat, rocky ledge, that showed itself inshore, and I amused myself with a tramp on the ice-island to which we were fast. I had for company a noble Esquimaux slut, that Governor Moldrup had enabled me to get at Disco, and a dog of the same breed belonging to Mr. Lovell. I do not know what has become of Hosky, as Mr. Lovell named his favorite; but my poor Disco fell a martyr to our Philadelphia climate and his Arctic costume together, some three days after we got home.

I had a quiet day's walk. My companions rambled with evident glee over the peaks and ravines of their familiar element. It was a magnificent pile of frost-work. But these crystal palaces of the ice, like every thing else under this northern sky, deceive one strangely in their apparent size. We thought, when we anchored, that the berg was a small one; yet we coursed more than the third of a mile in almost a direct line before we reached its further edge.

The pure surfaces which we traveled over were studded with irregular blocks of ice, evidently once detached and cemented on again. They varied in size and shape from a boy's playing-marble to a haystack; and by their interesting distribution suggested most obtrusively the question of almost every Arctic traveler, how such fragments find their place on the plateau surfaces of the icebergs. I had answered the question for myself before; but I was glad to be consumed by the observations I made in the course of this excursion. When first the mass separates from the land-berg or glacier, it is accompanied by a large quantity of disengaged fragments, with all varieties of detritus; and during the alternate risings and sinkings that follow the fall into the sea, a great deal of this is caught by the emerging surface of the berg, and adheres to it. I noticed valleys, where the subsequent roll had rounded the masses, and grouped them into something resembling bowlder-drift. I had seen similar valleys in some of the large bergs of Duneira Bay, supplying a bed for temporary water-streams, in which the bowlders were beautifully rounded, and arranged in true moraine fashion.

Off Storoë, a white fox (_C. lagopus_) came to us on the loose ice: his legs and the tip of his tail were black. He was the first we had seen on the Greenland coast.

He was followed the next day by a party of Esquimaux, who visited us from Pröven, dragging their kayacks and themselves over seven miles of the pack, and then paddling merrily on board. For two glasses of rum and a sorry ration of salt-pork, they kept turning somersets by the dozen, making their egg-shell skiffs revolve sideways by a touch of the paddle, and hardly disappearing under the water before they were heads up again, and at the gangway to swallow their reward.

The inshore ice opened on the thirtieth, and toward evening we left the hospitable moorage of our iceberg, and made for the low, rounded rocks, which the Hosky pointed out to us as the seat of the settlement. The boats were out to tow us clear of the floating rubbish, as the light and variable winds made their help necessary, and we were slowly approaching our anchorage, when a rough yawl boarded us. She brought a pleasant company, Unas the schoolmaster and parish priest, Louisa his sister, the gentle Amalia, Louisa's cousin, and some others of humbler note.

The baptismal waters had but superficially regenerated these savages: their deportment, at least, did not conform to our nicest canons. For the first five minutes, to be sure, the ladies kept their faces close covered with their hands, only withdrawing them to blow their noses, which they did in the most primitive and picturesque manner. But their modesty thus assured, they felt that it needed no further illustration. They volunteered a dance, avowed to us confidentially that they had educated tastes--Amalia that she smoked, Louisa that she tolerated the more enlivening liquids, and both that their exercise in the open air had made a slight refection altogether acceptable. Hospitality is the virtue of these wild regions: our hard tack, and cranberries, and rum were in requisition at once.

It is not for the host to tell tales of his after-dinner company. But the truth of history may be satisfied without an intimation that our guests paid niggard honors to the jolly god of a milder clime. The veriest prince, of bottle memories, would not have quarreled with their heel-taps. * * *

We were inside the rocky islands of Pröven harbor as our watches told us that another day had begun. The time was come for parting. The ladies shed a few kindly tears as we handed them to the stern-seats: their learned kinsman took a recumbent position below the thwarts, which favored a continuance of his nap; and the rest of the party were bestowed with seaman-like address--all but one unfortunate gentleman, who, having protracted his festive devotions longer than usual, had resolved not to "go home till morning."

The case was a difficult one; but there was no help for it. As the sailors passed him to the bottom of the boat, and again out upon the beach, he made the air vocal with his indignant outcries. The dogs--I have told you of the dogs of these settlements, how they welcomed our first arrival--joined their music with his. The Prövenese came chattering out into the cold, like chickens startled from their roost. The governor was roused by the uproar. And in the midst of it all, our little weather-beaten flotilla ran up the first American flag that had been seen in the port of Pröven.