Chapter III

"_AUGUST_ 28. Strange enough, during the night. Captain Austin, of her majesty's search squadron, with his flag-ship the _Resolute_, entered the same little indentation in which five of us were moored before. His steam-tender, the _Pioneer_, grounded off the point of Beechy Island, and is now in sight, canted over by the ice nearly to her beam ends. He has come to us not of design, but under the irresistible guidance of the ice. We are now seven vessels within hailing distance, not counting Captain Ommanney's, imbedded in the field to the westward.

"I called this morning on Sir John Ross, and had a long talk with him. He said that, as far back as 1847, anticipating the 'detention' of Sir John Franklin--I use his own word--he had volunteered his services for an expedition of retrieve, asking for the purpose four small vessels, something like our own; but no one listened to him. Volunteering again in 1848, he was told that his nephew's claim to the service had received a recognition; whereupon his own was withdrawn. 'I told Sir John,' said Ross, 'that my own experience in these seas proved that all these sounds and inlets may, by the caprice or even the routine of seasons, be closed so as to prevent any egress, and that a missing or shut-off party must have some means of falling back. It was thus I saved myself from the abandoned _Victory_ by a previously constructed house for wintering, and a boat for temporary refuge.' All this, he says, he pressed on Sir John Franklin before he set out, and he thinks that Melville Island is now the seat of such a house-asylum. 'For, depend upon it,' he added, 'Franklin will be expecting some of us to be following on his traces. Now, may it be that the party, whose winter quarters we have discovered, sent out only exploring detachments along Wellington Sound in the spring, and then, when themselves released, continued on to the west, by Cape Hotham and Barrow's Straits?' I have given this extract from my journal, though the theory it suggests has since been disproved by Lieutenant M'Clintock, because the tone and language of Sir John Ross may be regarded as characteristic of this manly old seaman.

"I next visited the _Resolute_. I shall not here say how their perfect organization and provision for winter contrasted with those of our own little expedition. I had to shake off a feeling almost of despondency when I saw how much better fitted they were to grapple with the grim enemy, Cold. Winter, if we may judge of it by the clothing and warming appliances of the British squadron, must be something beyond our power to cope with; for, in comparison with them, we have nothing, absolutely nothing.

"The officers received me, for I was alone, with the cordiality of recognized brotherhood. They are a gentlemanly, well-educated set of men, thoroughly up to the history of what has been done by others, and full of personal resource. Among them I was rejoiced to meet an old acquaintance. Lieutenant Brown, whose admirably artistic sketches I had seen in Haghe's lithotints, at Mr. Grinnell's, before leaving New York. When we were together last, it was among the tropical jungles of Luzon, surrounded by the palm, the cycas, and bamboo, in the glowing extreme of vegetable exuberance: here we are met once more, in the stinted region of lichen and mosses. He was then a junior, under Sir Edward Belcher: I--what I am yet. The lights and shadows of a naval life are nowhere better, and, alas! nowhere worse displayed, than in these remote accidental greetings.

"Returning, I paid a visit to Penny's vessels, and formed a very agreeable acquaintance with the medical officer. Dr. R. Anstruther Goodsir, a brother of assistant surgeon Goodsir of Franklin's flag-ship.

"In commemoration of the gathering of the searching squadrons within the little cove of Beechy Point, Commodore Austin has named it, very appropriately, Union Bay. It is here the _Mary_ is deposited as an asylum to fall back upon in case of disaster.

"The sun is traveling rapidly to the south, so that our recently glaring midnight is now a twilight gloom. The coloring over the hills at Point Innes this evening was sombre, but in deep reds; and the sky had an inhospitable coldness. It made me thoughtful to see the long shadows stretching out upon the snow toward the isthmus of the Graves.

"The wind is from the north and westward, and the ice is so driven in around us as to grate and groan against the sides of our little vessel. The masses, though small, are very thick, and by the surging of the sea have been rubbed as round as pebbles. They make an abominable noise."

The remaining days of August were not characterized by any incident of note. We had the same alternations of progress and retreat through the ice as before, and without sensibly advancing toward the western shore, which it was now our object to reach. The next extracts from my journal are of the date of September 3.

"After floating down, warping, to avoid the loose ice, we finally cast off in comparatively open water, and began beating toward Cape Spencer to get round the field. Once there, we got along finely, sinking the eastern shore by degrees, and nearing the undelineated coasts of Cornwallis Island. White whales, narwhals, seals--among them the Phoca leonina with his puffed cheeks--and two bears, were seen.

"The ice is tremendous, far ahead of anything we have met with. The thickness of the upraised tables is sometimes fourteen feet; and the hummocks are so ground and distorted by the rude attrition of the floes, that they rise up in cones like crushed sugar, some of them forty feet high. But that the queer life we are leading--a life of constant exposure and excitement, and one that seems more like the 'roughing it' of a land party than the life of shipboard--has inured us to the eccentric fancies of the ice, our position would be a sleepless one.

"_September_ 4, 2 A.M. Was awakened by Captain De Haven to look at the ice: an impressive sight. We were fast with three anchors to the main floe; and now, though the wind was still from the northward, and therefore in opposition to the drift, the floating masses under the action of the tide came with a westward trend directly past us. Fortunately, they were not borne down upon the vessels; but, as they went by in slow procession to the west, our sensations were, to say the least, sensations. It was very grand to see up-piled blocks twenty feet and more above our heads, and to wonder whether this fellow would strike our main-yard or clear our stern. Some of the moving hummocks were thirty feet high. They grazed us; but a little projection of the main field to windward shied them off.

"I killed to-day my first polar bear. We made the animal on a large floe to the northward while we were sighting the western shores of Wellington, and of course could not stop to shoot bears. But he took to the water ahead of us, and came so near that we fired at him from the bows of the vessel. Mr. Lovell and myself fired so simultaneously, that we had to weigh the ball to determine which had hit. My bullet struck exactly in the ear, the mark I had aimed at, for he had only his head above water. The young ice was forming so rapidly around us that it was hard work getting him on board. I was one of the oarsmen, and sweated rarely, with the thermometer at 25°.

"On the way back I succeeded in hitting an enormous seal; but, much to my mortification, he sunk, after floating till we nearly reached him.

"Without any organization, and with very little time for the hunt, the Advance now counts upon her game list two polar bears, three seals, a single goose, and a fair table allowance of loons, divers, and snipes. The _Rescue_ boasts of four bears, and, in addition to the small game, a couple of Arctic hares. Our solitary goose was the Anas bernicla, crowds of which now begin to fly over the land and ice in cunoid streams to the east of south. It was killed by Mr. Murdaugh with a rifle, on the wing.

"How very much I miss my good home assortment of hunting materials! We have not a decent gun on board; as for the rifle I am now shooting, it is a flintlock concern, and half the time hangs fire."

The next morning found me at work skinning my bear, not a pleasant task with the thermometer below the freezing point. He was a noble specimen, larger than the largest recorded by Parry, measuring eight feet eight inches and three quarters from tip to tip. I presented the skin, on my return home, to the Academy of Natural Sciences at Philadelphia.

The carcass was larger than that of an ordinary ox fatted for market. We estimated his weight at nearly sixteen hundred pounds. In build he was very solid, and the muscles of the arms and haunch fearfully developed. I once before compared the posterior aspect of the Arctic bear to an elephant's. All my mess-mates used the same comparison. The extreme roundness of his back and haunches, with the columnar character of the legs, and the round expansion of the feet, give you the impression of a small elephant. The plantigrade base of support overlapped by long hair heightens the resemblance. The head and neck, of course, are excluded from the comparison.

At five in the afternoon we succeeded in reaching within a quarter of a mile of the shore off Barlow's Inlet, and made fast there to the floe. This inlet is but a few miles from Cape Hotham, and is marked on the charts as a mere interruption of the coast line. Parry, who named it, must have had wonderfully favoring weather to sight so accurately an insignificant cove. He was a practiced hydrographer.

The limestone cliffs rise on each side, forming stupendous piers gnarled by frost degradation, between which is the entrance, about a quarter of a mile wide. The moment our little vessel entered the shadow of these cliffs, a quiet gloom took the place of bustling movement. We ground our way into the newly-formed ice, and, after making a couple of ships' lengths, found ourselves within a sort of cape of land floe, surrounded by high hummocks and anchored bergs. It was a melancholy spot; not one warm sun tint; everything blank, repulsive sterility.

"_September_ 6. The captain, Mr. Murdaugh, Mr. Carter, and myself started on a walk of exploration. The distance between the brig and the shore is not over three hundred yards, but the travel was arduous. The ice was eight and ten feet thick, studded with broken bergs and hummocks. These fragments were seldom larger than our Rensselaer dining-room, some twenty feet square, and, owing either to the rise and fall of the tides or the piling action of storms, deep crevices were formed around their edges, partially masked by the snow which had found its way into them, and by an icy crust over the surface. Alternately jumping these crevices and clambering up the hummocks between them made it a dangerous walk. We had some narrow escapes. Reaching the shore, we pushed forward about a mile and a quarter to the head of the inlet, and then crossed over on the ice to a cairn that stood near it. We found nothing but a communication from Captain Ommanney, whose vessels we saw as we entered the lead yesterday, informing the Secretary of the Admiralty that he had been off this place since the 24th, and that 'no traces are to be found on Cornwallis Island of the party under Sir John Franklin'--a somewhat too confident assertion perhaps, seeing that the island, if it be one, is more than fifty miles across, and that the observations can hardly have extended beyond the coast line.

"_September_ 7. The spot at which we have been lying is in front of Barlow's Inlet. There is no barrier between it and our vessels but the young ice, which has now attained a thickness of three inches. On the east we have the drift plain of Wellington Channel, impacted with floes, hummocks, and broken bergs; and to the south we look out upon a wild aggregation of enormous hummocks. These hummocks are totally unlike anything we saw in Baffin's Bay. They seem to have been so disintegrated by the conflicting forces that raised them as to have lost altogether the character of tables. If hogshead upon hogshead of crushed sugar had been emptied out at random, two or three in one pile, and two or three ship loads in another, and the summits of these irregular heaps were covered over with a succession of layers of snow, and the heaps themselves multiplied in number indefinitely, and crowded together in a disordered phalanx, they would look a good deal like the hummock field some twenty yards south of us. These fearful masses are all anchored, solid hills, rising thirty feet above the level from a bottom twenty-two feet below it.

"Our situation might be regarded as an ugly one in some states of the wind, but for the solid main floe to the north of us. This projected from the cliff, which served as an abutment for it; and, after forming a sort of cape outside of our position, extended with a horseshoe sweep to the northward and eastward, as far as the eye could reach, following the trend of the shore. It formed, of course, a reliable break-water. Commodore Austin's vessels were made fast to it some distance to the north and east of us.

"The barometer had given us, in the early morning of the 4th, 29.90, since when it rose steadily till the 5th, at 6 A.M., when it stood 30.38. For the next twenty-four hours it fluctuated between .33 and .37; but at 6 A.M. of the 6th, it again began to rise; by midnight, it had reached 30.44; and before ten o'clock P.M. of the 7th, it was at the unwonted height of 30.68. At 2 P.M. the wind had changed from S.S.E. to N.N.E., and went on increasing to a gale.

"We were seated cosily around our little table in the cabin, imagining our harbor of land ice perfectly secure, when we were startled by a crash. We rushed on deck just in time to see the solid floe to windward part in the middle, liberate itself from its attachment to the shore, and bear down upon us with the full energy of the storm. Our lee bristled ominously half a ship's length from us, and to the east was the main drift. The _Rescue_ was first caught, nipped astern, and lifted bodily out of water; fortunately she withstood the pressure, and rising till she snapped her cable, launched into open water, crushing the young ice before her. The _Advance_, by hard warping, drew a little closer to the cove; and, a moment after, the ice drove by, just clearing our stern. Commodore Austin's vessels were imprisoned in the moving fragments, and carried helplessly past us. In a very little while they were some four miles off."

The summer was now leaving us rapidly. The thermometer had been at 21° and 23° for several nights, and scarcely rose above 32° in the daytime. Our little harbor at Barlow's Inlet was completely blocked in by heavy masses; the new ice gave plenty of sport to the skaters; but on shipboard it was uncomfortably cold. As yet we had no fires below; and, after drawing around me the India-rubber curtains of my berth, with my lamp burning inside, I frequently wrote my journal in a freezing temperature. "This is not very cold, no doubt"--I quote from an entry of the 8th--"not very cold to your forty-five minus men of Arctic winters; but to us poor devils from the zone of the liriodendrons and peaches, it is rather cold for the September month of water-melons. My bear with his arsenic swabs is a solid lump, and some birds that are waiting to be skinned are absolutely rigid with frost."

In the afternoon of this day, the 8th, we went to work, all hands, officers included, to cut up the young ice and tow it out into the current: once there, the drift carried it rapidly to the south. We cleared away in this manner a space of some forty yards square, and at five the next morning were rewarded by being again under weigh. We were past Cape Hotham by breakfast-time on the 9th, and in the afternoon were beating to the west in Lancaster Sound.

"The sound presented a novel spectacle to us; the young ice glazing it over, so as to form a viscid sea of sludge and _tickly-benders_, from the northern shore to the pack, a distance of at least ten miles. This was mingled with the drift floes from Wellington Channel; and in them, steaming away manfully, were the _Resolute_ and _Pioneer_. The wind was dead ahead; yet, but for the new ice, there was a clear sea to the west. What, then, was our mortification, first, to see our pack-bound neighbors force themselves from their prison and steam ahead dead in the wind's eye, and, next, to be overhauled by Penny, and passed by both his brigs. We are now the last of all the searchers, except perhaps old Sir John, who is probably yet in Union Bay, or at least east of the straits.

"The shores along which we are passing are of the same configuration with the coast to the east of Beechy Island; the cliffs, however, are not so high, and their bluff appearance is relieved occasionally by terraces and shingle beach. The lithological characters of the limestone appear to be the same.

"We are all together here, on a single track but little wider than the Delaware or Hudson. There is no getting out of it, for the shore is on one side and the fixed ice close on the other. All have the lead of us, and we are working only to save a distance. Ommanney must be near Melville by this time: pleasant, very!

"Closing memoranda for the day: 1. I have the rheumatism in my knees; 2. I left a bag containing my dress suit of uniforms, and, what is worse, my winter suit of furs, and with them my double-barrel gun, on board Austin's vessel. The gale of the 7th has carried him and them out of sight.

"_September_ 10. Unaccountable, most unaccountable, the caprices of this ice-locked region! Here we are again all together, even Ommanney with the rest. The _Resolute_, _Intrepid_, _Assistance_, _Pioneer_, _Lady Franklin_, _Sophia_, _Advance_, and _Rescue_; Austin, Ommanney, Penny, and De Haven, all anchored to the 'fast' off Griffith's Island. The way to the west completely shut out."