Chapter IV

THE succeeding pages are very little else than a transcript from my journal. It would have been easy to condense them into a more attractive form; but they relate to the furthest limits of our cruise, "_long arum meta viarum_" and some of the topics which they embrace may perhaps invite that sort of evidence which is best furnished by a contemporary record.

"_September_ 11, Wednesday. Snow, light and fleecy, covering the decks, and carried by our clothes into our little cabin. The moisture of the atmosphere condenses over the beams, and trickles down over the lockers and bedding. We are still alongside of the fixed ice off Griffith's Island, and the British squadron under Commodore Austin are clustered together within three hundred yards of us. Penny, like an indefatigable old trump, as he is, is out, pushing, working, groping in the fog. The sludge ice, that had driven in around us and almost congealed under our stern, is now by the ebb of the tide, or at least its change, carried out again, although the wind still sets toward the floe.

"_September_ 12, Thursday. We have had a rough night. About 4 P.M., the heavy snow which had covered our decks changed to a driving drift; the wind blew a gale from the northwest, and the thermometer fell as low as +16°. All the squadron of search, with the exception of Penny, were fastened by ice-anchors to the main ice; but the great obscurity made us invisible to each other.

"At three the _Rescue_ parted her cable's hold, and was carried out to sea, leaving two men, her boat, and her anchors behind. We snapped our stern-cable, lost our anchor, swung out, but fortunately held by the forward line. All the English vessels were in similar peril, the _Pioneer_ being at one time actually free; and Commodore Austin, who in the _Resolute_ occupied the head of the line, was in momentary fear of coming down upon us. Altogether I have seldom seen a night of greater trial. The wind roared over the snow floes, and every thing about the vessel froze into heavy ice stalactites. Had the main floe parted, we had been carried down with the liberated ice. Fortunately, every thing held; and here we are, safe and sound. The _Rescue_ was last seen beating to windward against the gale, probably seeking a lee under Griffith's Island. This morning the snow continues in the form of a fine cutting drift, the water freezes wherever it touches, and the thermometer has been at no time above 17°.

"_September_ 12, 10 P.M. Just from deck. How very dismal every thing seems! The snow is driven like sand upon a level beach, lifted up in long curve lines, and then obscuring the atmosphere with a white darkness. The wind, too, is howling in a shrill minor, singing across the hummock ridges. The eight vessels are no longer here. The Rescue is driven out to sea, and poor Penny is probably to the southward. Five black masses, however, their cordage defined by rime and snow, are seen with their snouts shoved into the shore of ice: cables, chains, and anchors are covered feet below the drift, and the ships adhere mysteriously, their tackle completely invisible. Should any of us break away, the gale would carry us into streams of heavy floating ice; and our running rigging is so coated with icicles as to make it impossible to work it. The thermometer stands at 14°.

"At this temperature the young ice forms in spite of the increasing movement of the waves, stretching out from the floe in long, zigzag lines of smoothness resembling watered silk. The loose ice seems to have a southerly and easterly drift; and, from the increasing distance of Griffith's Island, seen during occasional intervals, we are evidently moving _en masse_ to the south.

"Now when you remember that we are in open sea, attached to precarious ice, and surrounded by floating streams; that the coast is unknown, and the ice forming inshore, so as to make harbors, if we knew of them, inaccessible, you may suppose that our position is far from pleasant. One harbor was discovered by a lieutenant of the Assistance some days ago, and named _Assistance_ Harbor, but that is out of the question; the wind is not only a gale, but ahead. Had we the quarters of Capua before us, we should be unable to reach them. It is a windward shore.

"11 P.M. Captain De Haven reports ice forming fast: extra anchors are out; thermometer +8°. The British squadron, under Austin, have fires in full blast: we are without them still.

"12 M. In bed, reading or trying to read. The gale has increased; the floes are in upon us from the eastward; and it is evident that we are all of us drifting bodily, God knows where, for we have no means of taking observations.

"_September_ 13, 10 A.M. Found, on waking, that at about three this morning the squadron commenced getting under weigh. The rime-coated rigging was cleared; the hawsers thashed;[A] the ice-clogged boats hauled in; the steamers steamed, and off went the rest of us as we might. This step was not taken a whit too soon, if it be ordained that we are yet in time; for the stream-ice covers the entire horizon, and the large floe or main which we have deserted is barely separated from the drifting masses. The _Rescue_ is now the object of our search. Could she be found, the captain has determined to turn his steps homeward.

[A] So in the original. Evidently a misprint.--(_Ed._)

"11:20 A.M. We are working, _i. e._, beating our way in the narrow leads intervening irregularly between the main ice and the drift. We have gained at least two miles to windward of Austin's squadron, who are unable, in spite of steamers, to move along these dangerous passages like ourselves. Our object is to reach Griffith's Island, from which we have drifted some fifteen miles with the main ice, and then look out for our lost consort.

"The lowest temperature last night was +5°, but the wind makes it colder to sensation. We are grinding through newly-formed ice three inches thick; the perfect consolidation being prevented by its motion and the wind. Even in the little fireless cabin in which I now write, water and coffee are freezing, and the mercury stands at 29°.

"The navigation is certainly exciting. I have never seen a description in my Arctic readings of any thing like this. We are literally running for our lives, surrounded by the imminent hazards of sudden consolidation in an open sea. All minor perils, nips, humps, and sunken bergs are discarded; we are staggering along under all sail, forcing our way while we can. One thump, received since I commenced writing, jerked the time-keeper from our binnacle down the cabin hatch, and, but for our strong bows, seven and a half solid feet, would have stove us in. Another time, we cleared a tongue of the main pack by riding it down at eight knots. Commodore Austin seems caught by the closing floes. This is really sharp work.

"4 P.M. We continued beating toward Griffith's Island, till, by doubling a tongue of ice, we were able to force our way. The English seemed to watch our movements, and almost to follow in our wake, till we came to a comparatively open space, about the area of Washington Square, where we stood off and on, the ice being too close upon the eastern end of Griffith's Island to permit us to pass. Our companions in this little vacancy were Captain Ommanney's _Assistance_, Osborne's steam tender the _Pioneer_, and Kater's steamer the _Intrepid_. Commodore Austin's vessel was to the southward, entangled in the moving ice, but momentarily nearing the open leads.

"While thus boxing about on one of our tacks, we neared the north edge of our little opening, and were hailed by the Assistance with the glad intelligence of the _Rescue_ close under the island. Our captain, who was at his usual post, conning the ship from the foretop-sail yard, made her out at the same time, and immediately determined upon boring the intervening ice. This was done successfully, the brig bearing the hard knocks nobly. Strange to say, the English vessels, now joined by Austin, followed in our wake--a compliment, certainly, to De Haven's ice-mastership.

"We were no sooner through, than signal was made to the _Rescue_ to 'cast off,' and our ensign was run up from the peak: the captain had determined upon attempting a return to the United States."

It could not be my office to discuss the policy of this step, even if the question were one of policy alone. But it was one of instructions. The Navy Department, imitating in this the English Board of Admiralty, had, in its orders to our commander, marked out to him the course of the expedition, and had enjoined that, unless under special circumstances, he should "endeavor not to be caught in the ice during the winter, but that he should, after completing his examinations for the season, make his escape, and return to New York in the fall." In the judgment of Commodore De Haven, these special circumstances did not exist; and he felt himself, therefore, controlled by the general terms of the injunction. I believe that there was but one feeling among the officers of our little squadron, that of unmitigated regret that we were no longer to co-operate with our gallant associates under the sister flag. Our intercourse with them had been most cordial from the very first. We had interchanged many courtesies, and I should be sorry to think that there had not been formed on both sides some enduring friendships.

In a little while we had the _Rescue_ in tow, and were heading to the east. She had had a fearful night of it after leaving us. She beat about, short-handed, clogged with ice, and with the thermometer at 8°. The snow fell heavily, and the rigging was a solid, almost unmanageable lump. Steering, or rather beating, she made, on the evening of the 12th, the southern edge of Griffith's Island, and by good luck and excellent management succeeded in holding to the land hummocks. She had split her rudder-post so as to make her _unworkable_, and now we have her in tow. An anchor with its fluke snapped--her best bower; and her little boat, stove in by the ice, was cut adrift.

"We were now homeward bound, but a saddened homeward bound for all of us. The vessels of our gallant brethren soon lost themselves in the mist, and we steered our course with a fresh breeze for Cape Hotham.

"As we passed the sweep of coast between Capes Martyr and Hotham, and were making the chord of the curve, our captain called my attention to a point of the coast line about six miles off. On looking without a glass, I distinctly saw the naked spars of a couple of vessels. 'Brigs!' said I. 'Undoubtedly,' said De Haven; and then both of us simultaneously, 'Penny!' On looking with the glass, the masts, yards, gaffs, every thing but the bowsprits, were made out distinctly. Lovell was called and saw the same. Murdaugh, who was half undressed, was summoned; and he, examining with the glass, saw a third, which De Haven, after a look, confirmed as a top-sail schooner, the _Felix_ of old Sir John.

"We changed our course, ran in, and determined to convince ourselves of their character, and perhaps to speak them. The fog, however, closed around them. Still we stood on. Presently, a flaw of wind drove off the vapor; and upon eagerly gazing at the spot, now less than three miles off, no vessels were to be seen.

"I can hardly comment upon this strange circumstance. It was a complete puzzle to all of us. Refractive distortion plays strange freaks in these Arctic solitudes; but this could hardly be one of its illusions. Four persons saw the same image with the naked eye, and the glass confirmed the details. There was no disagreement. As plainly as I see these letters did I see those brigs; and although we supposed the _Lady Franklin_ and _Sophia_ to be ice-caught at or toward Cape Walker, I did not hesitate to name them as the vessels before us. Ten minutes of obscurity, we sailing directly toward them, a sudden interval of brightness--and they had passed away.

"Some large hummocks of grounded ice were near them, and we try to convince ourselves that they may have been closed in by changes in our relative positions; but this is hard to believe, for we should have seen their upper spars above the ice. I gazed long and attentively with our Fraünhofer telescope, at three miles' distance, but saw absolutely no semblance of what a few minutes before was so apparent."

We were obliged several times the next day to bore through the young ice; for the low temperature continued, and our wind lulled under Cape Hotham. The night gave us now three hours of complete darkness. It was danger to run on, yet equally danger to pause. Grim winter was following close upon our heels; and even the captain, sanguine and fearless in emergency as he always proved himself, as he saw the tenacious fields of sludge and pancake thickening around us, began to feel anxious. Mine was a jumble of sensations. I had been desirous to the last degree that we might remain on the field of search, and could hardly be dissatisfied at what promised to realize my wish. Yet I had hoped that our wintering would be near our English friends, that in case of trouble or disease we might mutually sustain each other. But the interval of fifty miles between us, in these inhospitable deserts, was as complete a separation as an entire continent; and I confess that I looked at the dark shadows closing around Barlow's Inlet, the prison from which we cut ourselves on the seventh, just six days before, with feelings as sombre as the landscape itself.

The sound of our vessel crunching her way through the new ice is not easy to be described. It was not like the grinding of the old formed ice, nor was it the slushy scraping of sludge. We may all of us remember, in the skating frolics of early days, the peculiar reverberating outcry of a pebble, as we tossed it from us along the edges of an old mill-dam, and heard it dying away in echoes almost musical. Imagine such a tone as this, combined with the whir of rapid motion, and the rasping noise of close-grained sugar. I was listening to the sound in my little den, after a sorrowful day, close upon zero, trying to warm up my stiffened limbs. Presently it grew less, then increased, then stopped, then went on again, but jerking and irregular; and then it waned, and waned, and waned away to silence.

Down came the captain: "Doctor, the ice has caught us: we are frozen up." On went my furs at once. As I reached the deck, the wind was there, blowing stiff, and the sails were filled and puffing with it. It was not yet dark enough to hide the smooth surface of ice that filled up the horizon, holding the American expedition in search of Sir John Franklin imbedded in its centre. There we were, literally frozen tight in the mid-channel of Wellington's Straits.

"_September_ 15. The change of tide, or, rather, those diurnal changes in the movement of the ice which seem to be indirectly connected with it, gave us a little while before noon a partial opening in the solid ice around us. We made by hard work about a mile, and were then more fast than ever. The ice alongside will now bear a man: the wind, however, is hauling around to the westward. With a strong northwester, there might still be a hope for us.

"This afternoon, at 6h. 20m., a large spheroidal mass was seen floating in the air at an unknown distance to the north. It undulated for a while over the ice-lined horizon of Wellington Channel; and after a little while, another, smaller than the first, became visible a short distance below it. They receded with the wind from the southward and eastward, but did not disappear for some time. Captain De Haven at first thought it a kite; but, independently of the difficulty of imagining a kite flying without a master, and where no master could be, its outline and movement convinced me it was a balloon. The _Resolute_ dispatched a courier balloon on the 2d; but that could never have survived the storms of the past week. I therefore suppose it must have been sent up by some English vessel to the west of us.

"I make a formal note of this circumstance, trivial as it may be; for at first Franklin rose to my mind, as possibly signalizing up Wellington Channel."

Cape Hotham was at this time nearly in range, from our position, with the first headland to the west of it; and our captain estimated that we were about thirty miles from the eastern side of the strait. The balloon was to leeward, nearly due north of us, more so than could be referred to the course of the wind as we observed it, supposing it to have set out from any vessel of whose place we were aware. It appeared to me, the principal one, about two feet long by eighteen inches broad; its appendage larger than an ordinary dinner-plate. The incident interested us much at the time, and I have not seen any thing in the published journals of the English searchers that explains it.