Chapter VI

I AM reluctant to burden my pages with the wild, but scarcely varied incidents of our continued drift through Wellington Channel. We were yet to be familiarized with the strife of the ice-tables, now broken up into tumbling masses, and piling themselves in angry confusion against our sides--now fixed in chaotic disarray by the fields of new ice that imbedded them in a single night--again, perhaps, opening in treacherous pools, only to close round us with a force that threatened to grind our brigs to powder. I shall have occasion enough to speak of these things hereafter. I give now a few extracts from my journal; some of which may perhaps have interest of a different character, though they can not escape the saddening monotony of the scenes that were about us.

I begin with a partial break-up that occurred on the 23d.

"_September_ 23. How shall I describe to you this pressure, its fearfulness and sublimity! Nothing that I have seen or read of approaches it. The voices of the ice and the heavy swash of the overturned hummock-tables are at this moment dinning in my ears. 'All hands' are on deck fighting our grim enemy.

"Fourteen inches of solid ice thickness, with some half dozen of snow, are, with the slow uniform advance of a mighty propelling power, driving in upon our vessel. As they strike her, the semi-plastic mass is impressed with a mould of her side, and then, urged on by the force behind, slides upward, and rises in great vertical tables. When these attain their utmost height, still pressed on by others, they topple over, and form a great embankment of fallen tables. At the same time, others take a downward direction, and when pushed on, as in the other case, form a similar pile underneath. The side on which one or the other of these actions takes place for the time, varies with the direction of the force, the strength of the opposite or resisting side, the inclination of the vessel, and the weight of the superincumbent mounds; and as these conditions follow each other in varying succession, the vessel becomes perfectly imbedded after a little while in crumbling and fractured ice.

"Perhaps no vessel has ever been in this position but our own. With matured ice, nothing of iron or wood could resist such pressure. As for the British vessels, their size would make it next to impossible for them to stand. Back's 'Winter' is the only thing I have read of that reminds me of our present predicament. No vessel has ever been caught by winter in these waters.

"We are lifted bodily eighteen inches out of water. The hummocks are reared up around the ship, so as to rise in some cases a couple of feet above our bulwarks--five feet above our deck. They are very often ten and twelve feet high. All hands are out, laboring with picks and crowbars to overturn the fragments that threaten to overwhelm us. Add to this darkness, snow, cold, and the absolute destitution of surrounding shores.

"This uprearing of the ice is not a slow work: it is progressive, but not slow. It was only at 4 P.M. that nips began, and now the entire plain is triangulated with ice-barricades. Under the double influence of sails and warping-hawsers, we have not been able to budge a hair's-breadth. Yet, impelled by this irresistible, bearing-down floe-monster, we crush, grind, _eat_ our way, surrounded by the ruins of our progress. In fourteen minutes we changed our position 80 feet, or 5.71 per minute.

"Sometimes the ice cracks with violence, almost explosive, throughout the entire length of the floe. Very grand this! Sometimes the hummock masses, piled up like crushed sugar around the ship, suddenly sink into the sea, and then fresh mounds take their place.

"Our little neighbor, the _Rescue_, is all this time within twenty yards of us, resting upon wedges of ice, and not subjected to movement or pressure--a fact of interest, as it shows how very small a difference of position may determine the differing fate of two vessels.

"_September_ 24. The ice is kinder; no fresh movements; a little _whining_ in the morning, but since then undisturbed. The ice, however, is influenced by the wind; for open water-pools have formed--three around the ship within eye distance. In one of these, the seals made their appearance toward noon; no less than five disporting together among the sludge of the open water. I started off on a perilous walk over the ruined barricades of last night's commotion; and, after cooling myself for forty minutes in an atmosphere ten degrees above zero, came back without a shot. The condensed moisture had so affected my powder that I could not get my gun off.

"This condensation is now very troublesome, dripping down from our carlines, and sweating over the roof and berth-boards. When we open the hatchway, the steam rises in clouds from the little cabin below.

"We have as yet no fires; worse! the state of uncertainty in which we are placed makes it impossible to resort to any winter arrangements. Yet these lard lamps give us a temperature of 46°, which to men like ourselves, used to constant out-door exercise, exposure, and absence of artificial heat, is quite genial. But for the moisture--that wretched, comfortless, rheumatic drawback--we would be quite snug.

"Our captain is the best of sailors; but, intent always on the primary objects and duties of his cruise, he is apt to forget or postpone a provident regard for those creature-comforts which have interest for others. To-day, with the thermometer at 10°, we for the first time commenced the manufacture of stove-pipes. I need not say that the cold metal played hob with the tinkers. If they go on at the present rate, the pipes will be nearly ready by next summer.

"_September_ 26. The hummocks around us still remain without apparent motion, heaped up like snow-covered barriers of street rioters. We are wedged in a huge mass of tables, completely out of water, cradled by ice. I wish it would give us an even keel. We are eighteen inches higher on one quarter than the other.

"The two large pools we observed yesterday, one on each side of us, are now coated by a thick film of ice. In this the poor seals sometimes show themselves in groups of half a dozen. They no longer sport about as they did three weeks ago, but rise up to their breasts through young ice, and gaze around with curiosity-smitten countenances.

"The shyness of the seal is proverbial. The Esquimaux, trained from earliest youth to the pursuit of them, regard a successful hunter as the great man of the settlement. If not killed instantaneously, the seal sinks and is lost. The day before yesterday, I adopted the native plan of silent watching beside a pool. Thus for a long time I was exposed to a temperature of +8°; but no shots within head-range offered; and I knew that, unless the spinal column or base of the brain was entered by the ball, it would be useless to waste our already scanty ammunition.

"To-day, however, I was more fortunate. A fine young seal rose about forty yards off, and I put the ball between the ear and eye. A boat was run over the ice, and the carcass secured. This is the second I have killed with this villainous carbine: it will be a valuable help to our sick. We are now very fond of seal-meat. It is far better than bear; and the fishiness, which at first disturbed us, is no longer disagreeable. I simply skin them, retaining the blubber with the pelt. The cold soon renders them solid. My bear, although in a barrel, is as stiff and hard as horn.

"Took a skate this morning over some lakelets recently frozen over. The ice was tenacious, but not strong enough for safety. As I was moving along over the _tickly-benders_, my ice-pole drove a hole, and came very near dropping through into the water.

"_September_ 27. This evening the thermometer gave 3° above zero. A bit of ice, which I took into my mouth to suck, fastened on to my tongue and carried away the skin. When we open the cabin hatch now, a cloud of steam, visible only as the two currents meet, gives evidence of the Arctic condensation.

"Afar off, skipping from hummock to hummock, I saw a black fox. Poor desolate devil! what did he, so far from his recorded home, seven miles from even the naked snow-hills of this dreary wilderness? In the night-time I heard him bark. They set a trap for him; but I secretly placed a bigger bait outside, without a snare-loop or trigger. In the morning it was gone, and the dead-fall had fallen upon no fox. How the poor, hungry thing must have enjoyed his supper! half the guts, the spleen, and the pluck of my seal.

"Lovell raised a swing; cold work, but good exercise. He rigged it from the main studding-sail boom. Murdaugh and Carter are building a snow-house. The doctor is hard at work patching up materials for an overland communication with the English squadron--an enterprise fast becoming desperate. Yet, drifting as we are to unknown regions north, it is of vast importance that others should know of our position and prospects."

Our position, however, at the end of September, thanks to the rapidly-increasing cold, gave promise of a certain degree of security and rest. The _Advance_ had been driven, by the superior momentum of the floes that pressed us on one side, some two hundred and fifty feet into the mass of less resisting floes on the other; the _Rescue_ meanwhile remaining stationary; and the two vessels were fixed for a time on two adjacent sides of a rectangle, and close to each other. The unseen and varying energies of the ice movements had occasionally modified the position of each; but their relation to each other continued almost unchanged.

We felt that we were fixed for the winter. We arranged our rude embankments of ice and snow around us, began to deposit our stores within them, and got out our felt covering that was to serve as our winter roof. The temperature was severe, ranging from 1°.5, and 4° to +10°; but the men worked with the energy, and hope too, of pioneer settlers, when building up their first home in our Western forests.

The closing day of the month was signalized by a brilliant meteor, a modification of the parhelion, the more interesting to us because the first we had seen.

"_October_ 1, Tuesday. To-day the work of breaking hold commenced. The coal immediately under the main hatch was passed up in buckets, and some five tons piled upon the ice. The quarter-boats were hauled about twenty paces from our port-bow, and the sails covered and stacked; in short, all hands were at work preparing for the winter. Little had we calculated the caprices of Arctic ice.

"About ten o'clock A.M. a large crack opened nearly east and west, running as far as the eye could see, sometimes crossing the ice-pools, and sometimes breaking along the hummock ridges. The sun and moon will be in conjunction on the 3d; we had notice, therefore, that the spring tides are in action.

"Captain Griffin had been dispatched with Mr. Lovell before this, to establish on the shore the site for a depôt of provisions: at one o'clock a signal was made to recall them. At two P.M., seeing a seal, I ran out upon the ice; but losing him, was tempted to continue on about a mile to the eastward. The wind, which had been from the westward all the morning, now shifted to the southward, and the ice-tables began to be again in motion. The _humming of bees_ and upheaving hummocks, together with exploding cracks, warned me back to the vessel.

"At 3:20, while we were at dinner, commenting with some anxiety upon the condition of things without, that unmistakable monitor, the '_young puppies_,' began. Running on deck, we found a large fissure, nearly due north and south, in line with the _Advance_. A few minutes after, the entire floe on our starboard side was moving, and the ice breaking up in every direction.

"The emergency was startling enough. All hands turned to, officers included. The poor land party, returning at this moment, tired and dinnerless, went to work with the rest. Vreeland and myself worked like horses. Before dark, every thing was on board except the coal; and of this, such were the unwearied efforts of our crew, that we lost but a ton or two.

"This ice-opening was instructive practically, because it taught those of us who did not understand it before how capriciously insecure was our position. It revealed much, too, in relation to the action of the ice.

"1. The first crack was nearly at right angles to the axis of the channel; the subsequent ones crossed the first; the wind being in the one case from the westward, and afterward changing to the southward.

"2. The next subject of note was the disintegration of the old floes. It took place almost invariably at their original lines of junction, well marked by the hummocky ridges. This shows that the cementation was imperfect after seventeen days of very low temperature; a circumstance attributable, perhaps, to the massive character of the up-piled tables, which protected the inner portion of them from the air, and to the constant infiltration (_endosmose_) of salt-water at the abraded margins.

"3. The extent to which the work of super and infra position had been carried during the actions may be realized, when I say that the floe-piece which separated from us to starboard retained the exact impression of the ship's side. There it was, with the gangway stairs of ice-block masonry, looking down upon the dark water, and the useless embankment embracing a sludgy ice-pool.

"We could see table after table, more properly layer after layer, each not more than seven inches thick, extending down for more than twenty feet. Thus, it is highly probable, may be formed many of those enormous ice-tables, attributed by authors to direct and uninterrupted congelation.

"The quantity of ice adhering to our port-side must be enormous; for although the starboard floe, in leaving us, parted a six-inch hawser, it failed to budge us one inch from the icy cradle in which we are set."