CLOSE QUARTERS WITH THE ICE
That no time should be lost on the upward voyage, and also that my
Eskimos might not have too much leisure in which to consider the dangers
which constantly threatened their floating home, I kept them all busy.
The men were put to work making sledges and dog-harness, so that when we
reached Cape Sheridan--if we reached it,--we might be ready for the fall
hunting. I had on board the raw materials, and each Eskimo built a
sledge for himself, putting his best work into it. This pride of the
Eskimo in personal achievement has been of great service to me, and has
been encouraged by special prizes and special praise.
The Eskimo women were put to work on our winter garments as soon as
possible after leaving Etah, so that, in the event of our losing the
ship, every man would have a comfortable outfit. In the North we wear
practically the same clothing as the Eskimos, including the fur
stockings with the fur on the inside. Otherwise we should have frozen
feet often instead of only occasionally. A man who could not live
without silk stockings would not be likely to attempt the North Pole. As
we had altogether, including the Eskimos, sixty-nine persons on board
the ship--men, women, and children--it will be seen that there was
considerable sewing to be done. Old garments had to be overhauled and
mended, and new ones made.
The worst of the ice fighting did not begin immediately, and the new
members of the expedition, MacMillan, Borup, and Dr. Goodsell, were at
first much interested in watching the Eskimo women at their sewing. They
sit on anything that is convenient, a chair, a platform, or the floor.
In their own quarters they remove their footgear, put up one foot, and
hold one end of the fabric between their toes, sewing a seam over and
over from them, instead of toward them, as our women do. The foot of an
Eskimo woman is a sort of third hand, and the work is gripped between
the great toe and the second toe.
The Eskimo women have great confidence in their own skill at
garment-making, and they take suggestions from the inexperienced white
men with a good-natured and superior tolerance. When one of the northern
belles was shaping a garment for Bartlett to wear on the spring sledge
journey, he anxiously urged her to give him plenty of room. Her reply
was a mixed Eskimo and English equivalent for:
"You just trust me, Captain! When you get out on the road to the Nor
Pol, you'll need a draw-string in your jacket, and not gussets." She had
seen me and my men come back from previous sledge journeys, and she knew
the effect of long continued fatigue and scanty rations in making a
man's clothes fit him loosely.
The Eskimos had the run of the ship, but the port side of the forward
deck house was given to them entirely. A wide platform three or four
feet high, made of packing boxes, was placed around the wall of the deck
house for them to sleep on. Each family had its own quarters,
partitioned off by planks, and screened in front by a curtain. They
cooked their own meat and whatever else they desired, though Percy, the
ship's steward, provided them with tea and coffee. If they had baked
beans, or hash, or anything of that kind from the ship's store, it was
cooked for them by Percy; and he also furnished them with his famous
bread, which for lightness and crispness is unsurpassed in the round
world.
The Eskimos seemed always to be eating. There was no table for the crowd
of them, as they do not incline to regular meal hours; but each family
ate by itself, as appetite dictated. I gave them pots, pans, plates,
cups, saucers, knives, forks, and oil stoves. They had access to the
ship's galley, day and night; but Percy was always amiable, and the
Eskimos at length learned not to wash their hands in the water in which
he purposed to boil meat.
The third day out the weather was villainous. It rained steadily, and
there was a strong southerly wind. The group of dogs on the main deck
stood about with low, dejected heads and dripping tails. Only at feeding
time did they take courage even to fight or snap at one another. Most of
the time the ship was stationary, or drifting slowly with the ice toward
the mouth of Dobbin Bay. When at last the ice loosened, we made about
ten miles in open water--then the wheel rope broke, and we had to stop
for repairs, unable to take advantage of the stretch of water still
before us. The captain's remarks when the strands of that cable parted I
will leave to the imagination of the reader. Had the accident occurred
at a time when the ship was between two big floes, the fortress of the
North Pole might still remain uncaptured. It was after midnight before
we got under way, and half an hour later we were stopped again by the
impassable ice.
On the fourth day we lay quiet all day long, with a slight breeze from
Princess Marie Bay setting us slowly eastward; but, as the sun was
shining, we utilized the time in drying our clothing, wet and soggy from
the almost continuous rain and snow of the previous two days. As it was
still summertime in the Arctic, we did not suffer from cold. The pools
between the ice floes were slowly enlarging, and at nine in the evening
we were on our way again, but at eleven we ran into a thick fog. All
night we bored and twisted through the ice, which, though thick, was not
heavy for the _Roosevelt_, and only once or twice we had to back her. An
ordinary ship could have made no headway whatever.
Wardwell, the chief engineer, stood his eight-hour or twelve-hour watch
the same as his assistants, and during the passage of these dangerous
channels he was nearly always in the engine-room, watching the machinery
to see that no part of it got out of order at a crucial moment--which
would have meant the loss of the ship. When we were between two big
floes, forcing our way through, I would call down the tube leading from
the bridge to the engine-room:
"Chief, you've got to keep her moving until I give you word, no matter
what happens."
Sometimes the ship would get stuck between the corners of two floes
which were slowly coming together. At such a time a minute is an
eternity. I would call down the tube to Wardwell, "You've got to jump
her now, the length of fifty yards," or whatever it might be. And I
could feel the ship shaking under me as she seemed to take the flying
leap, under the impulse of live steam poured directly from the boilers
into the fifty-two-inch low-pressure cylinder.
The engines of the _Roosevelt_ have what is called a by-pass, by which
the live steam can be turned into the big cylinder, more than doubling
the power of the engines for a few minutes. This simple bit of mechanism
has saved us from being crushed flat by the ice on more than one
occasion.
The destruction of a ship between two ice floes is not sudden, like her
destruction by a submarine mine, for instance. It is a slow and
gradually increasing pressure from both sides, sometimes till the ice
meets in the vitals of the ship. A vessel might stay thus, suspended
between two floes, for twenty-four hours--or until the movement of the
tides relaxed the pressure, when she would sink. The ice might open at
first just sufficiently to let the hull go down, and the ends of the
yards might catch on the ice and break, with the weight of the
water-filled hull, as was the case with the ill-fated _Jeannette_. One
ship, in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, was caught in the ice and dragged
over the rocks like a nutmeg over a nutmeg grater. The bottom was sliced
off as one would slice a cucumber with a knife, so that the iron
blubber tanks in the hold dropped out of her. The ship became nothing
but the sides and ends of a box. She remained some twenty-four hours,
gripped between the floes, and then went down.
On the 22d of August, the fifth day, our lucky stars must have been
working overtime; for we made a phenomenal run--more than a hundred
miles, right up the middle of Kennedy Channel, uninterrupted by ice or
fog! At midnight the sun burst gloriously through the clouds, just over
Cape Lieber. It seemed a happy omen.
Could such good fortune continue? Though my hopes were high, the
experience of former journeys reminded me that the brightest coin has
always a reverse side. In a day we had run the whole length of Kennedy
Channel, and immediately before us there was only scattered ice. But
beyond lay Robeson Channel, only some thirty miles away, and the
navigator who knows Robeson Channel will never be sanguine that it has
anything good in store for him.
Soon we encountered both ice and fog, and, while working slowly along in
search of an opening, we were forced clear across to the Greenland coast
at Thank God Harbor, the winter quarters of the _Polaris_ in 1871-72. I
have mentioned the lane of water which often lies at ebb tide between
the land and the moving central pack; but the reader must not fancy that
this is an unobstructed lane. On the contrary, its passage means
constant butting of the smaller ice, and constant dodging of larger
pieces.
Of course the steam is up at all times, ready, like ourselves, for
anything at a moment's notice. When the ice is not so heavy as to be
utterly impenetrable, the ship under full steam moves back and forth
continually, butting and charging the floes. Sometimes a charge will
send the ship forward half her length, sometimes her whole
length--sometimes not an inch. When, with all the steam of the boilers,
we can make no headway whatever, we wait for the ice to loosen up, and
economize our coal. We do not mind using the ship as a battering
ram--that is what she was made for; but beyond Etah coal is precious,
and every ounce of it must yield its full return of northward steaming.
The coal at present in our bunkers was all that we should have until our
return the following year, when the Peary Arctic Club would send a ship
to meet us at Etah.
[Illustration: THE MIDNIGHT SUN AS SEEN IN THE WHALE SOUND REGION]
It must be remembered that during all this time we were in the region of
constant daylight, in the season of the midnight sun. Sometimes the
weather was foggy, sometimes cloudy, sometimes sunny; but there was no
darkness. The periods of day and night were measured only by our
watches--not, during the passage of these channels, by sleeping and
waking, for we slept only in those brief intervals when there was
nothing else to do. Unresting vigilance was the price we paid for our
passage.
Bartlett's judgment was reliable, but the cabin had no attraction for me
when the ship and the fortunes of the expedition were swaying in the
balance. Then, too, when the ship was butting the ice, the shock of the
impact would have made Morpheus himself sit up and rub his eyes every
few minutes.
[Illustration: CAPTAIN BARTLETT IN THE CROW'S NEST]
Owing to the stupendous and resistless character of the heavier ice, a
ship would be utterly helpless if she were ever caught fairly and
squarely between two giant floes. In such a case there would be no
escape for any structure which man could design or build. More than once
a brief nip between two big blue floes has set the whole one hundred and
eighty-four-foot length of the _Roosevelt_ vibrating like a violin
string. At other times, under the pressure on the cylinders of the
by-pass before described, the vessel would rear herself upon the ice
like a steeplechaser taking a fence. It was a glorious battle--this
charging of the ship against man's coldest enemy and possibly his
oldest, for there is no calculating the age of this glacial ice.
Sometimes, as the steel-shod stem of the _Roosevelt_ split a floe
squarely in two, the riven ice would emit a savage snarl that seemed to
have behind it all the rage of the invaded immemorial Arctic struggling
with the self-willed intruder, man. Sometimes, when the ship was in
special peril, the Eskimos on board would set up their strange barbaric
chant--calling on the souls of their ancestors to come from the
invisible realm and help us.
Often on this last expedition of the _Roosevelt_, as on the former one,
have I seen a fireman come up from the bowels of the ship, panting for a
breath of air, take one look at the sheet of ice before us, and mutter
savagely:
"By God, she's _got_ to go through!"
Then he would drop again into the stoke hole, and a moment later an
extra puff of black smoke would rise from the stack, and I knew the
steam pressure was going up.
During the worst parts of the journey, Bartlett spent most of his time
in the crow's nest, the barrel lookout at the top of the main mast. I
would climb up into the rigging just below the crow's nest, where I
could see ahead and talk to Bartlett, backing up his opinion with my
own, when necessary, to relieve him, in the more dangerous places, of
too great a weight of responsibility.
Clinging with Bartlett, high up in the vibrating rigging, peering far
ahead for a streak of open water, studying the movement of the floes
which pressed against us, I would hear him shouting to the ship below us
as if coaxing her, encouraging her, commanding her to hammer a way for
us through the adamantine floes:
"Rip 'em, Teddy! Bite 'em in two! Go it! That's fine, my beauty!
Now--again! Once more!"
At such a time the long generations of ice and ocean fighters behind
this brave, indomitable young Newfoundland captain seemed to be
re-living in him the strenuous days that carried the flag of England
'round the world.
[Illustration: TABULAR ICEBERG AND FLOE ICE]