ON THE ICE PACK
Our task was before us and it was to be entered upon at once. Perhaps
you are thinking that we were hopelessly amateurish, inconsiderate,
improvident and foolish. BUT WE SUCCEEDED. Nor were we forgetful or
ignorant. Everything had been read. The elaborate preparations for polar
exploration in the great expeditions had been studied. Two of us had
been in the north before. The apparent simplicity of our outfit arose
from a peculiar circumstance, and that was an imbedded conviction,
perhaps only in me shaken by recurrent fits of alarm, that Krocker Land
was a reality, and that it was habitable. And that meant life and
living.
Then too we had fallen under a spell of imagination, we had become
hopelessly enthralled in the visions of a new order of things. It was as
if we had drunk draughts of some Medean drug that had stolen away our
common sense and immersed us in a flood of fantasies. I don’t think we
confessed anything concretely to one another; we talked together about
Krocker Land just as men might talk about some portion of the earth that
they had never seen, but which as a geographical certainty was on the
maps and was known to possess an unusual interest. Perhaps, after all,
the Professor was responsible for the orientation of thought that made
us clairvoyant and credulous.
Still our plans had been fixed with a dry precision, as those of other
explorers had been, and our supplies comprised just the things that
stock the most prosaic and methodically arranged scientific expeditions.
We had our tins of pemmican, of biscuit, of sugar, of coffee, condensed
milk, our oil and our oil stoves. We were each provided with a rifle, a
shotgun and ammunition. There were matches, hatchets, can openers, salt,
needles and thread, bandages, quinine, astringents, liniments, sledges
and kayaks, dogs and harness, tents, furs, alcohol, rugs, snowshoes,
pickaxes, saw-knives, _kamiks_, certainly more things than Nansen and
Johannsen had had when they left the “Fram” and scooted for the pole
over the paleocrystic sea; and we were not looking for the pole, we were
engaged in a trip to a continent, most certainly impingeable, because it
stretched over 90 or 100 degrees of longitude, and 20 or 30 degrees of
latitude.
And then—Ah, here our minds, _irised_, so to speak, like cracked
crystals, furnished us a journey into fairy land—once there, we were to
be entertained by wonders and comforts, then more wonders and comforts!
Had we ever said that to each other consciously in our waking moments,
we would have forlornly concluded that _piblokto_, the Eskimo hysteria,
had carried us into the seventh heaven of affectation and madness. No;
it was not fairy land indeed, but something more marvelous, a miracle of
realities that to recall even now makes my head spin with the vertigo of
a confessed self-delusion. LISTEN!
We had staked everything on the naphtha launch. As an invention it was
ideal. We expected to drive it over the ice floes, and to sail it across
the leads. It would hold all we needed, and our team of dogs, forty or
fifty in number, would be able to pull it over the ice. If it was too
heavy in the snows it could be lightened of its load on the sledges, or
on the sledge teams which we expected would accompany it. The project
appeared a little cumbersome but safe. We had noticed the striking
absence from the western polar sea of icebergs, and we concluded that
the sea north of Point Barrow, like the sea generally north of Cape
Columbia or Cape Sheridan was a frozen water, smooth or interrupted only
by the pressure ridges which scarred its surface with cyclopean walls of
massed ice. We had indeed gone further in our inferences, and assumed
that no mountainous elevations, with their chasms, intervening valleys
and gorges made up the coasts of Krocker Land, for if they had, as in
Greenland or Grant Land or as usually in the eastern archipelago, the
discharge of the ice streams that filled them would have produced
icebergs. Or was the annual snowfall inadequate?
Certainly the spectacular processions of the icebergs every spring and
summer in the east were absent in the west. The conditions presented
seemed to be a convincing assurance that our naphtha launch and ice
boat, in its composite adaptation to land or water, would successfully
traverse the flat ice sheet. Not indeed that it would actually be a
plane table, but the obstacles of hummocks, piled up ice floes, ridges,
mounds and walls could be circumvented, avoided, and the launch bodily
driven over the pack. Such maneuvers might add much to the distance, but
the resources were sufficient for a long journey, and, were we made to
feel that the launch offered insurmountable difficulties, we would
abandon it, increase the loads of our sledges with its distributed
freight, and go on.
The naphtha launch was a simple and interesting vessel. It was a long,
narrow, strong wooden raft with curving sides, and a broad, smooth
sloping bow, reinforced by steel binders, bolts and rivets, set on
runners, with a short tiller, easily unshipped, and a peculiar slanting
propeller which was simply one rotating blade of alternating plates of
wood and steel, allowing a shifting attachment to the engine, so that
its stem could be shortened or lengthened, or withdrawn altogether, and
the propeller disk sheathed in a pocket in the body of the vessel.
The upper works were a watertight box and nothing more, about six feet
in height, made up of two skins, between which was packed asbestos,
built strongly, with no doors or windows. A few covered eyelets allowed
a poor sort of ventilation which could be improved by opening the
manhole on top, through which entrance to the inside was to be made.
Through this manhole everything we carried was introduced; the sledges
and kayaks were placed on its roof. This box-cabin covered three-fourths
of the length of the boat. The bow admitted the socket and step for a
mast and a small sail. It had no beauty, no speed, but we believed it
was adaptable to the vicissitudes of travel before us, because of its
amphibious properties. If fairly caught in an ice jam it would be
crushed like a peanut shell, but it was intended to rise on the ice, and
we expected to save it from the contingency of any ice chancery by
keeping it on open fields of ice.
The conditions before us welcomed this treatment, or at least we thought
so. We could give it a load of two tons, which affords an equivalent of
one ton in traction force to haul, so that forty dogs, pulling fifty
pounds each, would draw it, and this was a very lenient exaction.
Circumstances vary, and the phases of Arctic mutability are almost
incalculable, but once on the ice we anticipated success. The weak
feature of our plan was the late start. If nothing could be negotiated,
in the slang parlance of exploration, we would return to Point Barrow
and wait until later.
The long days invited us and the calculable chance of escaping the awful
winter storms. What we probably could not cross were the large pressure
ridges which are perhaps twenty feet high, a fourth of a mile in width,
and which contain individual masses of ice as big as a small house, all
in a _gallimaufry_ of confusion. But we would flank them somehow; that
was our purpose. The summer might give us good leads, winding,
penetrating lanes of water drifting through labyrinthine courses to the
“promised land.” _It_ was there, and it grew in our thoughts every day
as more and more desirable. We did not care at what point we hit it.
Four hundred miles ahead of us somewhere lay _terra firma_, and the
conception grew in magnitude, not as another Greenland buried under
thousands of feet of snow, a monstrous, appalling desert of ice scoured
by hurricanes and chilled in death with a temperature half a hundred
below zero. No! By an incomprehensible infatuation (the Professor had
warped our judgments by his indefatigable promises) we were convinced
that Krocker Land contained the resources of life.
Had not Peary at Independence Bay, on the very northern edge of
Greenland, found flowers, grass and musk oxen? Had he not, when driving
for the pole, “repeatedly passed fresh tracks of bear and hare together
with numerous fox tracks”? And then those uncovered veins of gold
seaming the primal rocks, how they swam before our eyes in yellow
reticulations over square miles of quartz! We had become decidedly crazy
about it all, for, unexpressed, but cherished in our deepest hearts were
fantastic hopes of some indescribable faunal, floral, _human_ remnant,
like Conan Doyle’s “Lost World” or the Kosekin in De Mille’s “Strange
_MS_ in a Copper Cylinder” in the Antarctic, and that romantic and
sufficing Paradise that Paine depicted in “The Great White Way,” or even
the nightmare trances and inventions, the megalithic splendors and
horrific glories of Atvatabar, or the mythic creatures in Etidorhpa. And
yet our extravagancies of imagination were all finally obliterated, even
to memory, in the grandeur and miracle of Reality.
In one respect we altered our first plan. Hopkins had wished to have
three Americans selected to bring back our launch, and to pick us up
again the next summer. We changed that. We would never come back, or if
there were disappointments (“Inconceivable,” said the Professor) we
would get back our own way unaided, and—
(Erickson looked at me solemnly, and his voice struck a sepulchral tone
that would have done credit to Paris at the tomb of the Capulets.)
“And Mr. Link, I am the only one that _did_ come back. The Professor and
Hopkins are in Krocker Land today; Goritz is dead.”
(He resumed his narration.)
Captain Coogan steamed over to the ice pack which lay beyond the shore
channels of open water, towing our launch, which certainly now seemed to
dwindle into an inconsiderable implement of insertion in that trackless
ocean of ice. He pushed his way through the “slob” ice, and jammed the
nose of the “Astrum” upon the bulwarks of a great floe, whose uneven,
rumpled and snow encumbered surface receded into a measureless distance,
veiled, gray, dismal. We disembarked with the dogs, the launch came
alongside, Goritz started the engine and she bucked the ice hopelessly.
Then we windlassed her _onto_ the pack, harnessed the dogs to her in
five teams, one pack from the bow, two amidships and two at the stern,
and started. Goritz and I were good teamsters, and Hopkins made a fair
try at it, with promiscuous difficulties. The rudder and tiller were
unshipped. It looked as if she would “go.” We did not make fifty feet in
our trial, but the dogs certainly could pull her easily on her bone
runners. Then came the unloading of our supplies from the steamer.
The day was most favorable, clear, cold and still. The wind with its
usual aptitude for mischief in these northern asylums of meteorological
chaos, was waiting to catch us later. We packed the supplies, sledges,
two kayaks, guns, ammunition, stoves, oil, pemmican, and the assorted
constituents of the regular provisioning of an Arctic expedition, into
and on the launch, which made a very original and unique picture. The
Eskimos who came offshore with the steamer and the dogs themselves
seemed quite thoroughly perplexed, and doubtless entertained unspoken
and unfavorable opinions as to our final success, and the dogs were
perhaps dubious as to their own fate.
The closing hour of the day, scarcely separable now from the night, with
the sun always above the horizon, found us ready. The dogs were an
anxiety. We hoped to feed them on fresh meat in a large measure. Seals,
the flipper, the bearded, and the hooded, were common. Goritz and I were
good hunters, and a better shot than Hopkins never lived. Our formal
relations and duties were pretty quickly arranged. Goritz was commander,
with especial charge of the dogs, Hopkins was engineer, I was steward,
and the Professor combined, very happily, the services of cook and
scientific observer. We started with one hundred dogs, double perhaps
our actual needs, but the sometimes sudden and unaccountable mortality
among these animals justified our precaution.
Then came the leave taking and, for the first time, an explicit avowal
of our intentions, with Krocker Land pictured as our destination, and
also with the renewed stipulation, enforced by a signed agreement and
the additional security of prepayment, that Coogan should return the
following year and look for us. I have said we did not intend to return.
We did not, but then that reservation was a hidden, peculiarly communal
feeling, unspoken and realized between ourselves, as a psychological
dithyramb which we didn’t confess or particularize, but which coerced us
insensibly, as a mission does a prophet, an ambition a conqueror, or a
dream a poet. Externally our demeanor was of the ordinary rational type.
Coogan should come back for us—OF COURSE.
It was picturesque and unprecedented, that leave taking. The Arctic
scene, the outlandish and piled up “Pluto,” the waiting, serviceable
dogs, alert and incredulous, the swarthy, grimy, wrinkled, heterogeneous
natives, ourselves on one side of the pictorial composition, Coogan,
Stanwix, Phillips, Spent on the other, with the crew in an amazement of
disgust hanging over the steamer’s taffrail, perched in the rigging, or
sauntering near us, and that illimitable ice-packed sea, imperturbably
plotting our destruction. Hopkins delivered the valedictory.
“My friends,” he said with a profound sweep of his cap, and a big
obeisance that made the Eskimos shout with glee, “we’re off for parts
unknown. You probably entertain a rather hopeful feeling that we’ll
never come back. May be. You never can tell. At this end of the earth
the unusual usually happens. However, we’re not worrying. Not in the
least. To miss the resumption of your acquaintance would distress us,
and might hurt your feelings, but it’s a case of taking what comes, and
kicking don’t go _up here_. You’re all aware of that. No, you mustn’t
put us in a class by ourselves. We are just part of the bunch, that for
the last one hundred years or more has been leaving cards at the door of
Our Lady of Snows, with an occasional intimation on the part of her
ladyship that the visitors were welcome, but generally with a bolted and
barred entrance, and an upset of snow, ice, wind and zeros from the
upper stories of her palatial residence, that compelled an inglorious
departure, or left the gentlemen in question dead on the doorstep. Well,
we’re ready to join the previous company.
“Only I don’t think so. I’m not in the least nutty—I hope you catch
me—and there are scientific reasons—” Hopkins patted the back of the
Professor—“scientific reasons for banking on a safe return, with the
goods, for all of us. When that happens, my friends, you’ll be very glad
to see us. Nothing will be too good for us, nothing too handsome. The
ordinary brand of explorer won’t be in it with us, for if that kind gets
back with his clothes on, and the breath in his body, he gets in the
picture supplements, is put up for sale to the highest bidder for
receptions, cornerstone laying, and memorial exercises; he can put the
whole country to sleep listening to his talk at one hundred
per—minute!—and is never known to disappear from the public eye until he
crosses the Styx on another kind of expedition from which there
certainly is no ‘come back.’
“That won’t be our way. When next we reach New York, and the land of the
free and the home of the brave, our suit cases will be so full of boodle
that you won’t be able to shut them with a steam compressor, and we can
give you cross references to all the original sources of all the gold
that the world ever had or can have. The trusts won’t be in it, John
Rockefeller will dwindle into invisibility, and the bunko lords and
potentates on the other side of the big pond, always fishing for _big_
money will just scramble to get in first to sell their junk crowns to
us. JUST WAIT. If there’s an income tax on our return, we’ll undertake
single handed to run the government and, what’s more expensive, buy up
the politicians. Fact, Captain Coogan; fact, Mate Stanwix; fact,
Engineer Phillips; fact, Jack Spent; fact, all of you!” And Hopkins
executed another inclusive gyration, “And now, Good-bye.”
I don’t think his audience took him in, or else their previous
convictions were only somewhat strengthened by this nondescript
allocution. The Professor smiled benignly. Goritz grunted approval, I
felt queerly elated. Coogan came forward, hoped it would all turn out
right, promised to look for us next summer, told us to stack up all the
spare meat we could when the winter set in and shook hands. There was no
more speech making; the rest came forward and shook hands too, as did
all the Eskimos. Jack Spent, the carpenter, with his spectacles on his
nose, and his brushy whiskers stiffened out like a privet hedge, tried
to sing a song, which by reason of its quavering falsetto brought howls
from the Nuwukmeun. Its import ran:
“Good Luck to you my trusty mates,
Good Luck and Fortune brave,
May God and all the kindly Fates
Your souls and bodies save.”
The groups turned back, the grave Eskimos climbing in last, over the
“Astrum’s” rail. The steamer backed out of the “porridge,” and we,
impatient to be off, trimmed up the dogs, tightened the ropes over the
pyramidal freight, and cheering as we heard the parting whistles from
the “Astrum,” soon hazily obscured in a rising evening dusk, went
northward over the great ice field before us.
[Illustration:
ON THE ICE PACK
]
The dogs were alert, the yacht-sledge went along well, the ice was
sloppy but fairly smooth, and the floe had apparently escaped the
contusions, bumps and collisions, which heap up these Arctic rafts with
mounds, faults and pressure ridges, over which our unusual equipage
never could have made its way. As it was, we at times traveled slowly
enough, avoiding inequalities and dodging obstreperous humps. Towards
evening of that first day the thermometer fell, an easterly wind came
out of the sullen eastern sky, the snow flakes floated thickly in the
air, and the sun glared like a gigantic ruby in the west, across which
scurried veils from snow banks, eclipsing and revealing it at inconstant
intervals—an augury of a storm.
We camped; that is we unharnessed the dogs, who proceeded, accordingly
to the conventional style, immemorially recorded, to tie themselves up
into yelping snarls of fur and harness; we lit our stove, partook of tea
and pemmican, biscuit and marmalade (Yes, Mr. Link, _marmalade_) and
slipped into protected nooks, amid the boxes on our diminutive ark. As
the wind was rising we turned her lengthwise to the wind to prevent a
capsize, wedged her forward and, under warning to jump to the ice if
anything happened—a generalized warning for almost every sort of
disturbance—tried to sleep.
It was a long time before dreams came to me, and when they did come they
were unwelcome, for I seemed to be helplessly struggling up an inclined
plain of ice over which flowed a sheet of icy water. I woke with a
start. A roaring sound, almost stunning in its loudness, came through
the snowladen air. The snowfall had increased and might have deadened
the distant report had it not been for the hissing wind which brought
the sound sharply to our ears, mingling it menacingly with its own
sibilant fury. Another and another! We all tumbled out on the ice. The
floe shook. We distinctly felt its tremors under our feet, and, as it
were, subterranean cracking and splitting noises developed underneath
us, as if the floe might break. It was an anxious moment. But the floe
was some eight feet thick, a resistant mass that might easily, however,
succumb to cleavage surfaces. The booming sound ceased, but a prolonged
crushing and rattling followed. Goritz clapped his hands. It seemed an
unaccountable exhibition of spirits.
“Well,” exclaimed Hopkins, “what do you make of it?”
“The best thing for us. We’ve got another length laid out for us on the
straight track to Krocker Land. This floe probably ended off there
somewhere,” he pointed northeast, “and now another has struck it,
crumpling the edges. We’re not making such progress as we thought. The
whole sea is in motion, but pretty nearly due east, so that as long as
we go forward the easting does not hold us back on the northing, or very
little.”
“What do you say to breaking up camp now. Let’s see what’s happened,”
suggested Hopkins.
“Certainly,” chimed in the Professor, “Krocker Land has a long coast of
course. The nearer we get to it the greater likelihood of eddies,
conflicting currents, flood tides and even favoring winds driving us
ashore. I’m for the advance.”
“And I,” I concurred. We dug out the dogs, who were not very deeply
covered, fed them, had tea and biscuit and some potted beef stew, and
were off. Goritz calculated we had covered eight miles in northing,
though our speculative way around obstacles had made the actual stretch
spanned much longer.
Curiosity and suspense conflictingly urged us to make haste. The snow
died away with the wind, and the sun, running its cartwheel course along
the horizon, again watched us from the east in a clear sky. It was a
“gorgeous Arctic day.” The summer heat had not yet too strongly
prevailed, and the air almost sparkled over the dazzling splendor of the
ice, undulating where it was seen in spaces somewhat cleared of snow, or
spread with the deep ermine of the snow itself, which again, in rifts,
drifts or circular heaps, reflected the sun like a firmament of pinpoint
stars. The snow, melting, became compressed, and at length a duller
lustre relieved our eyes of the strain of the almost insupportable
brilliancy of the morning hours.
We had made sluggish headway, the wet snow clogging and detaining us;
indeed we lightened the load on the yacht-sledge, and used the sledges
and extra dogs to improve our progress. About noon we saw the results of
the night’s collision. A toppling but not very high pressure ridge had
soared upward between our floe and another, presumably larger, for it
had overtaken the one we were on. On that floe we must ourselves
continue our advance, for already to the north and west we saw the broad
leads of open water, indicated to Goritz’s experienced eyes by the dark
“water blink” seen, as he told us, the day before.
But how to surmount the barrier of ice blocks? Goritz and Hopkins went
forward to investigate, the Professor and myself watching the dogs whose
sudden alternations of obedience and mutiny kept us perpetually active.
Hopkins found a less prominent section of the ridge, where the slanting
and unevenly disposed blocks might be flattened to aid our progress, or
be shattered into fragments, with dynamite. We adopted Peary’s expedient
in shaking the “Roosevelt” free of ice at Lincoln Bay. Dynamite sticks
attached to poles were stuck among the blocks, and connected by wires to
our battery. Then we turned on the current. The explosion seemed to stop
our hearts and breath, but if it did we were conscious enough to wonder
at the fountain of splintered ice that rose like a geyser in the air,
shimmering too with ten thousand irises against the sun, as it subsided
with clatter and tinkling to the floe.
We had cleared our way and to our exultation the avenue opened showed us
a wonderfully level and unencumbered field of ice. This obstruction
might have been circumvented by taking to the water, but too late we
realized the danger of being crushed in the battling floes that swirled
together with the current or were driven by the winds. It was a prudent
measure to keep to the ice at present. Our launch was flat, rounded and
intended, like the “Fram,” to rise over the squeezing ice blocks. But
would it? It seemed a trifle top-heavy, with its varied load. An upset
would have been fatal; the dogs would be lost.
And now joy ruled, hope rose, the promise seemed granted. Oh, the
incurable madness of human dreams. A gleam of light betokens the full
day; it may be only a ray from a lantern, or the quiet before the storm
gives assurance of eternal peace; it may be but the presage of the
tempest.
We drove in triumph through the dismantled gateway, pierced by the
convulsion of those yellow sticks of doom. Out on the white field, on
which perhaps only the wind had left its imprint, which no eye but that
all-seeing orb of day had ever scanned, whose silence only the winds,
the waves, the storming ice had ever broken, and which now, the first
time since Eternity began its reign there, was rudely assailed—we
imagined it as an astonished deity—by yelping dogs and four hurrahing
mortals!
The snow was deep and melting, but our dogs (Goritz had harnessed all
the dogs and they were still in good condition) dragged the strange bulk
of our ice-yacht with its rocking cargo at a topping speed. Exhilaration
reigned, we were hilarious with confidence. It was not long before
Hopkins, in spite of the heavy trudging, indulged in some characteristic
musical levity, and his baritone notes finely contrasted with the
silence of that void, in which we alone seemed sentient and animated.
It was a college reminder, and I just recall that the refrain had a most
freakish incongruity:
“‘’Twas on the Arctic polar pack
I smoked my last cigar.’”
Well, the merriment did not last long. In about an hour we saw before us
a rising hillside, the snow sloping up to an elevation of twenty feet or
more and having drifted in thick mounds above and below it. We halted.
Goritz plunged forward and struggled to the top of the eminence. We
noticed him turning from side to side, leaning forward, looking backward
too over our heads, tramping up and down like a dog on a lost scent.
Then he waved his arms. We understood his summons. I watched the dogs,
and Hopkins and the Professor ran on, tumbling into the white heaps,
apparently hitting slippery surfaces below, which sent them sprawling in
a splutter of white dust. The three men at length stood together and
their gesticulations made black strokes against a white-gray sky. There
was rain coming. I knew we had struck a break; there was a bad hole
ahead with a poor chance of getting over it. Slowly the three returned,
and it was Hopkins who gave the first intimation of the difficulty.
“Mr. Erickson, we’ve been a little ‘previous’ in our expectations. I
think perhaps that psalm of joy was a mistaken indulgence on my part, or
else I unconsciously hit the nail on the head and—our last cigar _will_
be smoked here and a few other last things may happen along with it. Go
up and look at the scenery.”
He motioned to the snowhill. I did not need the invitation, I was
already on my way, noticing Goritz’s gravity and the absence of the
Professor’s static grin. And in the interval that may be allowed between
my first step and my surmounting the snow bank covering the topsy-turvy
_abattis_ of ice blocks, a paragraph of explanation may be wisely
inserted.
Anyone familiar with experiences of Arctic voyagers in this western
Arctic sea, as for instance the thrilling pages of DeLong’s diary in the
disastrous “Jeannette” expedition, will recall the fact of the broken
condition of the polar pack in the summer, and its hitherto almost
invariably pictured confusion of peaks, ridges and pits. Such a person
would question the truthfulness of the few previous pages and note
incredulously the absence of any remonstrance on the part of the
“Astrum’s” officers at our foolhardy undertaking. There was remonstrance
enough however. We were told we could not live in the broken, smashing,
surging ice; that there was no even ice floor; that everything was
uneasy, perilous, shifting, open; that we should wait until winter had
solidified the mass, and then “just hike it north.”
And we knew pretty well ourselves just what everyone else had seen and
recorded. But we took the chance, and by a perfect miracle of
opportunity found there was, outside of Point Barrow a marvelous field
of ice suited for our _progress_. (The real word turned out to be
_occupancy_.)
Well, I got to the top of the snow pile, and my heart beat a rapid
retreat to my boots at the sight before me. Ice, ice, ice, but
everywhere in blocks smiting each other, rolling, rocking, jamming, and
all together crying aloud in a jargon of groans, shivers, reports,
grumbles, growls, like packs of quarreling dogs or wolves. It was a
disconcerting, discouraging spectacle, and it stretched endlessly away
on every side. And in the middle distance, looming larger each instant,
rose a floeberg that came on, shoving to the right and left the ice
shards about it, resistlessly, as the steel prow of a cruiser or
battleship might sweep a flotilla of boats and barges from the path of
its imperious progress.
Its pinnacle blazed in the sun; its prow, a pointed ice foot, pierced
the obstacles before it with a rattling discharge of rending and
splitting; then came an ominous silence and the powerful ice ram rushed
down upon us through softer or smaller particles that brushed to each
side in parting waves. A few minutes more and its collision with our
floe would follow, and then—? I saw too quickly we could make no headway
in that hurly-burly of disorder, and then the thought flashed on me that
in the pathway of this rushing dreadnought of the north lay death and
destruction.
I leaped down the pressure ridge and regaining my feet at its base ran
on shouting to the others, who were arrested by my sudden return, “Back!
Back! Back!” waving to them to get away. Goritz understood, the rest
followed him. The dogs were wheeled round, the crack of the long whips
sounded in their ears, and the sting of the lash tingled on their backs.
The lumbering “Pluto” swept in a half circle, and was shot along the
trail we had just made towards the south. Perhaps we had gained a
hundred yards, when the jolt came. It threw us on our faces and upset
the dogs. It came with a queer, smothered roar that sharpened into a
long, rending shriek; the ice beneath shook with the blow, and
then—parted! A seam opened below the “Pluto,” and water spouting from
underneath covered the rearward dogs. The Professor and Hopkins were on
the separated section. They sprang forward, while Goritz jumped to his
feet in a flash, and played his whip like a demon on the dogs who
seemed, to my eyes, tied up in its rapid convolutions.
The yacht-sledge crossed the chasm, and I, a short distance behind, on
the “calf” made by the impact, pitched into the gap. I came up like a
cork and instantly felt Hopkins’ hand in the neck of my coat. He dragged
me out and for the moment we were safe.
But behind us ploughed on the _devastator_. A closer view revealed a
great hulk of ice blocks heaped up, up-ended pieces of the floeberg,
perhaps forty feet high. It would strike us again, the shock of its
first blow had allowed the strong current to turn its extension
northward, and it was slowly revolving on a water pivot, and another
face was about to deliver a second disrupting blow further along. There
were no councils held just then. We scampered out of danger at our best
speed, leaping to the sides of the “Pluto” and helping to pull with the
dogs, all together, with a simultaneous inspiration. It worked well. We
were slipping along fast, thanks to the level surface, when BANG, and
then _bang_ again, and then a fierce ripping sound.
“A wallop on the slats, and a jolt under the chin. _That rocks us_,”
exclaimed Hopkins spasmodically.
Goritz was keeping the air over the dogs blue with imprecations and hot
with the winnowing lashes of his whip. We were too late. Twenty or more
feet ahead a black jagged line suddenly ran over the ice, a million
unseen hands seemed to have seized the farther edge of the seam and
pushed it open with frightful speed. Deliberation was impossible, but
there must be a decision of some sort, “_right off the bat_,” as Hopkins
would say. It came.
Goritz called back, “Shoot it! Loosen the dogs! All aboard!”
We cast off the loops from the cleats, always intended for quick
release, and prepared for embarkation. The word “prepared” does not fit,
for it was preparation wound to the top-notch of precipitancy. Goritz
turned the forward teams of dogs and slowed the momentum of the
boat-sledge. She slid on, however, and almost dumped into the lead that
had been formed; a fortunate hump of ice blocked her and made her cargo
of boxes and tins rattle absurdly. It had a silly effect like the wail
of a baby in a storm. I long remembered it. Getting the dogs stowed was
troublesome. We had seventy (thirty had been discarded and sent back
with Coogan) but pemmican pitched on the boat hurried them aboard and
kept them there. Then we pushed the boat overboard, holding her back
with boathooks. In another instant we were on her, too, and the little
voyage towards the receding ice began—towards the larger mass, which we
believed to be still connected with the ice field we had first
traversed. That was a trifle, but it was another matter lifting her to
the surface of the pack. We sloped the edge with picks, anchored a
capstan on the ice, and by main strength hauled her on, putting in the
dogs at the final pull. We fed the dogs, fed ourselves, and took time to
think. As Goritz remarked, “there was some room for thought.”
Our dilemma was this: Should we try to regain the first floe cake,
through the gateway we had made in the pressure ridge, or stay where we
were? In any case the complete breakup of our platform involved sticking
to the boat, trusting that she would not be crushed and waiting for the
colder days when the cementation of the floes would begin, when we could
push northward somehow over the ice. A reconnaissance settled the
question. Our first floe had parted, the pressure ridge had disappeared;
south of us, as all around us, was the treacherous, shifting, pulverized
ice pack (the particles of the pulverization were often small rafts). We
drilled the ice and found it from four to six feet thick, and took our
position in the center. We were beleaguered; as with Marshal Bazaine it
was _J’y suis, j’y reste_, for each of us. A storm was brewing, the wind
rose and, as Mikkelsen has described it, the ice floes “ducked and
dipped and hacked at each other, crushing and being crushed.”
“As long as our island holds out we’re safe enough, and if some good
leads develop we might strike the water, and make off for another,” said
Goritz.
“There’s no place like home,” said Hopkins. “Stick here. We’re drifting
in the right direction. When we sight the metropolis of Krocker Land we
can hoist our colors and, if there are proper harbor facilities, come up
the bay under full steam. I guess the Professor understands the
formalities of these upper regions. He can introduce us to the mayor and
the aldermen and get us the freedom of the city, and perhaps we can
negotiate a commercial treaty that will give the United States of
America the monopoly of the ice crop. If we could get an attachment on
these rory-borealises for the movies, it would be a mint.”
The Professor ignored these pleasantries. He also believed our safest
plan was to stay on the floe and drift at present. Game would turn up
for the dogs—seal, walrus—and when we touched Krocker Land (persistent
iteration had banished all doubts now of its reality) we would find
bear.
“And really,” the Professor continued, “nothing could be more favorable
than our prospects at present. We are drifting northwest; wind and tide
are pushing us along on the right course. Krocker Land, my friends, is
not one hundred miles away. This coming storm will help amazingly, and I
see no reason why we shouldn’t raise sail.”
The suggestion was overruled by Goritz. The danger of collisions was too
great, and the headway might be faster than we could overcome if we were
threatened with one. The ice was getting softer; pools of water
glistened all around us, and a bad blow might break us up.
Watches were kept, and as the light lasted the full twenty-four hours,
we were not likely to be surprised by unsuspected invasions. The higher
floebergs were to be feared. Their bases, prolonged far below, furnished
push surfaces to the tide for perhaps hundreds of feet, and their mass
supplied momentum. They were dangerous neighbors. And now the storm rose
furiously around us. Except for our peril it was a spectacle we might
have enjoyed. The Professor alone was absolutely unconcerned, and his
nonchalance calmed our own apprehensions.
The clouds in strips and bulging banners were carried high above us.
Streamers they seemed, from the eastern sky where the high lying cirrus
flakes, slowly expanding into shapeless patches, had already delivered
their usual warning. These again were soon blotted out in the onrushing
scud all around us. A dull yellow light at first spread its sickly tint
over the ice field, and the sun, darkened and blurred, was soon utterly
cloaked from view. The wind rose quickly, brushing close to the surface
of the ice, ushering in interminable strife among the pitching blocks.
They ground together, and the swell, started below them, kept their
edges pounding, while a tumult of groans and creaking noises like the
smashing of heavy glass raised an unceasing din, a din indeed that
possessed some of the elements of a wild, fascinating rhythm. The rain
came in pelting downpours, whipped into horizontal sheets by the blast,
and then with a sudden drop of temperature changed to blinding snow
flurries, that buried everything in white dust, and sometimes smote us
with the sharpness of myriad-edged microscopic needles.
The water washed in long flows over the sides of the berg, and the berg
itself rocked and shook, threatening to start our ice-yacht into motion,
and to carry her and her precious cargo into the whirling, fighting ice
about us. Fortunately it continued to grow colder, and the snow, besides
offering us means of banking the yacht, stem, stern, and prow, and
ramming her bowl-shaped sides with a stiff embrace from which a jolt
would hardly free her, provided a bed for the poor dogs, who were
frantic with misery, howling and whining in disgust.
Our berg had shrunk considerably; it was only a remnant, an angle of the
big field we had entered with such rejoicing, and we knew it was getting
smaller. When the dogs had quieted, and we felt that the launch was
immovable, we crept into the box-cabin and gratefully partook of hot
tea, warmed pemmican, and biscuit, with cups of soup to “wash it down.”
It was a parnassian feast, and though we were anxious, the snug refuge
and the soul-stimulating grub brought us to the verge of exultation.
Even the hard knocks that the pack received attested to our progress,
and if it held together, and the blizzard lasted, we would win some
miles of our journey, almost without effort, and, as Goritz said, “it
was just the sort of a blow to clear the track.”
I certainly had fallen asleep. Pictures had risen like projections on a
screen, one after the other, in my mind, one melting deliciously into
its predecessors, and all linked together by the memories of home. My
mother, my sister and her two boys under the pine tree by the side of
the dreaming pond, holding in its reflexions the cloud-flecked bosom of
the blue sky, and the slanting cliff, the hillside graveyard, and the
reversed boats moored to the little dock, and then the dash of the
phaeton down the road, the group waving their kerchiefs at me, and my
own answering salute, the turn of the road, the dark passage through the
spruce forest, the cleared farmsides with the red houses, and the
clustering friends along the filled fences, cheering, and then—a
terrific bump—the phaeton had smashed against a stone, and—!
“Wake up, Erickson, all hands busy.”
It was Goritz’s voice bellowing in my ear, it was his hand, shaking me
like a giant by the shoulder. I leaped to my feet, dazed and, leaping to
conclusions as quickly, thought the ice had split our keel and we were
sinking. Everything was dark around me. I heard Hopkins swearing over
the oil lamps which had fallen to the floor and the Professor mumbling
further away. And then came a curiously stifled boom.
“Well, what’s up?” I stuttered.
“The ice cake is breaking up. There—it goes again,” groaned Goritz.
Another report, louder, keener, like a gun shot, was heard above the
babel of noises that the wind, the waters now and the straining boat,
not to speak of the cargo on the deck, rustled and scraped throughout
its many joints and the crevices between the boxes, promiscuously
raised. There was a pause, then came another report that made us all
jump to the door; it seemed almost as if the launch were cracking
beneath our feet. It was a detonation directly below us. Outside the
wailing, demoniacal storm was raging. Our cargo, thanks to its
unbreakable anchorage to the deck, seemed safe, but on all sides of us
was water, laden with ice blocks that beat trip-hammer blows against the
sides of the launch. OUR DOGS WERE LOST!
No, not all. Ten had struggled from their confinement in the snow and
had taken refuge on the boat. The rest, swallowed up in the sundering of
the raft, had perished in the foaming sea. The boat was tossing, and the
waves would have swamped us had not the watertight door of the cabin
house been shut. She was drifting helplessly amid the ice-strewn
billows, whose retreating slopes were sheeted white with a lather of
foam. We were holding onto anything convenient, and were drenched, but
finally Goritz and Hopkins found their way somehow with the agility and
tenacity of cats to the stern, and shipped the rudder, and in a few
moments—they seemed hours—we were in line with the wind, and racing
before it, lifted and shot onward by the waves that, luckily for us,
were not dangerously crested, but were peaked hills of water, whose
ebullitions were somewhat suppressed by the masses of ice distributed
over them. We seemed like playthings, and like playthings the giant of
the deep tossed us on, thus humorously willing to aid us to our
destination if we could stand the treatment.
The storm would half subside and then, as if maddened at its clemency,
would renew its violence. As Hopkins put it, “She certainly can come
back good and hearty, gets her second wind and takes a right hook, just
as if nothing had happened. But after all it’s no raw deal. We’re
covering ground fine, and not turning a hair to pay for it, provided we
can hold together. The insides of the weather man are hard to fathom,
and he has never been credited with too big a supply of the milk of
human kindness, but if he isn’t putting it over us hard with a
goldbrick, it looks to me as if we might soon expect to run up against
the revenue cutter of the Krocker port. I suppose we can declare these
goods as essential to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and
beat the duty.”
It grew lighter on the third day, and the awful tumult lapsed suddenly
into a peacefulness amazing and ideal. The temperature rose and the
skies cleared, the sun was unclouded and intensely brilliant for these
latitudes, and, most glorious of all, the ocean was clear of ice, only
the green rolling waves sweeping over the limitless distances,
flattening out against that magic circle where sky and water meet, and
where we half expected to see the emergent peaks of mountains.
And the next days were wonder days. The air was even balmy; the sea,
cleared of its litter of ice, invited us with green gleaming undulations
to tempt its mercies still farther. Our engine was started, and the
“Pluto,” albeit a little slowly, forged on, and later, aided by a sail
that drew every wind that stirred, advanced over the ocean, with even a
flattering pretence to speed; her safeness had been assumed at the
start.
Except for the destruction of our dogs whom we had already begun to
admire and to cherish, nothing seemed wanting for our perfect peace of
mind except a little more confidence that this unknown world, now
rapidly approaching, would offer us a decent foothold; that it would not
be an ice-buried continent, the asylum of all the terrors of the north,
awful in its solitude, remorseless in its scorn, brutal in its revenge.
Well, the Professor undertook to calm our doubts, and while he exerted
his culinary skill in the infinite variety of combinations of soups,
canned fruits, preserves, bread, cake, biscuits, candy, pemmican, wine,
custards, pie and macaroni, he expended a more valuable art in
convincing us that we were indeed to discover a pleasant country, and
was not averse to beguiling us into raptures over his fabulous pictures
of its possibilities—“spinning yarns” and “pipe dreams,” Hopkins
contemptuously styled them.
“My friends,” said the Professor, sprinkling dried raisins into the
yellow dough which would later be transformed into a delectable cake,
“this Krocker Land has been the dream of ages. It is the ancient Eden,
and it is preserved to us in the records of prehistoric men who have
retained the childhood stories of still more ancient peoples. Relatively
it is a legend because no one has seen it. In reality it will establish
the unity of tradition, as it ought,” and so on and on, with some new
notions of the oblateness of the earth’s form, and the fact that at the
north we were some thirteen miles nearer the earth’s center, and then
some more about the unequal distribution of the interior fluid masses of
rock, and the great probability that such unsolidified magmas, radiating
great heat, might occur in the boreal regions of the earth’s crust to
produce local warmth. But of course his great point was the depression
idea. He harped incessantly on that.
“It looks to me,” said Hopkins as we sat round our little mess table in
the cabin, “that if the going stays good, and the food lasts, we surely
will get there. Holes are, however, dangerous things, and Americans
don’t relish getting into them too deep. The grub question is important.
We’ve stacks of it just now, but this invincible habit of eating is
getting the best of it, and starvation is a most inglorious death. Do
you think, Professor, that this Krocker Land has got any live stock on
it?”
The pained expression, of having been wounded in the house of a friend,
that came over the Professor’s face, as he wiped his mouth and
reluctantly paused in his consumption of a ham sandwich was very
delightful.
“In Krocker Land, Mr. Hopkins” this ceremonial gravity was met by a
severe, deferential attention on Hopkins’ part that was perfect—“we may
expect to meet a concentrated reflexion of the palearctic and the
neoarctic faunas. Along the coast there will be whales, walrus, seal,
bear, the shores will be tenanted by the eider duck; and snipe, geese,
ducks, ptarmigans, plover, will be found inland, with the reindeer, the
fox, hare, and the musk ox, and—” here the Professor paused with a
deliberation intended to impress us—“and I should not be surprised to
meet with the American bald headed eagle.”
We all shouted, and the Professor hid his face and his satisfaction in
his sandwich. But Hopkins accepted the challenge unflinchingly:
“Good, Professor. If the American eagle is up there, it certainly is
God’s country, and a white man can live in it!”
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