ALONG THE EDGE OF THE PACK-ICE
For the last few days we have had under discussion a striking
peculiarity of the antarctic pack. It is a noticeable yellowness in the
second sheets of newly broken pieces of ice. We saw this first in the
ice close to Dancoland, and at this time most of us thought it due to
earthy material from the neighbouring lands. But we have seen it to-day
and we have seen it every day since we left this land now hundreds of
miles eastward. Can it be earthy matter? In the laboratory there have
been a number of experiments made. Almost every department claims the
mysterious yellow as its special preserve, but all are at work either
guessing or making painstaking experiments, or observations. The
discussions grow quite heated. The navigating officers, with whom I
coincided, held that it was earthy matter brought down upon the sea-ice
by glacial streams. The fact that it is seen most close to the land,
and only in patches in our present position, seems to bear out this
fact; but the geologist, who is a chemist of ability, will not agree to
this, and heaps upon us all sorts of mild humourous abuse. Arctowski
has experiments in hand which he thinks will prove a chemical origin
of the knotty yellow question. None of us are chemists, and of course
we cannot dispute the theory of a chemical origin, but we hold fast to
our first idea. The zoölogist would not venture a theory, but he said
it belonged to his department, and we tried to talk him down also, but
he would say little and took our unkindly jests goodnaturedly. Late in
the afternoon Racovitza came out of his laboratory all aglow with good
humour, but he heaped upon us of the majority, a stream of abuse which
made us, for the time, abandon all theories. He has examined the yellow
stuff carefully under the microscope and finds the ice literally alive
with sea algæ, which prove to be the cause of the yellow colour. For a
short time this is hailed as a discovery, but presently some one finds
that it had been noticed by Hooker sixty years ago. Then followed a
discordant murmur on the strains, “There is nothing new under the sun.”
[Illustration: A Tabular Iceberg, Seen at the Pack-edge in the
South Pacific. About 200 Feet High.]
Shortly after noon we made a sounding. We found the water 480 metres
deep, under which there was a gray clay bottom. There is very little
variation in the temperature of the sea at various depths. At the
bottom it is 1° C.; coming up there are little variations of a half
degree, and at the surface it is -1.5°C.(29.3°F.). At the time of
making these soundings there were seventy-eight icebergs on the
horizon, most of them southward, a few miles within the edge of the
pack-ice. There were also a few lines of drift-ice flowing northward
in the trough of the sea. The sea is running in easy undulations with
an oily, unbroken surface of blue, and though the sky is slaty, there
is a charm in the solitude and a fascination in the scenic effects as
the pearly mountains and streams of ice rise and fall with the sea of
sapphire.
At ten o’clock to-night we turned around a point of heavy drift-ice and
headed southward. Before us here there seemed to be little ice to offer
an obstruction to our ambitions to reach the regions beyond. To the
east and the west there was a distinct ice-blink, but southward we saw
a smoky water-sky. The sea, as we advanced, became even smoother than
it had been, and was entirely free of ice.
We seem to select the nights for our attacks upon the barriers of ice
which everywhere have threatened to prevent our entry into the snowy
preserve beyond. During the night the temperature falls, the fog,
which always screens the ice in daytime, is congealed and deposited
as snow; and, though the sky here at the edge of the pack generally
remains dark at night, there is an incomprehensible metallic glow on
the glassy surface of the water, and a sharp phosphoretic glitter
from every spire and pan of ice. The night is a long twilight, and
when the demons of storm are not hovering about it is a long, dreamy
spell of joy. The inspiration of this solitude, the transcendental and
indescribable something about this continued twilight from sunset to
dawn, and the wine which one drinks with the wintry atmosphere raises
the soul into a plane of superhuman existence. The glory of these
midnight glimmers will haunt me for the rest of my days. But we are
below the antarctic circle, and the average reader will expect that
we are flooded by the almost perpetual light of the polar summer day.
This would be true earlier in the season; but now the sun is low on the
horizon. The darkness, which is soon to throw the icy splendours into
a hopeless, sooty gloom, is gathering its hellish fabric to cover the
laughing glory of day. The sunless winter of storm, of unimaginable
cold, of heart-destroying depression, is rapidly advancing. We are
hoping to continue our voyage of exploration as long as possible, and
when the darkness and cold become too great we expect to steal away
and winter in more congenial latitudes. (How utterly we failed to gain
freedom from the icy fetters of this heartless Frost King of the night
is shown by our imprisonment later.)
[Illustration: Bird’s-eye View of the Pack-ice Near the Outer
Edge.]
February 20, 8 a.m.--We have steamed south by east, since midnight,
through a sea free of drift-ice, but icebergs are in great numbers on
all sides. Over the port gunwale, about two miles off, there is still
the white line indicating the edge of the main body of the pack. There
is a little swell, but the sea has a gray and cold aspect. There is
almost no wind stirring the glassy air. The temperature has fallen to
-2° C. (28.4° F.). The sky above us is smoky, with leaden streaks here
and there. To the south a narrow strip of horizon is clear, and above
this there are a few divisions with ragged silvery edges, beyond which
is the gladdening blue of the unscreened heavens, which is so rare
here. Nearly everywhere on the horizon to the south there is reflected
the glitter of the ice-blink. The narrow sooty bands, however, which
interrupt this blink, indicate that the ice is separated by open lanes
of water. We shall try these lanes, so nicely mapped on the sky, for
our benefit, and as our bowsprit is laid for one due south, we again
stir our hopes and discouraged spirits to fresh ambitions of further
discoveries. “Shall we succeed, or will the ice seize us with a final
and relentless embrace?” A fog soon fell over the scene, but we
continued our renewed efforts to push poleward with increasing vigour.
At ten o’clock we reached a point where the main body of the pack
again refused us a path. The _Belgica_, however, will not be
discouraged. She ploughs on between the heavy masses of ice, to some
open lakes beyond, where she seems to gain fresh courage, and then
rushes upon the offending fields with a spirit of animation altogether
in keeping with that of her directors. There are about us great numbers
of white and gray petrels seeming to urge us on. The fog rises and
falls offering a peep, now and then, into the white world to which we
are so anxious to force our way. Most of the men are standing about on
the decks, offering words of encouragement to the bark as she batters
and breaks the offending floes which hinder her passage. A few men,
sitting on the anchor chains, have premonitions of impending danger
and discuss the prospects of an antarctic winter, and the incidents of
starving and freezing, cast adrift on the ice. While thus making our
way energetically, and with our hopes raised to the highest pitch of
anticipation, some mystic force brought the ice together, and early
in the afternoon we found ourselves again beset--powerless either to
advance or retreat.
Again, disappointed and discouraged, we tried to turn the bark in an
effort to retrace our track. The entire afternoon was devoted to this
effort, but we were held with fetters not easily broken. This battle
with the ice has been the worst to the present. We go full speed ahead,
then full speed astern. Each change in direction is followed by crash
after crash, until it seems that every part of the good ship has been
loosened. Either the ice or the _Belgica_ must go to pieces. After
many hours of hard struggling the _Belgica_ obtains sufficient
room to give her a good headway, and then she rushes against and upon
the ice in a manner to make her mistress of the situation. Ploughing,
and jamming, and crushing her way through the huge masses of ice, she
scraped off her new dress of paint, and tore away many pieces of her
outer sheathing. Her path was marked by specks of paint and pieces of
wood, the result of scratches and bruises, but as she fought her way
again out into the open sweep of the new antarctic sea she had the
appearance, and we had for her the admiration, of a battleship after a
destructive engagement.
While the _Belgica_ was engaged battering the ice, Racovitza,
Tollefsen, and myself, started out over the ice to study the life and
to secure zoölogical specimens, as well as photographs. We saw numbers
of penguins, some giant petrels, and a few crab-eating, or white
antarctic seals; but the surprise of the day was a lone seal with a
thick neck and a big head, altogether different from any variety which
we had seen before. We at once recognised it as the “new seal” claimed
to have been discovered by Borchgrevink, in 1894. While it agreed in
every particular with the descriptions of the adventurous Norwegian
sailor, the animal proved, upon minute examination, to be a yearling of
the true sea-leopards. Borchgrevink’s discovery then, in this case as
in another, which will be cited later, is a myth, for the sea-leopard
has been known for about one hundred years.
February 21, 10 A. M.--During the night we skirted the pack,
steaming slowly westward. Now we are steaming south-west by the
compass, whose variation is here 39° west. The prow is cutting clear,
blue waters entirely free of ice. Along the horizon, from the north to
the south-west, there is a marked ice blink. In the south-east, just
over the horizon barely visible, is the edge of the pack. There are one
hundred and ten icebergs visible from the mast head; of this number ten
are true table-topped masses ranging, in height, from one hundred to
two hundred and fifty feet, and in length from a thousand feet to one
mile. All of the others were of the usual arctic type, with fantastic
towers of every conceivable shape. Some five or six had the form of
an easy chair, others that of a giant couch, still others assumed the
forms of human faces. Some of the forms were particularly striking and
needed no explanation; but at nearly every hour of the day some one
went into raptures about a fetching figure, which generally required a
vivid, and often a poetic imagination with a liberal artistic license.
It is curious that the eye generally sees what the mind intends to
picture. An illustration of this point is the different forms which
we ascribe to these icebergs. The Captain points to a berg, not
particularly attractive to anyone, but he insists in describing upon
it the face and the form of a beautiful woman, chiseled in walls of
alabaster. We look, and try to be interested while Lecointe grows
enthusiastic, but we see only dead white cliffs. There are some
irregularities, a few delicate blue lines, some suggestive hummocks,
and various dark cavities; but these we see in every berg, and with our
different mental attitudes we fail to recognise the ascribed topography
of a human figure. We dare not, however, admit our ignorance, for such
a lack of sympathetic support, especially on a sentimental subject,
would be equal to a challenge for a duel on the _Belgica_.
The naturalist comes along next, he is always realistic, sometimes
poetical, but never sentimental. Upon a small tabular berg there is
a shapeless mass of ice-blocks, and these blocks are so piled that
one cannot help but notice them. To me the thing seemed like a marble
statue of England’s Prime Minister, Salisbury, raised upon a huge,
rounded block of granite. I heard Arctowski suggest the Egyptian
Sphinx, but Racovitza insisted upon the likeness of a polar bear and
some one shouted, “It moves!” At once the picture became real, and the
sailors refused to believe that it was not a living bear. Racovitza’s
imagination was accepted by all, for to doubt him was to have humorous
abuse and sarcastic caricatures heaped upon us for weeks. There was,
however, one man with a glass. He looked intently for an hour at the
thing without saying much. This was Michotte, the cook. After we had
all finished our discussions, and had come to a general agreement about
the bear, he shattered our allegory with a little giggle and followed
it by the announcement that it was all a mistake;--“to me it looks
like a pot of boiling soup.” Next to the Captain the cook is the most
important personage on the ship; there are short instances when he even
rises above the Captain. It was so in this case. Michotte canvassed
the observers one by one, gave them his glasses and pointed out the
rounded base of the huge polished kettle, and then he made steam out of
our beautiful statuary in the centre. Dobrowolsky suggested that pots
were generally black, but Koren, the cook’s assistant, took a look at
the thing and said, “That’s just like our pots, they are always clean
and white and polished.” I noticed that everybody, even Racovitza,
gave a hearty assent. We dared not do otherwise, for it meant no soup
to-morrow, and Kydbolla every day. We can afford to dispute with the
naturalist somewhat, we can even doubt the Captain’s eyesight, but we
cannot dream of endangering the good-will of Michotte,--it is, then, a
pot of boiling soup, and I think Koren added it was “hot stuff;”--even
this is granted.
10 P. M.--It is still light enough to write on deck, but
there is a little wind coming out of the south which makes ungloved
fingers stiff. The temperature is -4° C. (24.8° F.). At two o’clock
this afternoon we again came to a region of pack-ice which loved us too
well. It closed about and squeezed our sides with such force that we
were powerless to resist. We have remained here since, and shall remain
for the night. The engine fires have been burned down, but Gerlache
says he will make another attempt to push southward to-morrow.
There has been considerable animal life about us to-day. In the air
we have seen the usual songless and noiseless birds, the giant and
the white petrels. Finback whales have been spouting and showing
their huge blue backs in the open triangles of water. Seals have been
stealing about the ship under the water, curiously examining the hull
of the bark without coming to the surface to vent their curiosity by
a look upon us. The speck of blackness which the _Belgica_ makes
in their world of perennial whiteness must be of rare interest to
these semi-human subaqueous denizens. On the ice we have seen a few
king penguins, uttering, now and then, a weird _gha-a-ah_. They
were always alone, generally standing to the lee of hummocks with
heads bowed, looking as solemn and dignified as deacons at a love
feast. Roaming about on the floes we see the ever-restless little
black-billed, yellow-footed pack penguins. This flightless bird
is gregarious and sociable, and must have companions to be happy.
It congregates in groups, numbering from six to thirty, and these
gatherings are the only cheerful signs of life in the great silent
circle around the south pole.
The air is cold and bracing, bringing with it a wine of action which is
opposed to fatigue. With it we seem to require little sleep, keeping
at hard physical and mental work from early morning till midnight.
With the much lower temperature the air is now getting glassy, the fog
is dispersing, and the sky shows signs of clearing, with considerable
colour. Mirages were seen to-night for the first time. All along the
horizon, from the north-east to the south-east, there are elongated,
raised and distorted masses of ice, with their bases resting upon the
water. There seem to be no inverted images, as in the arctic regions.
The sun set in the south-south-west to-night at 7:30. We rarely have
a sky at the edge of the pack permitting a view of this phenomenon,
but we can notice that the days are rapidly getting shorter, and
the light is progressively fading. Only two weeks ago we could take
instantaneous photographs until ten o’clock, but now, a picture taken
at eight is very feeble. With the sun almost perpetually screened by
a black icy mist the sky has remained cheerless and depressing, but
southerly winds seem to brush aside this gloomy curtain. Along the
southern sky to-night there is a streak of gold, fringed with orange
and a suggestion of carmine. At best, however, colours are sparingly
distributed along the outer fringe of this antarctic pack. We have seen
the stars and the moon but once since entering the Pacific, and, to the
present, there have been no auroras visible.
[Illustration: Lecointe Making Observations. The Nautical
Observatory.]
[Illustration: Dobrowolski Measuring the Depth of the Snowfall.]
February 22, 8 A.M.--During the night we have rested easily in a
triangular space of water, which was surrounded by large pans of ice.
At about midnight a half gale of wind came out of the south-south-east
and rushed through the masts with a bitter howl, but the sea remained
quiet, and in our position we rested as peacefully as if in a sheltered
harbour. This changed direction and augmented force of the wind
separated the pack and sent it drifting northerly over the boundless
sea. Taking advantage of this favourable loosening of the grip upon
us, we got up steam at six A. M. and started in a renewed effort to
push southward. The navigation, at best, is extremely difficult. We go
ahead squeezing through breaks in the ice until our headway is barred
by a floe, then we go astern to give the ship time for a new onslaught.
In this way we batter and ram the ice until it seems as though every
timber must break; but excepting the bruising, scraping, and polishing
of her sides, the _Belgica_ receives no hurts. She complains and groans
and cracks and shivers, but she goes on cutting great pans of ice five
feet thick, and pushing aside floes two hundred feet in diameter. She
is ploughing the ice-littered sea like something animate.
To the south there is a water-sky coaxing us on to the frozen mystery
beyond. Perhaps this is a temptation of the manless antarctic to
ensnare and keep us for the winter; perhaps it is to reveal to us new
lands and new glories in the unknown white expanse. But whatever our
reward, or our punishment, for this forced intrusion, the task is
difficult. There are about us to-day many signs of land, and this also
urges us on in our hopeless effort to navigate the seemingly endless
sea of ice.
Toward the south-east there are yellow land clouds, which slide over
each other as though their mission was to hide the outline of some
heaven-guarded coast from human gaze. Above these low-hanging clouds
there are black bands of sky, indicating open lanes of water near what
promises to be land. The ice, too, is what is usually termed bay-ice,
with freshly broken edges, with icicles hanging from some points, and
having upon the surface only small hummocks. There are no signs of
pressure and the whole scene is weighted down with about twenty inches
of soft snow. The animal life also indicates an approach to land. We
have about us large numbers of ossifrages and magalestris, which are
supposed to keep land within easy reach. The penguins and seals seen
to-day are indicative of a near land mass; while the meteorologist
vows that the cold dry wind coming from the south-south-east rolls
off from some continental ice-capped country. Even the engineer comes
forward with a sign. He has a keen nose, and says he smells the mossy
rocks. But where is this mysterious land? We are not within a thousand
miles of any known land. Shall we discover this land, or is it an
illusion? (We afterwards saw many similar signs of land, but all proved
deceptive. We saw no real land, except what came from the sea-bottom,
from the time we got the last glimpse of Alexander Islands until we
returned to Tierra del Fuego thirteen months later.)
[Illustration: Hauling Snow to Augment the Water Supply.]
[Illustration: Making Soundings.]
Early in the afternoon our hopes were shattered. We again reached a
zone, as we so often had, farther east, where it was impossible to pass
between the sheets of heavy ice. Here we rested for the balance of the
afternoon and the night. We continued to search the horizon for further
signs of the promised land, but most of the indications disappeared
during our stay. The engine fires were burnt down. Everything about the
_Belgica_ is non-restful. There is little wind; the temperature
remains low -7.5° C. (-18.5° F.) An easy swell keeps the ice in a
constant groan, and penguins send out their social calls. We are now
accustomed to all this noise. Indeed, when tired and weary, as we are
at present from long-continued anxiety, the groans of the ice and the
cries of the penguins serve only to impress us with the awful solitude
and the uninterrupted pearly monotony of the antarctic.
A beautiful sunset to-night has served to reawaken our interest in
this world of white sameness. Throughout the day the sky has been a
cheerless gray from the zenith to a few degrees from the horizon. Low
down there have been changes, now an ice-blink, now a water-sky, and
again a series of seeming land clouds. The little play and change in
colour, which has been evident for brief periods, is limited to a
narrow strip under and over the cloud-hidden sun in the west and south.
The comparative rarity of brilliant sunbursts and sunsets, in the smoky
skies at the edge of the pack, has made the phenomenon to-night a real
joy. At seven o’clock the long stratus clouds in the south-south-west,
which were slaty in colour, became fringed with a touch of luminous
gold. This increased gradually until the entire body of the clouds was
gilded; then the sun, a great yellow ball of dull orange, sank under
the creamy sheets of waving snows. The great fiery ball was only fifty
seconds in passing from view, but in this time its face changed into
at least ten distortions. There is a weird sadness in these faces: an
expression which is singularly appropriate, because we know the good
old luminary is quickly leaving us to brighten the top of the globe.
She seems to feel it, for her face is like that of a dying mother sorry
to leave her children alone in a world of hazard. The final parting,
however, was more prolonged and more glorious than the actual presence.
Soon the upper stratus of low clouds were showered with a scarlet
light, which remained without apparent change for thirty minutes. Below
and above this were narrow belts of bright and glistening silvery blue,
while the ice was all aglow under a veil of pale magenta. Then followed
a long purple twilight, which, in itself, is full of delightful charm.
It is all an unimaginable dream.
February 23.--We are still firmly fixed by the compact sea of ice
about us. New ice formed on every open space last night. Winter is
coming over us quickly, and the season for navigating these unknown
seas is now past. The rapidity with which the new ice forms, the
increasing cold, and the fading light of the sun all prove this, but
the Commandant is hoping against hope to push still farther into the
mystic gloom of the south. Throughout the night the sky was a clear,
pale purple blue, while stars of the first and second magnitude were
struggling to display their icy glitter. The Captain obtained an
observation and was able to find our position by fixing a planet and
a star. Latitude 69° 46′ 30″, longitude 81° 59′. It is curious how a
little thing like the definite knowledge of our position raises the
hopes and anticipations of everybody on board. Though such a knowledge
is a mere play of figures, it assures us that we are at least on a
fixed point upon the unknown under surface of the globe. We make
calculations accordingly; some plan work and pleasure for the return
to the world of living, and others lay down a system of effort for
exploration of the new regions to which we expect to penetrate, and
surely all are elated at the prospect of some other view except the
inhospitable whiteness, at present on every side of our position.
At noon we made a deep sea sounding, with a long series of temperatures
at various depths. We lowered five hundred and sixty metres of wire,
and brought up a cup of blue clay. The temperature at the surface was
at the freezing point, and at the bottom slightly warmer. We have made
various excursions to obtain photos of the ice and the life, and to
study the physical laws which govern the construction and destruction
of the sea-ice. The pans are closely packed, but in some places there
are soft buffers of pulverised ice and snow, and these are dangerous
to the traveler. Gerlache stepped on such a place and promptly sank
into the icy water beneath. Fortunately I saw him before he sank too
far, and jerked him out by the coat collar. I tore his collar, and
disturbed his buttons, but I had the satisfaction of keeping him from a
complete bath at a temperature six degrees below zero.
The sunset is again superbly beautiful to-night. All day we have
remained firmly held by the ice. The sky has been of a pale, wintry
blue with alto-stratus and fracto-stratus clouds of a leaden and
steel-gray colour. In the north-west and the north-east there is a
water-sky, but the hopeless ice-blink is in every other direction. A
dazzling whiteness has made the pack glitter to such an extent that it
has become painful to walk about without smoked glasses, but to-night
there is a restful lilac over the white glitter, which is a charming
relief from the intense brilliancy of the day. As the sun descended
into the invisible mist of ice-crystals, which always hangs over the
pack, it poured out a wealth of golden light over the clouds and onto
the pack. For a very brief period the clouds had the appearance of
streams of hot metal, and the projecting snows were aglow like mounds
of fire. As the sun sank from view a great bunch of cumulus clouds, in
the south, suddenly lit up with a brilliant rose light. The yellow then
vanished and the rose was thrown on the snows. The rose later faded
into the purple of twilight, which for several hours gave a steady glow
of lilac to the pack.
[Illustration: The Sailor’s Recreation.]
[Illustration: Bow of the _Belgica_ After a Collision with
an Iceberg.]
We did not retire until late to-night. There is something about our
present position which suggests many premonitions. For forty-five
hours we have not consciously moved, and the ice holds us with a grip
which promises us no relief for forty-five weeks. There is a cheer
and a new joy in the curious colour effect of the coming night, and
this is about the only encouragement in our present prospects. We
have persistently tried, to-day and to-night, to steam northward and
southward, and eastward and westward, but the _Belgica_ refuses
to mind the helm, while the ice disputes our right of way. The fact
is forced more and more upon us that we are fixed for the winter, and
destined to pass through the first long antarctic night. Gerlache has
all along manifested an inclination for wintering in the pack, but
every officer has been so much opposed to this that the Commandant did
not openly betray his disposition. To-night Gerlache is sounding the
sentiments of all hands, upon their willingness to winter in the ice.
Everybody is opposed to it, but if it must be, they are inclined to
submit gracefully to the unquestionable fate.
The main objections offered to our voluntary stay in the pack are the
ignorance of the home authorities of our whereabouts, and the certain
death which would follow the loss of the _Belgica_ by pressure,
or by other accidents. If an expedition has planned to winter in the
unknown antarctic pack she should have two vessels, so that if one is
crushed another might remain to bring home her precious cargo of human
life, and the records of the equally precious work. If this is not the
fortune of an expedition, there should, at least, be left at home a
clear outline of the prospective route. It is unnecessarily hazardous
to trust to the pitfalls and certain misfortunes of polar work without
such safeguards. In our case no one knows of our whereabouts. If our
vessel should be lost, no relief could possibly reach us, because it
is not definitely known where we may be found. Death by freezing and
starvation would be our lot if our trusty ship were disabled, and such
a possibility must always remain in view, in a battle against the
ponderous polar-ice. With this prospect before us we do not take kindly
to a voluntary berth among the ever restless floes during the many
weeks of sure darkness and unknowable cold.
February 24.--A sharp southerly wind has been blowing all night. The
sky is again gray and cheerless and full of promise for an early
tempest. Sailors at sea rarely pray for a tempest, but this is the only
hope we now have of securing freedom from the ice. We are longing for
a gale of wind. We are not particular from what direction, anything
will do so long as it breaks the ice and gives us a little room. With
this promise before us, and while still beset, the Commandant comes
forward with the first of a long series of new programmes. We are to
gain the open sea northward, as quickly as possible, from here make
a line of soundings from the edge of the pack northward, and another
line parallel to the western shores of Grahamland, then go to Yankee
Harbour, Deception Island, and return to Belgica Strait for a short
period. As the season for ice exploration ceases we are to go to
Ushuaia, where Racovitza and I are to be left for the winter to make
zoölogical and anthropological studies of the Fuegian life, while the
_Belgica_ returns to Buenos Aires to winter. Next season we are to
go south of Australia to Victorialand.
[Illustration: The Hummocks of a Pressure-Angle.]
[Illustration: Cestrugi.]