DRIVEN BY THE STORM
All day long on both September 21 and 22, it was dull and cloudy and
the barometer was falling steadily, so I was not surprised at daylight
September 23 to find the wind blowing from the east forty miles an
hour. McKinlay’s anemometer was seeing active service at once. I
noticed that the Eskimo seemed very uneasy and made frequent visits
to the dredge-hole, where we were in the habit of using the hand
lead-line to detect movements of the ice; whenever the ice moved we
could feel the lead coming with us. After breakfast I began to visit
the dredge-hole myself more often than usual. At quarter of ten I was
there and felt no drift but at ten, while I had the line in my hand,
the lead started to go. Kerdrillo and Kataktovick were near me; handing
them the line I asked them what they thought; they instantly replied
that we were moving. Immediately I had everything that we had placed on
the ice taken aboard again, including the sledge and the canoe which we
had used in our duck-shooting, for it seemed likely that the ice would
eventually break up. Towards afternoon it began to snow and soon a
blizzard was in full blast.
On the twenty-fourth the storm moderated and the sun came out for a
short time. The temperature was mild and there was a good deal of water
to be seen to the northeast. The Eskimo resumed their hunting and
killed three seal. The rate of drift was about two miles an hour; this
increased somewhat in the afternoon, when the wind freshened. Sometimes
the ship would appear to be in a vast floating island of ice, with
water on every hand but too far away for us to reach even if we could
have made our way through the solid mass in which we were frozen.
The next day, September 25, the gale, which had sprung up again,
continued with unabated violence and the air was filled with snow. The
season was wearing on towards the time of unbroken darkness and there
were several hours now in the twenty-four when it was intensely dark.
The nights were moonless and starless, for the air was filled with
blinding snow.
All about us we could hear the ice tearing and grinding. The water
through which we were drifting was comparatively shallow and there
was danger not only from the great fragments of the floe, which
turned up and toppled over and over, but also, and chiefly, from the
heavier floes which occurred here and there and had protruding edges,
submerged and hidden, like the long, underwater arm that ripped the
side out of the _Titanic_. Every moment the _Karluk_ was in danger of
being tossed up on one of these heavy floes and left stranded, to break
up like a ship wrecked on a beach, or of being flung against the ice
bodily like a ship thrown by wind and waves against a cliff. At any
moment, too, the ice-floe might smash up and release her to the peril
of being crushed by the impact of the floating fragments. We all slept
with our clothes on—when we slept at all—and kept the boats loaded
with supplies, ready to be lowered at an instant’s notice.
The drift of the _Karluk_ was a much worse experience than the voyage
of the _Roosevelt_ through Kennedy Channel from Kane Basin into the
Arctic Ocean. The waters traversed by the _Roosevelt_ were, of course,
narrower than Beaufort Sea and they were filled with floating icebergs
and floe-ice, but there we had continuous daylight and could see what
we were doing and, also, knew definitely where we were headed, whereas
in the _Karluk_ we might drift in the ice even to destruction, unable
to do anything to save the ship. The _Roosevelt_, to be sure, as I
have said, was built for pushing through the broken ice but I very
much doubt whether, even she, once frozen in like the _Karluk_, would
have been able to extricate herself, and how much less effective was
the _Karluk_ with her weaker construction and less powerful engines.
As long as the ice remained frozen solidly about the ship, our chief
danger was from the heavy grounded floes; if it broke up, then the
fragments were more likely to be fatal to the _Karluk_ than they would
be to a ship built like the _Roosevelt_.
We were not far from land. In fact from the crow’s nest during the day
I caught a glimpse of what I took to be Cape Halkett. The next day
the storm subsided, conditions improved somewhat, though our drift
continued, and by the chart we were not far now from Point Barrow. The
hunters were able to go out and the Eskimo brought in three seal.
When we started our drift we had brought the dogs aboard to avoid
losing any, because the dogs, of course, were essential to our safety
if anything should happen to the ship; we now put them back again on
the ice. When aboard ship they were chained in all parts of the deck,
wherever we could find room for them, with a leeway of about two feet
for each. They had to be kept separate in this way so that they could
not get at each other, for when a fight started it was liable to be a
fight to a finish. There were about forty of them all told and when
they were on board they all barked constantly day and night.
I do not consider the Alaskan dog the equal of the dogs we had with us
on the North Pole trips with Peary. I don’t know whether contact with
civilization has caused them to deteriorate or not. It has certainly
had that effect on the Eskimo who, since the coming of the whalers and
traders, have not had to depend for their living on the country but
go to Point Barrow and the other stations and buy whatever they need,
exchanging pelts from the animals they shoot or trap. The dogs that
Stefansson took with him on his shore journey on September 20 were
obtained from one of the best dog-drivers in Nome. The best of the
remaining dogs were none of them so good as the worst of the dogs we
had on the North Pole trips. They required more food, could not stand
fatigue so well, though they were heavier than the North Greenland
dogs, and they were trained for land, not for ice, travel.
When I came to use them later on, I found that they were terrified by
the groaning and crushing of the ice and, when they were going over
new ice that buckled, they would become frightened and instead of
separating would all huddle together for mutual protection; perhaps
they were not to be blamed for this, for though it is all right if you
are used to it, the shifting ice can furnish the uninitiated with an
unlimited number of surprises. In such times of danger they would not
respond either to the voice or to the whip of the driver.
Driving Eskimo dogs is a hard job at best, for they seem possessed
of the spirit of Satan, himself, even the best of them. The North
Greenland Eskimo harness their dogs to the sledge fan-wise, each dog
having traces that fasten directly to the sledge itself, whereas
the Alaskan Eskimo harness the dogs to a long rope, at intervals on
either side. With both methods the dogs get the harness tangled again
and again and then, out of the range of the whip, they will sit down
and blink at the driver in a way calculated to make him feel like
committing cruelty to animals. They will all of them chew the harness
and free themselves if you give them half a chance.
We fed the dogs on the _Karluk_ on dried salmon which we obtained
at Nome, together with rice and oatmeal and Indian meal, all cooked
together. As long as we had steam on the main boiler we cooked the
dog-food by letting the steam blow through a hose leading into a pork
barrel filled with the ingredients. We always served the dogs with hot
food—and it was quite good enough for a man to eat—and after the
boiler was blown down we cooked it every night in the galley stove.
Mr. Hadley looked after feeding the dogs, and no better man could have
been found, for he understood not only how to feed them but also how
important it was to have them well cared for. Whenever possible we kept
the dogs on the ice, for the freedom was good for them. Even then, to
prevent their fighting, we often had to chain them up to raftered ice.
It is a mistake to think that Arctic weather is characterized by
unvarying cold; on the contrary it offers radical differences in
temperature from day to day, and the seasons differ greatly from year
to year. We were experiencing an extraordinarily early and severe
winter and yet for the next few days now the weather was frequently
mild and springlike, with temperatures above the freezing-point.
This does not mean that there was any sudden thaw; the snow fell at
intervals and the sky was overcast but the wind was not bitterly cold
as it became later on in our drifting.
We busied ourselves, as we had from the beginning of the drift, in
making preparations to leave the ship, an event which under the
circumstances was probable at any moment. The Eskimo woman, Keruk,
began making fur clothing for us. We put all the Jaeger underwear in
large canvas bags placed where they could be reached conveniently at
once. The whaleboats we provisioned each for eight persons for twenty
days and we put supplies for a couple of months on deck ready to be
thrown overboard. We fixed up the forward hold as a carpenter’s shop
for Mr. Hadley and he started in to make a Peary sledge.
This was the kind of sledge that I had been accustomed to use on the
ice on my various trips with Peary. He invented it himself, evolving
it from the experience of his years of Arctic work and, in several
important particulars, it was a marked improvement over the Eskimo
sledge. We did not have the material to make an exact duplicate but we
did the best we could.
The Peary sledge is thirteen feet long over all, with runners made
each of a single piece of hickory or ash, three inches wide by an
inch-and-a-half thick, bent up by steaming at each tip and shod the
whole length with a steel shoe, like the tire of a wheel. The bow has
a long, low rake and the stern turns up to make steering with the
upstanders true as the runners slide along. The filling-in pieces are
of oak, fastened with sealskin lashing, and the bed of the sledge
is made of boards of soft wood, lashed to the filling-in pieces. In
loading the Peary sledge we always put the bulk of the weight in the
middle and left each end light; with its long rake fore and aft the
sledge will swing as on a pivot, so that when you get into a position
where you cannot go ahead you can back the sledge or turn it around
and even go stern first if necessary, without lifting it. When, for
instance, you come suddenly to a crack in the ice, when travelling
with the Peary sledge, you can turn it around or steer it aside. Being
constructed with lashings instead of bolts, it is flexible and adapted
to the rough going over the sea ice, while in getting through young
ice, on account of its turned-up rear end it can be easily dragged back
on to firm ice with a rope.