THE ARCTIC NIGHT
The first few days of December were cold and stormy, with very high
winds. I made up my mind that we were in the place where all the bad
weather was manufactured, to be passed along to Medicine Hat and thence
distributed to Chicago and Boston and points south. We got a little
twilight from ten to two on pleasant days, so that the men could see
to work out of doors. The health of the party throughout our drift
was excellent. Every one had plenty of vigorous, outdoor exercise and
slept soundly, though the incessant howling of the wind was not always
conducive to a feeling of carefree contentment.
There was considerable pressure early in the month at a point about
a mile from the ship, which tossed the ice into rafters, but we did
not feel it on board. On the tenth a ribbon of water about a foot
wide showed in the ice about two hundred yards from the ship, opening
and closing off and on for several days. The temperature was getting
pretty cold now, down in the minus thirties, yet the air was clear
much of the time and we were not uncomfortable out of doors, even in
American clothes. Mr. Hadley finished the third Peary sledge on the
eleventh. On the same day I had the Eskimo build a large snow igloo on
the floe where we had our box-house of supplies, to furnish additional
shelter for ourselves and the dogs. We began making wooden boxes for
the protection of our Primus stoves in case we had to take to the ice.
The Primus stove is an ingenious device for heating tea or whatever
else you have that needs heating; it uses kerosene oil, ignited by
means of alcohol, works somewhat like a plumber’s torch and has long
been used by men engaged in Arctic work. It is not so efficient as the
special alcohol stove invented by Peary for his expeditions but as a
general rule it does good work. On our trip to Wrangell Island, we used
gasoline in these stoves, although warned by the directions in big red
letters not to do so. In spite of the directions the gasoline worked
well and did not need to be ignited by alcohol.
On the sixteenth I had the Eskimo dig out the seal meat which we had
kept in the “ice-houses” near the ship and put it on deck, so that
we could have it handy in case the ice broke up around the ship.
Furthermore, I wanted to see how much we had accumulated. I found that
we had forty-one seal, about 1600 pounds, enough to last twenty-five
people sixty-seven days. Not every one on board liked seal meat but all
could eat it. I had Mamen at work these days making up a list of things
required in case I went on another Arctic drift some time. Murray lost
his dredge again on the eighteenth when it caught on the ice and parted
the line; the chief engineer started work at once on another.
December 21 was the Arctic midnight, the day of days in the Arctic, the
day that we all looked forward to, for now the sun was coming towards
us every day, and every day the daylight would lengthen. We were
not, of course, getting real daylight but at midday we got a kind of
twilight that was good enough to get about by, out of doors. Mr. Hadley
and I experimented with the acetylene lights but found that outside of
the ship they would not work because the water froze.
On the twenty-second much of the twilight time was used in clearing
away the huge banks of snow that had drifted about the ship. The chess
tournament was decided on that day. The men had been playing it for
a good while and now the winner of the most games received the first
prize, a box of fifty cigars, and the next man the second prize, a box
of twenty-five cigars. Mamen took the first prize and the mate, Mr.
Anderson, the second.
The dogs, which we had been keeping all together in the box-house,
broke their chains on the twenty-third, and some of them got into a
fight; our best dog, Jack, was so badly bitten that he could not walk.
I took him on board and down into the carpenter’s shop where Mr. Hadley
sewed up his wounds with surgical needle and silk cord. Poor Jack
was in bad shape and at first refused all food. He received constant
attention from Mr. Hadley but could not bear a harness until the latter
part of February. The fight in which he was hurt warned us that we must
not keep too many dogs together, so I had the Eskimo build several snow
kennels in a large snow-bank near the ship. They sprinkled ashes on the
floor of the kennels and chained up the nine most quarrelsome dogs,
each in his separate kennel.
With the approach of Christmas all hands began to make plans for the
proper celebration of that good old holiday. The spirits of the whole
party were excellent; now that they were in the neighborhood of the
place where Santa Claus came from they seemed determined to observe the
day in a manner worthy of the jolly old saint.
At six o’clock on Christmas morning the second engineer and McKinlay
started in decorating the cabin with the flags of the International
Code and a fine lot of colored ribbon which Mr. Hadley had brought with
him from Point Barrow for the trading he had hoped to do in Banks
Land. Later in the morning I went around and distributed presents to
the Eskimo. I gave each of the Eskimo men a hunting-knife and a watch
and the Eskimo woman a cotton dress, stockings and underwear, talcum
powder, soap, a looking-glass, a comb and brush and some ribbon, with a
cotton dress for each of the little girls.
At eleven o’clock the first event on our typewritten programme
began—the sports. This was the list:
D. G. S. _Karluk_. XMAS DAY, 1913
The events of the sports programme arranged for the day will take
place in the following order:
1. 100 yards sprint
2. Long jump (standing)
3. Long jump (running)
4. Sack race
5. High jump
Interval for refreshments
6. Three-legged race
7. Putting the weight
8. 50-yard burst
9. Hop, step and leap
10. Tug of war
11. Obstacle race
12. Wrestling
Proceedings will commence at 11 A. M. (_Karluk_ time); dogs and
bookmakers not allowed on the field.
The doctor was umpire and wore a paper rosette. I was the official
starter and fired a pistol in the regulation manner.
Mamen won the running long jump and would have won all the other
jumps and races if he had entered them. The obstacle race was funny
to watch and greatly enjoyed. The contestants started on the ice on
the starboard side about amidships. From here they had to go to, and
under, the jib-boom from which hung loops of rope; they had to pass
through these loops and then under some sledges turned bottom up. Then
they had to keep on around the ship to a kind of track which we had
dug in a snow-bank running at right angles to the ship; the track was
just wide enough for a man to put both feet in and they had to go up
the track and down again. This was no easy task and it was a cause for
hilarious mirth to watch them trying to pass each other in the narrow
path. Then they had to go to the dredge igloo where life-belts had been
placed, each marked with its owner’s name. Each man had to find his own
life-belt and put it on just as he would wear it if he were called upon
to use it. It was pitch dark in the igloo; a man would rush in, pick up
a life-belt and rush out again on to the ice to look at the belt in the
twilight and see if it were his. It often took a man several trips to
find his own. Then they made the final dash to the starting-point and
the first man home with his life-belt on, as if for regular use, won
the race. Williamson, the second engineer, was the winner.
The Eskimo entered all the sports and even Keruk took part in most of
them. I pulled in the tug of war, to make both sides even, and I am
proud to say that my side won. We did not have the wrestling-match
because it got too dark to see.
It was a fine day and the men wore American clothes and sweaters. For
several days before Christmas we had had a severe storm with a high
wind which blew the tops of the ice ridges bare of snow and gave the
scene the appearance of a ploughed field. On Christmas Eve, however,
the wind subsided so that all day long on Christmas Day we had good
weather, clear, crisp air, with a temperature of twenty below zero.
Dinner as usual was at half past four. I confess that I felt homesick
and thought of other Christmas dinners. It was my fourth Christmas in
the Arctic; in 1898 I had been with Peary at Cape D’Urville on the
_Windward_ and in 1905 and 1908 at Cape Sheridan with the _Roosevelt_,
but our situation now had far more elements of uncertainty in it than
we had felt on those occasions and in addition this time it was I who
had the responsibility for the lives and fortunes of every man, woman
and child in the party.
We sat down at 4:30 P. M. to a menu laid out and typewritten by
McKinlay:
“Such a bustle ensued”
Mixed Pickles Sweet Pickles
Oyster Soup
Lobster
Bear Steak
Ox Tongue
Potatoes Green Peas
Asparagus and Cream Sauce
Mince Pie Plum Pudding
Mixed Nuts
Tea Cake
Strawberries
“God Bless You, Merry Gentlemen;
May Nothing You Dismay!”
Murray produced a cake which had been given in Victoria to cut for this
particular occasion and which he had kept carefully secreted. Dinner,
which was a great credit to Bob, the cook, was followed by cigars and
cigarettes and a concert on the Victrola which had been presented
to the ship by Sir Richard McBride. We had records that played both
classical and popular music, vocal and instrumental, and we kept this
up with singing, to a late hour. Malloch wrote a Christmas letter of
many pages to his father, a letter which, alas, was destined never to
be delivered.
On Friday the twenty-sixth a crack in the ice made from the waist of
the ship towards the stern, running for about a hundred yards off the
starboard bow. The crack did not open, but for the first time in our
drift we felt a slight tremor on the ship. In about an hour we felt
another slight tremor. I followed the crack for a hundred yards and
then lost it. There was a fresh north-northeast wind which moderated
as the day wore on but it looked as if we were in for some more bad
weather, though the barometer was steady, and next day we began to get
things ready to leave the ship at once, in case we should have to get
out in a hurry. Everything was where we could lay our hands on it at
once.
Our soundings had been giving us depths of about twenty-five fathoms,
which did not tally with our charts. It seemed likely that our
chronometer was a trifle slow and that we were somewhat to the westward
of our apparent position. We had a clear view of the sky with a very
pronounced twilight glow to the south.
On the twenty-eighth we altered the ship’s time again to get the
benefit of the increasing twilight. Molly gave birth to a litter of
nine pups, which, if she had not eaten most of them, would have been
useful members of the party, had our drift continued for another year
so that they could have grown large enough to use. The prizes won on
Christmas Day were now distributed: safety razors and extra blades,
shaving-soap, hair-clippers, goggles, pipes, sweaters, shirts, and
various other things.
As soon as it was light on the twenty-ninth I kept a sharp eye out for
land; south by west, by the compass, I could see a blue cloud raised
up on the horizon. According to the soundings we should have been
nearer Wrangell Island than Herald Island; I was inclined to think
that it was Herald Island, although working out our position with our
chronometer readings gave us Herald Island sixty miles to the south.
Afterwards I found out that our observations at this time were correct
but that the soundings were not right on the chart. What deceived us
more than anything else was the big mirage; Herald Island looked large
and distorted for many days. Later in the day I went aloft to see if
I could make out which island it really was but on account of the
imperfect light I found it impossible to tell.
Some time during the night the ice cracked about a hundred yards from
the ship and made an open ribbon of water ten inches wide; during the
next day the young ice was cracking a good deal all around us. There
was no lateral movement of the ice.
The next day was the last day of 1913. Our time was six hours and
thirty-six minutes later than Boston and New York time and as the day
wore on and it got to be 5:24 P. M. I realized that it was midnight on
Tremont Street and Broadway and I thought of the friends who would now
be seeing the old year out and the new year in. I wondered what they
thought had become of us on the _Karluk_, and whether the news of our
unforeseen drift had yet reached them from Stefansson. I could picture
the carefree throngs in the hotels waiting for the lights to go out for
the moment of midnight and greeting 1914 with a cheer and a song.
We had our own New Year’s celebration, though it was only a coincidence
that it came on this particular day, for we had planned a football game
on the ice when the weather should be good and the wind fairly light;
New Year’s Day happened to be the first good day for it.
The ball was made of seal-gut, cut into sections and sewed up, with
surgeon’s plaster over the seams. We blew it up with a pipe stem and
plugged up the hole. To protect the ball we had a sealskin casing made
to fit it; the result was a fairly good ball, constructed on the same
principle as any college football.
It was Scotland vs. All-Nations; the game was association football,
played on a field of regulation size laid out on young ice about a foot
and a half in thickness. At each end of the field were goal posts with
the usual cross-bar.
Fireman Breddy was captain of All-Nations and Mr. Munro of Scotland.
The Eskimo, though not well-versed in the game, played well. Keruk,
clad as usual in dress and bloomers, was goal-tender for All-Nations.
Some of the players wore skin-boots, others ordinary American shoes. I
had forgotten a good deal about the association game but I refreshed
my memory from the encyclopedia in the ship’s library and armed with a
mouth-organ in lieu of a whistle took my place as referee, umpire and
time-keeper. I soon found, however, that the cold would make it too
dangerous for me to use the “whistle,” for it would freeze to my lips
and take the skin off, so I had to give my signals for play by word of
mouth.
The teams lined up at 11:30. Breddy won the toss and took the western
end of the field. All-Nations scored the first goal and the play ranged
furiously up and down the field until the first thirty-minute period
was over. Then at noon we had an intermission and served coffee. At
half-past twelve the teams lined up again, with changed goals. During
the second half Scotland played well but when the game ended the score
stood: All-Nations, 8; Scotland, 3. Another game was planned for the
following Sunday.