After several weeks’ trying to get through the ice we failed to get
ashore, owing to there being twenty to sixty miles of fixed land ice, and
now have worked our way back eastward through three hundred miles of pack
and floe ice. By luck we might have found part of the coast free of ice,
or only a few miles of it, but apparently, instead of this drifting south
and giving some rain to the British Isles, southerly and easterly winds
have held back the South Polar ice-drift. Eight to ten miles off the
coast of Shannon Island, on the north-east of Greenland, was as far west
as we could press; other navigators have taken almost the same course
and have found as little as only fifteen miles of ice to shove through
between Norway and Greenland.
Yesterday we got the open sea and swell and now, as I write, we have come
in contact with ice from north of Spitzbergen, and the ice from Siberia
coming round north and south of Spitzbergen, and it is so plentiful that
we are obliged to go north-east to find an opening easterly.
All afternoon we have been trying to find an opening and till six or
seven could not see a way through, and ice coming from north jammed us
considerably, but it was light pack, not more than four or five deep, so
our ship, little as it is, was able to hold her own. You could by its
thin and flat appearance at once distinguish the Spitzbergen ice from
older, heavier polar ice, which we just left to the west.
Now, at seven in the evening, we have struggled through, and are leaving
all Arctic ice behind. The pieces get smaller and smaller as we approach
the open sea, till at the sea-edge there is only a margin of, say, a mile
or so, studded with small pieces a few feet wide, and then again there
is a further margin still smaller, remnants that were once hummocks or
even parts of some iceberg. Then even these faint sentinels of the Arctic
fade away behind us in a pale line, and we are free and in a handsome,
rolling, free-born, deep-sea true-blue ocean swell. Everyone is pleased.
One is bound to admit that at any time in the ice there is, especially
to one who knows about it, an indefinable sense of strain. This strain,
slight as it is, expresses itself in our crowd. De Gisbert is playing
“The Cock o’ the North” on the mouth melodeon, with great go; the writer
has just adapted the old sea chantey to the bagpipes, “What shall we do
with a Drunken Sailor,” and a violent desire to excel at lasso-throwing
has seized Archie, and so on.
Even our home, lately so sedate and dignified and restrained in its
movements in amongst the ice, has taken a jolly seaman-like lurch and
roll. The crow’s nest and mast, shining in the sun, go swinging to and
fro across the sky—now she puts her nose down into the blue, pleasantly,
and rises and our old level horizon of the ice days is away below us
as our bows point to the skies—right and left we roll and we swing her
south-east, for habitable land, for Trömso and Trondhjem and green trees
growing and new fresh food; for even a few months in the ice with food
getting rather stale makes us hanker a little after a new kitchen. We
are tired of eating bear and of looking at their legs, which adorn our
shrouds, great red-black limbs that we see all day swinging against the
sky and eat slices of at every meal. Eating and seeing dead bear and
hearing and smelling the living captives twenty-four hours of the day is
too much of a good thing, so this is why we hanker after a new kitchen.
I dislike a storm at sea, but I do confess I love the sea when it is
smooth and blue, and it soothes you with a long gentle roll such as we
have to-day.
[Illustration: OUR LAST GLIMPSE OF THE ICE]
It looks as if we were to have a smooth crossing to Norway, still the
fiddles must come down from our cabin walls and again grace our little
table. For in a small boat such as ours every yachtsman knows that they
are inevitable whilst deep-sea sailing. Gisbert cleans his rifle and the
fiddles are on the table! so we are really done with the Arctic in the
meantime. He and I each used our rifles an hour or two ago in the ice.
No one knew who was to shoot at a seal on a floe that possessed a coat
we all envied; we were rapidly passing, so someone had to shoot and
that quickly, so Gisbert and I dived for our respective rifles, and each
loaded at the same instant and each fired as we swung past at eighty
yards, and each within the hundredth part of a second, and each hit the
seal in the middle. Neither of us knows which was the vital shot. We
shoved the ship’s head against the floe and a man clambered over the
bow and made a lasso fast to the seal. It seems a small matter to pot a
seal on an ice-floe, but I would give many pounds, shillings and pence
to be able to pass on the beauty of the colouring of that chunk of ice
and green and lilac reflections in the purple sea, the silvery grey of
the seal sparkling in the sunlight on the snow, and the reflected white
light on the pink face of the man who jumped on to the ice to bring it
aboard. The Prophet, we call him, a typical Norseman, with blue eyes,
bushy yellow eyebrows, yellow hair and a kindly expression—he may be
thirty years old, he might be a thousand—he is a type. His prophecies
almost always come true. “It will be better before it is worse.” “We will
get another bear before Gisbert cleans his rifle,” and so on. Remarks
such as above are more interesting in his broken English—our steward’s
broken English this morning almost rose to the level of punning. Archie
Hamilton asked him sympathetically how he had slept—Archie, Gisbert and
the steward all sleep in the fore part of the deck-house, and the bears
are just outside. Gisbert snores, and the steward coughs alarmingly, and
the bear shouts, so Archie says he has not slept a wink for nights. “Nay,
nay,” said Pedersen, “no mans can sleep, der is Gisbare, he go snore,
snore, und dem fordumna ice-bears dey go roar, roar, all de nights—no man
can sleep noddings!”
[Illustration]
At night we are in the open sea, rolling south-east, and try to hit off
the north of Norway somewhere. The sun almost sets now, there is at any
rate the warm glow of sunset, it pours into our two cabin ports from the
north, making two golden discs wave up and down on the white walls that
look quite green in contrast.
The guitar is mended, the glue gave way with the fog in the ice and the
heat of the stove combined. So again we have music, Gisbert the principal
performer, the writer causing some surprise at his remembering part of a
Spanish love song picked up in Southern Spain. Gisbert sings a number of
these queer folk-songs, with their strange airs and unexpected intervals
and the beat of Africa in the heart of them.
[Music]
I insert the scrap referred to above. It is not everyone who cares for
this minor music, but it draws tears to a Spaniard’s eyes; and it appeals
to the writer, inexplicably, for we have no music like it in our country.
The words amount to this: that in love, the eyes are as eloquent as the
lips.
We have to play and hum tunes to keep our minds off the deep sea roll,
that after the stillness of the ice comes as almost too much of a good
thing.