WE remained during the rest of this month ice-cradled, and drifting
about near the outlet of Wellington Channel. Occasionally a strong
southerly wind would set us back again to the north, as far, perhaps as
Barlow's Inlet; but it was soon apparent that the greater compactness
of the barrier that had come down after us, and the force of some
unknown current, were resisting our progress in that direction. A
northerly wind, on the other hand, seemed to have no counteracting
influences. A little while after it began to blow, open leads would
present themselves under our lee, and the floe which imbedded us
moved gradually and without conflict through them toward the south.
Our thoughts turned irresistibly to the broad expanse of Lancaster
Sound, which lay wild and rugged before us, and to the increasing
probability that it was to be our field of trial during the long, dark
winter--perhaps our final home.
With this feeling came an increasing desire to communicate with our
late associates of Union Bay. I had volunteered some weeks before to
make this traverse, and had busied myself with arrangements to carry it
out. The _Rescue's_ India-rubber boat was to carry the party through
the leads, and, once at the shore, three men were to press on with
a light tent and a few days' provisions. The project, impracticable
perhaps from the first, was foiled for a time by a vexatious incident.
I had made my tent of thin cotton cloth, so that it weighed, when
completed, but fourteen pounds, soaking it thoroughly in a composition
of caoutchouc, ether, and linseed oil, the last in quantity. After it
was finished and nearly dried, I wrapped it up in a dry covering of
coarse muslin, and placed it for the night in a locked closet, at some
distance from the cook's galley, where the temperature was between
80° and 90°. In the morning it was destroyed. The wrapper was there,
retaining its form, and not discolored; but the outer folds of the
tent were smoking; and, as I unrolled it, fold after fold showed more
and more marks of combustion, till at the centre it was absolutely
charred. There was neither flame nor spark.
In a few days more the tumult of the ice-fields had made all chance of
reaching the shore hopeless. But the meantime was not passed without
efforts.
"_October_ 23. I started with a couple of men on another attempt
to reach the shore. After five miles of walking, with recurring
alternations of climbing, leaping, rolling, and soaking, we found
that the ice had driven out from the coast, and a black lane of open
water stopped our progress. This is the seventh attempt to cross the
ice, all meeting with failure from the same cause. The motion of ice,
influenced by winds, tides, and currents, keeps constantly abrading the
shore-line. Any outward drift, of course, makes an irregular lane of
water, which a single night converts into ice; the returning floes heap
this in tables one over another; and the next outward set carries off
the floes again, crowned with their new increment.
"The haze gathered around us about an hour after starting, and the
hummocks were so covered with snow that the chasms often received us
middle deep. We walked five hours and a half, making in all but eleven
miles; and even then were at least a mile from the beach.
"At one portion of our route, the ice had the crushed sugar character;
the lumps varying in size from a small cantaloupe to a water-melon, but
hard as frozen water at zero ought to be. Over this stuff we walked in
tiptoe style--and a very miserable style it was.
"At another place, for a mile and a half, we trod on the fractured
angles of upturned ice. Call these curbstones; toss them in mad
confusion, always taking care that their edges shall be uppermost; dust
them over with flour cooled down to zero; and set a poor wretch loose,
in the centre of a misty circle, to try for a pathway over them to the
shore!
"At another place, break-water stones, great quarried masses of ice,
let you up and down, but down oftener than up. At another time,
you travel over rounded dunes of old seasoned hummock, covered with
slippery glaze. Again, it is over snow, recent and soft, or snow,
recent and sufficiently crusty to bear you five paces and let you
through the sixth--a trial alike to temper and legs.
"At last, to crown the _deliciæ_ of our Arctic walk, we come to a long
meadow of recent ice, just enough covered with snow to keep you from
slipping, and just thin enough to make it elastic as a polka floor.
Over this, with a fine bracing air, every nerve tingling with the
exercise, and the hoary rime whitening your beard, you walk with a
delightful sense of ease and enjoyment.
"One of my attendants had both ears frost-bitten; the whole external
cartilage (_Pinna_) was of tallow, jaundiced. Snow-rubbing set him
right. I have ordered the men to take ear-rings from their ears.
Wilson, a Livournese, rejoiced in a couple of barbaric pendules,
doubtless of bad gold, but good conducting power."
The indications of winter were still becoming more and more marked.
On the 11th, the sun rose but 9° at meridian; on the 15th but 6°;
and on the 7th of November, at the same hour, it almost rested on the
horizon. The daylight, however, was sometimes strangely beautiful. One
day in particular, the 8th, a rosy tint diffused itself over every
thing, shaded off a little at the zenith, but passing down from pink to
violet, and from violet to an opalescent purple, that banded the entire
horizon.
The moon made its appearance on the 13th of October. At first it was
like a bonfire, warming up the ice with a red glare; but afterward, on
the 15th, when it rose to the height of 4°, it silvered the hummocks
and frozen leads, and gave a softened lustre to the snow, through which
our two little brigs stood out in black and solitary contrast. The
stars seemed to have lost their twinkle, and to shine with concentrated
brightness as if through gimlet-holes in the cobalt canopy. The
frost-smoke scarcely left the field of view. It generally hung in
wreaths around the horizon; but it sometimes took eccentric forms; and
one night, I remember, it piled itself into a column at the west, and
Aquila flamed above it like a tall beacon-light. We were glad to note
these fanciful resemblances to the aspects of a more kindly region;
they withdrew us sometimes from the sullen realities of the world that
encompassed us--ice, frost-smoke, and a threatening sky.
We had parhelia again more than once, but developed imperfectly; a
mass of incandescence 22° from the sun, with prismatic coloring, but
without the circular and radial appearances that had characterized it
before. On the 27th, a partial paraselene was visible, the first we
observed--merely the limbs of two broken arcs, destitute of prismatic
tint, stretching like circumflexes at about 23° distance on each side
the moon; the moon about 20° high, thermometer -10°, barometer 30.55,
atmosphere hazy. The sky clearing shortly afterward, it shone out with
increased beauty for a while, but died away as the haze disappeared.
The thermometer was now generally below the zero point, sometimes
rising for a little while about noon a few degrees above it, once
only as high as +13°. When there was no wind, even the lowest of its
range was quite bearable; and while we were exercising actively, it
was difficult to believe that our sensations could be so strikingly
in contrast with the absolute temperature. But a breeze, or a pause
of motion till we could raise the sextant to a star or make out
some changing phasis of the ice-field, never failed to persuade us,
and that feelingly, that the mercury was honest. Night after night
the bed-clothes froze at our feet; and a poor copy of the _New York
Herald_, that lay at the head of the captain's bunk, was glazed with
ice.
"_November_ 8. Tempted by the overarching beauty of the sky, I started
off this morning with Captain De Haven on a walk of inspection
shoreward. The open water, frozen since October 2d, is now nearly two
feet thick, and at this low temperature (-15°) it becomes hard and
brittle as glass. Wherever the nipping has caught two of the floes,
they have been driven with a force inconceivable one above the other,
rising and falling until they now form a ridge fifteen or twenty feet
high.
"The tension of the great field of ice over which we passed must have
been enormous. It had a sensible curvature. On striking the surface
with a walking-pole, loud reports issued like a pistol-shot, and lines
of fissure radiated from the point of impact. It seemed as if the blow
of an axe would sever the keystone, and break up by a shock the entire
expanse. In one place the ice suddenly arched up like a bow while we
were looking at it, burst into fragments, collapsed at the exterior
margins of fracture, and by the work of a moment created a long barrier
line of ruins ten feet high. Our position was one of peril. We had
crossed two miles of ice. A change of tide relieved the strain, and we
returned.
"The nearest break-up to our homestead floe is about one hundred
and fifty yards off. It is now to the south; though our position,
constantly changing, alters the bearing by the hour. Very many of the
masses that compose it are as large as the grapery at home, two hundred
feet long perhaps, and lifted up, barricade-fashion, as high as our
second story windows."
The next day our winter arrangements were completed. They were simple
enough, and hardly worth describing in detail. A housing of thick felt
was drawn completely over the deck, resting on a sort of ridge-pole
running fore and aft, and coming down close at the sides. The rime
and snow-drift in an hour or two made it nearly impervious to the
weather. The cook's galley stood on the kelson, under the main hatch;
its stove-pipe rising through the housing above, and its funnel-shaped
apparatus for melting snow attached below. The bulkheads between cabin
and forecastle had been removed; and two stoves, one at each end of
the berth-deck, distributed their heat among officers and seamen
alike. We had of course a community of all manner of odors; and as our
only direct ventilation was by the gangway, we had the certainty of a
sufficient diversity of temperatures.
The exemption from gales, that has attracted the notice of other
travelers in this region, had not yet been confirmed by our experience.
On the contrary, our approach to Lancaster Sound, and the earlier part
of our drift after we entered it, were marked by frequent storms. Some
of these had all the sublimity that could belong to a mingled sense
of danger and discomfort. They reminded me of the sand-storms of the
Sahara. "The fine particles of snow flew by us in a continuous stream.
When they met the unprotected face, the sensation was like the puncture
of needles. Standing under the lee of our brig, and watching the drift
as it scudded on the wings of the storm through the interval between
the two vessels, the lines of sweeping snow were so unbroken that its
filaments seemed woven into a mysterious tissue. Objects fifty yards
off were invisible: no one could leave the vessels."
[Illustration: STOVE IN COOK'S GALLEY WITH APPARATUS FOR MELTING SNOW.]
The month of November found us oscillating still with the winds and
currents in the neighborhood of Beechy Island. Helpless as we were
among the floating masses, we began to look upon the floe that carried
us as a protecting barrier against the approaches of others less
friendly; and as the month advanced, and the chances increased of our
passing into the sound, our apprehensions of being frozen up in the
heart of the ice-pack gave place to the opposite fear of a continuous
drift. We had seen enough, and encountered enough of the angry strife
among the ice-floes in the channel, to assure us of disaster if we
should be forced to mingle in the sterner conflicts of the older
ice-fields of the sound. Yet, as the new fields continued forming about
us, thickening gradually from inches to feet, and locking together
the floes in one great amorphous expanse, we retained a hope to the
last that our island floe, thickening like the rest, and piling its
wall of hummocks around us, would continue to ward us from attack,
till the all-pervading frost had made it a stationary part of the
great winter covering of the Arctic Sea. It encountered almost daily
immense hummocks, some of them impinging against us while we were
apparently at rest; some, apparently motionless, receiving the impact
from us. At such times our floe would be deflected at an angle from
its normal course, or would rotate slowly round its centre, and pass
on--not, however, always in the same direction; sometimes nearing the
western shore, sometimes closing in upon the beach of "the Graves," and
sometimes fluctuating slowly to the northward.
But our general course was toward the south and east. On the 17th we
were fairly in the sound. It welcomed us coldly. The mercury stood for
a while at -19°, and sunk during the night to -27°.
The next day, however, a shift of wind, gradually increasing in force,
combined with a tidal influence to drive us back to our old position.
The thermometer was at this time lower than we had ever seen it, and
the sky seemed to sympathize with the temperature. The moon had a solid
look, resting upon the snow-hills of Cape Riley, like a great viscid
globe of illumination. In the morning the sky combined all the tints
of the spectrum in regular zones, a broad band of orange girding the
horizon with an almost uniform intensity of color. The stars shone
during the entire day. At daybreak on the 18th, Leopold's Island rose
by refraction above the ice, standing with its unmistakable outline
clearly black against the orange sky; but it went down as the sun
neared the horizon, and passed to the south of his low circuit. My
journal for the next two days shows the degree of illumination at the
different hours.
"_November_ 20, Wednesday. The winds are unlike those encountered
by Parry, our only predecessor in this region at this season of the
year. It has been very providential, and very unexpected for us,
this predominance of breezes from the southward and eastward. It has
prevented our drifting into the dreaded sound, there to be carried, if
it pleased Fortune, into Baffin's Bay by the easterly current.
"We had a heavy gale from 2 P.M. of yesterday (19th) until this morning
at 9 A.M., hauling round from southeast to east-south-east. After this
last hour, it gradually died away; and now, at 3 P.M., we have a gentle
breeze from the same quarter. The wind has left the north since the
18th.
"Our temperature, which on the 18th gave us -27°, the lowest we have
yet recorded, was at the close of the next day but -6°; and to-day its
extreme was -4°. Now, by gradual elevation, it has reached zero.
"Zero once more, and a positive sensation of warmth! There was no wind;
and the haze vapors so softened this once greatest cold, that I walked
about with bare hands and sweating body.
"The daylight is hardly now worthy of the name, according to the
Philadelphia notions of the blessing; but to us it is the last leaf of
the sibyl. Here is a little record of its incomings and outgoings.
"9 A.M. Breakfast over; furs on; deck covered in with black felt, the
frozen condensation patching it with large white wafers of snow. A
lantern makes it barely light enough to walk. No red streak to the
east: one misty haze of visible darkness.
"10 A.M. A twilight gloom: can just see the Azimuth, with its tripod
stand, thirty yards off on the ice. Snow whirling in drifts.
"11 A.M. Can read newspaper print by going to open daylight, _i. e._,
twilight--the twilight of a foggy sunrise at home.
"12 M. Noonday. A streak of brown red looms up above the mist to the
south. Save a little more light from the 'foggy sunrise' of 11 A.M.,
no great perceptible difference; yet I can now read the finest print
easily.
"1 P.M. Very decidedly more hazy than at 11, the corresponding hour
before meridian. Can read with difficulty the newspaper--_London
Illustrated News_.
"2 P.M. A hazy darkness, but so compounded with the fast-rising light
of the dear moon, that it is far lighter than the corresponding hour
before meridian.
"Day is over. Moonlight begins!
"This is a fair specimen of our usual day. The occasional clear day,
such as we had the 18th, is far lighter, and full of variety and
interest.
"_November_ 21, Thursday. The day is clear; but the moonlight, an
absolute _clair de lune_, so confounds itself with the day as to make a
merely solar register impossible.
"8 A.M. The whole atmosphere bathed in pellucid clearness. The moon,
like a luminous sphere, not a circle, as with us, is away up the
straits in the northern sky. Not a speck betokens sunrise.
"9 A.M. The southeastern horizon is zoned with a mellow uniform band
of light. Nothing we have seen has its extension or its uniformity.
The visual angle is an unbroken tint, rising from the ice with a raw
sienna, mellowing into pink, and softened again into an orange yellow,
which runs sometimes through a gradation of green into the clear blue
sky. The moon absorbs all perception of other light.
"10 A.M. The light of dawn begins to mingle with the moon-light; I can
not say where or how, but I am conscious of an interfering light. To
the southward all is orange, and red, and solar. To the northward, from
a cobalt sky of even tint, the moon 'shineth down alone'--alone, save
the bright planet Saturn to the northward, and the broad zone of red
sunrise at the south.
"11 A.M. Day upon us on one side, and moon bright on the other:
moon-light and sunlight blend overhead. To the north and south, each
keeps its separate dominion. I read the finest print readily.
"12 M. Walked out to see the ice. I have no change of words left to
describe noonday. The sunlight zone of color was more light and less
bright, perhaps--and the moon was more bright and less light, perhaps;
but both were there.
"1 P.M. The light hardly dimmed; but the moon shines out so emulously,
that it is hard to measure the sunlight.
"2 P.M. It is evidently no longer day, although the southwestern
horizon is flared with red streaks, and a softening of yellow into the
blue of heaven says that the sun is somewhere below it. The moon has
confused the day; and coming as she does at this commencement of our
long night, I bless her for the grateful service. I make my four to six
hours of daily walk, and hardly miss the guidance of day.
"3 P.M. Moonlight!"