I EMPLOYED the dreary intervals of leisure that heralded our Christmas
in tracing some Flemish portraitures of things about me. The scenes
themselves had interest at the time for the parties who figured in
them; and I believe that is reason enough, according to the practice of
modern academics, for submitting them to the public eye. I copy them
from my scrapbook, expurgating only a little.
"We have almost reached the solstice; and things are so quiet that I
may as well, before I forget it, tell you something about the cold in
its sensible effects, and the way in which as sensible people we met it.
"You will see, by turning to the early part of my journal, that the
season we now look back upon as the perfection of summer contrast to
this outrageous winter was in fact no summer at all. We had the young
ice forming round us in Baffin's Bay, and were measuring snow-falls,
while you were sweating under your grass-cloth. Yet I remember it as a
time of sunny recreation, when we shot bears upon the floes, and were
scrambling merrily over glaciers and murdering rotges[D] in the bright
glare of our day-midnight. Like a complaining brute, I thought it cold
then--I, who am blistered if I touch a brass button or a ramrod without
a woolen mitt.
[D] Little auk. Commonly spelled rotche.
"The cold came upon us gradually. The first thing that really struck
me was the freezing up of our water-casks, the drip-candle appearance
of the bung-holes, and our inability to lay the tin cup down for a
five-minutes' pause without having its contents made solid. Next came
the complete inability to obtain drink without manufacturing it. For a
long time we had collected our water from the beautiful fresh pools of
the icebergs and floes; now we had to quarry out the blocks in flinty,
glassy lumps, and then melt it in tins for our daily drink.
"By-and-by the sludge which we passed through as we traveled became
pancakes and snow-balls. We were glued up. Yet, even as late as the
11th of September, I collected a flowering Potentilla from Barlow's
Inlet. But now any thing moist or wet began to strike me as something
to be looked at--a curious, out-of-the-way production, like the bits
of broken ice round a can of mint-julep. Our decks became dry, and
studded with botryoidal lumps of dirty foot-trodden ice. The rigging
had nightly accumulations of rime, and we learned to be careful about
coiled ropes and iron work. On the 4th of October we had a mean
temperature below zero.
"By this time our little entering hatchway had become so complete a
mass of icicles, that we had to give it up, and resort to our winter
door-way. The opening of a door was now the signal for a gush of
smoke-like vapor: every stove-pipe sent out clouds of purple steam; and
a man's breath looked like the firing of a pistol on a small scale.
"All our eatables became laughably consolidated, and after different
fashions, requiring no small experience before we learned to manage the
peculiarities of their changed condition. Thus, dried apples became
one solid breccial mass of impacted angularities, a conglomerate of
sliced chalcedony. Dried peaches the same. To get these out of the
barrel, or the barrel out of them, was a matter impossible. We found,
after many trials, that the shortest and best plan was to cut up both
fruit and barrel by repeated blows with a heavy axe, taking the lumps
below to thaw. Saur-kraut resembled mica, or rather talcose slate. A
crowbar with chiseled edge extracted the _laminæ_ badly; but it was
perhaps the best thing we could resort to.
"Sugar formed a very funny compound. Take _q. s._ of cork raspings,
and incorporate therewith another _q. s._ of liquid gutta percha or
caoutchouc, and allow to harden: this extemporaneous formula will give
you the brown sugar of our winter cruise. Extract with the saw; nothing
but the saw will suit. Butter and lard, less changed, require a heavy
cold chisel and mallet. Their fracture is conchoidal, with hæmatitic
(iron-ore pimpled) surface. Flour undergoes little change, and
molasses can at -28° be half scooped, half cut by a stiff iron ladle.
"Pork and beef are rare specimens of Florentine mosaic, emulating
the lost art of petrified visceral monstrosities seen at the medical
schools of Bologna and Milan: crowbar and handspike! for at -30° the
axe can hardly chip it. A barrel sawed in half, and kept for two days
in the caboose house at +76°, was still as refractory as flint a few
inches below the surface. A similar bulk of lamp oil, denuded of the
staves, stood like a yellow sandstone roller for a gravel walk.
"Ices for the dessert come of course unbidden, in all imaginable and
unimaginable variety. I have tried my inventive powers on some of
them. A Roman punch, a good deal stronger than the noblest Roman ever
tasted, forms readily at -20°. Some sugared cranberries, with a little
butter and scalding water, and you have an impromptu strawberry ice.
Many a time at those funny little jams, that we call in Philadelphia
'parties,' where the lady-hostess glides with such nicely-regulated
indifference through the complex machinery she has brought together,
I have thought I noticed her stolen glance of anxiety at the cooing
doves, whose icy bosoms were melting into one upon the supper-table
before their time. We order these things better in the Arctic. Such
is the 'composition and fierce quality' of our ices, that they are
brought in served on the shaft of a hickory broom; a transfixing rod,
which we use as a stirrer first and a fork afterward. So hard is this
terminating cylinder of ice, that it might serve as a truncheon to
knock down an ox. The only difficulty is in the processes that follow.
It is the work of time and energy to impress it with the carving-knife,
and you must handle your spoon deftly, or it fastens to your tongue.
One of our mess was tempted the other day by the crystal transparency
of an icicle to break it in his mouth; one piece froze to his tongue,
and two others to his lips, and each carried off the skin: the
thermometer was at -28°.
"Thus much for our Arctic grub. I need not say that our preserved meats
would make very fair cannon-balls, canister shot!
"Now let us start out upon a walk, clothed in well-fashioned Arctic
costume. The thermometer is, say -25°, not lower, and the wind blowing
a royal breeze, but gently.
"Close the lips the first minute or two, and admit the air suspiciously
through nostril and mustache. Presently you breathe in a dry, pungent,
but gracious and agreeable atmosphere. The beard, eyebrow, eye-lashes,
and the downy pubescence of the ears, acquire a delicate, white, and
perfectly-enveloping cover of venerable hoar-frost. The mustache and
under lip form pendulous beads of dangling ice. Put out your tongue,
and it instantly freezes to this icy crusting, and a rapid effort and
some hand aid will be required to liberate it. The less you talk, the
better. Your chin has a trick of freezing to your upper jaw by the
luting aid of your beard; even my eyes have often been so glued, as to
show that even a wink may be unsafe. As you walk on, you find that the
iron-work of your gun begins to penetrate through two coats of woolen
mittens, with a sensation like hot water.
"But we have been supposing your back to the wind; and if you are a
good Arcticized subject, a warm glow has already been followed by a
profuse sweat. Now turn about and face the wind; what a devil of a
change! how the atmospheres are wafted off! how penetratingly the cold
trickles down your neck, and in at your pockets! Whew! a jack-knife,
heretofore, like Bob Sawyer's apple, 'unpleasantly warm' in the
breeches pocket, has changed to something as cold as ice and hot as
fire: make your way back to the ship! I was once caught three miles off
with a freshening wind, and at one time feared that I would hardly see
the brig again. Morton, who accompanied me, had his cheeks frozen, and
I felt that lethargic numbness mentioned in the story books.
"I will tell you what this feels like, for I have been twice 'caught
out.' Sleepiness is not the sensation. Have you ever received the
shocks of a magneto-electric machine, and had the peculiar benumbing
sensation of 'can't let go,' extending up to your elbow-joints? Deprive
this of its paroxysmal character; subdue, but diffuse it over every
part of the system, and you have the so-called pleasurable feelings of
incipient freezing. It seems even to extend to your brain. Its inertia
is augmented; every thing about you seems of a ponderous sort; and the
whole amount of pleasure is in gratifying the disposition to remain at
rest, and spare yourself an encounter with these latent resistances.
This is, I suppose, the pleasurable sleepiness of the story books.
"I could fill page after page with the ludicrous miseries of our
shipboard life. We have two climates, hygrometrically as well as
thermometrically at opposite ends of the scale. A pocket-handkerchief,
pocketed below in the region of stoves, comes up unchanged. Go below
again, and it becomes moist, flaccid, and almost wet. Go on deck again,
and it resembles a shingle covered with linen. I could pick my teeth
with it.
"You are anxious to know how I manage to stand this remorseless
temperature. It is a short story, and perhaps worth the telling. 'The
Doctor' still retains three luxuries, remnants of better times--silk
next his skin, a tooth-brush for his teeth, and white linen for his
nose. Everything else is Arctic and hairy--fur, fur, fur. The silk is
light and washable, needing neither the clean dirt of starch nor the
uncomfortable trouble of flat-irons. It secures to me a clean screen
between my epidermoid and seal-skin integuments.
"I try to be a practical man as to clothing and the et ceteras of a
traveler. All baggage beyond the essential I regard as _impedimenta_,
and believe in the wisdom of Titian Peale, who, when preparing for an
exploring tour around the world, purchased--a tin cup. For the sake of
poor devils condemned to cold winters, I give in detail my dress, the
result of much trial, and, I think, nearly perfect. Here it is, from
tip to toe.
"1. Feet. A pair of cotton socks (Lisle thread) covered by a pair of
ribbed woolen stockings, rising above the knee and half way up the
thigh. Over these a pair of Esquimaux water-proof boots, lined by a
sock of dog-skin, the hair inside; the leg of dressed seal-hide; a sole
with the edges turned up, and crimped so as to form a water-tight cup;
the furred edge of a dog-skin sock inserted as a lining; and some clean
straw laid smoothly at the bottom, which forms the elastic cushion on
which you tread.
"2. Legs. A pair of coarse woolen drawers, and a pair of seal-skin
breeks over them, stitched with reindeer tendon.
"3. Chest. A jumper or short coat, double, of seal-skin and reindeer
fur. This invaluable article I got at Disco on my fur journey,
obtaining a good number besides for men and officers. It consists of an
inner-hooded shirt of reindeer-skin with the hair inside, reaching as
far as the upper ridge of the hips, so as to allow free swing to the
legs, and fitting about the throat very closely. It is drawn on like
the shirt, and, except at the neck, is perfectly loose and unbinding.
"4. Head. Our people generally wear fur caps. I wear an ear-ridge, a
tiara, to speak heroically, of wolf-skin. Excellent is this Mormon fur!
Leaving the entire poll bare to the elements, it guards the ears and
forehead effectually: in any ordinary state of the wind above -15°, I
am not troubled with the cold. Before I resorted to this, my cap was
full of frozen water, stiff and uncomfortable, all the condensation
turning to ice the moment I uncovered. When the weather is very cold,
I up hood; when colder, say -40°, with a middling breeze--quite cold
enough, I assure you--I wear an elastic silk night-cap in addition,
one of a pair forced on me by a certain brother of mine as I was
leaving New York, drawn over my head and face, and lined with a mask of
wolf-skin. To prevent excessive condensation, I cut only two eye-holes,
and leave a large aperture below the point of the nose for talking and
breathing. A grim-looking object is this wolf-skin mask, its openings
lined with water-proof oiled silk.
"The only changes in the above are a pair of cloth pants for fur, when
the thermometer strays above -15°, and a pair of heavy woolen wad-mail
leggins, drawn over my fur pants, and worn, stocking fashion, within
my boots, in windy weather, when we get down to -30° or thereabouts.
A long waist-scarf, worn like the kummerbund of the Hindoos, is a
fine protection while walking, to keep the cold from intruding at
the pockets and waist: it consummates, as it floats martially on the
breeze, the grotesque harmonies of my attire."