"_DECEMBER_ 21, Saturday. To-day at noon we saw, dimly looming up from
the redness of the southern horizon, a low range of hills; among them
some cones of great height, mountains of a character differing from the
naked table-lands of the northern coast. The land on the other side of
Croker's Bay, with one high headland, supposed to be Cape Warrender, is
in view. From all of which it is clear that we are drifting regularly
on toward Baffin's Bay.
"An opening occurred last night in the ice to the northward. It is not
more than a hundred yards from us, and it is already seventy wide. It
was explored for about a mile in a northwest and southeast course.
Another of the same character is about half a mile to the south of us.
"Our floe has now remained in peace for nearly three weeks; and, with
the happy indifference of sailors' human nature, we are beginning to
forget the driving ice and the groaning pressures which have perched
us thus upon a lump of drift. I look, however, to the spring-tides for
a renewal of the trouble. The ice about us is apparently as strong and
solid as the slow growth of Wellington Channel; but we know it to be
recent, and less able to withstand pressure. Every thing now depends
upon preserving our vessel and stores. A breaking up must take place,
and for us the later in the spring the better. At the present rate of
progress, we shall be in Baffin's Bay by the latter end of January.
There the daylight will be with us again; most providentially, for the
icebergs are wretched enemies in darkness. Thirty more days, and we may
take a noonday walk; forty-four, and the sun comes back.
"Our men are hard at work preparing for the Christmas theatre, the
arrangements exclusively their own. But to-morrow is a day more welcome
than Christmas--the solstitial day of greatest darkness, from which we
may begin to date our returning light. It makes a man feel badly to see
the faces around him bleaching into waxen paleness. Until to-day, as a
looking-glass does not enter into an Arctic toilet, I thought I was the
exception, and out of delicacy said nothing about it to my comrades.
One of them, introducing the topic just now, told me, with an utter
unconsciousness of his own ghostliness, that I was the palest of the
party. So it is, 'All men think all men,' &c. Why, the good fellow is
as white as a cut potato!"
In truth, we were all of us at this time undergoing changes
unconsciously. The hazy obscurity of the nights we had gone through
made them darker than the corresponding nights of Parry. The
complexions of my comrades, and my own too, as I found soon afterward,
were toned down to a peculiar waxy paleness. Our eyes were more
recessed, and strangely clear. Complaints of shortness of breath became
general. Our appetite was almost ludicrously changed: ham-fat frozen,
and saur-kraut swimming in olive-oil were favorites; yet we were
unconscious of any tendency toward the gross diet of the Polar region.
Most of my companions would not touch bear; indeed, I was the only one,
except Captain De Haven, that still ate it. Fox, on the other hand,
was a favorite. Things seemed to have changed their taste, and our
inclination for food was at best very slight.
Worse than this, our complete solitude, combined with permanent
darkness, began to affect our _morale_. Men became moping, testy,
and imaginative. In the morning, dreams of the night--we could not
help using the term--were narrated. Some had visited the naked shores
of Cape Warrender, and returned laden with water-melons. Others had
found Sir John Franklin in a beautiful cove, lined by quintas and
orange-trees. Even Brooks, our hard-fisted, unimaginative boatswain,
told me, in confidence, of having heard three strange groans out upon
the ice. He "thought it was a bear, but could see nothing!" In a word,
the health of our little company was broken in upon. It required
strenuous and constant effort at washing, diet, and exercise to keep
the scurvy at bay. Eight cases of scorbutic gums were already upon my
black-list. One severe pneumonia left me in anxious doubt as to its
result. There was, however, little bronchitis.
"_December_ 22, Sunday. The solstice!--the midnight of the year! It
commences with a new movement in the ice, the open lead of yesterday
piling up into hummocks on our port-beam. No harm done.
"The wind is from the west, increasing in freshness since early in the
morning. The weather overcast; even the moon unseen, and no indications
of our drift. We could not read print, not even large newspaper type,
at noonday. We have been unable to leave the ship unarmed for some time
on account of the bears. We remember the story of poor Barentz, one of
our early predecessors. One of our crew, Blinn, a phlegmatic Dutchman,
walked out to-day toward the lead, a few hundred yards off, in search
of a seal-hole. Suddenly a seal rose close by him in the sludge-ice:
he raised his gun to fire; and, at the same instant, a large bear
jumped over the floe, and by a dive followed the seal. Blinn's musket
snapped. He was glad to get on board again, and will remember his
volunteer hunt. Thermometer, minimum, -18°; maximum, -6°. A beautiful
paraselene yesterday!
"_December_ 23, Monday. Perfect darkness! Drift unknown. Winds nearly
at rest, with the exception of a little gasp from the westward.
Thermometer never below -12°, nor above -7°.
"_December_ 24, Tuesday. 'Through utter darkness borne!'
"_December_ 25. 'Y{e} Christmas of y{e} Arctic cruisers!' Our Christmas
passed without a lack of the good things of this life. 'Goodies' we
had galore; but that best of earthly blessings, the communion of loved
sympathies, these Arctic cruisers had not. It was curious to observe
the depressing influences of each man's home thoughts, and absolutely
saddening the effort of each man to impose upon his neighbor and be
very boon and jolly. We joked incessantly, but badly, and laughed
incessantly, but badly too; ate of good things, and drank up a moiety
of our Heidsiek; and then we sang negro songs, wanting only tune,
measure, and harmony, but abounding in noise; and after a closing
bumper to Mr. Grinnell, adjourned with creditable jollity from table to
the theatre.
"It was on deck, of course, but veiled from the sky by our felt
covering. A large ship's ensign, stretched from the caboose to the
bulwarks, was understood to hide the stage, and certain meat-casks
and candle-boxes represented the parquet. The thermometer gave us -6°
at first; but the favoring elements soon changed this to the more
comfortable temperature of -4°.
"Never had I enjoyed the tawdry quackery of the stage half so much. The
theatre has always been to me a wretched simulation of realities; and I
have too little sympathy with the unreal to find pleasure in it long.
Not so our Arctic theatre: it was one continual frolic from beginning
to end.
"The 'Blue Devils:' God bless us! but it was very, very funny. None
knew their parts, and the prompter could not read glibly enough to do
his office. Every thing, whether jocose, or indignant, or commonplace,
or pathetic, was delivered in a high-tragedy monotone of despair; five
words at a time, or more or less, according to the facilities of the
prompting. Megrim, with a pair of seal-skin boots, bestowed his gold
upon the gentle Annette; and Annette, nearly six feet high, received it
with mastodonic grace. Annette was an Irishman named Daly; and I might
defy human being to hear her, while balanced on the heel of her boot,
exclaim, in rich masculine brogue, 'Och, feather!' without roaring.
Bruce took the Landlord, Benson was James, and the gentle Annette and
the wealthy Megrim were taken by Messrs. Daly and Johnson.
"After this followed the Star Spangled Banner; then a complicated
Marseillaise by our French cook, Henri; then a sailor's horn-pipe by
the diversely-talented Bruce; the orchestra--Stewart, playing out the
intervals on the Jew's-harp from the top of a lard-cask. In fact, we
were very happy fellows. We had had a foot-race in the morning over the
midnight ice for three purses of a flannel shirt each, and a splicing
of the main-brace. The day was night, the stars shining feebly through
the mist.
"But even here that kindly custom of Christmas-gifting was not
forgotten. I found in my morning stocking a jack-knife, symbolical of
my altered looks, a piece of Castile soap--this last article in great
request--a Jew's-harp, and a string of beads! On the other hand, I
prescribed from the medical stores two bottles of Cognac, to protect
the mess from indigestion.[E] So passed Christmas. Thermometer,
minimum, -16°; maximum, -7°. Wind west.
[E] An offense which I thus publicly acknowledge in advance of the
court-martial, to which this illegal dispensation of the public stores
may subject me.
"_December_ 26, Thursday. To-day, looming up high in the air, we catch
a sight of new unknown land. Of our drift, save by analogy, we know
nothing.
"_December_ 27, Friday. The shores of this coast seem to have changed
their scale. At Cape Riley, as my sketches show, the limestone rises
in a mural face, based by a deposit of detritus, which extends out
in tongues, indentations, and salient capes; and between these, a
cemented shingle, full of corallines and encrinites, forms a beach of
varying extent.
"Sometimes this beach is backed by rolling dune-like hills of the scaly
mountain limestones; but after a mile or two of intermission, the
high cliffs rise up again in abutments, and continue unbroken until
another interval occurs. As we proceeded east, these escarped masses
became more buttress-like and monumental, rising up into plateau-topped
masses, separated by chasms, which seem mere ruptures in the continuous
hill-line. Now, however, a trace is seen in the clouds indicative of
distant land, higher, more mountainous, rolling, and broken. It may be
the Cunninghame Mountains toward Cape Warrender.
"The wind is quietly blowing from the west, and the misty haze gives us
barely a vestige of daylight.
"_December_ 28, Saturday. From my very soul do I rejoice at the
coming sun. Evidences not to be mistaken convince me that the health
of our crew, never resting upon a very sound basis, must sink under
the continued influences of darkness and cold. The temperature and
foulness of air in the between-deck Tartarus can not be amended,
otherwise it would be my duty to urge a change. Between the smoke of
lamps, the dry heat of stoves, and the fumes of the galley, all of
them unintermitting, what wonder that we grow feeble. The short race
of Christmas-day knocked up all our officers except Griffin. It pained
me to see my friend Lovell, our strongest man, fainting with the
exertion. The symptoms of scurvy among the crew are still increasing,
and becoming more general. Faces are growing pale; strong men pant for
breath upon ascending a ladder; and an indolence akin to apathy seems
to be creeping over us. I long for the light. Dear, dear sun, no wonder
you are worshiped!
"Our drift is still eastward, with a slow but unerring progress. The
high land mentioned yesterday took, in spite of the obscuring haze,
a distinguishable outline. It is not more than eight miles off, and
so high that, with its retiring flanks on either side, it can be
none other than the projecting Cape Warrender. Its structure is
unmistakably gneissoid. We have now left the limestones.
"This cape is the great entering landmark of the northern shores of
Lancaster Sound. Just one hundred days ago we passed it, urged by the
wings of the storm; our errand of mercy filling us with hope, and the
gale calling for our best energies. We were then but a few hours from
Baffin's Bay, and not over twenty-four from the coast of Greenland. How
differently are we journeying now!
"The Bay of Baffin, with its moving ice and opposing icebergs, bathed
in foggy darkness and destitute of human fellowship or habitable
asylum, is before us; and we, so utterly helpless, hampered, and
nonresistant, must await the inevitable action of the ice. This
nearness to Cape Warrender makes us feel that our silent marches have
brought us near to another conflict.
"_December_ 29, Sunday. The drift shows an indent of the cape now
abaft our beam. We are slowly making easting. The day is one of the
same obscure and dimmed fog which for the past week has wrapped us
in darkness. The ice gives no change as yet: the same great field of
moving whiteness.
"_December_ 30, Monday. By a comparison of our several days' positions,
I find that from the 18th to the 28th we have drifted fifty-two miles
and a half, something over five miles a day. The winds during this
period have been from the westward, constant though gentle; and our
progress has been of the same steady but gentle sort. At this rate, we
will in a few days more be within the Baffin's Bay incognita.
"Looking round upon my mess-mates with that sort of scrutiny that
belongs to my craft and my position, I am startled at the traces,
moral and physical, of our Arctic winter life. Those who con it over
theoretically can hardly realize the operation of the host of retarding
influences that belong to a Polar night. If I were asked to place in
foremost rank the item that has been most trying, it would be neither
the perpetual cold, nor the universal sameness, nor our complete
exclusion from the active world of our brother men, but this constant
and oppressing gloom, this unvaried darkness.
"To-day was clear toward the south, so that the blessing of light came
to us more largely than of late. I walked about a mile on the recent
lead, now frozen to a level meandering lane. We see to the north the
Cunninghame Mountains of Cape Warrender, but can not make out our
change of position definitely. To the south, an outlined ridge of
doubtful mountain land shows itself high in the clouds; probably a part
of the high ridges east of Admiralty Inlet.
"The thermometer fell at eight this morning to -21°. By noonday it gave
us -26° and -27°. It is now -22°. The wind is gentle and cold, but not
severe.
"_December_ 31, Tuesday. The ending day of 1850! So clear and beautiful
is this parting day, that I must take it as a happy omen. Pellucid
clearness, and a sky of deep ultra-marine, brought back the remembrance
of daylight. I give the record of the day.
"9 A.M. The stars visible even to the lesser groups; but a deep zone of
Italian pink rises from the south, and passes by prismatic gradations
into the clear blue. The outline of the shore to the northward is well
defined.
"10. The day is growing into clearness. The thermometer is at
twenty-seven degrees below zero. Your lungs tingle pleasantly as you
draw it in.
"11. Can read ordinary over-sized print. Started on a walk, the first
time for twenty-odd days. Saw the great lead, and traveled it for a
couple of miles, expanding into a plain of recent ice.
"M. Passed noon on the ice. Can read diamond type. Stars of the first
magnitude only visible. Saturn magnificent!
"1 P.M. With difficulty read large type. The clouds gathering in black
stratus over the red light to the south.
"2. The heavens studded with stars in their groupings. Night is again
over every thing, although the minor stars are not yet seen.
"Since the first of this month, we have drifted in solitude one hundred
and seventy miles, skirting the northern shores of Lancaster Sound.
Baffin's Bay is ahead of us, its current setting strong toward the
south. What will be the result when the mighty masses of these two
Arctic seas come together!"