1851, _January_ 1, Wednesday. The first day of 1851 set in cold, the
thermometer at -28°, and closing at -31°. We celebrated it by an extra
dinner, a plumcake unfrosted for the occasion, and a couple of our
residuary bottles of wine. But there was no joy in our merriment: we
were weary of the night, as those who watch for the morning.
It was not till the 3d that the red southern zone continued long enough
to give us assurance of advancing day. Then, for at least three hours,
the twilight enabled us to walk without stumbling. I had a feeling of
racy enjoyment as I found myself once more away from the ship, ranging
among the floes, and watching the rivalry of day with night in the
zenith. There was the sunward horizon, with its evenly-distributed
bands of primitive colors, blending softly into the clear blue
overhead; and then, by an almost magic transition, night occupying the
western sky. Stars of the first magnitude, and a wandering planet here
and there, shone dimly near the debatable line; but a little further
on were all the stars in their glory. The northern firmament had the
familiar beauty of a pure winter night at home. The Pleiades glittered
"like a swarm of fire-flies tangled in a silver-braid," and the great
stars that hang about the heads of Orion and Taurus were as intensely
bright as if day was not looking out upon them from the other quarter
of the sky. I had never seen night and day dividing the hemisphere so
beautifully between them.
On the 8th we had, of course, our national festivities, and remembered
freshly the hero who consecrated the day in our annals. The evening
brought the theatricals again, with extempore interludes, and a hearty
splicing of the main-brace. It was something new, and not thoroughly
gladsome, this commemoration of the victory at New Orleans under a
Polar sky. There were men not two hundred miles from us, now our
partners in a nobler contest, who had bled in this very battle. But
we made the best of the occasion; and if others some degrees further
to the south celebrated it more warmly, we had the thermometer on our
side, with its -20°, a normal temperature for the "laudatur et alget."
But the sun was now gradually coming up toward the horizon: every
day at meridian, and for an hour before and after, we were able to
trace our progress eastward by some known headland. We had passed
Cape Castlereagh and Cape Warrender in succession, and were close on
the meridian of Cape Osborn. The disruptions of the ice which we had
encountered so far, had always been at the periods of spring-tide. The
sun and moon were in conjunction on the 21st of December; and, adopting
Captain Parry's observation, that the greatest efflux was always within
five days after the new moon, we had looked with some anxiety to the
closing weeks of that month. But they had gone by without any unusual
movement; and there needed only an equally kind visitation of the
January moon to give us our final struggle with the Baffin's Bay ice by
daylight.
Yet I had remarked that the southern shore of Lancaster Sound extended
much further out to the eastward than the northern did; and I had
argued that we might begin to feel the current of Baffin's Bay in a
very few days, though we were still considerably to the west of a line
drawn from one cape to the other. The question received its solution
without waiting for the moon.
I give from my journal our position in the ice on the 11th of January:
"_January_ 11, Saturday. The floe in which we are now imbedded has
been steadily increasing in solidity for more than a month. Since the
8th of December, not a fracture or collision has occurred to mar its
growth. The eye can not embrace its extent. Even from the mast-head you
look over an unbounded expanse of naked ice, bristling with contorted
spires, and ridged by elevated axes of hummocks. The land on either
side rises above our icy horizon; but to the east and west, there is no
such interception to our winteryness.
"The brig remains as she was tossed at our providential escape of
last month, her nose burrowing in the snow, and her stern perched
high above the rubbish. Walking deck is an up and down hill work. She
retains, too, her list to starboard. Her bare sides have been banked
over again with snow to increase the warmth, and a formidable flight of
nine ice-block steps admits us to the door-way of her winter cover. The
stores, hastily thrown out from the vessel when we expected her to go
to pieces, are still upon the little remnant of old floe on our port or
northern side. The _Rescue_ is some hundred yards off to the south of
east."
The next day things underwent a change. The morning was a misty one,
giving us just light enough to make out objects that were near the
ship; the wind westerly, as it had been for some time, freshening
perhaps to a breeze. The day went on quietly till noon, when a sudden
shock brought us all up to the deck. Running out upon the ice, we found
that a crack had opened between us and the _Rescue_, and was extending
in a zigzag course from the northward and eastward to the southward and
westward. At one o'clock it had become a chasm eight feet in width;
and as it continued to widen, we observed a distinct undulation of the
water about its edges. At three, it had expanded into a broad sheet of
water, filmed over by young ice, through which the portions of the floe
that bore our two vessels began to move obliquely toward each other.
Night closed round us, with the chasm reduced to forty yards and still
narrowing; the _Rescue_ on her port-bow, two hundred yards from her
late position; the wind increasing, and the thermometer at -19°.
My journal for the next day was written at broken intervals; but I give
it without change of form:
"_January_ 13, 4 A.M. All hands have been on deck since one o'clock,
strapped and harnessed for a farewell march. The water-lane of
yesterday is covered by four-inch ice; the floes at its margin more
than three feet thick. These have been closing for some time by a
sliding, grinding movement, one upon the other; but every now and then
coming together more directly, the thinner ice clattering between them,
and marking their new outline with hummock ridges. They have been
fairly in contact for the last hour: we feel their pressure extending
to us through the elastic floe in which we are cradled. There is a
quivering, vibratory hum about the timbers of the brig, and every
now and then a harsh rubbing creak along her sides, like waxed cork
on a mahogany table. The hummocks are driven to within four feet of
our counter, and stand there looming fourteen feet high through the
darkness. It has been a horrible commotion so far, with one wild,
booming, agonized note, made up of a thousand discords; and now comes
the deep stillness after it, the mysterious ice-pulse, as if the
energies were gathering for another strife.
"6-1/2 A.M. Another pulse! the vibration greater than we have ever
yet had it. If our little brig had an animated centre of sensation,
and some rude force had torn a nerve-trunk, she could not feel it
more--she fairly shudders. Looking out to the north, this ice seems to
heave up slowly against the sky in black hills; and as we watch them
rolling toward us, the hills sink again, and a distorted plain of
rubbish melts before us into the night. Ours is the contrast of utter
helplessness with illimitable power.
"9:50 A.M. Brooks and myself took advantage of the twilight at nine
o'clock to cross the hummocky fields to the _Rescue_. I can not convey
an impression of the altered aspects of the floe. Our frozen lane has
disappeared, and along the line of its recent course the ice is heaped
up in blocks, tables, lumps, powder, and rubbish, often fifteen feet
high. Snow covered the decks of the little vessel, and the disorder
about it spoke sadly of desertion. Foot-prints of foxes were seen in
every imaginable corner; and near the little hatchway, where we had
often sat in comfortable good-fellowship, the tracks of a large bear
had broken the snow crust in his efforts to get below.
"The _Rescue_ has met the pressure upon her port-bow and fore-foot. Her
bowsprit, already maimed by her adventure off Griffith's Island, is
now completely forced up, broken short off at the gammoning. The ice,
after nipping her severely, has piled up round her three feet above the
bulwarks. We had looked to her as our first asylum of retreat; but
that is out of the question now; she can not rise as we have done, and
any action that would peril us again must bear her down or crush her
laterally.
"The ice immediately about the _Advance_ is broken into small angular
pieces, as if it had been dashed against a crag of granite. Our camp
out on the floe, with its reserve of provisions and a hundred things
besides, memorials of scenes we have gone through, or appliances and
means for hazards ahead of us, has been carried away bodily. My noble
specimen of the Arctic bear is floating, with an escort of bread
barrels, nearly half a mile off.
"The thermometer records only--17°; but it blows at times so very
fiercely that I have never felt it so cold: five men were frost-bitten
in the attempt to save our stores.
"9 P.M. We have had no renewal of the pressure since half past six this
morning. We are turning in; the wind blowing a fresh breeze, weather
misty, thermometer at -23°."
The night brought no further change; but toward morning the cracks,
that formed before this a sort of net-work all about the vessel, began
to open. The cause was not apparent: the wind had lulled, and we saw no
movement of the floes. We had again the same voices of complaint from
the ship, but they were much feebler than yesterday; and in about an
hour the ice broke up all round her, leaving an open space of about a
foot to port, indented with the mould of her form. The brig was loose
once more at the sides; but she remained suspended by the bows and
stern from hummocks built up like trestles, and canted forward still
five feet and a quarter out of level. Every thing else was fairly
afloat: even the India-rubber boat, which during our troubles had found
a resting-place on a sound projection of the floe close by us, had to
be taken in.
This, I may say, was a fearful position; but the thermometer, at a
mean of -23° and -24°, soon brought back the solid character of our
floating raft. In less than two days every thing about us was as firmly
fixed as ever. But the whole topography of the ice was changed, and
its new configuration attested the violence of the elements it had
been exposed to. Nothing can be conceived more completely embodying
inhospitable desolation. From mast-head the eye traveled wearily over a
broad champaigne of modulating ice, crowned at its ridges with broken
masses, like breakers frozen as they rolled toward the beach. Beyond
these, you lost by degrees the distinctions of surface. It was a great
plain, blotched by dark, jagged shadows, and relieved only here and
there by a hill of upheaved rubbish. Still further in the distance came
an unvarying uniformity of shade, cutting with saw-toothed edge against
a desolate sky.
Yet there needed no after-survey of the ice-field to prove to us what
majestic forces had been at work upon it. At one time on the 13th, the
hummock-ridge astern advanced with a steady march upon the vessel.
Twice it rested, and advanced again--a dense wall of ice, thirty feet
broad at the base and twelve feet high, tumbling huge fragments from
its crest, yet increasing in mass at each new effort. We had ceased to
hope; when a merciful interposition arrested it, so close against our
counter that there was scarcely room for a man to pass between. Half a
minute of progress more, and it would have buried us all. As we drifted
along five months afterward, this stupendous memento of controlling
power was still hanging over our stern. The sketch at the head of the
next chapter represents its appearance at the close of the month.