[Illustration]
WE continued our progress through a labyrinth of ice, sometimes running
into a berg, or grazing against its edge so close as to carry away a
spar or stave a quarter-boat, but still making our way across to the
Greenland shore. The sea was studded with low bergs and water-washed
floes, wearing the fantastic forms which had surprised us the year
before. Some were both complicated and graceful, supported generally
by peduncular bases, which gave them a curious aspect of fragility.
This was evidently due to the action of the waves at the water-line,
aided by the warmth of the atmosphere.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
If we suppose a nearly symmetrical lump of ice, floating with that
stable equilibrium which belongs to its excessive submergence, the
atmosphere, which has now a temperature as high as 64° in the sunshine,
will gradually round off and crease the edges, and at the same time
will melt the portions of the mass which are above water. Its buoyancy
increasing as its weight is reduced, the berg will now rise slowly,
presenting a succession of new surfaces to the abrasion of the waves;
and thus we shall have the familiar mushroom or fungoid appearance
which is shown in many of the plates illustrating peculiar berg forms.
The process continuing under all the modifications of wave action,
while the opposing face of the berg varies with every change of its
gravitating centre, we may have eccentric resemblances to animated
things sculptured in the ice, and at other times forms of classic
symmetry, or the frets and garniture of mediæval art.
Our sail through this fanciful archipelago was a most uncomfortable
one. Our stoves had been taken down; and the scurvy, exaggerated by
the increased exposure to damp, began again to bear hard upon us. We
devoured eagerly the seal, of which, by good fortune, we had several
re-enforcements; but as the excitements of peril declined, the energies
of the men seemed to relax more and more; and I had reason to fear
that we should not be able to resume our search effectively, until the
health of our party had undergone a tedious renovation.
It had been determined by our commander that we should refresh at Whale
Fish Islands, and then hasten back to Melville Bay, the North Water,
Lancaster Sound, and Wellington Channel; and certainly there was no one
on board who did not enter heart and soul into the scheme. It was in
pursuance of it that we were now bending our course to the east.
The circumstances that surrounded us, the daily incidents, our
destination and purpose, were the same as when approaching the
Sukkertoppen a year before. There were the same majestic fleets of
bergs, the same legions of birds of the same varieties, the same
anxious look-out, and rapid conning, and fearless encounter of
ice-fields. Every thing was unchanged, except the glowing confidence of
young health at the outset of adventure. We had taken our seasoning:
the experience of a winter's drift had quieted some of our enthusiasm.
But we felt, as veterans at the close of a campaign, that with
recruited strength we should be better fitted for the service than
ever. All, therefore, looked at the well-remembered cliffs, that hung
over Kronprinsen, with the sentiment of men approaching home for the
time, and its needed welcomes.
We reached them on the 16th. Mr. Murdaugh, and myself, and four men,
and three bottles of rum, were dispatched to communicate with the
shore. As we rowed in to the landing-place, the great dikes of injected
syenite stood out red and warm against the cold gray gneiss, and the
moss gullies met us like familiar grass-plots. Esquimaux crowded the
rocks, and dogs barked, and children yelled. A few lusty pulls, and
after nine months of drift, and toil, and scurvy, we were once more on
terra firma.
God forgive me the revulsion of unthankfulness! I ought to have dilated
with gratitude for my lot.
Winter had been severe. The season lagged. The birds had not yet begun
to breed. Faces were worn, and forms bent. Every body was coughing. In
one hut, a summer lodge of reindeer and seal skins, was a dead child.
It was many months since I had looked at a corpse. The poor little
thing had been for once washed clean, and looked cheerful. The father
leaned over it weeping, for it was a boy; and two little sisters were
making lamentation in a most natural and savage way.
I gave the corpse a string of blue beads, and bought a pair of
seal-skin boots for twenty-five cents; and we rowed back to the brig.
In a very little while we were under sail for Godhaven.
We were but five days recruiting at Godhaven. It was a shorter stay
than we had expected; but we were all of us too anxious to regain
the searching ground to complain. We made the most of it, of course.
We ate inordinately of eider, and codfish, and seal, to say nothing
of a hideous-looking toad fish, a _Lepodogaster_, that insisted on
patronizing our pork-baited lines; chewed bitter herbs, too, of every
sort we could get; drank largely of the smallest of small-beer; and
danced with the natives, teaching them the polka, and learning the
pee-oo-too-ka in return. But on the 22d, by six o'clock in the morning,
we were working our way again to the north.
We passed the hills of Disco in review, with their terraced summits,
simulating the Ghauts of Hindostan; the green-stone cliffs round
Omenak's Fiord, the great dockyard of bergs; and Cape Cranstoun, around
which they were clustered like a fleet waiting for convoy. They were of
majestic proportions; and as we wound our way tortuously among them,
one after another would come into the field of view, like a temple set
to be the terminus of a vista. At one time we had the whole Acropolis
looking down upon us in silver; at another, our Philadelphia copy of
the Parthenon, the monumental Bank of the United States, stood out
alone. Then, again, some venerable cathedral, with its deep vaults and
hoary belfries, would spread itself across the sky; or perhaps some
wild combination of architectural impossibilities.
[Illustration: AN ICE CATHEDRAL.]
[Illustration: THE GROTTO IN THE BERG.]
We moved so slowly that I had time to sketch several of these
dreamy fabrics. The one which is engraved on the opposite page was
an irregular quadrangle, projected at the extremity of a series of
ice-structures, like the promontory that ends an isthmus: it was
crowned with ramparts turreted by fractures; and at the water-line a
great barreled arch went back into a cavern, that might have fabled
as the haunt of sea-kings or smugglers. Another, much smaller, but
still of magnificent size, had been excavated by the waves into a deep
grotto; and the light reflected from the bay against its transparent
sides and roofs colored them with a blue too superb for imitation by
the brush or pencil.
In the morning of the 24th we made the pack; more to the south,
therefore, than last year. It appeared at first like a firm neck,
extending out among heavy bergs well into Haroë Island; and remembering
our last year's experience, we moved cautiously. But after a while, our
captain, now perhaps the best ice-master afloat, determined on boring.
The dolphin-striker was triced up, the boats were taken on board, and
the old sounds of conning the helm began again. This time we were
lucky. In four hours we were through the tongue of the pack, and out in
nearly an open sea.
We did not move long, however, before the navigation became
embarrassed. The ice between Cape Lawson and Storoë was too compact to
be wedged aside; and after some rude encounters with the floes, and a
narrow escape from a reef of rocks which Captain Graah's charts do not
mention, we found ourselves, on the 25th, nearly embayed by the noble
headlands off Ovinde Oerme. The ice, in a horseshoe curve, completely
shut us in to the north, and the tongue of the pack we had come through
lay between us and the sea. The wind had left us. We were drifting
listlessly in a glassy sea that reflected the green-stone terraces and
strange pyramidal masses of its romantic shores.
We amused ourselves killing seals. There must have been hundreds of
them of all varieties playing about us. Generally they were to be
seen paddling about alone, but sometimes in groups, like a party of
school-boys frolicking in the Schuylkill. One of their favorite sports
was "treading water," rising breast-high, keeping up a boisterous,
indefatigable splashing, and stretching out their necks, as if to pry
into the condition of things aboard ship. We compared their behavior
to that of the timorous but curious natives, when the Europeans first
met them in the waters of America; and in our intercourse with them,
conformed accurately to the Spanish precedent.
Occasionally only we obeyed our "manifest destiny" with reluctance.
Some of the younger of these poor sea-dogs had overmuch of the honest
expression of their land brethren: the truncation of the muzzle in
others, with no external ear showing behind it, set their faces in
almost perfect and human-like oval. When one of these would come up out
of the water near us, and, raising his head and shoulders, that stooped
like those of a hooded Esquimaux, gaze steadily at us with his liquid
eye, then diving, come up a little nearer and stare again; so drawing
nearer and nearer, diving and rising alternately, till he came within
musket range; it sometimes went hard to salute him with a bullet.
We shot, among others, a very large beast (_P. barbata_), lying upon a
floating piece of ice. The captain's ball went through his heart; and
my own, equally deadly, within a few inches of it; but the unwieldy
creature continued struggling to reach the water, until a shot from
Mr. Lovell, close upon him, drove a musket-ball through his head. He
measured eight feet from tip to tip, five feet eleven inches in his
greatest circumference, and five feet six inches in girth behind the
fore-flippers. His carcass was a shapeless cylinder, terminating in an
awkward knob to represent the head.
We lost two seals by sinking. Hitherto, when killed on the instant by
perforation of the brain or spinal marrow, they had invariably floated.
But the rule does not hold always. I wounded one so as to carry away
the crown of his skull, and Captain De Haven gave him a second shot
from within a few yards directly through his head, and yet we lost him.
As the balls struck, he discharged, almost explosively, a quantity of
air, and went down like a loon. The whalers say, wound your seals; but
my own experience is, that, if they are fat, it is best to kill them
at once. A Danish boy, who had joined us by stealth at Disco, told
us that the animal's sinking was a proof that he had no blubber. He
was probably right: we certainly did not secure any that were in good
condition.
The next day gave us excitement of a different sort. We had been lying
in the young ice-field, close under the southeast shore of Storoë, with
the current setting strong toward it, and a grim array of bergs to the
west of us. It was an ugly position; but we were fairly entangled, and
there was no escape. Early in the morning, the wind freshened, and blew
in toward the island; the ice piling against the rocky precipice under
our lee, and opening in broken masses to windward. The _Rescue_ managed
to make fast to a crag between us and the shore, but our ice-anchors
missed. At four in the afternoon we were within rifle-shot of the
land, and still drifting; the wind a gale, and the sea-swell coming in
heavily.
We stopped, of course, or there would have been an end of my journal.
But for some hours things looked squally enough. Our soundings had
become small by degrees and beautifully less, till they were down to
thirteen feet; and the black wall looked so near that you could have
hit it with a filbert. It could not have been fifty yards off, when
we brought up on some grounded floe-pieces. By eleven, our warps had
headed us to windward, and our bow was off shore. For once, at least,
we owed our safety to the ice.
The _Rescue_ followed a few hours after; and we took the direction of
the pack together to the N.N.W. By the next day at noon we were within
twenty-three miles of Uppernavik, but a belt of ice lay between. We
anchored to a berg, and for two days waited patiently for an opening.
My mess-mates in the mean time went off on a hunt to a flat, rocky
ledge, that showed itself inshore, and I amused myself with a tramp
on the ice-island to which we were fast. I had for company a noble
Esquimaux slut, that Governor Moldrup had enabled me to get at Disco,
and a dog of the same breed belonging to Mr. Lovell. I do not know what
has become of Hosky, as Mr. Lovell named his favorite; but my poor
Disco fell a martyr to our Philadelphia climate and his Arctic costume
together, some three days after we got home.
I had a quiet day's walk. My companions rambled with evident glee over
the peaks and ravines of their familiar element. It was a magnificent
pile of frost-work. But these crystal palaces of the ice, like every
thing else under this northern sky, deceive one strangely in their
apparent size. We thought, when we anchored, that the berg was a small
one; yet we coursed more than the third of a mile in almost a direct
line before we reached its further edge.
[Illustration: ICE BOULDERS.]
The pure surfaces which we traveled over were studded with irregular
blocks of ice, evidently once detached and cemented on again. They
varied in size and shape from a boy's playing-marble to a haystack;
and by their interesting distribution suggested most obtrusively the
question of almost every Arctic traveler, how such fragments find
their place on the plateau surfaces of the icebergs. I had answered
the question for myself before; but I was glad to be consumed by the
observations I made in the course of this excursion. When first the
mass separates from the land-berg or glacier, it is accompanied by a
large quantity of disengaged fragments, with all varieties of detritus;
and during the alternate risings and sinkings that follow the fall into
the sea, a great deal of this is caught by the emerging surface of the
berg, and adheres to it. I noticed valleys, where the subsequent roll
had rounded the masses, and grouped them into something resembling
bowlder-drift. I had seen similar valleys in some of the large bergs of
Duneira Bay, supplying a bed for temporary water-streams, in which the
bowlders were beautifully rounded, and arranged in true moraine fashion.
Off Storoë, a white fox (_C. lagopus_) came to us on the loose ice:
his legs and the tip of his tail were black. He was the first we had
seen on the Greenland coast.
He was followed the next day by a party of Esquimaux, who visited us
from Pröven, dragging their kayacks and themselves over seven miles of
the pack, and then paddling merrily on board. For two glasses of rum
and a sorry ration of salt-pork, they kept turning somersets by the
dozen, making their egg-shell skiffs revolve sideways by a touch of the
paddle, and hardly disappearing under the water before they were heads
up again, and at the gangway to swallow their reward.
The inshore ice opened on the thirtieth, and toward evening we left
the hospitable moorage of our iceberg, and made for the low, rounded
rocks, which the Hosky pointed out to us as the seat of the settlement.
The boats were out to tow us clear of the floating rubbish, as the
light and variable winds made their help necessary, and we were slowly
approaching our anchorage, when a rough yawl boarded us. She brought a
pleasant company, Unas the schoolmaster and parish priest, Louisa his
sister, the gentle Amalia, Louisa's cousin, and some others of humbler
note.
The baptismal waters had but superficially regenerated these savages:
their deportment, at least, did not conform to our nicest canons. For
the first five minutes, to be sure, the ladies kept their faces close
covered with their hands, only withdrawing them to blow their noses,
which they did in the most primitive and picturesque manner. But their
modesty thus assured, they felt that it needed no further illustration.
They volunteered a dance, avowed to us confidentially that they had
educated tastes--Amalia that she smoked, Louisa that she tolerated the
more enlivening liquids, and both that their exercise in the open air
had made a slight refection altogether acceptable. Hospitality is the
virtue of these wild regions: our hard tack, and cranberries, and rum
were in requisition at once.
It is not for the host to tell tales of his after-dinner company. But
the truth of history may be satisfied without an intimation that our
guests paid niggard honors to the jolly god of a milder clime. The
veriest prince, of bottle memories, would not have quarreled with their
heel-taps. * * *
We were inside the rocky islands of Pröven harbor as our watches told
us that another day had begun. The time was come for parting. The
ladies shed a few kindly tears as we handed them to the stern-seats:
their learned kinsman took a recumbent position below the thwarts,
which favored a continuance of his nap; and the rest of the party were
bestowed with seaman-like address--all but one unfortunate gentleman,
who, having protracted his festive devotions longer than usual, had
resolved not to "go home till morning."
The case was a difficult one; but there was no help for it. As the
sailors passed him to the bottom of the boat, and again out upon the
beach, he made the air vocal with his indignant outcries. The dogs--I
have told you of the dogs of these settlements, how they welcomed
our first arrival--joined their music with his. The Prövenese came
chattering out into the cold, like chickens startled from their roost.
The governor was roused by the uproar. And in the midst of it all, our
little weather-beaten flotilla ran up the first American flag that had
been seen in the port of Pröven.