ICE NAVIGATION
On July 6,[1] 1908, a black, rakish-looking steamer moved slowly up the
East River, New York, beside a puffing tug. Seen broadside on, this
craft was as trim and rakish as a yacht; seen end on, the impression
given was of the breadth of beam and solidity of a battle-ship.
A sailor, glimpsing any feature of this vessel,--the slender, raking
pole-masts; the big, elliptical smoke-stack; the sharply inclined
stem; the overhanging stern; the sheer of the bows; the barrel at the
mast-head,--would have noted its peculiarity, and looked the vessel
over with great interest; and yet she did not look a “freak” ship.
As she passed along, whistles on each shore vied with one another in
clamorous salutations, and passing craft, from the little power-boat to
the big Sound steamer, dipped flags and shrieked a greeting.
[Illustration: BEGINNING THE NORTH POLE VOYAGE
The “Roosevelt” steaming up East River, N. Y., July 6, 1908]
With glasses one could make out on a pennant flying from the masthead,
_Roosevelt_. The Stars and Stripes at the stern were fluttering up and
down incessantly, and the white jets of steam from her whistle were
continuous in answer to the salutes.
This was the arctic ice-fighter _Roosevelt_, as sturdy and aggressive
as her namesake, built on American plans, by American labor, of
American material, and then on her way to secure the North Pole as an
American trophy.
At Oyster Bay the ship was inspected and given God-speed by President
Roosevelt, then steamed out through Long Island Sound, to Sydney,
Cape Breton, for her cargo of coal, then through the Gulf of St.
Lawrence, up the Labrador coast, through Davis Strait, across Melville
Bay, and between the arctic Pillars of Hercules, Cape Alexander and
Cape Isabella, to the battle-ground and the fight for which she was
built--the conquest of the contracted channels filled with massive,
moving ice which form the American gateway to the polar ocean.
The design of the _Roosevelt_ was based upon twenty years of actual
experience afloat and ashore in the very region where she was to be
used. I had reversed all previous practice in regard to polar ships,
and had made this one a powerful steamer with auxiliary sail power
instead of a sailing-ship with auxiliary steam-power. I had seen her
keel fashioned and laid, I had seen her ribs grow in place, I had
seen them clothed with planks, the steel-clad stem and stern shape
themselves, had seen every timber put into place and every bolt driven.
I felt that I had beneath my feet a magnificent tool and fighting
machine that would put me within striking distance of the pole.
Innumerable conversations during a number of years with all kinds of
intelligent, well-read people have shown me conclusively that outside
of the scientist, the geographer, and those who have made a study of
polar exploration, the average person has no idea whatever of the real
character of polar ice.
Perhaps the most general impression--I shall not call it idea, because
it is not definite enough for that--is that the ice of the polar ocean
is a smooth, even, permanent surface, and that the terrible cold of
that region was the principal reason why it was not traversed long ago.
Others think that this ice is snow-covered, and still others are far
enough advanced to think of it as rough, hummocky, or even ragged, but
yet as fixed as land itself.
Ideas as to the thickness of the ice are equally wrong, varying from
a few feet to a conception of the entire polar ocean as solid. Most
people take it for granted that the ice has been formed by the
freezing of the ocean water.
The character of ice varies in different portions of the polar regions.
North of Spitzbergen and Franz-Josef-Land and the long stretches of the
Siberian coasts there may be even in midwinter miles of ice of a few
inches or a foot or two in thickness. This, however, the navigator of a
ship rarely sees, as it has either been broken up by the wind or melted
by the sun before the season of navigation begins.
In Melville Bay and the channels of the North American archipelago,
like Lancaster Sound and Jones Sound and their western extensions,
ice forms early in the autumn and continues to increase in thickness
through the winter until it reaches a thickness of six or eight feet
or, in the fresher waters near the coast of North America, nine feet in
thickness.
Some of this ice, with the advent of summer, slowly melts in place and
disappears. Most of it, however, gradually decreases in thickness as
spring progresses, becomes perforated with holes where the warmer and
fresher water from the melting snow on its surface bores through, and
then moves off in great fields sometimes miles across.
Ice of this kind, encountered in July or August, presents about the
simplest form of ice-work. Two or three well-directed blows at full
speed by a ship like the _Roosevelt_ will often start a crack across a
field a mile or more wide through which the ship can slowly crowd her
way. Or continuous ramming will result in progress, from half to a full
ship’s length being gained at a blow.
Such ice presents no menace at any time to a ship like the _Roosevelt_,
as it cannot crush her, and is simply irritating because of the slow
progress it causes and the persistent way in which it drags along the
ship’s side. In ice like this the monotony is often relieved by the cry
of “Nannook!” (bear), from the masthead, and the resulting scurry over
the ice in pursuit of the animal.
North of Greenland and Grant Land, from their northern shores to
the pole, the character of the ice of the polar ocean is entirely
different. In my final journey to the pole less than one-tenth of the
ice traversed was ice formed by the freezing of the ocean surface, and
more than nine-tenths was fresh-water ice, great fields, some of them
of astonishing thickness, broken off from the low, undulating glaciers
of northern Grant Land and Greenland, and the “glacial fringe” which
skirts all those northern coasts.
The thickness of ice varied from half an inch to an inch on cracks
and narrow lanes a few yards wide that had just frozen over, to floes
drawing one hundred and twenty feet of water, and with hummocks thirty
feet above water-level.
During the winter this mass of ice is for the most part quiet, except
that at the spring-tides of every month cracks and narrow lanes form,
and then freeze rapidly again. Violent wind-storms will cause some
disturbance in the ice, the pressure against the hummocks and ragged
pinnacles of the large fields causing them to crush any thin ice before
them and throw it up in ridges, thus leaving lanes or pools of open
water behind, and causing a slow grinding, twisting motion of the
pack, which, however, stops, and the open water freezes over, with the
cessation of the wind.
In June, July, August, September, October, and November the mass of
ice becomes separated into its various parts, and while no water may
be visible, the fields and cakes of ice are simply in contact, not
frozen together. Then the spring-tides cause much greater motion, and a
violent storm will set the whole mass driving before it, with the big
floes wheeling and smashing everything in their course until the storm
ceases or the movement is stopped by contact with land. Wide lanes and
large areas of open water form, and do not freeze over, and the whole
ocean is similar to a river in which the ice breaking up in the spring
is moving.
This is the time when the ice pours into all the southward-leading
channels; that is, between Franz-Josef-Land and Spitzbergen, between
Spitzbergen and Iceland, between Iceland and Greenland, and down the
American gateway between Greenland and Grant Land.
In none of these places is ice navigation a more serious proposition
than in the last. With the exception of brief and infrequent periods
when the combination of a fresh southwesterly wind and ebb-tide pushes
a fan of open water or loosely drifting ice-cakes out from the northern
entrance to this channel between Cape Sheridan and Cape Brevoort, the
ice is constantly moving rapidly southward through this outlet. When
strong northerly winds combine with spring-flood tides, it rushes
through with a violence that is startling.
Entering the widely flaring funnel between Cape Joseph Henry and Cape
Stanton, then the narrower one between Cape Sheridan and Repulse
Harbor, the ice is compressed between the iron cliffs of Cape Beechey
and Polaris Promontory (less than eleven miles), while the swift
current of this deep gorge does not permit it to stop, and despite a
slight overflow into Newman Bay, is forced sometimes a hundred feet
up the cliffs by the resistless momentum and pressure from behind.
In mid-channel the pressure forces the ice to rafter, or ride, one
field over the other, or the edges of the floes crumble as they come
together, and pile up the huge ice-blocks in long ridges fifty or
seventy-five feet high. Many of the ice-cakes are forced far under
water. One who has seen a big drive of logs which filled the banks of
a rapid river pile up and plunge under and ride over when some narrow
rock gorge is reached can get a crude idea.
Once through this gorge, Lady Franklin Bay and Peterman Fiord give the
ice a chance to expand, and a ship may find here in Hall Basin some
open water. Then the walls narrow again between Cape Defosse and Cape
Bryant, and farther south the passage is obstructed by Franklin Island
and Cape Constitution, till the main channel is less than ten miles
wide, before opening out into the wide expanse of Kane Basin, only to
be constricted again between Cape Sabine and Cairn Point to a width of
twenty-two miles.
When working north in these channels, the only sure way much of the
time is to hug the shore, taking advantage of every sheltering point
and shallow bit of water, crowding on all steam and forcing ahead a few
miles on the ebb-tide, then making fast with all the lines and holding
on desperately during the flood-tide, with the ice spinning past only
a few feet from the ship’s side. Occasionally courage and judgment
give a fifty or hundred mile run in mid-channel, but at its end a firm
shore-hold is necessary to prevent being set back by the ever southward
rush of the ice, and losing all the hard-earned miles.
A kind of ice navigation that may be encountered by polar ships
returning from a voyage late in the season is the tough, leathery,
newly forming young ice. A fortunate experience and apprenticeship in
the whaler _Eagle_, in a very late and unusual voyage in 1886, gave me
some knowledge of this, which proved invaluable in later years, and on
the expedition of 1905–06 kept me from being held in the arctic a year
longer with the crippled _Roosevelt_. For nearly twenty-four hours on
the _Eagle_ voyage, her crew, rushing back and forth across her deck
timed by Captain Jackman or me, rolled her from side to side, while her
engines, going at full speed, slowly drove her out of the clutch of the
young ice in Cumberland Sound. A day later, and we probably would not
have escaped.
In 1906, when at last, late in September, the battered _Roosevelt_
forced her way out of the heavy ice some miles north of Cairn Point,
young ice several inches thick extended all the way to Littleton
Island. This ice was just a little too thick for the _Roosevelt_ to
steam through, but by rolling her, as we had rolled the _Eagle_ years
before, she moved slowly through it. A little later an easterly breeze
sprang up, and, with all sails set, these heeled the _Roosevelt_ to
just the right angle to have her lee bow turn the ice under her in a
steady stream, and she walked along to open water without a hitch.
At this season of the year a returning ship should never stop in a deep
bay, should, if possible, not got caught over night in loose ice,
and should always have full steam up.
[Illustration: DRYING SAILS ON THE “ROOSEVELT” AT CAPE SHERIDAN]
[Illustration: SHEAR-POLES FOR HANDLING THE “ROOSEVELT’S” INJURED
RUDDER]
The key to all polar work is ice navigation. It has made possible the
attainment of the north and south poles and the solution of many other
mysteries of the surrounding regions which have baffled scientists for
hundreds of years. It is ice navigation which puts an expedition where
it can do its work, puts it within striking distance of its objective,
and without this key the knowledge which the world now has of polar
conditions and geography would be comparatively little.
The history of ice navigation dates back to the latter part of the
fifteenth century, when for the first time the arctic circle was
penetrated by Sebastian Cabot. What ice navigation was in the earliest
days it is almost impossible to imagine, though some of the old
chronicles give here and there a glimpse of it, and the narrative of
Barents’s voyage helps us to form an idea. It is no wonder that in the
little craft of those days the terrors of the ice to first adventurers
loomed as terrible as the horrors of our childhood ghost-stories.
With the growth of the whale fisheries in Baffin and Hudson Bays, the
navigation of the ice by the Scottish and American sailors in the first
whalers, square-rigged sailing-ships, became a science, and the way
in which those ships were worked through tortuous leads under sail
was almost unhuman, if some of the stories are believed. With a strong
breeze, these ships could even at times do a bit of ramming, backing
their sails to give them sternway, and then squaring them forward to
go ahead. But when there was no wind, then they were often laboriously
“tracked” by their crews walking along the ice; that is, towed along
like canal-boats with a tow-rope. At other times a small anchor would
be carried out ahead as far as the longest hawser on board, hooked in a
hole cut in the ice, and the ship slowly warped up to it by working the
windlass.
When the ice was in small pieces, the crew would get out with long
poles and push piece after piece behind the vessel, enabling her to
move slowly ahead. Often, however, hours and even days of laborious
work would be set at naught by a shift of the wind or a movement of the
ice setting the ship back for miles.
This use of poles to push the ice aside was the custom even up to very
recent times. I recall how the _Windward_, in August, 1898, coming out
of Etah Harbor, was obliged to force her way through a stream of ice
two or three miles in width. The engine power of the _Windward_ was
pronouncedly weak, and we were obliged to resort to this method to get
the ice out of the way, so that she might strike feeble blows at the
firmer cakes.
I also remember distinctly the feelings with which I watched the
_Hope_, a more powerful ship, less than a mile north of us, moving
steadily along through ice of the same character, finally emerging into
the open water on the outside of the stream, and disappearing from
sight to the south before the _Windward_ was completely through.
The introduction of steam revolutionized polar navigation as it did all
other kinds, though the first attempt to utilize it in the _Victory_
was a rank failure. To whalers fitted with engines as well as sails,
voyages, which before were a gamble, now became a regular certainty,
and fishing-grounds were sought and utilized that before were
absolutely impossible.
Without steam the conquest of the south polar regions would have been
impossible despite Weddell’s surprising voyage in the early thirties.
Without steam the Northwest Passage and the Northeast Passage might
still be unnegotiated, and without steam the north pole would still be
undiscovered.
As late as the fifties and sixties the ships of Kane and Hayes were
propelled by sails alone. Hall in the seventies was the first American
to have a steam vessel.
With the construction of the powerful _Roosevelt_, built not only for
avoiding ice pressure, but for forcing her way through it and, when
necessary, smashing it with powerful blows, ice navigation became a
gladiatorial contest, a royal sport, with the _Roosevelt’s_ steel-clad
bow as cæstus and her fifteen hundred tons of displacement to drive it
home.
There is probably no place where ice navigation is so hazardous as in
the Smith Sound, or American, route to the pole, where the heaviest
of ice, swift currents, narrow channels, and iron shores make the
pressures sudden, erratic, almost continuous, and of great intensity.
The negotiation of the three hundred and fifty miles of virtually
solid ice of all conceivable shapes and sizes that lie between Etah
and Cape Sheridan presents problems and difficulties, which will test
the experience and nerve of the ablest navigator, and the powers
of the strongest vessel that man can build. The value of detailed
experience in such strenuous work cannot be too strongly accentuated.
In my earlier expeditions I have traveled the shores of these channels
anywhere from three to eight times, and know every foot of the coast
from Payer Harbor in Ellesmere Land to Cape Joseph Henry on the Grant
Land shore, and the ice conditions to be encountered. It was my
minute familiarity with the tides of these regions, the small bays
or indentations which would afford shelter to a ship, as well as the
places which grounding icebergs would make impracticable and dangerous,
together with the ice experience and determination of Captain Bartlett,
that made it possible four times for the _Roosevelt_ successfully
to navigate these channels, a feat which was long regarded as utterly
impossible.
[Illustration:
Scotch “Aurora” Italian “Stella Polare”
Norwegian “Fram” German “Gauss”
American “Roosevelt” British “Discovery”
COMPARATIVE PICTURES OF VARIOUS EXPLORING SHIPS]
The earliest voyages into polar waters were made almost solely in the
interests of commerce--to discover, if possible, a short route to China
and the East Indies. Keen and costly was the rivalry among the various
European nations, and many daring and hardy navigators were sent out by
Great Britain, Holland, Russia, Germany, Norway, Sweden, and France.
In 1588, John Davis, following the coast of Greenland from Cape
Farewell to Sanderson Hope, a distance of eight hundred miles, gained
for Great Britain the record of farthest north, 72° 12´.
Hudson in 1607 broke this record by reaching 80° 23´ N. Lat., and
on his return reported the discovery of large numbers of whales and
walruses. As a result the arctic circle became the Mecca for the next
two centuries for hundreds of whaling-ships and thousands of men from
Northern countries.
In 1773, almost one hundred and seventy-five years later, Hudson’s
record was surpassed by the small margin of twenty-five miles by
Phipps, and this new record was not bettered until 1806, when Scoresby,
an enterprising British whaler, ventured to deviate from the beaten
track of the whalers and reached 81° 30´ N. Lat.
Several attempts were made by Parry to find the Northwest Passage, and
although he was unsuccessful in this, the experience gained in ice-work
was most valuable and marked a new era in polar exploration. He was the
first to suggest the idea of a journey afoot from a land base to the
North Pole.
After Parry came Ross, and later Franklin; but it was not until 1850–55
that the Northwest Passage was accomplished by McClure on foot. McClure
traversed the ice between his ship, the _Investigator_, which had
entered the polar ocean via Bering Strait, and was crushed by the ice
in Barrow Strait, and Collinson’s ship, the _Enterprise_, in Melville
Sound, and returned to England via Lancaster Sound and Davis Strait.
The actual navigation of the Northwest Passage was effected by Roald
Amundsen, who in 1903–06 sailed from the Atlantic to the Pacific in the
_Gjoa_.
Subsequently arctic navigators turned their attention to the attainment
of the North Pole, and in 1853–55 for the first time in America took
a part in ice navigation. Kane discovered and explored the shores of
Kane Basin, and outlined a route to the pole, which is now known as the
American route.
Hayes, who had accompanied Kane, undertook a later expedition, but did
not materially extend Kane’s work.
In 1871, Hall, another American, forced his ship, the _Polaris_, to
a new northing of 82° 11´. Four years later Nares in the _Alert_
attained 83° 20´ N. Lat. These two ships were the only ones up to
this time which had successfully negotiated the channels forming the
American gateway to the pole.
All previous records for ice navigation in the arctic regions of the
Western Hemisphere were broken by the _Roosevelt_, which reached Cape
Sheridan in 1905, and penetrated two miles beyond it in 1908. One ship
only has been nearer the pole, the _Fram_, but this higher latitude was
attained not under stress of her own power, but by drifting in the grip
of the ice.
A glance at the history of north polar exploration will show that it is
studded with crushed and foundering ships.
Barents, in 1594–95, lost his ship and his life, his crew barely
escaping. Following him came Bering, whose vessels were wrecked,
causing the loss of his life, and much suffering on the part of
his men before they reached safety on the coast of Kamchatka. The
_Dorothea_ of Franklin’s expedition in 1818 was badly crushed in the
ice; in the expedition of Parry and Lyon in 1823–24 Lyon’s vessel
was nearly wrecked on two occasions, and Parry’s vessel, the _Fury_,
was actually lost; Captain Ross who started out in the _Victory_ in
1829, was obliged to abandon her. Franklin’s two ships, the _Erebus_
and _Terror_, were lost. The _Assistance_, _Pioneer_, _Intrepid_,
_Resolute_, _Investigator_, were all lost in the course of the
search for the Franklin expedition. The Bremen exploring vessel _Hansa_
was wrecked (1860–70), and the crew forced to take to the drift ice
and later to their boats. Hall’s ship, the _Polaris_, in 1872 was
caught in and drifted with the ice, nearly destroyed in a violent
gale off Northumberland Island, and later grounded. In 1874, Payer
and Weyprecht, leaders of the Austrian expedition which discovered
Franz-Josef-Land, were obliged to abandon their ship, and with their
crew, in four small boats, struggled with the ice-pack for three months
before they reached the open sea on their way to safety. In 1879 the
_Jeannette_, under the command of DeLong, was caught in the ice, and
two years later was crushed and sunk, a number of the party, including
DeLong himself, losing their lives.
Some of these disasters have been the result of inexperience, others
have been due to the disregard of the first principles of ice
navigation, and still others are directly attributable to the utter
unfitness of the ship for ice-work. Striking examples of the latter
were the _Jeannette_ and _Polaris_. These ships, because of their
build, should never have gone into the ice. Wall-sided as they were,
once caught between opposing fields of ice there was no escape for
them, as their shape made it utterly impossible for them to rise and
escape the deadly pressure.
[Illustration: ICE NAVIGATION BEFORE THE ADVENT OF POWERFUL STEAMERS]
[Illustration: THE “ROOSEVELT” BESET IN WRANGEL BAY]
The difficulties of ice navigation increase with higher latitude.
Any vessel navigating in polar waters may at any time be crushed so
suddenly that nothing below can be saved. At Etah I have always made
preparations for such an emergency, and had all the pemmican, tea,
coffee, biscuits, sugar, oil, ammunition,--in fact, all the essentials
necessary to sustain life and health,--placed on deck close to the
rail, where it could easily be thrown off to the ice. In addition to
this, the whale-boats, fully equipped for a week or ten-days’ voyage,
were ready at a moment’s notice to be lowered. Each boat, beside the
required complement of oars, oar-locks, boat-hooks, a liquid compass,
and a bailer, contained pemmican, conveniently packed in six-pound
tins; biscuits, fifty pounds; coffee, ten pounds; compressed tea, five
pounds; sugar, ten pounds; condensed milk, ten cans; salt; oil, five
gallons; a small oil-stove; one rifle and one hundred cartridges;
one shotgun and fifty shells; one box of matches in a tightly-corked
bottle; one hatchet; knives; a can-opener; needles, and thread; and
medical supplies consisting of quinine, astringent, bandages, cotton,
gauze, boracic acid, dusting powder, needles, catgut, and liniment. And
every member of the party, including the Eskimos, had a small bundle of
extra clothing packed, and stood ready to leave the ship immediately
after throwing off the supplies and lowering the boats.
The heavy pack-ice which surges down Smith Sound past Littleton Island
usually makes it almost impossible to follow the coast of Greenland
northward, and on leaving Etah it is necessary to cross to Cape Sabine,
on the Ellesmere Land side.
As a rule, the trip from Etah to Cape Sabine presents no particular
difficulty to a ship like the _Roosevelt_, and it may at times be made
in continuous open water.
From Cape Sabine the most practical course lies along the west shore,
where at ebb-tide a navigable lane of water is often to be found
between the shore ice and the moving pack. In 1905, after leaving
Cape Sabine and working northward along the west shore past Bache
Peninsula and Hayes Point, we were forced to seek shelter in Maury Bay
to avoid the heavy ice advancing swiftly before a stiff northerly wind.
By keeping a close watch on the ice and availing ourselves of every
opportunity to advance, we followed the shore-line up past Scoresby Bay
and Richardson Bay. Two attempts to reach Cape Joseph Goode failed,
each time the _Roosevelt_ being driven back to Cape Wilkes by the
ice-pack. Rawlings Bay was packed with ice, and conditions to the
northward, on the Grinnell Land side, altogether so unfavorable, that
I determined to cross Kennedy Channel and proceed northward on the
Greenland side, previous experience in this region having led me to
believe that in most seasons Kennedy and Robeson channels could be more
easily traversed on the Greenland side than on the Grinnell Land side.
After a long, hard struggle we reached the loose ice off Cape Calhoun,
and headed north from Crozier and Franklin islands. Finding the channel
which lies between Franklin Island and Cape Constitution impracticable,
we followed the main channel close to Franklin Island.
As far as Joe Island it was fairly easy sailing as polar navigation
goes. Making the _Roosevelt_ fast to the ice-foot here, a trip to the
summit of the island showed the Greenland side of Hall Basin as far as
Cape Lupton, and possibly up to Cape Sumner, free from ice, while the
Grinnell Land coast was filled with heavy ice, making navigation out
of the question. Just beyond Cape Lupton, while breaking a way through
a small gap in the ice, a quick change in the current, which runs very
swiftly in this deep and narrow channel, forced the ice-floes together
about the _Roosevelt_, smashing her up against and along the ice-foot.
In less time than it takes to describe, it twisted the back of her
rudder, snapped her tiller-rods, almost put her steering-gear out of
commission permanently, and necessitated a stop of several days at
Newman Bay to make repairs.
We had hoped that a lead across Robeson Channel to the neighborhood
of Cape Union would make the return to the west side of the channel
comparatively easy, but in this we were disappointed.
In 1908 the route of the _Roosevelt_ from Cape Etah to Sabine and up
the west coast of Kane Basin, past Victoria Head, was virtually the
same as in 1905. This year, however, we found Kennedy Channel almost
free from ice, and with no fog to delay, the _Roosevelt_ steamed her
way up the center of it, and broke all previous records by navigating
the channel’s one hundred miles of length in one day.
Before reaching Robeson Channel we encountered ice and fog, and were
once driven over to the east coast at Thank God Harbor in an attempt
to find an opening in the pack. With this exception the Grinnell Land
and Grant Land coasts of the channels were found practicable from Cape
Sabine to Cape Sheridan.
On the return voyage from Cape Sheridan to Etah in 1908 I determined to
try out a new route in these narrow and ice-filled channels. Instead
of hugging the shore, the _Roosevelt_, on reaching Cape Union, was
deliberately driven out into the pack-ice in order to work her way down
the center of Robeson and Kennedy Channels. For a ship not specially
built for ice-work such a course would be almost certain to result in
disaster, but for one of the _Roosevelt_ type, and in the hands of
experienced ice-navigators, I consider this by far the preferable
return route. It is also the quickest route, the trip from Cape
Sheridan to Cape Sabine taking only twenty-three days, or twenty-three
days less time than by the old route in 1906.
The navigation of polar waters demands incessant watchfulness and
instant readiness even under apparently the most favorable conditions.
During the passage of Kennedy and Robeson Channels Bartlett was nearly
always in the crow’s-nest, and while I had almost unbounded faith
in his judgment, I spent much of the time in the rigging below the
crow’s-nest, watching the ice ahead, and in the worst places often
relieving Bartlett of too great a load of responsibility by backing
up his judgment with my own views. The periods of night at such times
might as well not have been, for it is possible to get only snatches
of sleep in the short times when nothing else remains to be done,
and Bartlett and I have spent days and even weeks at a time in these
regions without thinking of taking our clothes off to sleep.
The chief engineer, like his assistants, stood his eight- or
twelve-hour watch, and was almost always to be found in the engine-room
when the _Roosevelt_ was passing through dangerous places; for any slip
in the machinery at a critical time would have resulted in the loss of
the ship.
The _Roosevelt_ has undoubtedly deliberately struck heavier blows while
fighting ice than any other ship would dare to attempt. Many times
she has reared and risen on a steel blue mass of old floe-ice till I
was reminded of a hunter rising to a stone wall. Repeated blows of her
steel stem in the same spot have at times split pieces of floes, or the
projecting tongue of a big floe which barred our passage, of almost
incredible thickness just as a small hand ice-pick, if properly used,
will split a large cake of ice.
In loose ice or in one season’s ice or in any kind of ice in the open
sea a ship like the _Roosevelt_ may be regarded as immune.
Really serious conditions are those met in threading a way through a
succession of big floes of heavy ice in contracted channels where the
tides run rapidly, and where the impingement of one floe against an
unyielding headland may cause a jam extending for miles, the floes
coming together like the cars of a long freight train in a head-on
collision.
Under these conditions the movements of the floes are watched with hawk
eyes, and if it is seen that the ship is going to be caught between two
of the fields, she is made fast in a concavity in the edge of one floe
or the other, with a point of ice ahead and astern to take the brunt of
the pressure. Then, if there is time and the floes are very heavy, the
crew go out onto the ice with pick-axes and bevel down the edge of the
floe against the ship’s side to assist her in rising.
This beveling of the edge of the ice next to the ship’s side was
always done when the _Roosevelt_ was made fast against the face of the
ice-foot in an exposed position. Sometimes charges of dynamite in line
a few yards away from the ship will shatter the edge of the floe and
form a cushion of smaller pieces for the ship to be forced against.
With skill and good judgment it is often possible to drive the ship
into a sheltered pool where three floes coming together form a
deadlock, expending their force against each other while the ship lies
in a little ice-locked pool of water as in a natural harbor. Sometimes
this harbor opens with change of the tide. Often it grows smaller and
smaller till it disappears; but time is thus given to make the ship
secure, and sometimes, by placing dynamite to smash off a corner and
having full steam on to jump the ship through before the floes close
again, escape is effected.
The _Roosevelt’s_ most serious times were at the northern entrance to
Kennedy Channel, where at the neck of the funnel there is a grinding
hell of great ice-fields crowding one another on the rush of the
spring-tides in their eagerness to get south. A memorable instance was
her thirty-five-hour battle across the channel from Cape Sumner to
Wrangel Bay August, 1905, a distance of _fifteen_ miles.
Two crucial situations are when, with the unbroken face of a big floe
on one side, the point or corner of another on the other side catches
the ship. In this situation, if the ship does not rise, she is lost.
The other is when a big field, with the weight and pressure of miles of
ice behind it, comes slowly rotating along the shore with resistless
force. Every effort should be made to get outside of such a floe. If
this is impossible, then the ship should be driven into a niche of the
ice-foot, if possible in the lee of some stream delta, made fast with
every line, and the edge of the ice-foot abreast of the ship beveled
down as low as possible to facilitate the ship’s rising on it.
The _Roosevelt_ had two or three very close calls of this kind on her
upward voyages, the ice pressing up over the ice-foot and piling up
on the cliffs a few hundred yards ahead or astern of her. I recall
one instance where with the glasses I saw from the crow’s-nest huge
ice-blocks climb fifty feet up the cliffs at a point a mile or so ahead
of us at the very place where some hours earlier I had thought of
making the _Roosevelt_ fast to await the turn of the tide. Fortunately
I had decided to take no chances, and had retreated a mile or so to a
safer position.
[Illustration: THE “ROOSEVELT” STEAMING THROUGH THE ICE-PACK]
[Illustration: FLOE IN LADY FRANKLIN BAY THAT LIFTED THE “ROOSEVELT”
NEARLY CLEAR OF WATER]
There is one phenomenon in this region which is certain to cause the
leader of an expedition temporary palpitation of the heart the first
time it occurs. When the ice-floes come together, and the edges crush
and pile up in great ridges of ice-blocks, other pieces of ice are
forced down, and in the deeper portions of Kennedy Channel large
granite-like blocks are held down undoubtedly one hundred or more feet
below the water. When the ice pressure relaxes, these start for the
surface, gathering momentum, as they rise, and leap half their bigness
above water, then settle back.
Two or three times blocks of this kind on their way up struck the
bottom of the _Roosevelt_ a resounding thump just as she was released
from the strain of ice pressure and had settled back into the water.
The shock is different from the tense vibrations of ice pressure or the
crash of butting ice at full speed, or the grinding crunch of running
on a rock. It is an upward shock as from the blow of a great hammer,
that jars every timber in the ship. Its first occurrence usually forces
the involuntary exclamation, “My God! what has happened now?” After the
first time, one is always ready for it, and so is not disturbed.
No attempt should ever be made to anchor in this kind of navigation
unless one wishes to present the ice deities with his anchor and much
or all of his cable.
Just as sure as the anchor is put down a big floe will come along and
squat on it; then there is nothing to do but unshackle your cable and
let it go. It cost me two anchors and two cables one summer’s trip
to learn this lesson thoroughly. On another voyage in a usually safe
position a big floe compelled me to drop an anchor and all of its
cable, though I recovered it the next season.
Whenever the ship is to be made fast, it should be done with lines and
hawsers made fast to ice pinnacles, holes in the ice, or ice anchors.
It is well also to bring the end of line or hawser on board, so that it
can be cast loose without sending a man off the ship. Movements of ship
and ice are sometimes too rapid to risk a man.
To a ship built as sturdily as the _Roosevelt_, with no greater speed
and with a lively helm, icebergs are no bugbear. During the upward
voyage it is continuous daylight, so that even in thick weather there
should be no difficulty, with ordinary care, in detecting the proximity
of bergs along the Labrador coast and in Greenland, waters in time to
avoid them. North of Kane Basin real icebergs are rarely seen, and
these only small ones. In the polar ocean there is nothing that can be
dignified by the name. On the return voyage, in the long, dark nights
and short, dull days of late autumn, in Melville Bay, Davis Straits,
and along the Labrador coast, they compel a careful lookout. With all
lights shut off, a reliable man way forward, and two officers on the
bridge, we never had serious trouble even in the darkest nights in
detecting the “loom” of a berg in time to shift the wheel and avoid it.
“Growlers”--that is, translucent fragments of bergs as hard as granite,
of the same color as the water, and just barely floating--are the kind
of ice that succeeds most completely in rendering itself invisible. My
ships have bumped these more than once in brilliantly clear weather,
with no other ice in sight and the lookout gone below.
I recall coming home across Melville Bay in one of my earlier auxiliary
ships. It was a brilliant moonlit September night, not a piece of ice
in sight anywhere, a fresh following breeze, and the ship making about
ten knots. It was the mate’s watch, and the other officers and members
of the expedition were below in the cabin when suddenly there was a
terrific bump. The ship seemed to stop completely for an instant; then,
after a vicious lurch or two, went on her way. Every one in the cabin
except the captain went in a mess against the bottom of the forward
bulkhead. The captain, sitting on the after locker, was nearly cut in
two against the cabin table, and went about for a day or two like a
man who had been kicked below the belt by an army mule. We had made a
bull’s-eye shot at what appeared to be the only growler in the bay. Of
course these growlers are not a source of danger to a ship like the
_Roosevelt_, though they would be to a weaker ship.
I have thought, if I should go north again, that I would try a
search-light for the autumn return voyage. In thick fog, of course,
such a light would be of little or no use.
A trick that is sometimes of considerable value in squeezing through
the ice is to use the ship as a big pinch bar to separate two cakes of
ice. With the stem forced into the crack between the cakes, the engines
are driven ahead full speed and the wheel thrown hard over alternately
to port and starboard. In this way the bows are gradually forced
farther and farther in until the ice has been pried apart, and the ship
squeezes through.
Streams of ice in the open sea are a pronounced comfort in heavy
weather. If the ship is on the lee side, she can steam along in smooth
water, with the wind blowing a howling gale, the ice acting as a
breakwater. If she is on the weather side, a ship like the _Roosevelt_
can force her way into the pack and lie in comfort. This is often a
distinct help with a deeply loaded ship on the upward voyage.
In the one season’s ice of Melville Bay a ship may often force her way
through mile after mile by continuous repeated blows like a drill or
well-borer, smashing the ice into small pieces for some feet or yards
at every blow. But once past Cape Sabine there is no more of this. Then
it needs skill as well as power, and progress is a matter of dodging,
turning, squeezing, twisting, rushing along a narrow lane of water and
striking sledge-hammer blows at points or masses of blue granite; then,
when further progress is absolutely impossible, banking fires to save
coal and waiting for the next round.
[Illustration: THE “ROOSEVELT” LASHED TO THE ICE FOOT]
[Illustration: IN THE CROW’S NEST]
It needs incessant watching of every move of an enemy with a myriad
tricks and resources, and then instant decision,--“pep,” as my young
friend Borup would have put it,--and a little courage.
In all my experiences I recall nothing more exciting than the thrill,
the crash, the shock of hurling the _Roosevelt_, a fifteen-hundred-ton
battering-ram, at the ice to smash a way through; or the tension of the
moments when, caught in the resistless grip of two great ice-fields, I
have stood on the bridge and seen the deck amidships bulge upward and
the rigging slacken with the compression of the sides; or have listened
to the crackling fusillade of reports, like an infantry engagement,
from the hold, and felt the quivering of the whole ship like a mighty
bowstring, till she leaped upward, free of the death-jaws, and the ice
in snarling turmoil met beneath her keel and expended its fury upon
itself.
Again I can see Bartlett up in the crow’s-nest, at the head of the
swaying mast, jumping up and down like a mad man, swearing, shouting to
the ship, exhorting it like a coach with his man in the ring. Ah, the
vibrating bigness of it! How fine it would seem to be at it again!