Winter Climate—Preservative Effect of Cold—Falling
Temperature—Unprecedented Cold—Extreme Low Temperature
not Unendurable—A Visitor from the Shore—Cold v.
Vitality—Sudden Changes—A Breeze from the South—Warm Wind
Aloft—Danger from East Wind—Dawn—Brilliant Effect of Low
Sunlight—Lemming—Sunrise—Preparations for Spring—Snow-shoes—Our
Prospects—Motion of the Floes—A Tide Wave.
As the absence of the sun lengthened, so the cold increased.
Arctic Expeditions have almost invariably registered their lowest
temperatures in February and March, the months in which the earth
is coldest even in England. The darkness and the low temperature of
winter do not occur together: the cold, indeed, belongs rather to
spring than to winter. In our case, it was not till after darkness had
left us and dawn was well advanced that the state of our thermometer
became a subject of general interest.
We did not expect an unusually cold winter. Maps marked the “pole
of cold” far south of our position, and it seemed likely that the
great polar sea, though much the reverse of open, would make our
winter warm. The thermometer stands were conspicuous objects as we
came out from the ship to the floes. The first was supported on a
barrel and snow pedestal only seventeen feet from the ship, so as to
be convenient for hourly or half-hourly registration. Then came the
self-registering thermometer, elevated on a tripod about thirty yards
from the ship. Others were placed on the floe near shore, and on a
hillock close to the beach.
It may be said to be always freezing in the far north. Even in a warm
summer day, when the air is perhaps 40° Fahrenheit, flakes of ice
rise up from the cold sides of the floebergs, and in the shade float
in a thin pellicle on the water in the ice-cracks. Meat exposed to
the air keeps all the year round, and for many months our rigging was
decorated with sides of musk ox and carcases of mutton. In connection
with the keeping of meat, it is worth while to mention that a piece
of musk ox meat, exposed for six months in the rigging, and sealed
up in the cold air, remained, very unexpectedly, unchanged when the
temperature rose, and was exhibited perfectly fresh three months after
the Expedition returned to England.
The temperature of the air sank permanently below freezing in the
middle of August before we had reached winter quarters, and continued
below for nine months. Fifty-four degrees of frost were registered
during the October sledging. In November, mercury froze and the spirit
thermometers fell to forty-five below zero (_i.e._, 77° of frost). The
lowest in December was one degree colder. Then hopes of a warm winter
were given up, and we watched the spirit shrink degree after degree
past the coldest recorded by our predecessors. January’s lowest was
58°.7; February brought 66°.3 below zero; but on the third of March,
three days after sunrise, the unparalleled temperature of 73.7 degrees
below zero was indicated by our Kew-corrected thermometers, and for
many hours the temperature remained more than one hundred degrees
below freezing.
[Illustration: EXAMINING THERMOMETER: -73.4°.]
As a general rule, people look upon extreme cold as the most
characteristic and most insupportable part of Arctic service, but
this is altogether a mistake. It is not nearly as trying as the long
darkness, and both are insignificant compared to the social friction
of the confined life—a friction which would be unbearable if the men
and officers had not been accustomed to habits of discipline, and
inured to the confinement and restraints of “man-of-war” life. The
hardships of mere low temperature are by no means unendurable. In
comfortable winter quarters, and with plenty of dry warm clothing, we
found the extremest cold rather curious and interesting than painful
or dangerous. An icy tub on an English winter morning feels colder
to the skin than the calm Arctic air. Cold alone never interrupted
daily exercise. It was possible to walk for two or three hours over
our snow-clad hills, in a temperature of one hundred degrees below
freezing, without getting a single frost-bite, or perceptibly lowering
the temperature of the body. It is possible even to perspire if one
works hard enough. The fact is, only the face and lungs are really
exposed, and neither appear to suffer from it. Our experience led
us to think that men, thoroughly prepared, might safely encounter
far lower temperatures. Many a time, as we sat round the stove on
the main-deck discussing the events of the day and the state of the
weather, the relative merits of Arctic cold and tropic heat were
warmly canvassed. Several of both our officers and men had lately
returned from the Ashantee campaign, and they could speak with
authority. There was one thing clear—one could sometimes get warm in
the Arctic, but never get cool on the Coast.
If the intense cold was more endurable in winter quarters than some
of us had anticipated, it was altogether a different thing camping
out away from the ship on a sledge party. Then, with food and clothing
limited by the sledge-weights, with no warmer bed than a snowdrift,
and no possibility of changing ice-saturated clothes, cold, far less
than that experienced in winter quarters, becomes a real hardship, and
its miseries can hardly be exaggerated.
During the period of intense cold, we amused ourselves with many
experiments on its effects on various substances. Ordinary spirit,
such as brandy or rum, froze into crystalline paste. Even the alcohol
in our astronomer’s spirit levels acted sluggishly. Glycerine became
as hard as soap; mercury remained frozen for ten or twelve days at a
time. Everyone knows the danger of handling metal at low temperatures.
The danger depends greatly upon the state of the hand; if it is at all
moist or soft, it will adhere, and soon be dangerously frost-bitten;
but if quite dry, we could, for experiment sake, take a mitt off and
turn the brass handle of our outer door without experiencing anything
more serious than a sudden sting, which was like neither heat nor
cold. It was even possible to melt a small fragment of mercury on the
naked palm without leaving a trace of injury.
We had few opportunities of noting how the lower animals bore the
cold. Our Eskimo dogs evidently suffered much at times, but never
learnt to use a snow-kennel built to shelter them. Some of the bitches
had sumptuous apartments constructed for them on deck, in the vain
hope that comfort would make them more careful of their offspring. One
old dog, Master Bruin, who had no tail to coil round his neck when
he went to sleep, and was perhaps more susceptible to cold on that
account, discovered that the magnetic observatory was warmer than the
star-lit side of a hummock, and would willingly have taken up his
quarters there if it had been allowed. Nellie, the retriever, always
took her daily exercise, but slept between decks in the warmth. Pussy
paid one visit to the deck just to see what Arctic winter was like;
but she hopped about shaking one foot after another, and sneezed so
incessantly that she seemed in danger of choking, and had to be taken
below again.
Neither rats nor mice had come north with us. Three of our useless
carrier pigeons had reached winter quarters alive, fluttering round
the ship and perching on the frozen rigging, but none survived
long. It was in the depth of winter, when the land seemed utterly
lifeless and deserted, that the first living inhabitant of Floeberg
Beach presented himself on board our ship. Midnight was past, and
one officer alone lingered beside the main-deck stove, watching the
red light flickering on a much-weathered musk ox skull that had been
picked up on shore and was now being dried before the fire. Suddenly
he falls on his knees and stares intently at the bone, then rushes to
the naturalist’s cabin, and reappears with that gentleman lightly clad
in scarlet flannel, and bearing the first bottles and specimen boxes
that came to hand. A little black spider, revived by the warmth, had
crept out of a small hole in the skull, but retreated again before he
could be bottled. Two weary hours elapsed ere he reappeared, but the
watchers were at length rewarded, and he was triumphantly captured,
packed away, dated, and labelled in the naturalist’s store, commonly
known as “South Kensington.”
At that time we had an unreasoning impression that no live thing
could endure actual reduction to the temperatures of Arctic night.
But cold is by no means so deadly. The mosquitoes, butterflies,
and dragon-flies of brief Arctic summer are assuredly not all new
arrivals. A good example of vitality in the vegetable kingdom
was afforded by the wheat left at “Hall’s Rest” by the ill-fated
“Polaris.” In spite of the cold of five winters, it was still alive
when we found it. Sown at Discovery Bay, it germinated freely, and, as
I write, some of it carried home with the ships promises to reproduce
itself in a fair crop of bearded “Polaris wheat.” Even at the Polar
Sea, and in the midnight of winter, the air holds spores of
moulds, and many of them grew rapidly when carried into the warmth
inside the ship. It is hard to say what temperatures would kill such
primitive organisms—in fact, so far as our little experience goes, Sir
William Thomson’s “moss-grown fragment of another world” might have
carried the germ of terrestrial life safely enough through the chills
of stellar space.
The temperature of winter was by no means steady; on the contrary, its
progressive fall was interrupted by many sudden rises.
In ordinary cold weather the sky was wonderfully clear, and the
weather wonderfully calm. Many a time, as we walked at daily exercise
up and down our half-mile of shadowy snow, with nothing to look at
but the stars, the whole sky was absolutely vapourless, from the
pole star in the zenith to Orion or the three stars of Aquila just
skirting along the horizon. Sometimes a faint fleecy mist, hardly
distinguishable from one of our feeble auroras, would pass overhead;
but round piled-up masses of cloud, such as are common in southern
skies, were never seen.
A change rarely came unexpectedly. Often for days beforehand “mare’s
tail” clouds, with a hard wavy outline, would float up against the
faint moonlight in the southern sky, and spread themselves into wings
and fingers over Robeson Channel. Then, with a sudden gust from the
south, and a mist of flying snow from the land, the temperature
would rise. Mercurial thermometers would thaw, and soon register as
faithfully as spirit instruments beside them. After a while the wind
begins to come more and more from the westward. The thermometers
remain high, but the wind feels piercingly cold wherever it can find
a way inside our sealskins. While the storm lasts, it is impossible
to go outside the ship. Whirling snow hides everything. Even on
deck exercise is uncomfortable, for powdery snow floats in through
every chink in the carefully-closed tent-like awnings. Notes on the
instruments on shore have to be suspended, for no one could force
a way as far as the beach through the darkness and whirlwind of
drifting snow; and if they could, they would find the observatories
so buried that it would take several hours to dig out their doorways.
Even the thermometers within seventeen feet of the ship were not
always easily registered. Upon one occasion the officer in charge
of the meteorological work had to confess himself beaten, after two
determined attempts to reach and register them. In twenty-four hours
or more the storm lessens, and gradually dies away to a gentle breeze
from the northward; and with it the temperature declines, until it is
as cold or colder than before.
A striking change of this sort came in December. From thirty-five
degrees below zero, the thermometers rose rapidly with a gusty
southerly wind till the temperature reached the freezing-point. This
strangely warm wind cannot have travelled far in contact with the
frozen earth, for it was being rapidly cooled. The quick changes,
with every puff of wind, suggested the advisability of trying what
the temperature was in the air overhead, and it was discovered that
the higher we climbed up the rigging the warmer it got. The main-top
was three degrees warmer than the deck at the same instant, and a
thermometer secured high aloft in the cross-trees actually registered
+ 36°—a temperature which can hardly be accounted for by supposing
that the wind was warmed by passing over pools of open water in
Robeson Channel or Smith’s Sound.
At times, when the air was undergoing rapid changes of this sort,
it was striking to find that, by boring a hole into the ice with
an auger, it was possible to get down past zero, and reach the
temperature of yesterday or last week before coming to + 28°.3, the
steady temperature of the Polar Sea beneath.
Although such warm southerly breezes sometimes occurred, our winter
was on the whole marvellously calm. During its earlier months, the
wind was anxiously watched. Our safety depended entirely upon its
direction. A north-easterly wind might force the whole polar pack with
irresistible pressure upon our unprotected shore. Many parts of the
beach bore witness to the effects of such pressure in former seasons.
Vast blocks of ice, thousands of tons in weight, had been forced high
upon the shore, pushing up redans of mud, sand, and shells before
them. It was not pleasant to contemplate the enormous force which had
accomplished such work, and might any day repeat it. And our autumn
efforts to reach the “Discovery” gave us poor encouragement for a
march southward from a crushed or stranded ship.
Towards the end of January a pale violet light made its appearance
over the southern horizon. It was at first only noticeable at noon,
and the glow was so faint that stars shone brilliantly through it.
It heralded the returning sun, and every one watched it hopefully.
It and the increasing cold were the two staple subjects for every
conversation. Day by day the faint noon-light imperceptibly increased,
till, in the first week in February, a tender greenish glow succeeded
the violet, and for an hour at noon we could fairly call it twilight.
[Illustration: PLATE IX.—THE DAWN OF 1876. H.M.S. “ALERT” IN WINTER
QUARTERS.—p. 49.
Dawn in the latitude of Floeberg Beach is a
season rather than an hour, and the growing brightness skirts round
the whole horizon almost impartially. This is a sketch very early in
March, looking north at midnight. At the time it was made, the spirit
thermometers on the small stand, and on the tripod seen to the left of
the ship, registered -70° Fahrenheit. The outlines were made without
much difficulty, with a pencil pushed through two pairs of worsted
mitts. The colours were laid on in the warmth and candle-light between
decks, and verified by repeated trips into the cold. In regions where
wind could crush the ice together, or where open water existed to
leeward, Arctic ships have more than once been blown to sea with the
ice of their winter quarters; and, as a precautionary measure, our
ship was secured to shore by chain cables, raised at intervals on
casks to prevent them sinking into the ice.]
[Illustration: PLATE X.—THE “ALERT” IN WINTER QUARTERS, FROM AMONGST
THE BARRIER BERGS, MARCH, 1876.—p. 50.
Nowhere is it more true that “the low sun makes the colour” than
in the Arctic regions. The ice and snow, that are wearily white in
midsummer, glow with all sorts of opaline tints in the sunrise light
of March. The sketch is from amongst the floebergs to seaward of the
ship. The sides of the berg in the centre have been worn into columns
and alcoves by the surface floods of some former summer; but it has
since been forced higher on the beach, and into shallower water.
Snow-drifts fill up all the gorges and ravines amongst the bergs, and
are in some places so hardened by wind and infiltration of sea-water,
that tidal motion cracks and fissures them, especially round the
grounded bergs.]
If any part of Arctic life deserves the sentiment and romance that
have been lavished on it, it is returning daylight. However practical
and matter-of-fact a man may be, a long spell of Egyptian darkness
will make him glad to see daylight again, and he may well be excused
a little unnecessary emotion at the dawn of the pale young year.
With us the day and the year were all but the same. When daylight
was once established there was no more real night, though the sun
made thirty-seven more and more shallow dips below the horizon before
rising spirally through the heavens in perpetual day. Winter was our
night, and the morning and the evening were spring and autumn. As
February advanced, we began to have light enough to walk about on
shore. Up to this time we had laboured under two disadvantages that
had not oppressed our predecessors—namely, the extra noon darkness and
the softness of the snow. Both together rendered it utterly impossible
to indulge in exercise except along the well-trodden half-mile, with
empty meat tins for guide posts, or backwards and forwards to the
shore along the track of the sledges carrying stores to and from
“Markham Hall.” It was not till we were able to walk about a little
at noon that we got impatient of the darkness, and began to realise
its length and intensity. The transition from darkness to daylight was
like recovery from a long and somewhat delirious illness.
As the light increased, the sky displayed all the colours of the
rainbow, from rosy red at the horizon to cold violet overhead, and the
ice, borrowing the spectrum sky tints, assumed hues of indescribable
delicacy and beauty. A few hundred yards ahead of the ship some acres
of floe had stranded and split into bergs with narrow lanes between
them. The cliff-like walls afforded convenient sections of the ice,
where its varying saltness and its strange lines of “air dust” could
be favourably examined. Accordingly, these narrow clefts were well
explored, and in them especially the low light produced most magical
changes of opaline colour. Such effects are unsketchable. Form
there was none, but while the low light lasted the tints of the ice
vista were incredible—a brilliant transformation scene would look
commonplace and natural beside them.
Our walks were not carried very far from the ship before we discovered
that other animals had begun, like ourselves, to take advantage of the
returning daylight. Even while the darkness was at its greatest, men
carrying lanterns to and from the water-berg or the shore occasionally
noticed the little lines of curved scratches left by lemming. What the
little creatures could have been doing out on the floes we could not
understand; their tracks usually led into deep cracks and fissures
of the ice. Perhaps they found warmer quarters near the water. After
daylight one could hardly walk half-a-mile on shore without coming
across their burrows—little circular tunnels leading long distances
under the snow, either to saxifrage pastures, or to warm nests made of
grass that must have taken them a long time to collect. Sometimes we
came across them sitting near their burrows. They were about the size
of a small rat, almost tailless, and as yet in their yellowish white
winter fur. Later on, ermine tracks were met with, but they were much
less common. They were generally found pursuing lemming, but upon one
occasion it was quite plain that the ermine had followed a hare. Of
course whoever met a hare track was bound to follow it. Three hares
remained in our neighbourhood; they lived in burrows in the snow five
or six feet long; two were shot, but the third would never allow us
within rifle range.
On 29th February the sun rose, but those who climbed to Cairn Hill
to see him were disappointed. The high flat land southwards shut him
from view. On the 2nd of March, however, when we mustered as usual
by sledge crews on the floes beside the ship, bright sunlight lit up
the tops of the higher floebergs and shone on the upper parts of the
ship’s rigging. The Greenland mountains were already pink, and as the
sun approached the gap between them and Cape Rawson, half his orb was
seen for a moment by a few who climbed the rigging to look for it; the
others thought they could well wait another day after waiting so long.
The month after sunrise was a busy time for all hands, for there
was much to be done before the whole strength of the Expedition was
diverted to the sledging campaign.
Although there was broad daylight outside the ship, the work inside
had still to be done by lamp and candle-light. In one place a group
of figures might be seen surrounded by open packing-cases, carefully
weighing out sledging-rations, and dividing the daily allowances in
little bags made of fancy calico intended for theatrical purposes; in
another an officer and the captain of his sledge might be seen filling
a large gutta-percha box with the stores to be placed in depôt for his
return journey. Everywhere through the ship men were busy with needle
and thread making many small improvements in the fit of their duffle
suits or holland overalls; some were adding linen leggings to their
mocassins, others strengthening the soles with thick soft leather cut
from the top of their fishermen’s boots. The general sledging outfit
was of course rigorously adhered to, but each man made such small
changes in the fit of his clothes as his autumn experience suggested.
During the darkness the snow had hardened considerably; in many places
a sledge now travelled readily where it would have sunk out of sight
in the autumn, and as early as the 28th February an exercise party
travelling with a dog-sledge to the south reached in a few hours the
spot from which our autumn sledges had returned baffled after a ten
days’ struggle towards the “Discovery.”
But the snow was not hardened everywhere. There were many drifts
and patches along the shore that were not easily crossed except
on snow-shoes. With these, travelling over smooth snow was easy,
and a man could even pull along another seated on a small sledge,
faster than a third could wade beside them. No Arctic expedition had
hitherto used snow-shoes, though the Germans three hundred miles
south of us on the east coast of Greenland had found it necessary
to extemporise rough substitutes during the winter. Some of our men
made two excellent copies of a well-worn pair presented by Dr. Rae
to one of our officers. These were at times most useful, but much of
our travelling was over snow and ice so rugged that no one, however
expert, would have attempted snow-shoeing.
Constant preparation for the sledging soon superseded the winter
evening routine. School was suspended, and the theatrical season
closed on 24th February with a very successful burlesque written by
our chaplain. On the following Thursday the weekly lectures were
concluded by an address from the captain on the sledging work we were
about to undertake, and on the prospects that lay before us. Those
prospects were not promising, however we looked at them; they were
no more encouraging than when we first rounded Cape Rawson and saw
no land to the northwards. The very first elements of success were
absent, but it was still possible that the land might trend to the
north somewhere beyond Cape Joseph Henry. It was possible, too, that
sledges journeying northward over the floes might reach some land
where depôts could be left, and which might next year serve as a fresh
base for poleward sledges.
A few in the ship cherished a third hope, founded on the character of
our ice. It seemed not unlikely that if sledges could penetrate that
zone of the floating ice-cap which had been fractured year after year
by contact with the shores, they might reach a broad mass of almost
continental ice rounded into hills and valleys by ages of summers, but
not offering insuperable obstacles to poleward travel.
If the floes had not been in rapid motion all the autumn, and if Sir
Leopold M’Clintock’s method of pushing forward sledges on depôts
deposited in the autumn could have been applied to the polar pack, we
might start from the land with fair hopes of practical success. But,
as it was, our sledges would have to leave shore carrying _all_ their
fuel and provisions, and therefore greatly limited in point of time,
for no men can drag more than between forty and fifty days’ provisions
and fuel, together with tent, bedding, cooking-gear, and sledge. The
system of supporting sledges was still applicable. By it additional
sledges would fall back from the main party when say one-third of
their provisions were expended, retaining a third to return on, and
filling up the advancing sledges with the remainder.
We were by no means certain that the motion of the floes would not
even now prove a serious obstacle. Even as late as January they were
heard roaring and crushing in the darkness to seaward, and their
pressure forced our protecting floeberg somewhat shoreward, cracking
and buckling up the floes, and heeling the ship over four degrees.
For months, however, little sign of motion had been apparent except
at tidal periods, when it sometimes came with curious suddenness,
as if the tide wave had all at once overcome the resistance of the
ice that bound it. For example, the morning of the 12th of March was
beautifully calm and still, and few but those whose special duty it
was knew that a high tide was due that day. I was engaged picking out
some stones grooved and scratched by ice-motion from an overturned
“floeberg” not far from the ship, when suddenly a curious faint sound
came from the north-west, at first a dull, indistinct hum, but in a
moment it grew nearer and louder, like the rush of a railway train.
Then, as it swept down along the beach, the ice cracked visibly in
every direction with a sharp rattle like musketry, and a loud rush of
water under the floes came so suddenly and unexpectedly that I ran to
the top of the berg with a vague idea that the ice was breaking up.
But in a moment the tide wave had passed off to the south-west, and
all was still again.