Elisha Kent Kane

“ Murdaugh and myself reached the deck just in time to see De Haven crossing our gangway. We followed. Imagine our feelings when, midway between the two vessels, we saw Griffin with the ice separating before him, and at the same instant found a crack tracing its way between us, and the water spinning up to the surface. ‘Stick by the floe. Good-by! What news for home?’ said he. One jump across the chasm, a hearty God-bless-you shake of the hand, a long jump back, and a little river divided our party. ”

“ The increasing cold and brightening stars,—the labours, anxieties, and sickness that pressed upon us,—these almost engross the pages of my journal. Now and then I find some marvel such as Petersen’s about the fox’s dexterity as a hunter; Hans tells me of domestic life in South Greenland, or of a seal-hunt and a wrecked kayack; or perhaps M’Gary repeats his thrice-told tale of humour; but the night has closed down upon us, and we are hibernating through it.
Yet some of these are topics of interest. The intense beauty of the Arctic firmament can hardly be imagined. ”

“ This is the heaviest storm we have had since entering Lancaster Sound, exactly seven months and a day ago. The snow is « 280 » whirled in such quantities, that our thick felt housing seems as if of gauze: it not only covers our decks, but drives into our clothes like fine dust or flour. A plated thermometer was invisible fourteen feet from the eye: from the distance of ten paces off on our quarter, a white opacity covers every thing, the compass-stand, fox-traps, and all beyond: the Rescue, of course, is completely hidden. ”

“ A fresh wind makes the cold very unbearable. In walking to-day, my beard and mustache became one solid mass of ice. I inadvertently put out my tongue, and it instantly froze fast to my lip. This being nothing new, costing only a smart pull and a bleeding abrasion afterward, I put up my mittened hands to ‘blow hot’ and thaw the unruly member from its imprisonment. Instead of succeeding, my mitten was itself a mass of ice in a moment: it fastened on the upper side of my tongue, and flattened it out like a batter-cake between the two disks of a hot griddle. ”

“ August 16.—Fast still; the wind dying out, and the ice outside closing steadily. And here, for all I can see, we must hang on for the winter, unless Providence shall send a smart ice-shattering breeze to open a road for us to the northward.
“More bother with these wretched dogs! worse than a street of Constantinople emptied upon our decks; the unruly, thieving, wild-beast pack! Not a bear’s paw, nor an Esquimaux cranium, or basket of mosses, or any specimen whatever, can leave your hands for a moment, without their making a rush at it, and, after a yelping scramble, swallowing it at a gulp. ”

“ The open pools can no longer be called pools; they are great rivers, whose hummock-lined shores look dimly through the haze. Contrasted with the pure white snow, their waters are black even to inkyness; and the silent tides, undisturbed by ripple or wash, pass beneath a pasty film of constantly forming ice. The thermometer is at 10°. Away from the ship, a long way, I walked over the older ice to a spot where the open river was as wide as the Delaware. Here, after some crevice-jumping and tickly-bender crossing, I set myself behind a little rampart of hummocks, watching for seals. ”

“ A narrow lead, a mere fissure at the edge of the land-ice, ended opposite a low platform; we had traced its whole extent, and it landed us close under the shadow of the precipitous shore.
Providence Retreat, as I called this spot, abounded in life. We found the lumme, nearly as large as canvas-backs, « 217 » and, as we thought, altogether sweeter and more juicy; their eggs, well known as delicacies on the Labrador coast; the cochlearia, growing superbly on the guano-coated surface;—all of them in endless abundance: imagine such a combination of charms for scurvy-broken, hungry-stricken men. ”

“ Helpless as we were among the floating masses, we began to look upon the floe that carried us as a protecting barrier against the approaches of others less friendly; and as the month advanced, and the chances increased of our passing into the sound, our apprehensions of being frozen up in the heart of the ice-pack gave place to the opposite fear of a continuous drift. We had seen enough, and encountered enough of the angry strife among the ice-floes in the channel, to assure us of disaster if we should be forced to mingle in the sterner conflicts of the older ice-fields of the sound. ”

“ We only know that in the midst of a clamour utterly indescribable, through which the braying of a thousand trumpets could no more have been heard than the voice of a man, we were shaken, and raised, and whirled, and let down again in a swelling waste of broken hummocks, and, as the men grasped their boat-hooks in the stillness that followed, the boats eddied away in a tumultuous skreed of ice, and snow, and water. ”

“ The drifting snow either rises like smoke from the levels, or whirls away in « 260 » wreaths from the hummocks. The atmosphere has an opaline ashy look; in the midst of which, like a huge girasole, flashes the round sun. The clouds are of a sort seldom seen, except in the conceptions of adventurous artists, quite undefinable, and out of the line of nature, defying Howard’s nomenclature. They are blocked out in square, stormy masses, against a pearly, misty blue—harsh, abrupt, repulsive, quite out of keeping with the kindly lightness of things belonging to the sky. ”

“ Now, Whitey!’ ‘Good dogs!’ ‘Tu-lee-ēē-ēē! Tuh!’ They went at it like good staunch brutes, and the next minute the whole team was rolling in a lump, some sixteen feet below me, in the chasm of the ice-foot. The drift was such that at first I could not see them. The roaring of the tide, and the subdued wail of the dogs, made me fear for the worst. I had to walk through the broken ice, which rose in toppling spires over my head, for nearly fifty yards, before I found an opening to the ice-face, by which I was able to climb down to them. ”

“ It made me thoughtful to see the long shadows stretching out upon the snow toward the isthmus of the Graves.
“The wind is from the north and westward, and the ice is so driven in around us as to grate and groan against the sides of our little vessel. The masses, though small, are very thick, and by the surging of the sea have been rubbed as round as pebbles. They make an abominable noise.” ”

“ We are short of fuel and therefore cook in the cabin. Our breakfast, for all fare alike, is hard tack, pork, stewed apples frozen like molasses-candy, tea and coffee, with a delicate portion of raw potato. After breakfast the smokers take their pipe till nine; then all hands turn to, idlers to idle and workers to work; Ohlsen to his bench, Brooks to his ‘preparations’ in canvas, M’Gary to play tailor, Whipple to make shoes, Bonsall to tinker, Baker to skin birds, and the rest to the ‘Office!’ Take a look into the Arctic bureau! ”

“ 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 have little to amuse ourselves, and we go through the monotonous round of the day’s duties with as much celerity and ready will, as our drooping circumstances will admit of.
I cannot hide from myself the fact that the main object of our expedition must now be finally abandoned; and our duty, in the next instance, is toward ourselves: to wait the return of light in order to accomplish our escape from the ice,—with the brig if possible, if impossible, without it,—before the frail appliances and stores which are now left are entirely exhausted. ”

“ The limestone cliffs rise on each side, forming stupendous piers gnarled by frost degradation, between which is the entrance, about a quarter of a mile wide. The moment our little vessel entered the shadow of these cliffs, a quiet gloom took the place of bustling movement. We ground our way into the newly-formed ice, and, after making a couple of ships’ lengths, found ourselves within a sort of cape of land floe, surrounded by high hummocks and anchored bergs. ”

“ But at this moment, while passing on my return near the door of the bulkhead, which leads to the carpenter’s room, the gas began to affect me. My lantern went out as if quenched by water; and, as I ran by the bulkhead door, I saw the deck near it a mass of glowing fire for some three feet in diameter. I could not tell how much further it extended, for I became quite insensible at the foot of the ladder, and would have sunk, had not Mr Brooks seen my condition and hauled me out. ”

“ Standing on our little deck, and looking out on the floe, we had the strange spectacle of an undulating solidity, a propagated wave borne in swell-like ridges, as if our ice was a carpet shaken by Titans. I can not convey the effect of this sublime spectacle. The ice, broken into polyhedric masses, gave at a few hundred yards no indications to the eye of the lines of separation; besides which, the infiltration of salt water had no doubt increased the plasticity of the material. ”

“ A few ruined walls here and there showed that it had once been the seat of a rude settlement; and in the little knoll which we cleared away to cover in our storehouse of valuables, we found the mortal remains of their former inhabitants.
Nothing can be imagined more sad and homeless than these memorials of extinct life. Hardly a vestige of growth was traceable on the bare ice-rubbed rocks; and the huts resembled so much the broken fragments that surrounded them, that at first sight it was hard to distinguish one from the other. ”

“ To look at the completely unbroken area which shows itself from our mast-head, motion would be the last idea suggested. In Lancaster Sound the changing phases of the coast gave us a feeling of progress, movement, drift—that sensation of change so pleasing to one’s incomprehensible moral machinery. But here, with this circle of impenetrable passive solidity everywhere around us, it is hard to realize that we move. ”

“ The dogs of Smith’s Sound are educated more thoroughly than any of their southern brethren. Next to the walrus, the bear is the staple of diet to the north, and except the fox, supplies the most important element of the wardrobe. Unlike the dogs we had brought with us from Baffin’s Bay, these were trained, not to attack, but to embarrass. They ran in circles round the bear, and when pursued would keep ahead with regulated gait, their comrades effecting a diversion at the critical moment by a nip at her hind-quarters. ”

“ The strong floe of ice-table under ice-table, and hummock upon hummock, makes our position one of nearly complete solidity. We are glued up in ice; and to liberate us, some fearful disruption must take place. Twenty-five feet of solid ice is no feeble matrix, for a brig drawing but ten. Yet the water is wider, and still widening around us; so that now we hold on—that is, our floe holds on, to the great mass to the north of us, like a little peninsular cape.
“To the south every thing is in drifting motion—water, sludge, frost-smoke—but no seals. ”

“ It turns out that besides his mother there is another of the softer sex at Fiskernaes that the boy’s heart is dreaming of. He looked as wretched as any lover of a milder clime. I hope I have treated his nostalgia successfully, by giving him first a dose of salts, and secondly, promotion. He has now all the dignity of a henchman. He harnesses my dogs, builds my traps, and walks with me on my ice-tramps; and, except hunting, is excused from all other duty. He is ready attached to me, and as happy as a fat man might to be. ”

“ It blows a young gale. Brooks and myself have been flying kites. The wind was like prickling needles, and the snow smoked over the moving drifts.
“I am struck more and more with the evidences of gigantic force in the phases of our frozen pedragal. Returning from a chase after an imaginary bear, we came across, yesterday, a suspended hummock, so imposing in its form, that, half frozen as we were, we stopped to measure it. It was a single table of massive ice, supported upon a pile of rubbish, and inclined about 15° to the horizon. ”

“ Not a man now, except Pierre and Morton, is exempt from scurvy; and, as I look around upon the pale faces and haggard looks of my comrades, I feel that we are fighting the battle of life at disadvantage, and that an Arctic night and an Arctic day age a man more rapidly and harshly than a year anywhere else in all this weary world. ”

“ I was in the act of writing the above, when a startling sensation, resembling the spring of a well-drawn bow, announced a fresh movement. Running on deck, I found it blowing a furious gale, and the ice again in motion. I use the word motion inaccurately. The field, of which we are a part, is always in motion; that is, drifting with wind or current. It is only when other ice bears down upon our own, or our own ice is borne in against other floes, that pressure and resistance make us conscious of motion. ”

“ Never did heart-tried men acknowledge with more gratitude their merciful deliverance from a wretched death.
“The day had already its full share of trials; but there were more to come. A flaw drove us from our shelter, and the gale soon carried us beyond the end of the lead. We were again in the ice, sometimes escaping its onset by warping, sometimes forced to rely on the strength and buoyancy of the brig to stand its pressure, sometimes scudding wildly through the half-open drift. ”

“ T HE port of Pröven is securely sheltered by its monster hills. But they can not be said to smile a welcome upon the navigator. A smiling country, like a smiling face, needs some provision of fleshly integuments; and no earthly covering masks the grinning rocks of Pröven. They look as if the process of crumbling, and wrinkling, and splitting, and splintering had been at work on them since the first Arctic frost succeeded the last metamorphic fire; and even now great ledges are wedged off from the hillsides by the ice, and roll clattering down the slopes into the very midst of the settlement. ”

“ My aim was to take the channel obliquely at Littleton Island; and, making the drift-ice or the land to the south-west in the neighbourhood of Cape Combermere, push on for Kent Island and leave a cairn there.
Toward night the wind freshened from the northward, and we passed beyond the protection of the straits into the open sea-way. My journal gives no picture of the life we now entered on. The oldest sailor who treads the deck of his ship with the familiar confidence of a man at home, has a distrust of open-boat navigation which a landsman hardly shares. ”

“ An air insect would be, in this dreary waste of cold, an impossibility greater than the diamond in the snow-drift. Save a seal and a fox, nothing sharing our principle of vitality has greeted us for months. The teeming myriads of life which characterized the Arctic summer have gone. The anatidæ are clamoring in the great bays and water-courses of the middle south. The gulls have sought the regions of open water. ”