Elisha Kent Kane

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ They have been fairly in contact for the last hour: we feel their pressure extending to us through the elastic floe in which we are cradled. There is a quivering, vibratory hum about the timbers of the brig, and every now and then a harsh rubbing creak along her sides, like waxed cork on a mahogany table. The hummocks are driven to within four feet of our counter, and stand there looming fourteen feet high through the darkness. It has been a horrible commotion so far, with one wild, booming, agonized note, made up of a thousand discords ”

“ Yet fairly on the way, an energetic commander, a united ship’s company, the wind freshening, our well-tried little ice-boat now groping her way like a blind man through fog and bergs, and now dashing on as if reckless of all but success—it was impossible to repress a sentiment almost akin to the so-called joyous excitement of conflict. ”

“ At these times our vessels underwent a nipping on a small scale. The smoother ice-field that held us would be driven in, piling itself in miniature hummocks about us, sometimes higher than our decks, and much too near them to leave us a sense of security against their further advance. The noises, too, of whining puppies and swarming bees made part of these demonstrations, much as when the heavier masses were at work, but shriller perhaps, and more clamorous. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Should we try our fortunes for the while on board the Rescue? She would probably be the first to go, and could hardly hope for a more protracted fate than her consort. Or should we try for the shore, and what shore? Admiralty Inlet, or Pond’s Bay, or the River Clyde? We have no reason to suppose the Esquimaux are accessible on the coast in winter; and if they are, they can not have provisions for such a hungry re-enforcement as ours; besides, the chance of reaching land from the drift-field through the broken ice between them is slender at the best for men worn down and sick ”

“ The doubt is gone. Our floe, ice-cradle, safeguard, has been thrown round. Its eastern margin is grinding its way to the northward, and the west is already « 155 » pointing to the south. Our bow is to Baffin’s Bay, and we are traveling toward it. So far, ours has been a mysterious journeying. For two months and more, not a sail has fluttered from our frozen spars; yet we have passed from Lancaster Sound into the highest latitude of Wellington Channel, one never attained before, and have been borne back again past our point of starting, along a capriciously varied line of drift. ”

“ The moon, like a luminous sphere, not a circle, as with us, is away up the straits in the northern sky. Not a speck betokens sunrise.
“9 A.M. The southeastern horizon is zoned with a mellow uniform band of light. Nothing we have seen has its extension or its uniformity. The visual angle is an unbroken tint, rising from the ice with a raw sienna, mellowing into pink, and softened again into an orange yellow, which runs sometimes through a gradation of green into the clear blue sky. The moon absorbs all perception of other light. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Mount Raleigh, named by sturdy old John Davis ‘a brave mount, the cliffes whereof were as orient as golde,’ shows itself still, not so glittering as he saw it two hundred and sixty-five years ago, but a ‘brave mount’ notwithstanding. No Christian eyes have ever gazed in May time on its ice-defended slope, except our own. ”

“ The snow is driven like sand upon a level beach, lifted up in long curve lines, and then obscuring the atmosphere with a white darkness. The wind, too, is howling in a shrill minor, singing across the hummock ridges. ”

“ More deficient in the resources of education, and less restrained by conventional usages or the principle of honor from communicating to each other what they felt, all sympathized in the imaginary terrors which each one conjured up. The wild voices of the ice and wind, the strange sounds that issued from the ship, the hummocks bursting up without an apparent cause through the darkness, the cracks and the dark rushing water that filled them, the distorted wonder-workings of refraction ”

“ When I saw the little brig through the darkness, on the afternoon of the 13th of January, moving slowly past us and losing herself in the gloom, while sounds like artillery mingled with the shrieking, howling, and crashing of the ice, as the great ridges rose and fell—and when the India-rubber boat was launched, and the men took their « 311 » knapsacks, and old Brooks called out to us to get out of the way of the rigging, believing the brig about to topple over—I did not think there would be a spring-time for the Rescue. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Their alertness is probably due to their vigilant enemy, the bear. Sometimes you will see them frolicking together like a parcel of swimming school-boys; sometimes they are solitary, but keenly alive always to the enjoyment of the sunshine. I have often crawled within fair eye-shot, and, seated behind a concealing lump of ice, watched their movements.
“The first act of a seal, after emerging, is a careful survey of his limited horizon. For this purpose he rises on his fore flippers, and stretches his neck in a manner almost dog-like. ”

“ We are literally running for our lives, surrounded by the imminent hazards of sudden consolidation in an open sea. All minor perils, nips, humps, and sunken bergs are discarded; we are staggering along under all sail, forcing our way while we can. One thump, received since I commenced writing, jerked the time-keeper from our binnacle down the cabin hatch, and, but for our strong bows, seven and a half solid feet, would have stove us in. Another time, we cleared a tongue of the main pack by riding it down at eight knots. Commodore Austin seems caught by the closing floes. ”

“ Men became moping, testy, and imaginative. In the morning, dreams of the night—we could not help using the term—were narrated. Some had visited the naked shores of Cape Warrender, and returned laden with water-melons. Others had found Sir John Franklin in a beautiful cove, lined by quintas and orange-trees. Even Brooks, our hard-fisted, unimaginative boatswain, told me, in confidence, of having heard three strange groans out upon the ice. He “thought it was a bear, but could see nothing!” In a word, the health of our little company was broken in upon. ”