Frozen sea

“ I got into the main chains to view the body of the vessel, and noticed with satisfaction that the constant pouring of the sea had thinned down the frozen snow to the depth of at least a foot. This encouraged me to hope that the restless tides would sap to her keel at least, and put her into a posture to be easily launched by the blow of a surge upon her bows—that is if fortune continued to keep her head on. ”

“ During the day the glare is too great but a moonlight night on a frozen sea is the grandest sight possible. The weird sounds caused by the ever restless ice are a fitting accompaniment. On this Friday night, the sounds caused by the ever increasing sea, crunching the pack up, were rather startling at times, but we kept pretty well out of it, so we were safe. There was quite a little motion on board, owing to the swell, and we steamed easy ahead all night, going full speed at daybreak, and by noon had the satisfaction of finding our seals. ”

“ Valleys do not interfere with its onward march, for the frozen stream enters them, and levels them with the highest hills. It heeds not the precipice, for it leaps over it into the plain below,—a giant, frozen waterfall. Winter and summer are to it alike the same. It moves ever forward in its irresistible career,—a vast, frozen tide swelling to the ocean. It pours through every outlet of the coast ranges, down every ravine and valley, overriding every impediment, grinding and crushing over the rocks ”

“ The gradual unfolding of the picture prepared my mind for what I could not see till the brink was reached; then, looking down, I beheld a schooner-rigged vessel lying in a sort of cradle of ice, stern-on to the sea. A man bulked out with frozen snow, so as to make his shape as great as a bear, leaned upon the rail with a slight upwards inclination of his head, as though he were in the act of looking fully up to hail me. ”

“ No squall was then passing; the rocks rose up on either hand in a ghastly glimmer to the ebony of the heavens; the gale swept overhead in a wild, mad blending of whistlings, roarings, and cryings in many keys, falling on a sudden into a doleful wailing, then rising in a breath to the full fury of its concert; the sea thundered like the cannonading of an electric storm, and you would have said that the rending and crackling noises of the ice were responses to the crashing blows of the balls of shadow-hidden ordnance. ”

“ These pieces or masses of ice are pushed towards the shore, and there the ice first begins to make a firm covering over the sea.
‘But the ice on the sea is never smooth or even, like the ice on a pond or on a river; it is rough, and large pieces are heaped together, and large cracks are often made in the ice by the wind and the waves moving it, which makes it dangerous to drive or even walk a long distance over the Frozen Sea.’
‘Can people drive over the sea? ”

“ These accumulations of ice thus formed on land constitute171 the chief obstructions that bar the channels and inlets fringing the unknown Polar area. The glacier fragments above described are cemented together in the winter time by the freezing of the water between them. An open frozen sea, pure and simple, instead of forming a barrier to arctic exploration, would supply a most desirable highway. It must not be supposed that, because the liquid ocean is ruffled by ripples, waves, and billows, a frozen sea would have a similar surface. ”

“ With the warm flood of the Gulf Stream pouring northward, and keeping the waters of the Polar Sea at a temperature above the freezing point, while the winds, blowing as constantly under the Arctic as under the Tropic sky, and the ceaseless currents of the sea and the tide-flow of the surface, keep the waters ever in movement, it is not possible, as I have before observed, that even any considerable portion of this extensive sea can be frozen over. ”

“ In that case we will test the hospitality of the people of Spitzbergen, Iceland, Nova Zembla, Ferroe Isles, and sundry others in this part of the Atlantic and Frozen Ocean, and then descend to warmer climates."
MR. WILTON. "A very good plan, if we do not get blocked up by the ice in these dreadful seas. By-the-by, there is an account of such a calamity happening to a vessel some years ago.—In the year 1775, Captain Warrens, master of the 'Greenland,' a whale-ship, was cruising about in the Frozen Ocean, when at a little distance he observed a vessel. ”

“ Next day, thanks to a falling thermometer, the ice had thickened, and the floes were compacted once more into a solid mass. Some of these floes, scattered here and there like gaunt icy islands in a sea of ice, were very big, with noticeable hummocks uprearing from the main mass. As a strong southerly wind was blowing, which was favourable to our purpose, we got busy and set topsail and staysail. Seen from outboard we must have looked much more like an ice-yacht than a sea-going ship, I fancy; but under the weight of this canvas we edged a very slow and very difficult way to the north. ”

“ During the long nine months of winter the water about Nome is frozen solid some two miles out to sea. All garbage and junk is hauled out upon the ice with dog-teams and dumped there. When spring comes the ice loosens from the shore, and, laden with its great cargo of unwanted things, carries it through Bering Straits to haunt the Arctic Ocean, perhaps for years to come. ”

“ An arrangement in nature, by which a basin of considerable area in the frozen ocean could be supplied by water coming in at the bottom and rising up at the top, with a temperature not below 30°, or even 27°.2—the freezing-point of sea water—would go far to mitigate the climate in the regions round about. ”

“ And that which they speake of Mare glaciale, may be truely thought to be spoken of these parts: [Sidenote: Salt water cannot freeze.] for this may well be called indeede the ycie sea, but not the frozen sea, for no sea consisting of salt water can be frozen, as I haue more at large herein shewed my opinion in my second voyage, for it seemeth impossible for any sea to bee frozen, which hath his course of ebbing and flowing, especially in those places where the tides doe ebbe and flowe aboue ten fadome. ”

“ At other times of the year, when all inland water is frozen up, and even the sea to a great distance from land, he then keeps along the extreme edge of the frozen surface, and finds his food in the open water of the sea. ”

“ The Frozen Strait, Repulse Bay, and many islands of the same neighbourhood, were carefully explored. Parry, in his journal of October 8th, gives the following interesting description of the formation of “young” ice upon the surface of the sea, and the obstacle which it forms to navigation. ”

“ Where the cold is so intense, a river becomes frozen from the surface to the ground. Snow falls, there may be a little rain during the moderate season, then snow comes again, and all the time the water beneath is freezing more and more solid. Gravity and the pressure of the inconceivable weight beyond keeps forcing the bulk of ice and snow nearer the ocean, until it projects into the clear sea. ”

“ Lathrop. “And a cruise to the Arctic is a very different matter. The Narwhal’s a very old and small ship, and she’ll spend the winter there probably, freeze in and take chances of being crushed. And you’d find it far from a picnic. Why, just imagine being locked hard and fast in the ice for six or eight months with the temperature fifty or sixty below zero, and shut up in the ship with a crowd of greasy whalers and Eskimos. No, Jim, there’s far too much risk.” ”

“ The whole region is one of severe cold, and the sea is frozen for the greater part of the year, land and water becoming almost indistinguishable, but for the incessant movement and drift of the sea-ice. In summer the sea-ice breaks up into floes which may drift away southward and melt, or be driven by the wind against the shores of continents or islands, leaving lanes of open water which a shift of wind may change and close in an hour. Icebergs launched from the glaciers of the land also drift with tide, current, and wind through the more or less open water. ”

“ This would make those frozen regions cover a portion of this globe that is almost as large as the whole of the Atlantic Ocean, as far south as the equator. Any one can imagine what must be the influence of frost over so vast a surface, in reproducing itself, since the presence of ice-bergs is thought to affect our climate, when many of them drift far south in summer. As power produces power, riches wealth, so does cold produce cold. ”

“ The taking up ice proved such cold work, that it was eight o'clock by the time the boats had made two trips, when we hoisted them in, and made sail to the west, under double-reefed top-sails and courses, with a strong gale at north, attended with snow and sleet, which froze to the rigging as it fell, making the ropes like wires, and the sails like boards or plates of metal. The sheaves also were frozen so fast in the blocks, that it required our utmost efforts to get a top-sail down and up; the cold so intense as hardly to be endured; the whole sea, in a manner, covered with ice ”

“ During the entire day this breeze increased, with frequent squalls and a gloomy, lowering sky, and the wiseacres amongst us prognosticated bad weather. Of course it is always safest to prophesy bad weather at sea, because you naturally make up your mind that it is coming and prepare yourself for any emergency ”

“ For we cannot suppose that snow alone, as it falls, can form, on a plain surface, such as the sea, such a variety of high peaks and hills, as we saw on many of the ice-isles. It is certainly more reasonable to believe that they are formed on a coast whose surface is something similar to theirs. I have observed that all the ice-islands of any extent, and before they begin to break to pieces, are terminated by perpendicular cliffs of clear ice or frozen snow, always on one or more sides, but most generally all round. ”

“ It has been well observed that there are many instances on record of long ocean-voyages performed in open boats, but that, perhaps, not one is of so extraordinary a character as that which we are describing,—when two small and crazy craft ventured to cross the frozen seas for eleven hundred miles, continually endangered by huge floating ice-masses, threatened by bears, and exposed for forty days to the combined trials of sickness, famine, cold, and fatigue. ”

“ Outside the slanting wall of ice that made my haven the swell swept past in a gurgling, bubbling, drowning sound, dismal and ghastly, as though in truth some such ogre as the monster I had dreamt of lay suffocating there. I welcomed the cold colouring of the east as if it had been a ship, and watched the stars dying and the frozen shore darkening to the dim and sifting dawn behind it, against which the outline of the cliffs ran in a broken streak of ink. The rising of the sun gave me fresh life. ”

“ By now the fog was getting lighter with the rising sun. The boys could see the lower portions of the sails, the lower masts, the ship’s deck as far forward as the forerigging, and the dull gray-green sea for a few hundred feet about the schooner. Beyond that, all was a solid wall of gray through which the Narwhal forged slowly ahead, horn and bell constantly [48] sounding warnings, and with men aloft striving to peer into the impenetrable murk. ”

“ No novelist would dare to picture such an array of beautiful climatic conditions,—the rosy dawn, the morning star, the moon on the horizon, the sea stretching in level beauty to the sky-line,—and on this sea to place an ice-field like the Arctic regions and icebergs in numbers everywhere,—white and turning pink and deadly cold,—and near them, rowing round the icebergs to avoid them, little boats coming suddenly out of mid-ocean, with passengers rescued from the most wonderful ship the world has known. ”

“ That which I best recollect is the appearance of the mass of ice lying solidly, like a little island, upon the seas which roared in creaming waters about it. Every blow of the black and arching surge was reverberated in a dull hollow tremble back to the ear through the hissing flight of the gale. The frozen body was not taller than our mastheads, yet it showed like a mountain hanging over us as the brig was flung swirling into the deep Pacific hollow, leaving us staring upwards out of the instant's stagnation of the trough with lips set breathlessly and with dying eyes. ”

“ At Rio we were melted down with the heat; off Cape Horn our fingers were stiffened with the cold; and now the most grateful gift in the world would be a glass of ice-water. Such extremes of temperature are the more felt in the exposures inseparable from a sea-life. We have on board ship no forests into which we can rush from the heat; no glowing grates, around which we can gather from the cold. We must take the elements, whatever they may be, in their full force. They shatter the constitution; and sink a grave in the sailor’s path, over which he rarely passes to a green old age. ”

“ A stillness like death reigns over all the surrounding forms of ice, and the frozen ocean stretches out beneath a vast shroud. A sunless leaden sky spreads over all, not a breath of air stirs, it is neither warm nor cold, slowly melts the snow, and this pale realm of ice forms a world of danger and difficulty, against which are matched the strength and sagacity of three-and-twenty men! ”

“ It is impossible to imagine anything more melancholy than this gray, uniform, infinite veil or canopy; ocean itself, far as the eye can reach, is gray and gloomy.
For five successive days the weather remained in this condition, the fog alone varying in intensity, and growing thicker and thicker. On the 14th a calm prevailed, and the Germania lowered a boat to pick up drift-wood and hunt the sea-gulls. The ice-blink on the horizon showed that the ships were drawing near the great ice-fields of the Polar Ocean ”