CHAPTER XXXV
After several weeks’ trying to get through the ice we failed to get ashore, owing to there being twenty to sixty miles of fixed land ice, and now have worked our way back eastward through three hundred miles of pack and floe ice. By luck we might have found part of the coast free of ice, or only a few miles of it, but apparently, instead of this drifting south and giving some rain to the British Isles, southerly and easterly winds have held back the South Polar ice-drift. Eight to ten miles off the coast of Shannon Island, on the north-east of Greenland, was as far west as we could press; other navigators have taken almost the same course and have found as little as only fifteen miles of ice to shove through between Norway and Greenland.
Yesterday we got the open sea and swell and now, as I write, we have come in contact with ice from north of Spitzbergen, and the ice from Siberia coming round north and south of Spitzbergen, and it is so plentiful that we are obliged to go north-east to find an opening easterly.
All afternoon we have been trying to find an opening and till six or seven could not see a way through, and ice coming from north jammed us considerably, but it was light pack, not more than four or five deep, so our ship, little as it is, was able to hold her own. You could by its thin and flat appearance at once distinguish the Spitzbergen ice from older, heavier polar ice, which we just left to the west.
Now, at seven in the evening, we have struggled through, and are leaving all Arctic ice behind. The pieces get smaller and smaller as we approach the open sea, till at the sea-edge there is only a margin of, say, a mile or so, studded with small pieces a few feet wide, and then again there is a further margin still smaller, remnants that were once hummocks or even parts of some iceberg. Then even these faint sentinels of the Arctic fade away behind us in a pale line, and we are free and in a handsome, rolling, free-born, deep-sea true-blue ocean swell. Everyone is pleased. One is bound to admit that at any time in the ice there is, especially to one who knows about it, an indefinable sense of strain. This strain, slight as it is, expresses itself in our crowd. De Gisbert is playing “The Cock o’ the North” on the mouth melodeon, with great go; the writer has just adapted the old sea chantey to the bagpipes, “What shall we do with a Drunken Sailor,” and a violent desire to excel at lasso-throwing has seized Archie, and so on.
Even our home, lately so sedate and dignified and restrained in its movements in amongst the ice, has taken a jolly seaman-like lurch and roll. The crow’s nest and mast, shining in the sun, go swinging to and fro across the sky—now she puts her nose down into the blue, pleasantly, and rises and our old level horizon of the ice days is away below us as our bows point to the skies—right and left we roll and we swing her south-east, for habitable land, for Trömso and Trondhjem and green trees growing and new fresh food; for even a few months in the ice with food getting rather stale makes us hanker a little after a new kitchen. We are tired of eating bear and of looking at their legs, which adorn our shrouds, great red-black limbs that we see all day swinging against the sky and eat slices of at every meal. Eating and seeing dead bear and hearing and smelling the living captives twenty-four hours of the day is too much of a good thing, so this is why we hanker after a new kitchen.
I dislike a storm at sea, but I do confess I love the sea when it is smooth and blue, and it soothes you with a long gentle roll such as we have to-day.
Our Last Glimpse of the Ice
It looks as if we were to have a smooth crossing to Norway, still the fiddles must come down from our cabin walls and again grace our little table. For in a small boat such as ours every yachtsman knows that they are inevitable whilst deep-sea sailing. Gisbert cleans his rifle and the fiddles are on the table! so we are really done with the Arctic in the meantime. He and I each used our rifles an hour or two ago in the ice. No one knew who was to shoot at a seal on a floe that possessed a coat we all envied; we were rapidly passing, so someone had to shoot and that quickly, so Gisbert and I dived for our respective rifles, and each loaded at the same instant and each fired as we swung past at eighty yards, and each within the hundredth part of a second, and each hit the seal in the middle. Neither of us knows which was the vital shot. We shoved the ship’s head against the floe and a man clambered over the bow and made a lasso fast to the seal. It seems a small matter to pot a seal on an ice-floe, but I would give many pounds, shillings and pence to be able to pass on the beauty of the colouring of that chunk of ice and green and lilac reflections in the purple sea, the silvery grey of the seal sparkling in the sunlight on the snow, and the reflected white light on the pink face of the man who jumped on to the ice to bring it aboard. The Prophet, we call him, a typical Norseman, with blue eyes, bushy yellow eyebrows, yellow hair and a kindly expression—he may be thirty years old, he might be a thousand—he is a type. His prophecies almost always come true. “It will be better before it is worse.” “We will get another bear before Gisbert cleans his rifle,” and so on. Remarks such as above are more interesting in his broken English—our steward’s broken English this morning almost rose to the level of punning. Archie Hamilton asked him sympathetically how he had slept—Archie, Gisbert and the steward all sleep in the fore part of the deck-house, and the bears are just outside. Gisbert snores, and the steward coughs alarmingly, and the bear shouts, so Archie says he has not slept a wink for nights. “Nay, nay,” said Pedersen, “no mans can sleep, der is Gisbare, he go snore, snore, und dem fordumna ice-bears dey go roar, roar, all de nights—no man can sleep noddings!”
At night we are in the open sea, rolling south-east, and try to hit off the north of Norway somewhere. The sun almost sets now, there is at any rate the warm glow of sunset, it pours into our two cabin ports from the north, making two golden discs wave up and down on the white walls that look quite green in contrast.
The guitar is mended, the glue gave way with the fog in the ice and the heat of the stove combined. So again we have music, Gisbert the principal performer, the writer causing some surprise at his remembering part of a Spanish love song picked up in Southern Spain. Gisbert sings a number of these queer folk-songs, with their strange airs and unexpected intervals and the beat of Africa in the heart of them.
I insert the scrap referred to above. It is not everyone who cares for this minor music, but it draws tears to a Spaniard’s eyes; and it appeals to the writer, inexplicably, for we have no music like it in our country.
The words amount to this: that in love, the eyes are as eloquent as the lips.
We have to play and hum tunes to keep our minds off the deep sea roll, that after the stillness of the ice comes as almost too much of a good thing.