"After the close of the promenade and the traffic with the natives, the gunroom personnel have begun their labours. Some keep in their cabins, others in the gunroom itself. The magnetical and meteorological observations made the day before are transcribed and subjected to a preliminary working-out, the natural history collections are examined and looked over, studies and authorship are prosecuted. The work is now and then interrupted by conversation partly serious, partly jocular. From the engine-room in the neighbourhood we hear the blows of hammers and the rasping of files. In the 'tweendecks, pretty well heated, but not very well lighted, some of the crew are employed at ordinary ship's work; and in the region of the kitchen the cook is just in the midst of his preparations for dinner. He is in good humour as usual, but perhaps grumbles a little at the 'mosucks' (a common name on board for the Chukches), who will not give him any peace by their continual cries for 'mimil' (water.)
"The forenoon passes in all quietness and stillness. Immediately after noon nearly all the gunroom people are again on deck, promenading backwards and forwards. It is now very lively. It is the crew's meal-time. The whole crowd of Chukches are collected at the descent to their apartment, the lower deck. One soup basin after the other comes up; they are immediately emptied of their contents by those who in the crowd and confusion are fortunate enough to get at them. Bread and pieces of meat and bits of sugar are distributed assiduously, and disappear with equal speed. Finally, the cook himself appears with a large kettle, containing a very large quantity of meat soup, which the Chukches like starving animals throw themselves upon, baling into them with spoons, empty preserve tins, and above all with the hands. Notwithstanding the exceedingly severe cold a woman here and there has uncovered one arm and half her breast in order not to be embarrassed by the wide reindeer-skin sleeve in her attempts to get at the contents of the kettle. The spectacle is by no means a pleasant one.
"By three o'clock it begins to grow dark, and one after the other of our guests depart, to return, the most of them, in the morning. Now it is quiet and still. About six the crew have finished their labours and dispose of the rest of the day as they please. Most of them are occupied with reading during the evening hours. When supper has been served at half-past seven in the gunroom, he who has the watch in the ice-house from nine to two next morning prepares for the performance of his disagreeable duty; the rest of the gunroom personnel are assembled there, and pass the evening in conversation, play, light reading, &c. At ten every one retires, and the lamps are extinguished. In many cabins, however, lights burn till after midnight.
"Such was in general our life on the Vega. One day was very like another. When the storm howled, the snow drifted, and the cold became too severe, we kept more below deck; when the weather was finer we lived more in the open air, often paying visits to the observatory in the ice-house, and among the Chukches living in the neighbourhood, or wandering about to come upon, if possible, some game."
The snow which fell during winter consisted more generally of small simple snow-crystals or ice-needles, than of the beautiful snow-flakes whose grand kaleidoscopic forms the inhabitants of the north so often have an opportunity of admiring. Already with a gentle wind and with a pretty clear atmosphere the lower strata of the atmosphere were full of these regular ice-needles, which refracted the rays of the sun, so as to produce parhelia and halos. Unfortunately however these were never so completely developed as the halos which I saw in 1873 during the sledge-journey round North-east Land on Spitzbergen; but I believed that even now I could confirm the correctness of the observation I then made, that the representation which is generally given of this beautiful phenomenon, in which the halo is delineated as a collection of regular circles, is not correct, but that it forms a very involved system of lines, extended over the whole vault of heaven, for the most part coloured on the sun-side and uncoloured on the opposite side, of the sort shown in the accompanying drawings taken from the account of the Spitzbergen Expedition of 1872-73.
Another very beautiful phenomenon, produced by the refraction of the solar rays by the ice-needles, which during winter were constantly mixed with the atmospheric strata lying nearest the surface of the earth, was that the mountain heights to the south of the Vega in a certain light appeared as if feathered with fire-clouds. In clear sunshine and a high wind we frequently saw, as it were, a glowing pillar of vapour arise obliquely from the summits of the mountains, giving them the appearance of volcanos, which throw out enormous columns of smoke, flame-coloured by the reflection from the glowing lava streams in the depths of the crater.
A blue water-sky was still visible out to sea, indicating that open water was to be found there. I therefore sent Johnsen the hunter over the ice on the 18th December to see how it was. In three-quarters of an hour's walking from the vessel he found an extensive opening, recently covered with thin, blue, newly frozen ice. A fresh northerly breeze blew at the time, and by it the drift-ice fields were forced together with such speed, that Johnsen supposed that in a couple of hours the whole lead would be completely closed.