By night the sea was churning the ice in choppy waves, with a growl of wind through the mast, and the crew wakened the next morning to find a hurricane of sleet had wiped out the land. The huge floes were turning somersets in the rough sea with a banging that threatened to smash the little ship into a crushed egg shell. Under bare poles, she drove before the wind for open sea.
As she scudded from the crush of the tumbling ice, Hudson remarked something extraordinary in the conduct of his ship. Veering about, sails down, there was no mistaking it—she was drifting against the wind! As the storm subsided, it became plainer: the wind was carrying in one direction, the sea was carrying in another. Hudson had discovered that current across the Pole, which was to play such an important part with Nansen three hundred years later. Icebergs were floating against the wind, too, laboriously, with apparently aimless circlings round and round, but circles that carried them forward against the wind, and the ship was presently moored to a great icepan drifting along with the undertow.
Then the curse of all Arctic voyagers fell on the sea—fog thick to the touch as wool, through which the icebergs glided like phantoms with a great crash of waters, where the surf beat on the floes. Never mind! Their anchor-hold acts as a breakwater. They are sheltered from the turmoil of the waves outside the ice. And they are still headed north. And they are up to Seventy-three along a coast, which no chart has ever before recorded, no chart but the myths of death’s realm. As the coast might prove treacherous if the ice began thumping inland, Hudson names the region “Hold Hope,” which may be interpreted, “Keep up your Courage.”
Prince Rupert, from a Photograph in the Ottawa Archives, after Painting by Vandyke.
Ice and fog, fog and ice, and the eternal silences but for the thunder of the floes banging the ports; up to Seventy-five by noon of June 25, when the sailors notice that the floundering clumsy grampus are playing mad pranks about the ship. The glistening brown backs race round the prow and somerset bodily out of the water in a very deviltry of sauciness! Call it sailors’ superstition, but when the grampus schools play, your Northern crew looks for storm, and by noon of June 26, the storm is there pounding the hull like thunder and shrieking through the rigging. Not a good place to be, between land and ice in hurricane! Hudson scampers for the sea, still north, but driven out east by the trend of Greenland’s coast along an unbroken barrier of ice that seems to link Greenland to Spitzbergen.
No passage across the Pole this way! That is certain! But there is a current across the Pole! That, too, is certain! And Greenland is as long as a continent. So driving before the storm, Hudson steers east for Spitzbergen. In July, it is warmer, but heat brings more ice, and the man at the masthead on the lookout for land up at Seventy-nine could not know that a submerged iceberg was going to turn a somerset directly under the keel. There was a splintering crash. Something struck the keel like a cannon shot. Up reared the little boat on end like a frightened horse. When the waters plunged down two great bergs had risen one on each side of the quivering ship and a jagged gash gaped through the timbers at water line. Water slushed over decks in a cataract. The yardarms are still dipping and dripping to the churning seas when the crew leaps out to a man, some on the ice, some in small boats, some astraddle of driftwood to stop the leak in the bottom. As they toil—and they toil in desperation, for the safety of the ship is their only possibility of reaching home—they notice it again—wood drifting against the wind, the undertow of some great unknown Polar Current.
Hudson cannot wait for this current to carry him toward the Pole, as Nansen did. Up he tacks to Eighty-two, within eight degrees of the baffling Pole, within four degrees of Farthest North reached by modern navigators. When he finds Spitzbergen locked by the ice to the north, he tries it by the south. But the ice seems to become almost a living enemy in its resistance. Hudson had anchored to a drifting floe. Another icepan shut off his retreat. Then a terrific sea began running—the effect of the ice jam against the Polar Current. The fog was so thick you could cut it with a knife. Not a breath of wind stirred. Sails hung limp, and the sea was driving the ship to instant destruction against a jam of ice. Heaving out small boats, the crew rowed for dear life towing the ship out of the maelstrom by main force, but their puny human strength was as child’s play against the great powers of the elements. Backwash had carried rowers and ship and small boats within a stone’s throw of the ramming icebergs when a faint air breathed through the fog. Moistening their fingers, the sailors held up hands to catch the motion of any breeze. No mistake—it was a fair wind—right about sails there—the little ship turned tail to the ice and was off like a bird, for says the old ship’s log: “it pleased God to give us a gale, and away we steered.”
The battle for a passage seemed hopeless. Hudson assembled the crew on decks and on bended knees prayed God to show which way to steer. Of no region had the sailors of that day greater horror than Spitzbergen. They began to recall the fearful disasters that had befallen Dutch ships here but a few years before. Those old sailors’ superstitions of the North being the realm of the Goddess of Death, came back to memory. That last narrow escape from the ice-crush left terror in the very marrow of their bones. In vain, Hudson once more suggested seeking the passage by Greenland. To the crew, the Voice of the North uttered no call. Glory was all very well, but they didn’t want glory. They wanted to go home. What was the good of chasing an Idea down the Long Trail to a grave on the frozen shores of Death?