Towards evening the drunken miners down the forward hatch began to sober up and gradually come on deck. With their appearance there was a demand for heavy socks, boots, underwear, shirts, wind-proof coats and trousers. As the handling of these articles belonged to my department I was kept busy for several hours, assisted by my Norwegian clerks, dealing out wearing apparel to the men. The upper deck of the ship was transformed into a temporary store, and as each man filed by he was given what articles he needed, together with a store tag, a duplicate of which was retained in order to charge the amount of the purchase against his account—to be deducted from his first pay-check.
The second morning we sighted Bear Island, a lonely, uninhabited piece of land rising abruptly out of the ocean about midway between Norway and Spitzbergen. We saw an occasional chunk of float ice which had broken loose from the ice pack farther north and was drifting carelessly towards the south only to melt away when it came in contact with the Gulf Stream. We were awakened the next morning by the crashing of the bow of the ship against the ice. I went up on the bridge and as far as my eye could reach I could see nothing but countless pieces of float ice, varying in area from a few feet to the size of an acre lot. It was an inspiring sight—both fore and aft an endless expanse of white broken here and there by the irregular streaks of the blue water. For two days the patient ship ploughed her way through this creaking and cracking mass. Occasionally she would sail into a space of open sea, and in a few minutes would again be completely surrounded by an ocean of ice which rubbed and knocked against her sides with the wheezing sound of the ice-man's saw.
Pack Ice in Ice Fjord
Twenty Miles from Land
The captain said that we were making fine progress, and if nothing unforeseen occurred should arrive in Ice Fjord in the morning. All on board were aroused early by the fearful charging of the ship. We were now well within the fjord alongside of the fast ice. The boat would get up steam, proceed ahead at full speed, plunge into the ice, draw back and plunge again at a little distance away. By this process a large piece of ice would be loosened and would slowly drift off. All the morning the Munroe battered the ice in this manner. Finally we reached a point where the captain considered that the ice was secure enough to tie to. Stakes were driven, lines extended and the ship made fast.
We were now about twenty miles from shore. The little black ship was nestled in a bed of snowy down. Ice Fjord was a solid mass of ice. The steep and snow-clad mountains of Spitzbergen surrounded us like a cluster of marble cathedral spires, and the glacier-choked valleys looked like frozen and motionless rivers. It was a dream in snow. At first there appeared to be no signs of life, and the death-like silence made one sure that it was a new world. In the midst of this dreary expanse of ice and snow the little veteran ship of the Arctic, hugging its frozen wharf, stood like a messenger from another planet, bearing greetings to the bleak and uninhabited land around us. The first signs of life shortly came into sight. Here and there, at irregular intervals, we saw seals and sea lions dotting the ice like flies on a white ceiling. A flock of geese flew overhead and as soon as our advent had been heralded to the inhabitants of the air, droves of reaper hovered about the ship to welcome us to their frigid home. Thousands of these fearless birds, to whom the report of a gun was unknown, gathered about us and formed a sea of blackness in the open space at the stern of the ship.