On Friday the twenty-sixth a crack in the ice made from the waist of the ship towards the stern, running for about a hundred yards off the starboard bow. The crack did not open, but for the first time in our drift we felt a slight tremor on the ship. In about an hour we felt another slight tremor. I followed the crack for a hundred yards and then lost it. There was a fresh north-northeast wind which moderated as the day wore on but it looked as if we were in for some more bad weather, though the barometer was steady, and next day we began to get things ready to leave the ship at once, in case we should have to get out in a hurry. Everything was where we could lay our hands on it at once.
Our soundings had been giving us depths of about twenty-five fathoms, which did not tally with our charts. It seemed likely that our chronometer was a trifle slow and that we were somewhat to the westward of our apparent position. We had a clear view of the sky with a very pronounced twilight glow to the south.
On the twenty-eighth we altered the ship’s time again to get the benefit of the increasing twilight. Molly gave birth to a litter of nine pups, which, if she had not eaten most of them, would have been useful members of the party, had our drift continued for another year so that they could have grown large enough to use. The prizes won on Christmas Day were now distributed: safety razors and extra blades, shaving-soap, hair-clippers, goggles, pipes, sweaters, shirts, and various other things.
As soon as it was light on the twenty-ninth I kept a sharp eye out for land; south by west, by the compass, I could see a blue cloud raised up on the horizon. According to the soundings we should have been nearer Wrangell Island than Herald Island; I was inclined to think that it was Herald Island, although working out our position with our chronometer readings gave us Herald Island sixty miles to the south. Afterwards I found out that our observations at this time were correct but that the soundings were not right on the chart. What deceived us more than anything else was the big mirage; Herald Island looked large and distorted for many days. Later in the day I went aloft to see if I could make out which island it really was but on account of the imperfect light I found it impossible to tell.
Some time during the night the ice cracked about a hundred yards from the ship and made an open ribbon of water ten inches wide; during the next day the young ice was cracking a good deal all around us. There was no lateral movement of the ice.
The next day was the last day of 1913. Our time was six hours and thirty-six minutes later than Boston and New York time and as the day wore on and it got to be 5:24 P. M. I realized that it was midnight on Tremont Street and Broadway and I thought of the friends who would now be seeing the old year out and the new year in. I wondered what they thought had become of us on the Karluk, and whether the news of our unforeseen drift had yet reached them from Stefansson. I could picture the carefree throngs in the hotels waiting for the lights to go out for the moment of midnight and greeting 1914 with a cheer and a song.
We had our own New Year’s celebration, though it was only a coincidence that it came on this particular day, for we had planned a football game on the ice when the weather should be good and the wind fairly light; New Year’s Day happened to be the first good day for it.
The ball was made of seal-gut, cut into sections and sewed up, with surgeon’s plaster over the seams. We blew it up with a pipe stem and plugged up the hole. To protect the ball we had a sealskin casing made to fit it; the result was a fairly good ball, constructed on the same principle as any college football.
It was Scotland vs. All-Nations; the game was association football, played on a field of regulation size laid out on young ice about a foot and a half in thickness. At each end of the field were goal posts with the usual cross-bar.
Fireman Breddy was captain of All-Nations and Mr. Munro of Scotland. The Eskimo, though not well-versed in the game, played well. Keruk, clad as usual in dress and bloomers, was goal-tender for All-Nations. Some of the players wore skin-boots, others ordinary American shoes. I had forgotten a good deal about the association game but I refreshed my memory from the encyclopedia in the ship’s library and armed with a mouth-organ in lieu of a whistle took my place as referee, umpire and time-keeper. I soon found, however, that the cold would make it too dangerous for me to use the “whistle,” for it would freeze to my lips and take the skin off, so I had to give my signals for play by word of mouth.