The teams lined up at 11:30. Breddy won the toss and took the western end of the field. All-Nations scored the first goal and the play ranged furiously up and down the field until the first thirty-minute period was over. Then at noon we had an intermission and served coffee. At half-past twelve the teams lined up again, with changed goals. During the second half Scotland played well but when the game ended the score stood: All-Nations, 8; Scotland, 3. Another game was planned for the following Sunday.
CHAPTER XI
THE SINKING OF THE KARLUK
During the night of New Year’s Day we could hear, when we were below, a rumbling noise not unlike that which one often hears singing along the telegraph wires on a country road. The sound was inaudible from the deck. It was clear that there was tremendous pressure somewhere, though there were no visible indications of it in the vicinity of the ship. We were practically stationary. Apparently the great field of ice in which we had been zigzagging for so many months had finally brought up on the shore of Wrangell Island and was comparatively at rest, while the running ice outside this great field was still in active motion and tended to force the ice constantly in the direction of the island.
On Saturday, with a fresh north wind, in spite of which ship and ice still remained stationary, the rumbling noise could again be heard in the interior of the ship.
On Sunday the fourth there was an increasing easterly wind which sent us slowly westward. Evidently we could make no movement towards the south on account of the pressure but when the wind blew us towards the west and north we could go along without undue danger. The football game was played as planned on this day until the second engineer strained a muscle in his leg kicking the ball along the ice, and the game had to stop.
The easterly gale continued for several days, sometimes with hard snowstorms, sometimes with clearer skies. The barometer was low; the temperature rose to sixteen degrees above zero. I had the engineers at work making tins of one-gallon capacity to hold kerosene for our sledges if we should have to use them. All of our oil was in five-gallon tins which were unhandy for sledging use. They also made tea-boilers out of gasoline tins, to be used with the Primus stoves; these held about a gallon of tea and were very handy. I had five with me on my subsequent sledge trip. Besides these jobs the engineers trimmed down our pickaxes so that they would weigh not over two-and-a-half or three pounds. They put them in the portable forge in the engine-room, heated the iron and beat it down, and put on the steel tips afterwards. These pickaxes were regulation miners’ picks.
On the seventh and eighth the variable weather continued with occasional twilight of considerable intensity; the low barometer and high thermometer still prevailed. Our observations on the seventh, the last we were to take on shipboard, gave us our position as Lat. 72.11 N., Long. 174.36 W. The temperature dropped on the ninth; the sky, which was clear in the morning, became overcast by afternoon and the wind shifted from southeast to southwest. We were getting nearer the land and the ice was raftering in places with the pressure, so that I felt sure that something was going to happen before long. We continued our preparations for putting emergency supplies in condition to be handled quickly, putting tea tablets in tins made by the engineers, and twenty-two calibre cartridges in similar tins. Mannlicher cartridges we put up in packages of thin canvas, fifty to a package.
At five o’clock on the morning of the tenth I was awakened by a loud report like a rifle-shot. Then there came a tremor all through the ship. I was soon on deck. The watchman, who for that night was Brady, had already been overboard on the ice and I met him coming up the ice gangway to tell me what he had found. There was a small crack right at the stem of the ship, he said. I went there with him at once and found that the crack ran irregularly but in general northwesterly for about two hundred yards. At first it was very slight, although it was a clean and unmistakable break; in the course of half an hour, however, it grew to a foot in width and as the day wore on widened still more until it was two feet wide on an average.
By 10 A. M. there was a narrow lane of water off both bow and stern. The ship was now entirely free on the starboard side but still frozen fast in her ice-cradle on the port side; her head was pointed southwest. On account of the way in which the ice had split the ship was held in a kind of pocket; the wind, which was light and from the north in the earlier part of the day, hauled to the northwest towards afternoon and increased to a gale, with blinding snowdrift, and the sheet of ice on the starboard side began to move astern, only a little at a time. The ship felt no pressure, only slight shocks, and her hull was still untouched, for the open ends of the pocket fended off the moving ice, especially at the stern. It was clear to me, however, that as soon as the moving ice should grind or break off the points of these natural fenders there was a strong probability that the moving ice-sheet would draw nearer to the starboard side of the ship and, not unlike the jaws of a nut-cracker, squeeze her against the sheet in which she was frozen on the port side, particularly as the wind was attaining a velocity of forty-five miles an hour.