One good turn of fortune came when the fury of the gale was abated. But the icebergs drove on in the clutch of a racing current, a constant menace. A hundred times the stout ship pushed through between drifting masses of ice that closed their scintillant, clashing jaws behind her, thrilling those on deck with the nearness of complete disaster. As many times were the engines reversed in furious haste, to back the steel-clad adventurer from a closing trap that would have crushed her like a toy.
Here it was that the cool captain in command showed all his resourcefulness, had need for all the splendid seamanship and the reckless daring that had brought his ships unscathed through three voyages into the polar zones.
Fortunate was the foresight that had armed the ship for the dangers she was to meet. From her bow projected an immense ram of wrought steel, almost razor keen at its cutting edge. All around her sides she was rimmed with a protection of triple rails of the same metal, clamped fast to her hull, and set with powerful springs, to withstand the shock of impact with the floating ice. Ever her twin-screw propellers whirled within a sheltering hood of steel. She had been dismantled of many of her trappings and remodeled to conserve the two qualities most needed in her present straits—speed and strength.
Useless as he was in the management of the ship, Polaris spent four hours on deck to one in his cabin.
"Better to meet death up here in the free air, if death be fated for us, than to strangle down there like a trapped beast," he said to Zenas Wright. When perils thickened, he abandoned his cabin altogether, brought a huge bearskin on deck and slept there, when sleep he must.
Although in life's evening, the scientist was almost as active. For days Scoland seemed never to sleep at all. Under his guidance the Minnetonka pierced the dangers like a projectile launched from a cannon of the gods, and directed by a calm, clear mind that lived within it.
When they reached the lower end of Ross Sea a pale, uncertain light that shone in the north behind told them of the coming of the polar day. There a new and formidable obstacle confronted them. Where the sea narrowed to a three-mile channel, beyond which lay wider water, great ice floes had drifted in and barred the way. They were formed of drift and flat ice, of no great thickness, but lay acres in extent in a mighty jam. All along the edge of that field fretted and stormed the giant bergs that had come down with the tide.
Back and forth across the narrowed sea the Minnetonka steamed, playing her searchlights in vain. No passage was open. Scoland called a conference.
"There are two things we can do," he said. "We can hew ourselves a safe harbor and wait for the jam to break up, when we can fight our way through the channel with the bergs; or we can smash a way through ourselves with the ram and explosives. We can't remain as we are, for the big fellows are getting thicker. Every hour lost adds to the danger of being crushed in where we can't get out, perhaps of being sunk. Which shall it be?"
Lieutenant Everson, second in command of the Minnetonka, said nothing. Zenas Wright, who was a scientist first and a sailor very far second, said as much.