“Hey, brother!” I cautioned, “easy on taking in so much longitude in your thanks. Better wait till you see how it works. I’ll guarantee the machinery on this ship, but God himself won’t guarantee the men!” and with that I took my departure and returned to my evaporator, leaving the captain to redraft his order for the medical examinations.
To a degree, it worked. Collins, who it seems had submitted a written protest in addition to expressing himself so freely orally, when he read the revised order asked leave to withdraw his objection, and submitted himself (though very sullenly) to the examination which Dr. Ambler carried out in the privacy of his cabin. And the captain, who, boiling under Collins’ insolence, had been ready to hang him for it, calmed down despite the fact that in a measure Collins had won, and accepted the situation, treating Collins as courteously as if nothing had ever arisen.
Collins, however, not appreciating his luck, failed to reciprocate. Ever since the bear hunt incident, he had refused to ask the captain’s permission to go on the ice, staying aboard except when his routine observatory duties (and now the enforced exercise order) gave him the opportunity to leave the ship without asking. Instead, he had ostentatiously paced the deck, indulging in what he was pleased to inform us was “a silent protest,” which obviously gave him great satisfaction, though why I don’t know for De Long diplomatically took the sting out of that performance by totally ignoring it. Now Collins withdrew still further into his shell, avoiding the captain altogether except when duty made it impossible, and what was worse for him, taking to avoiding the rest of us also when he conveniently could, a proceeding which hardly added to the sociability of the wardroom mess. He even refused to say “Good morning” to any of us when first we greeted him in the messroom, and this boorishness soon put him completely beyond the pale of our little society.
Queerly enough, Collins now began associating almost exclusively with the very seamen with whom he took such violent objection to being classed, spending most of his time with my fireman Bartlett, and retailing to him and thus to the crew generally, practically every bit of wardroom gossip that he heard. Such a situation was hardly desirable aboard ship, and De Long endeavored to put an end to it by privately conveying to our meteorologist the information that such association was decidedly contrary to naval custom and that it was beneath his dignity as an officer so to consort with enlisted men. But the captain’s friendly admonition only drew more black looks from Collins, leaving De Long more perplexed than ever over Collins who refused to comport himself either as officer or seaman, and leaving Collins with his persecution mania flaring up even more fiercely.
December dragged along. The ice around us kept freezing thicker and thicker under the intense cold. On the surface, the pack held together, but despite that, kept us uneasy. Night and day (by the clock, that is, for so far as light went, it was always night for us except for a semi-twilight around noon) even in calm weather we were likely to be disturbed by noises like the beating of the paddle wheels of innumerable steamers and by occasional terrifying shocks on our hull, all of which kept us jumpy. At first we had no explanation for this uncanny state of affairs, the pack around us showing no movement and the ship being solidly enough frozen in.
But Dunbar finally solved it for us. As he pointed it out, evidently we were now suffering from a bombardment of underrunning floes. Considerable masses of ice thrust under the pack in the November breakups were kept constantly in motion by the current beneath the refrozen surface. They bumped along as best they could under its ragged contour, giving that paddle wheel effect, and naturally enough when one collided with our submerged hull, giving us the unpleasant sensation of having struck a rock.
An understanding of the situation, while removing the mystery, did not greatly help our peace of mind. None too sure in the light of our past experiences, of the solidity of the newly frozen pack, we were forever standing by for an emergency with sledges, boats, knapsacks, and provisions ready to go over the side. The monotony of continually expecting trouble with none of the excitement of actually seeing things happening, had its own peculiar effect on us, making sound sleep impossible, killing our appetites, and leaving us restless, listless, and haggard, a condition which the severe physical discomforts of our situation naturally aggravated.
Still, for all our nervousness, we began to note some strange things, the results of the intense cold which descended on us. The atmosphere, practically free of moisture, was startlingly clear, and never have I seen such brilliant stars as shined down on us from those December Arctic skies. Then (owing perhaps to the increased density of the cold air) sounds on the ice traveled unusual distances and boomed and reverberated as if from an overhead dome or the roof of a mammoth cave. And the auroras, shimmering across the sky in a dance of vivid colors, were indescribably beautiful. But what struck us most, around thirty degrees below zero, was the almost unbelievable effect of the cold on the ice itself. Subjected to a temperature far below its freezing point, the ice assumed a flinty hardness and strength entirely different from its normal state. The floes grating against each other, instead of crumbling under pressure, gave out an unearthly high-pitched screech. And when we went out with picks or axes to dig away the ice in the fire hole under our stern, granite itself could not have been more effective than that cold ice in turning the edges and blunting the points of our tools.
Finally there was another effect of the extremely low temperature which most of all racked our nerves. Standing, sitting, or sleeping, who can accustom himself to having pistols unexpectedly discharged practically in his ears? Yet we were constantly exposed to such nervous shocks. For all over the ship, the iron fastenings of our planking and our timbers, contracting abnormally from temperatures never expected by the builders, compressed the wood under the bolt heads as the iron shrank till the wood, finally able to stand no more, suddenly snapped with a noise like a pistol shot. And so startling was each such explosion in one’s ears, so like a pistol discharge, that even the thousandth time it happened, involuntarily I jumped as badly as the first time I ever heard it.
Even the poor dogs suffered unexpected trials and I well believe that to their canine souls, their difficulties were quite as trying as ours. Like Dunbar, I had little natural sympathy with the vicious brutes and saw little value in their presence, but having been to some degree a party to transporting them from their usual habitat, I could not but feel some responsibility for their new troubles. And queerly enough it fell to my lot as engineer partly to relieve them.