So ended our holiday season—a dismal Christmas and a worse New Year’s, leaving us with the temperature starting downward from -40° F. to face whatever new the pack had to offer.
January drew along, bringing gales, biting clouds of flying ice particles, and deeper cold. The ice, getting denser and denser as it grew colder, shrank, and about the middle of the month cracked open, forming little canals on both sides, leaving us in a small island of ice hardly a shiplength across. We contemplated that dubiously, for if any pressure came from the pack about us, now forty inches thick, we would receive almost directly the thrust of the pressing floes with no protection at all. But luckily no pressure came before the extraordinary cold rushed to our rescue by freezing the water which welled up in the fissures. The first half of the month, therefore, went by with only the usual monotonous groaning and rumbling of the pack and occasional nips on our hull to keep us in mind of our position.
January 19, 1880, was on the other hand a red letter day for us. In the silence following the subsidence of a gale which was in no way worse than many another we had experienced, for no reason apparent to us the floe into which we were frozen began early in the morning to crack and split in every direction. Promptly the anchor watch sent word below, and as usual, we all came tumbling up on deck, there to remain stockstill in our tracks as awestruck we watched in the unearthly half twilight of the Arctic a sight entirely new to us.
North, south, east, or west, it was the same. In a large circle surrounding the ship, the surface of the pack was everywhere heaving up into a ring of rugged mountains high above the level of the sea! Huge masses of ice, large as ocean liners, pitched and rolled on the crests, while reverberating from all about came a shrieking and a screeching from the tumbling ice that froze the very marrow in our bones. Like the jaws of a slowly closing vise, that circle drew in on us—ahead, astern, on either beam—whichever way we looked there was an approaching mountain of ice steadily, relentlessly advancing on the Jeannette across the small expanse of yet unbroken pack, while on that undulating ring with cracks streaking across it like forked lightning, the floes parted with roars like thunder, forming a deep bass background for the “high scream” of the flintlike ice of grating floebergs, the whole echoing across the pack to us in a veritable devil’s symphony of hideous sounds.
The ring was still a quarter of a mile away.
On the bridge, Captain De Long, eyeing it, cupped his hands to try to make himself heard above the din, bellowed to those on the spar deck below,
“All hands! Stations for abandon ship!”
Listlessly we moved to our stations abreast the loaded sledges on the poop, but what could we do? Enclosed on all sides by that shrinking circle of tumbling ice, where could we go for safety when we abandoned ship? Even unincumbered by sledges or knapsacks there was not a chance in the world of scaling the slopes of those moving mountains of ice against the stream of floebergs cascading down their sides. Flight was impossible, annihilation certain!
Dunbar was by my side. With a seagoing eye he scanned the little plain of unbroken pack still surrounding us, then muttered,
“That ice is approaching us at the rate of a fathom a minute. It’s still sixty fathoms off. In sixty minutes, chief, we’ll all pass over to the Great Beyond!”