On the debit side, the temperatures reached unbelievable depths. 57° below zero was recorded by our thermometers (the spirit ones, for the mercurial bulbs froze solidly at around -40°). The pack ice reached thicknesses of thirty-five and forty feet below the water where underrunning floes, freezing together, consolidated into a kind of glacial layer cake. Contemplation of these formations, measurable whenever the floes near us cracked apart, gave a gloomy aspect to the ship’s chances of ever getting free of the pack. And the irregular and formidable surface of the pack also gave us cause for thought, now that in the growing daylight we could see in what state the upheaval of January 19th had left the ice around us. Sledging across the pack was impossible; as soon might one think of getting from the Bronx to Brooklyn by dragging a team of dogs and a sledge over the Manhattan housetops. Here and there, conditions were even worse. Sharvell, with the impressionability of youth, came in from an exploring trip with eyes popping to tell me,
“Say, chief, five miles north o’ ’ere, the ice is standing in mountains ’igher nor our mast’eads!”
“Yes, Sharvell, it’s quite likely.”
“Shall I tell the skipper, sir, or will you?” he asked anxiously.
“Why bother him about it?”
“If ’e knew, it’d save work, sir. ’E’d quit ’aving the bug’unter clean an’ mount that big walrus ’ead with the tusks that ’e’s so busy fixing up. ’Cause when that ice gets to us, sir, we’re through, an’ it’ll be a terrible lot o’ work for us sailors dragging that ’eavy walrus ’ead over the pack. ’E better quit now, an’ ’e will, sir, when I tells ’im abaht them mountains of ice!”
But I told Sharvell to forget it, for I doubted that with all his other worries, the captain would be much exercised over mountains five miles off.
Aside from the aspect of the ice, we had troubles closer home. Especially forward in the deckhouse and crew spaces, the inside of the ship which now we had to keep above the freezing point to save our pumps from damage, was damp and disagreeable beyond expression, with moisture condensing on all cold surfaces and dripping from the beams into the men’s bunks.
Finally to deepen our gloom, Danenhower failed to respond favorably to treatment, and the doctor had to perform several more operations on his eye, coming at last to the conclusion that Dan must, till we escaped from the ice, remain a chronic invalid confined in darkness to his cabin, with no great hope of saving his sight even should he then get back to happier surroundings and decent hospital facilities.
Oddly enough through all this, after the first week’s struggle with the leak, we continued our scientific and meteorological observations. The captain clung to that routine as to a lifeline, which perhaps to him mentally it was, constituting his solitary claim to conducting a scientific expedition. For of explorations and geographical discoveries there were none; on the contrary instead of a steady drift northward which might uncover new lands or at least get us to higher latitudes, we shuffled aimlessly about with the pack, occasionally drifting northward for some weeks to De Long’s obvious delight, only to have the drift then reversed and to his intense depression of spirits, to turn out some clear morning to find himself gazing once again across the pack at the familiar mountainous outline of the north side of distant Wrangel Land. But after March, even this sight of far-off land, depressing as it was from its associations, was denied us, for as the season advanced the pack, still zigzagging over the polar sea as aimlessly as ever, failed to get quite so far south again; from that time on we saw land no more and the world for us became just one vast unbroken field of broken ice.