If the intense cold was more endurable in winter quarters than some of us had anticipated, it was altogether a different thing camping out away from the ship on a sledge party. Then, with food and clothing limited by the sledge-weights, with no warmer bed than a snowdrift, and no possibility of changing ice-saturated clothes, cold, far less than that experienced in winter quarters, becomes a real hardship, and its miseries can hardly be exaggerated.
During the period of intense cold, we amused ourselves with many experiments on its effects on various substances. Ordinary spirit, such as brandy or rum, froze into crystalline paste. Even the alcohol in our astronomer’s spirit levels acted sluggishly. Glycerine became as hard as soap; mercury remained frozen for ten or twelve days at a time. Everyone knows the danger of handling metal at low temperatures. The danger depends greatly upon the state of the hand; if it is at all moist or soft, it will adhere, and soon be dangerously frost-bitten; but if quite dry, we could, for experiment sake, take a mitt off and turn the brass handle of our outer door without experiencing anything more serious than a sudden sting, which was like neither heat nor cold. It was even possible to melt a small fragment of mercury on the naked palm without leaving a trace of injury.
We had few opportunities of noting how the lower animals bore the cold. Our Eskimo dogs evidently suffered much at times, but never learnt to use a snow-kennel built to shelter them. Some of the bitches had sumptuous apartments constructed for them on deck, in the vain hope that comfort would make them more careful of their offspring. One old dog, Master Bruin, who had no tail to coil round his neck when he went to sleep, and was perhaps more susceptible to cold on that account, discovered that the magnetic observatory was warmer than the star-lit side of a hummock, and would willingly have taken up his quarters there if it had been allowed. Nellie, the retriever, always took her daily exercise, but slept between decks in the warmth. Pussy paid one visit to the deck just to see what Arctic winter was like; but she hopped about shaking one foot after another, and sneezed so incessantly that she seemed in danger of choking, and had to be taken below again.
Neither rats nor mice had come north with us. Three of our useless carrier pigeons had reached winter quarters alive, fluttering round the ship and perching on the frozen rigging, but none survived long. It was in the depth of winter, when the land seemed utterly lifeless and deserted, that the first living inhabitant of Floeberg Beach presented himself on board our ship. Midnight was past, and one officer alone lingered beside the main-deck stove, watching the red light flickering on a much-weathered musk ox skull that had been picked up on shore and was now being dried before the fire. Suddenly he falls on his knees and stares intently at the bone, then rushes to the naturalist’s cabin, and reappears with that gentleman lightly clad in scarlet flannel, and bearing the first bottles and specimen boxes that came to hand. A little black spider, revived by the warmth, had crept out of a small hole in the skull, but retreated again before he could be bottled. Two weary hours elapsed ere he reappeared, but the watchers were at length rewarded, and he was triumphantly captured, packed away, dated, and labelled in the naturalist’s store, commonly known as “South Kensington.”
At that time we had an unreasoning impression that no live thing could endure actual reduction to the temperatures of Arctic night. But cold is by no means so deadly. The mosquitoes, butterflies, and dragon-flies of brief Arctic summer are assuredly not all new arrivals. A good example of vitality in the vegetable kingdom was afforded by the wheat left at “Hall’s Rest” by the ill-fated “Polaris.” In spite of the cold of five winters, it was still alive when we found it. Sown at Discovery Bay, it germinated freely, and, as I write, some of it carried home with the ships promises to reproduce itself in a fair crop of bearded “Polaris wheat.” Even at the Polar Sea, and in the midnight of winter, the air holds spores of moulds, and many of them grew rapidly when carried into the warmth inside the ship. It is hard to say what temperatures would kill such primitive organisms—in fact, so far as our little experience goes, Sir William Thomson’s “moss-grown fragment of another world” might have carried the germ of terrestrial life safely enough through the chills of stellar space.
The temperature of winter was by no means steady; on the contrary, its progressive fall was interrupted by many sudden rises.
In ordinary cold weather the sky was wonderfully clear, and the weather wonderfully calm. Many a time, as we walked at daily exercise up and down our half-mile of shadowy snow, with nothing to look at but the stars, the whole sky was absolutely vapourless, from the pole star in the zenith to Orion or the three stars of Aquila just skirting along the horizon. Sometimes a faint fleecy mist, hardly distinguishable from one of our feeble auroras, would pass overhead; but round piled-up masses of cloud, such as are common in southern skies, were never seen.
A change rarely came unexpectedly. Often for days beforehand “mare’s tail” clouds, with a hard wavy outline, would float up against the faint moonlight in the southern sky, and spread themselves into wings and fingers over Robeson Channel. Then, with a sudden gust from the south, and a mist of flying snow from the land, the temperature would rise. Mercurial thermometers would thaw, and soon register as faithfully as spirit instruments beside them. After a while the wind begins to come more and more from the westward. The thermometers remain high, but the wind feels piercingly cold wherever it can find a way inside our sealskins. While the storm lasts, it is impossible to go outside the ship. Whirling snow hides everything. Even on deck exercise is uncomfortable, for powdery snow floats in through every chink in the carefully-closed tent-like awnings. Notes on the instruments on shore have to be suspended, for no one could force a way as far as the beach through the darkness and whirlwind of drifting snow; and if they could, they would find the observatories so buried that it would take several hours to dig out their doorways. Even the thermometers within seventeen feet of the ship were not always easily registered. Upon one occasion the officer in charge of the meteorological work had to confess himself beaten, after two determined attempts to reach and register them. In twenty-four hours or more the storm lessens, and gradually dies away to a gentle breeze from the northward; and with it the temperature declines, until it is as cold or colder than before.
A striking change of this sort came in December. From thirty-five degrees below zero, the thermometers rose rapidly with a gusty southerly wind till the temperature reached the freezing-point. This strangely warm wind cannot have travelled far in contact with the frozen earth, for it was being rapidly cooled. The quick changes, with every puff of wind, suggested the advisability of trying what the temperature was in the air overhead, and it was discovered that the higher we climbed up the rigging the warmer it got. The main-top was three degrees warmer than the deck at the same instant, and a thermometer secured high aloft in the cross-trees actually registered + 36°—a temperature which can hardly be accounted for by supposing that the wind was warmed by passing over pools of open water in Robeson Channel or Smith’s Sound.
At times, when the air was undergoing rapid changes of this sort, it was striking to find that, by boring a hole into the ice with an auger, it was possible to get down past zero, and reach the temperature of yesterday or last week before coming to + 28°.3, the steady temperature of the Polar Sea beneath.