At one o’clock in the morning of 23rd July, the pack broke from the shore under the influence of a strong wind, and left pools of water outside our barrier bergs, but the ice still crushed close on Cape Rawson, and when the wind lessened, all closed in. Again, on the evening of 26th a space of water formed outside the bergs, and in order to be ready when an opportunity for a rush southward should offer, we set about breaking a channel through the floes between the ship and the nearest gap in the wall of grounded bergs. The ice was far too thick for even our longest and heaviest ice-saws, but with the aid of three hundred pounds of gunpowder, judiciously disposed in torpedoes made of tin cans and lime-juice jars, it was shattered, piece by piece, and as each mass broke off and floated free, it was pushed out to seaward by the united efforts of the whole crew wielding levers and ice-poles.
While we lay waiting for a path southward to open, we could not but look forward to the ordeal before us with a good deal of anxiety. Once round Cape Rawson, there would be no turning back. Thirty miles of shelterless cliff must be passed before we reached Lincoln Bay, and for the whole of that distance the ship would have to run the gauntlet through a mere fissure between a perpendicular wall of ice-foot, and a moving, irresistible mass of floe eighty feet and more in thickness. If fortune did not favour us, the destruction of the ship was certain, and every preparation was made to meet such an eventuality. Provisions and sledges were piled on deck ready to launch on the floes, and notes and sketches and carefully-selected specimens were packed into the smallest possible bundles, so that they could be pushed hastily into a pocket if it should be necessary to desert the ship. Early on the morning of 31st, an unusual sound awoke us; a strong breeze whistled and sung in the rigging overhead, and a low vibration, like the bass notes of an organ, filled the ship. It came from our heating boilers—steam was being got up. On deck one glance round told us that the time had come. A long black canal of water skirted the coast as far as we could see towards Cape Rawson, and the rush through it must be made now or never. Screw and rudder were already down in their places, and the sails “bent,” ready to be loosed. A few strong charges of gunpowder shook the ship from her icy bed. The order “full speed ahead” was given. The screw flung a stream of foaming water over the ice, and the ship moved slowly forward into the channel blasted for her. Then, as she swung round under steam and sail through the narrow portal in the wall of bergs, we caught our last glimpse of Floeberg Beach. Shadows of clouds chased each other down over the brown slopes. The headstone of Petersen’s grave stood out like a solitary human figure, and a piece of canvas fluttered on a pole over “the doctor’s garden,” where mustard and cress were just beginning to appear above ground. Our tall cairn on top of the hill remained in sight for a few minutes longer, then the bend of the coast shut it from view. At full speed we flew past the well-known headlands so often painfully rounded with tired crew and heavy sledge, past the ice-rounded rocks of Cape Rawson, the tower-like buttresses of Half-way Cliffs, and the dark precipices of Black Cape; but before we got to Cape Union our career was cut short—the angle of a floe lay right across our narrow path, and we had to wait in anxious inactivity till the next tide moved it off and let us slip past. All that night and next morning, the floes, closing in behind us, literally hunted us along the coast from one little hollow of the ice-foot to another. Over and over again the ship had to be pushed and wriggled through desperately narrow gaps to avoid the closing floes behind her. Several times there was so little space to pass that our boats, hoisted high up at the davits, scraped along the perpendicular wall of ice-foot. The accompanying etching is from a sketch made near midnight on 2nd August, looking back along our track, but no sketch can convey an idea of the chief feature of the scene—the majestic and irresistible motion of the ice-fields.
RUNNING THE GAUNTLET.
Two days later, when we lay walled in by bergs in “Shift Rudder Bay,” we could look back past Cape Beechey into the strait from which we had escaped, and watch the tight pack of ice islands streaming south from Robeson Channel into Hall’s Sea, without the distracting influence of immediate danger, and we one and all came to the conclusion that, as an impressive example of magnificent and imposing force, no other natural phenomena could equal it. Our little vessel went very near leaving her bones on the shores of this same bay. When we reached it, the ice was closing in. A line of grounded bergs lay along the beach, with a gap in it just large enough to admit the ship. Into this we thrust her, feeling thankful for so good and opportune a shelter, but unfortunately the gateway of our castle had no portcullis to close behind us, the ice followed us in, and, foot by foot, forced the ship up on the ice-foot, heeling her over and damaging her rudder. At four in the morning the pressure suddenly relaxed, and the ship fell two feet, but remained imprisoned. For days not a patch of water was to be seen, though the whole pack moved south with one tide and halted with the next. On 8th August it blew a gale, and the ice swept past with increased speed. One large, dome-shaped fragment of polar floe crushed through our gateway, and though it grounded long before getting near the ship, the pressure behind was so enormous that it continued to advance, shovelling round lumps of ice as big as a house on either side of it, and rising out of the water as it did so, till it came against the side of the ship. Now we were nipped in earnest. First a rattle on deck, exactly like a hail-storm overhead, as the pitch cracked and flew out of the seams; then a crunch as the ship yielded, then an interval, and then another horrible vibrating crunch—for downright unpleasantness, not even the tear of a shot through a ship’s timbers can compare with such a sound—but the decks did not buckle up under our feet, and the sides did not collapse. The “Alert” was evidently not fated to be destroyed in that way. Nevertheless, when the crush ceased, her position was far from comfortable; she was raised four feet by the stern and completely imprisoned in a citadel of bergs, apparently as hopelessly walled in as she well could be. There might be oceans of water outside, but how was she to get out? One chance only remained. It might be possible to make our jailor berg float by digging off the whole top of it; so all hands set to work, and for three days all that gunpowder, pick, and shovel could do was done. Time was everything, for the tide fell lower every day. At last our enemy gave up the fight, floated up, turned partly over, and sailed out through the gate, considerably smaller than when he came in. Victory came just in time; the ice opened before us across the bay and down the coast. Ice navigation is never very rapid work, every mile has to be fought for. We were only twenty-five miles from the “Discovery,” but it took two days of sleepless activity to accomplish that distance, and it was late on the evening of the 11th when we rounded Distant Cape and caught sight of our sister ship.
ESKIMO BIRD-SHELTER.