“We changed our course, ran in, and determined to convince ourselves of their character, and perhaps to speak them. The fog, however, closed around them. Still we stood on. Presently, a flaw of wind drove off the vapor; and upon eagerly gazing at the spot, now less than three miles off, no vessels were to be seen.
“I can hardly comment upon this strange circumstance. It was a complete puzzle to all of us. Refractive distortion plays strange freaks in these Arctic solitudes; but this could hardly be one of its illusions. Four persons saw the same image with the naked eye, and the glass confirmed the details. There was no disagreement. As plainly as I see these letters did I see those brigs; and although we supposed the Lady Franklin and Sophia to be ice-caught at or toward Cape Walker, I did not hesitate to name them as the vessels before us. Ten minutes of obscurity, we sailing directly toward them, a sudden interval of brightness—and they had passed away.
“Some large hummocks of grounded ice were near them, and we try to convince ourselves that they may have been closed in by changes in our relative positions; but this is hard to believe, for we should have seen their upper spars above the ice. I gazed long and attentively with our Fraünhofer telescope, at three miles’ distance, but saw absolutely no semblance of what a few minutes before was so apparent.”
We were obliged several times the next day to bore through the young ice; for the low temperature continued, and our wind lulled under Cape Hotham. The night gave us now three hours of complete darkness. It was danger to run on, yet equally danger to pause. Grim winter was following close upon our heels; and even the captain, sanguine and fearless in emergency as he always proved himself, as he saw the tenacious fields of sludge and pancake thickening around us, began to feel anxious. Mine was a jumble of sensations. I had been desirous to the last degree that we might remain on the field of search, and could hardly be dissatisfied at what promised to realize my wish. Yet I had hoped that our wintering would be near our English friends, that in case of trouble or disease we might mutually sustain each other. But the interval of fifty miles between us, in these inhospitable deserts, was as complete a separation as an entire continent; and I confess that I looked at the dark shadows closing around Barlow’s Inlet, the prison from which we cut ourselves on the seventh, just six days before, with feelings as sombre as the landscape itself.
The sound of our vessel crunching her way through the new ice is not easy to be described. It was not like the grinding of the old formed ice, nor was it the slushy scraping of sludge. We may all of us remember, in the skating frolics of early days, the peculiar reverberating outcry of a pebble, as we tossed it from us along the edges of an old mill-dam, and heard it dying away in echoes almost musical. Imagine such a tone as this, combined with the whir of rapid motion, and the rasping noise of close-grained sugar. I was listening to the sound in my little den, after a sorrowful day, close upon zero, trying to warm up my stiffened limbs. Presently it grew less, then increased, then stopped, then went on again, but jerking and irregular; and then it waned, and waned, and waned away to silence.
Down came the captain: “Doctor, the ice has caught us: we are frozen up.” On went my furs at once. As I reached the deck, the wind was there, blowing stiff, and the sails were filled and puffing with it. It was not yet dark enough to hide the smooth surface of ice that filled up the horizon, holding the American expedition in search of Sir John Franklin imbedded in its centre. There we were, literally frozen tight in the mid-channel of Wellington’s Straits.
“September 15. The change of tide, or, rather, those diurnal changes in the movement of the ice which seem to be indirectly connected with it, gave us a little while before noon a partial opening in the solid ice around us. We made by hard work about a mile, and were then more fast than ever. The ice alongside will now bear a man: the wind, however, is hauling around to the westward. With a strong northwester, there might still be a hope for us.
“This afternoon, at 6h. 20m., a large spheroidal mass was seen floating in the air at an unknown distance to the north. It undulated for a while over the ice-lined horizon of Wellington Channel; and after a little while, another, smaller than the first, became visible a short distance below it. They receded with the wind from the southward and eastward, but did not disappear for some time. Captain De Haven at first thought it a kite; but, independently of the difficulty of imagining a kite flying without a master, and where no master could be, its outline and movement convinced me it was a balloon. The Resolute dispatched a courier balloon on the 2d; but that could never have survived the storms of the past week. I therefore suppose it must have been sent up by some English vessel to the west of us.
“I make a formal note of this circumstance, trivial as it may be; for at first Franklin rose to my mind, as possibly signalizing up Wellington Channel.”