With this feeling came an increasing desire to communicate with our late associates of Union Bay. I had volunteered some weeks before to make this traverse, and had busied myself with arrangements to carry it out. The Rescue’s India-rubber boat was to carry the party through the leads, and, once at the shore, three men were to press on with a light tent and a few days' provisions. The project, impracticable perhaps from the first, was foiled for a time by a vexatious incident. I had made my tent of thin cotton cloth, so that it weighed, when completed, but fourteen pounds, soaking it thoroughly in a composition of caoutchouc, ether, and linseed oil, the last in quantity. After it was finished and nearly dried, I wrapped it up in a dry covering of coarse muslin, and placed it for the night in a locked closet, at some distance from the cook’s galley, where the temperature was between 80° and 90°. In the morning it was destroyed. The wrapper was there, retaining its form, and not discolored; but the outer folds of the tent were smoking; and, as I unrolled it, fold after fold showed more and more marks of combustion, till at the centre it was absolutely charred. There was neither flame nor spark.
In a few days more the tumult of the ice-fields had made all chance of reaching the shore hopeless. But the meantime was not passed without efforts.
“October 23. I started with a couple of men on another attempt to reach the shore. After five miles of walking, with recurring alternations of climbing, leaping, rolling, and soaking, we found that the ice had driven out from the coast, and a black lane of open water stopped our progress. This is the seventh attempt to cross the ice, all meeting with failure from the same cause. The motion of ice, influenced by winds, tides, and currents, keeps constantly abrading the shore-line. Any outward drift, of course, makes an irregular lane of water, which a single night converts into ice; the returning floes heap this in tables one over another; and the next outward set carries off the floes again, crowned with their new increment.
“The haze gathered around us about an hour after starting, and the hummocks were so covered with snow that the chasms often received us middle deep. We walked five hours and a half, making in all but eleven miles; and even then were at least a mile from the beach.
“At one portion of our route, the ice had the crushed sugar character; the lumps varying in size from a small cantaloupe to a water-melon, but hard as frozen water at zero ought to be. Over this stuff we walked in tiptoe style—and a very miserable style it was.
“At another place, for a mile and a half, we trod on the fractured angles of upturned ice. Call these curbstones; toss them in mad confusion, always taking care that their edges shall be uppermost; dust them over with flour cooled down to zero; and set a poor wretch loose, in the centre of a misty circle, to try for a pathway over them to the shore!
“At another place, break-water stones, great quarried masses of ice, let you up and down, but down oftener than up. At another time, you travel over rounded dunes of old seasoned hummock, covered with slippery glaze. Again, it is over snow, recent and soft, or snow, recent and sufficiently crusty to bear you five paces and let you through the sixth—a trial alike to temper and legs.
“At last, to crown the deliciæ of our Arctic walk, we come to a long meadow of recent ice, just enough covered with snow to keep you from slipping, and just thin enough to make it elastic as a polka floor. Over this, with a fine bracing air, every nerve tingling with the exercise, and the hoary rime whitening your beard, you walk with a delightful sense of ease and enjoyment.
“One of my attendants had both ears frost-bitten; the whole external cartilage (Pinna) was of tallow, jaundiced. Snow-rubbing set him right. I have ordered the men to take ear-rings from their ears. Wilson, a Livournese, rejoiced in a couple of barbaric pendules, doubtless of bad gold, but good conducting power.”