Adrift in the Arctic ice pack

by Elisha Kent Kane

The indications of winter were still becoming more and more marked. On the 11th, the sun rose but 9° at meridian; on the 15th but 6°; and on the 7th of November, at the same hour, it almost rested on the horizon. The daylight, however, was sometimes strangely beautiful. One day in particular, the 8th, a rosy tint diffused itself over every thing, shaded off a little at the zenith, but passing down from pink to violet, and from violet to an opalescent purple, that banded the entire horizon.

The moon made its appearance on the 13th of October. At first it was like a bonfire, warming up the ice with a red glare; but afterward, on the 15th, when it rose to the height of 4°, it silvered the hummocks and frozen leads, and gave a softened lustre to the snow, through which our two little brigs stood out in black and solitary contrast. The stars seemed to have lost their twinkle, and to shine with concentrated brightness as if through gimlet-holes in the cobalt canopy. The frost-smoke scarcely left the field of view. It generally hung in wreaths around the horizon; but it sometimes took eccentric forms; and one night, I remember, it piled itself into a column at the west, and Aquila flamed above it like a tall beacon-light. We were glad to note these fanciful resemblances to the aspects of a more kindly region; they withdrew us sometimes from the sullen realities of the world that encompassed us—ice, frost-smoke, and a threatening sky.

We had parhelia again more than once, but developed imperfectly; a mass of incandescence 22° from the sun, with prismatic coloring, but without the circular and radial appearances that had characterized it before. On the 27th, a partial paraselene was visible, the first we observed—merely the limbs of two broken arcs, destitute of prismatic tint, stretching like circumflexes at about 23° distance on each side the moon; the moon about 20° high, thermometer -10°, barometer 30.55, atmosphere hazy. The sky clearing shortly afterward, it shone out with increased beauty for a while, but died away as the haze disappeared.

The thermometer was now generally below the zero point, sometimes rising for a little while about noon a few degrees above it, once only as high as +13°. When there was no wind, even the lowest of its range was quite bearable; and while we were exercising actively, it was difficult to believe that our sensations could be so strikingly in contrast with the absolute temperature. But a breeze, or a pause of motion till we could raise the sextant to a star or make out some changing phasis of the ice-field, never failed to persuade us, and that feelingly, that the mercury was honest. Night after night the bed-clothes froze at our feet; and a poor copy of the New York Herald, that lay at the head of the captain’s bunk, was glazed with ice.

“November 8. Tempted by the overarching beauty of the sky, I started off this morning with Captain De Haven on a walk of inspection shoreward. The open water, frozen since October 2d, is now nearly two feet thick, and at this low temperature (-15°) it becomes hard and brittle as glass. Wherever the nipping has caught two of the floes, they have been driven with a force inconceivable one above the other, rising and falling until they now form a ridge fifteen or twenty feet high.

“The tension of the great field of ice over which we passed must have been enormous. It had a sensible curvature. On striking the surface with a walking-pole, loud reports issued like a pistol-shot, and lines of fissure radiated from the point of impact. It seemed as if the blow of an axe would sever the keystone, and break up by a shock the entire expanse. In one place the ice suddenly arched up like a bow while we were looking at it, burst into fragments, collapsed at the exterior margins of fracture, and by the work of a moment created a long barrier line of ruins ten feet high. Our position was one of peril. We had crossed two miles of ice. A change of tide relieved the strain, and we returned.

“The nearest break-up to our homestead floe is about one hundred and fifty yards off. It is now to the south; though our position, constantly changing, alters the bearing by the hour. Very many of the masses that compose it are as large as the grapery at home, two hundred feet long perhaps, and lifted up, barricade-fashion, as high as our second story windows.”

The next day our winter arrangements were completed. They were simple enough, and hardly worth describing in detail. A housing of thick felt was drawn completely over the deck, resting on a sort of ridge-pole running fore and aft, and coming down close at the sides. The rime and snow-drift in an hour or two made it nearly impervious to the weather. The cook’s galley stood on the kelson, under the main hatch; its stove-pipe rising through the housing above, and its funnel-shaped apparatus for melting snow attached below. The bulkheads between cabin and forecastle had been removed; and two stoves, one at each end of the berth-deck, distributed their heat among officers and seamen alike. We had of course a community of all manner of odors; and as our only direct ventilation was by the gangway, we had the certainty of a sufficient diversity of temperatures.

The exemption from gales, that has attracted the notice of other travelers in this region, had not yet been confirmed by our experience. On the contrary, our approach to Lancaster Sound, and the earlier part of our drift after we entered it, were marked by frequent storms. Some of these had all the sublimity that could belong to a mingled sense of danger and discomfort. They reminded me of the sand-storms of the Sahara. "The fine particles of snow flew by us in a continuous stream. When they met the unprotected face, the sensation was like the puncture of needles. Standing under the lee of our brig, and watching the drift as it scudded on the wings of the storm through the interval between the two vessels, the lines of sweeping snow were so unbroken that its filaments seemed woven into a mysterious tissue. Objects fifty yards off were invisible: no one could leave the vessels."