“The India-rubber boat inflated, and a few clothes stowed away, ready for a sudden break out; and all hands turn in for the night.
“December 1. There was a rude murmur in the night, that mingled its tones of admonition with the wind. But we are habituated pretty thoroughly to sounds of this sort, and they have ceased to disturb us. Walking after breakfast toward the northeast, to an ice-quarry, from which we have obtained our fresh water of late, we found that a water-crack we observed yesterday had undergone severe pressure during the night, and that the action was still going on. A low, hazy twilight just allowed us to distinguish near objects. A level, snow-covered surface was rising up in inclined planes or rudely undulating curves. These, breaking at their summits, fell off on each side in masses of twenty tons' weight. Tables of six feet in thickness by twenty of perpendicular height, and some of them fifteen yards in length, surging up into the misty air, heaving, rolling, tottering, and falling with a majestic deliberation worthy of the forces that impelled them. When a huge block would rise vertically, tremble for a moment, and topple over, you heard the heavy sough of the snow-padding that received it; but this was only the deep bass accompaniment to a wild, yet not unmusical chorus. I can not attempt to describe the sounds. There was the ringing clatter of ice, made friable by the intense cold and crumbling under lateral force; the low whine which the ice gives out when we cut it at right angles with a sharp knife, rising sometimes into a shriek, or sinking to the plaintive outcry of our night-hawk at home; the whirr of rapidly-urged machinery; the hum of multitudes: and all these mingled with tones that have no analogy among the familiar ones of unadventurous life.
“So slowly and regularly did these masses roll, rise, break, and fall, that, standing upon a broad table, ice-pole in air, we rolled when it rolled, rose when it rose, balanced when it broke, and jumped as it fell. What would our quiet people in brick houses say to such a ride? Temperature at 30° below zero.
“On deck; looming up in the very midst of the haze, land! so high and close on our port beam, that we felt like men under a precipice. We could see the vertical crevices in the limestone, the recesses contrasting in black shadow. What land is this? Is it the eastern line of Cape Riley, or have we reached Cape Ricketts?
“There is one thing tolerably certain: the Grinnell expedition is quite as likely to be searched for hereafter as to search. Poor Sir John Franklin! this night drift is an ugly omen.
“Do you remember, in the Spanish coasting craft, down about Barcelona and the Balearies, the queer little pictures of Saint Nicholas we used to see pasted up over the locker—a sort of mythic effigy, which the owner looked upon pretty much as some of our old commodores do the barometer, a mysterious something, which he sneers at in fair weather, but is sure, in the strong faith of ignorance, to appeal to in foul! Well, very much such a Saint Anthony have we down in the cabin here, staring us always in the face. Not a vermilion-daubed puerility, with a glory in Dutch leaf stretching from ear to ear; but a good, genuine, hearty representative of English flesh and blood, a mouth that speaks of strong energies as well as a kindly heart, and an eye—the other one is spoiled in the lithography—that looks stern will. Many a time in the night have I discoursed with him, as he looked out on me from his gutta percha frame—‘Sir John Franklin; presented by his wife;’ and sometimes I have imagined how and where I was yet to shake the glorious old voyager by the hand. I see him now while I am writing; his face is darkened by the lamp-smoke that serves us for daylight and air, and he seems almost disheartened. So far as help and hope of it are afloat in this little vessel, Sir John, well you may be!
“It is Sunday: we have had religious service as usual, and after it that relic of effete absurdity, the reading of the ‘Rules and Regulations.’
“We had the aurora about 7 P.M. The thermometer at -33° and falling; barometer, aneroid, 30°. 74; attached thermometer, 86°. Wind steady, W.N.W. The meteor resembled an illuminated cloud; illuminated, because seen against the deep blue night sky; otherwise it resembled the mackerel fleeces and mare’s tails of our summer skies at home.
“It began toward the northwestern horizon as an irregular flaring cloud, sometimes sweeping out into wreaths of stratus; sometimes a condensed opaline nebulosity, rising in a zone of clearly-defined whiteness, from 3° to 5° in breadth up to the zenith, and then arching to the opposite horizon. This zone resembled more a long line of white cirro-stratus than the auroral light of the systematic descriptions. There was no approach to coruscations, or even rectangular deviations from the axis of the zone. When it varied from a right line, its curvatures were waving and irregular, such as might be produced by wind, but having no relation to the observed air-currents at the earth’s surface. It passed from the due northwest, between the Pleiades and the Corona Borealis; the star of greatest magnitude in the latter of these constellations remaining in the centre, although its waving curves sometimes reached the Pleiades. At the zenith, its mean distance from the Polar Star was 7° south, and it passed down, increasing in intensity, near Vega, in Lyra, to the southeast.
“There was throughout the arc no marked seat of greatest intensity. Around the Corona of the north, its light was more diffused. The zone appeared narrowed at the zenith, and bright and clear, without marked intermission, to the southeast. The frost-smoke was in smoky banks to the northwest; but the aurora did not seem to be affected by it, and the compass remained constant.