“The cold came upon us gradually. The first thing that really struck me was the freezing up of our water-casks, the drip-candle appearance of the bung-holes, and our inability to lay the tin cup down for a five-minutes' pause without having its contents made solid. Next came the complete inability to obtain drink without manufacturing it. For a long time we had collected our water from the beautiful fresh pools of the icebergs and floes; now we had to quarry out the blocks in flinty, glassy lumps, and then melt it in tins for our daily drink.
“By-and-by the sludge which we passed through as we traveled became pancakes and snow-balls. We were glued up. Yet, even as late as the 11th of September, I collected a flowering Potentilla from Barlow’s Inlet. But now any thing moist or wet began to strike me as something to be looked at—a curious, out-of-the-way production, like the bits of broken ice round a can of mint-julep. Our decks became dry, and studded with botryoidal lumps of dirty foot-trodden ice. The rigging had nightly accumulations of rime, and we learned to be careful about coiled ropes and iron work. On the 4th of October we had a mean temperature below zero.
“By this time our little entering hatchway had become so complete a mass of icicles, that we had to give it up, and resort to our winter door-way. The opening of a door was now the signal for a gush of smoke-like vapor: every stove-pipe sent out clouds of purple steam; and a man’s breath looked like the firing of a pistol on a small scale.
“All our eatables became laughably consolidated, and after different fashions, requiring no small experience before we learned to manage the peculiarities of their changed condition. Thus, dried apples became one solid breccial mass of impacted angularities, a conglomerate of sliced chalcedony. Dried peaches the same. To get these out of the barrel, or the barrel out of them, was a matter impossible. We found, after many trials, that the shortest and best plan was to cut up both fruit and barrel by repeated blows with a heavy axe, taking the lumps below to thaw. Saur-kraut resembled mica, or rather talcose slate. A crowbar with chiseled edge extracted the laminæ badly; but it was perhaps the best thing we could resort to.
“Sugar formed a very funny compound. Take q. s. of cork raspings, and incorporate therewith another q. s. of liquid gutta percha or caoutchouc, and allow to harden: this extemporaneous formula will give you the brown sugar of our winter cruise. Extract with the saw; nothing but the saw will suit. Butter and lard, less changed, require a heavy cold chisel and mallet. Their fracture is conchoidal, with hæmatitic (iron-ore pimpled) surface. Flour undergoes little change, and molasses can at -28° be half scooped, half cut by a stiff iron ladle.
“Pork and beef are rare specimens of Florentine mosaic, emulating the lost art of petrified visceral monstrosities seen at the medical schools of Bologna and Milan: crowbar and handspike! for at -30° the axe can hardly chip it. A barrel sawed in half, and kept for two days in the caboose house at +76°, was still as refractory as flint a few inches below the surface. A similar bulk of lamp oil, denuded of the staves, stood like a yellow sandstone roller for a gravel walk.
“Ices for the dessert come of course unbidden, in all imaginable and unimaginable variety. I have tried my inventive powers on some of them. A Roman punch, a good deal stronger than the noblest Roman ever tasted, forms readily at -20°. Some sugared cranberries, with a little butter and scalding water, and you have an impromptu strawberry ice. Many a time at those funny little jams, that we call in Philadelphia ‘parties,’ where the lady-hostess glides with such nicely-regulated indifference through the complex machinery she has brought together, I have thought I noticed her stolen glance of anxiety at the cooing doves, whose icy bosoms were melting into one upon the supper-table before their time. We order these things better in the Arctic. Such is the ‘composition and fierce quality’ of our ices, that they are brought in served on the shaft of a hickory broom; a transfixing rod, which we use as a stirrer first and a fork afterward. So hard is this terminating cylinder of ice, that it might serve as a truncheon to knock down an ox. The only difficulty is in the processes that follow. It is the work of time and energy to impress it with the carving-knife, and you must handle your spoon deftly, or it fastens to your tongue. One of our mess was tempted the other day by the crystal transparency of an icicle to break it in his mouth; one piece froze to his tongue, and two others to his lips, and each carried off the skin: the thermometer was at -28°.
“Thus much for our Arctic grub. I need not say that our preserved meats would make very fair cannon-balls, canister shot!
“Now let us start out upon a walk, clothed in well-fashioned Arctic costume. The thermometer is, say -25°, not lower, and the wind blowing a royal breeze, but gently.
“Close the lips the first minute or two, and admit the air suspiciously through nostril and mustache. Presently you breathe in a dry, pungent, but gracious and agreeable atmosphere. The beard, eyebrow, eye-lashes, and the downy pubescence of the ears, acquire a delicate, white, and perfectly-enveloping cover of venerable hoar-frost. The mustache and under lip form pendulous beads of dangling ice. Put out your tongue, and it instantly freezes to this icy crusting, and a rapid effort and some hand aid will be required to liberate it. The less you talk, the better. Your chin has a trick of freezing to your upper jaw by the luting aid of your beard; even my eyes have often been so glued, as to show that even a wink may be unsafe. As you walk on, you find that the iron-work of your gun begins to penetrate through two coats of woolen mittens, with a sensation like hot water.