“1 P.M. With difficulty read large type. The clouds gathering in black stratus over the red light to the south.
“2. The heavens studded with stars in their groupings. Night is again over every thing, although the minor stars are not yet seen.
“Since the first of this month, we have drifted in solitude one hundred and seventy miles, skirting the northern shores of Lancaster Sound. Baffin’s Bay is ahead of us, its current setting strong toward the south. What will be the result when the mighty masses of these two Arctic seas come together!"
1
851, January 1, Wednesday. The first day of 1851 set in cold, the thermometer at -28°, and closing at -31°. We celebrated it by an extra dinner, a plumcake unfrosted for the occasion, and a couple of our residuary bottles of wine. But there was no joy in our merriment: we were weary of the night, as those who watch for the morning.
It was not till the 3d that the red southern zone continued long enough to give us assurance of advancing day. Then, for at least three hours, the twilight enabled us to walk without stumbling. I had a feeling of racy enjoyment as I found myself once more away from the ship, ranging among the floes, and watching the rivalry of day with night in the zenith. There was the sunward horizon, with its evenly-distributed bands of primitive colors, blending softly into the clear blue overhead; and then, by an almost magic transition, night occupying the western sky. Stars of the first magnitude, and a wandering planet here and there, shone dimly near the debatable line; but a little further on were all the stars in their glory. The northern firmament had the familiar beauty of a pure winter night at home. The Pleiades glittered “like a swarm of fire-flies tangled in a silver-braid,” and the great stars that hang about the heads of Orion and Taurus were as intensely bright as if day was not looking out upon them from the other quarter of the sky. I had never seen night and day dividing the hemisphere so beautifully between them.
On the 8th we had, of course, our national festivities, and remembered freshly the hero who consecrated the day in our annals. The evening brought the theatricals again, with extempore interludes, and a hearty splicing of the main-brace. It was something new, and not thoroughly gladsome, this commemoration of the victory at New Orleans under a Polar sky. There were men not two hundred miles from us, now our partners in a nobler contest, who had bled in this very battle. But we made the best of the occasion; and if others some degrees further to the south celebrated it more warmly, we had the thermometer on our side, with its -20°, a normal temperature for the “laudatur et alget.”