“9:50 A.M. Brooks and myself took advantage of the twilight at nine o’clock to cross the hummocky fields to the Rescue. I can not convey an impression of the altered aspects of the floe. Our frozen lane has disappeared, and along the line of its recent course the ice is heaped up in blocks, tables, lumps, powder, and rubbish, often fifteen feet high. Snow covered the decks of the little vessel, and the disorder about it spoke sadly of desertion. Foot-prints of foxes were seen in every imaginable corner; and near the little hatchway, where we had often sat in comfortable good-fellowship, the tracks of a large bear had broken the snow crust in his efforts to get below.
“The Rescue has met the pressure upon her port-bow and fore-foot. Her bowsprit, already maimed by her adventure off Griffith’s Island, is now completely forced up, broken short off at the gammoning. The ice, after nipping her severely, has piled up round her three feet above the bulwarks. We had looked to her as our first asylum of retreat; but that is out of the question now; she can not rise as we have done, and any action that would peril us again must bear her down or crush her laterally.
“The ice immediately about the Advance is broken into small angular pieces, as if it had been dashed against a crag of granite. Our camp out on the floe, with its reserve of provisions and a hundred things besides, memorials of scenes we have gone through, or appliances and means for hazards ahead of us, has been carried away bodily. My noble specimen of the Arctic bear is floating, with an escort of bread barrels, nearly half a mile off.
“The thermometer records only—17°; but it blows at times so very fiercely that I have never felt it so cold: five men were frost-bitten in the attempt to save our stores.
“9 P.M. We have had no renewal of the pressure since half past six this morning. We are turning in; the wind blowing a fresh breeze, weather misty, thermometer at -23°."
The night brought no further change; but toward morning the cracks, that formed before this a sort of net-work all about the vessel, began to open. The cause was not apparent: the wind had lulled, and we saw no movement of the floes. We had again the same voices of complaint from the ship, but they were much feebler than yesterday; and in about an hour the ice broke up all round her, leaving an open space of about a foot to port, indented with the mould of her form. The brig was loose once more at the sides; but she remained suspended by the bows and stern from hummocks built up like trestles, and canted forward still five feet and a quarter out of level. Every thing else was fairly afloat: even the India-rubber boat, which during our troubles had found a resting-place on a sound projection of the floe close by us, had to be taken in.
This, I may say, was a fearful position; but the thermometer, at a mean of -23° and -24°, soon brought back the solid character of our floating raft. In less than two days every thing about us was as firmly fixed as ever. But the whole topography of the ice was changed, and its new configuration attested the violence of the elements it had been exposed to. Nothing can be conceived more completely embodying inhospitable desolation. From mast-head the eye traveled wearily over a broad champaigne of modulating ice, crowned at its ridges with broken masses, like breakers frozen as they rolled toward the beach. Beyond these, you lost by degrees the distinctions of surface. It was a great plain, blotched by dark, jagged shadows, and relieved only here and there by a hill of upheaved rubbish. Still further in the distance came an unvarying uniformity of shade, cutting with saw-toothed edge against a desolate sky.
Yet there needed no after-survey of the ice-field to prove to us what majestic forces had been at work upon it. At one time on the 13th, the hummock-ridge astern advanced with a steady march upon the vessel. Twice it rested, and advanced again—a dense wall of ice, thirty feet broad at the base and twelve feet high, tumbling huge fragments from its crest, yet increasing in mass at each new effort. We had ceased to hope; when a merciful interposition arrested it, so close against our counter that there was scarcely room for a man to pass between. Half a minute of progress more, and it would have buried us all. As we drifted along five months afterward, this stupendous memento of controlling power was still hanging over our stern. The sketch at the head of the next chapter represents its appearance at the close of the month.