THE ADVANCE, FEBRUARY, 1851.
W
E had lost all indications of a shore, and had obviously passed within the influences of Baffin’s Bay. We were on the meridian of 75°; yet, though the recent commotions could be referred to nothing else but the conflict of the two currents, we had made very little southing, if any, and had seen no bergs. But on the 14th the wind edged round a little more to the northward, and at six o’clock in the morning of the 15th we could hear a squeezing noise among the ice-fields in that direction. By this time we had become learned interpreters of the ice-voices. Of course, we renewed our preparations for whatever might be coming. Every man arranged his knapsack and blanket-bag over again with the practiced discretion of an expert. Our extra clothing sledge, carefully repacked, was made free on deck. The India-rubber boat, only useful in this solid waste for crossing occasional chasms, was launched out upon the ice for the third time. Our former depôts on the floe had fared so badly that we were reluctant to risk another; but our stores were ready to be got out at the moment.[F]
[F] I have avoided speaking of my brother officers. From myself, a subordinate, only accidentally recording their exertions, it would be out of place; yet I should speak the sentiment of all on board were I to recognize how much we owed to our executive officer, Mr. Griffin. All our systematized preparation for the contingencies which threatened us, the sledges, the knapsacks, the daily training, and the provision depôts, were due to him. Our commander, then so ill with scurvy that we feared for his recovery, was compelled to delegate to his second in command many executive duties which he would otherwise have taken on himself.
Now began, with every one after his own fashion, the discussion what was best to be done in case of a wreck. Should we try our fortunes for the while on board the Rescue? She would probably be the first to go, and could hardly hope for a more protracted fate than her consort. Or should we try for the shore, and what shore? Admiralty Inlet, or Pond’s Bay, or the River Clyde? We have no reason to suppose the Esquimaux are accessible on the coast in winter; and if they are, they can not have provisions for such a hungry re-enforcement as ours; besides, the chance of reaching land from the drift-field through the broken ice between them is slender at the best for men worn down and sick; much more if they should attempt to carry two months' stores along with them. There was only one other resort, to camp out on the floe, if it should kindly offer us a foothold, and then move as best we might from one failing homestead to another, like a band of Arabs in the desert. Happily, Captain De Haven was spared the necessity of choosing between the alternatives: the ice-storm did not reach us.
“January 15. The moon is now nearly full. Her light mingles so with the twilight of the sun that the stars are quite sobered down. Walking out at 4 P.M., with the thermometer at -24°, to find, if I could, the cause of a sound a good deal like that of the surf, I was startled by a noise like a quarry blast, explosive and momentary, followed by a clatter like broken glass. Some ten minutes afterward, it was repeated, and a dark smoke-like vapor rose up in the moon-light from the same quarter. These things keep us on the qui vive.
“January 16. In the course of a tramp to-day about noon, the thermometer standing at -18°, I came across a wonderful instance of the yielding elasticity of ice under intense pressure. About two hundred yards from the brig, on her starboard quarter, was an unbroken plain of level ice, which before our recent break-up used to form one of my daily walks. It measured one hundred and thirty paces in its longer diameter and eighty-five in its shorter, and its thickness I ascertained this morning was over five feet. I found in crossing it to-day that the surface presented a uniform curve, a segment whose versed sine could not have been less than eight feet, abutted on each side by a barricade of rubbish. It strikes me that the dehiscence, lady’s slipper or Rupert’s drop fashion, of such tensely-compressed floes, must be the cause of the loud explosions we have heard lately. At -30° or -40° the ice is as friable and brittle as glass itself; besides, one of those yesterday was followed by a ringing clatter.
“January 18. The extreme stillness, and the facility with which sound travels over these Polar ice-plains, make us err a good deal in our estimates of distance at night. I went out to-day with Dr. Vreeland in search of a violent disruption of the ice, which our look-outs declared they had heard at the very side of the brig. We had some difficulty in finding it: it was the closing of a fissure considerably more than half a mile off.