“February 27, Thursday. An aurora passing through the zenith, east and west, at 3h. 30m. this morning. What little wind we have is coming feebly from the west and southwest. The thermometer has traveled from -40° to -31°, and the sun is out again in benign lustre. A difference of 27°, due to his influence, was evident as early as 10h. 20m., viz.: Green’s spirit standard gave, in shade,-33°; over black surface, in sunshine, -7° and -6°. At noonday, the same thermometer gave +2°. My glass—cased, hot-house like,—gave the pleasant deception of +40°.
“Still the scurvy increases. I am down myself to-day with all the premonitories. It is strangely depressing: a concentrated ‘fresh cold’ pain extends searchingly from top to toe. I am so stiff that it is only by an effort that I can walk the deck, and that limpingly. Once out on the floes, my energies excited and my blood warmed by exercise, I can tramp away freely; back again, I stiffen.
“Walked with our other cook, Auguste Canot. Queer changes these Frenchmen see! Canot’s father, a captain in the French army, was shot while serving with Oudinot, beneath the infernal ‘barricades’ of Rome—Canot the younger looking on. A few months after, the son had figured upon the list of condemned for the affair at Lyons, and was a fugitive emigré to the United States. The same sergeant-major, Canot, is now cooking salt junk in Baffin’s Bay. His confrère, the modest but gifted Henri, although a worse soldier, is a better cook. He first saw ice among the glaciers of La Tour. He has scullionized at the 'Trois Frères/ and played chêf to a London club-house. He passed through this latter ordeal, strange to say, unscathed; and, but for an amorous temperament, might be now at Delmonico’s, upon good wages and bad Bordeaux. Henri is a boy of talent, pensive by temperament, and withal ambitious. Were it not for the somewhat unequal distribution of two molars and an incisor, his entire stock of teeth, he would be an insufferable coxcomb. As it is, he treats his infirmity with amiable, if not philosophic contempt. He made me this morning an idea of white bear’s liver, à la brochette. The idea was good, the liver hippuric and detestable. Henri prides himself upon that most difficult simplicity, the filet. He prepares thus a sea-gull à merveille.
“February 28, Friday. The most wintery-looking day I have ever seen. The winds have been let loose, and the cheering novelty of a northwester breaks in on our calm. The drifting snow either rises like smoke from the levels, or whirls away in wreaths from the hummocks. The atmosphere has an opaline ashy look; in the midst of which, like a huge girasole, flashes the round sun. The clouds are of a sort seldom seen, except in the conceptions of adventurous artists, quite undefinable, and out of the line of nature, defying Howard’s nomenclature. They are blocked out in square, stormy masses, against a pearly, misty blue—harsh, abrupt, repulsive, quite out of keeping with the kindly lightness of things belonging to the sky."
The lowest temperature we recorded during the cruise was on the 22d of this month, when the ship’s thermometer gave us -46°; my offship spirit, -52°; and my own self-registering instruments, purchased from Green, placed on a hummock removed from the vessels, -53°, as the mean of two instruments. This may be taken as the true record of our lowest absolute temperature.
Cold as it was, our mid-day exercise was never interrupted, unless by wind and drift storms. We felt the necessity of active exercise; and although the effort was accompanied with pains in the joints, sometimes hardly bearable, we managed, both officers and crew, to obtain at least three hours a day. The exercise consisted of foot-ball and sliding, followed by regular games of romps, leap-frog, and tumbling in the snow. By shoveling away near the vessel, we obtained a fine bare surface of fresh ice, extremely glib and durable. On this we constructed a skating-ground and admirable slides. I walked regularly over the floes, although the snows were nearly impassable.
With all this, aided by hosts of hygienic resources, feeble certainly, but still the best at my command, scurvy advanced steadily. This fearful disease, so often warded off when in a direct attack, now exhibited itself in a cachexy, a depraved condition of system sad to encounter. Pains, diffuse, and non-locatable, were combined with an apathy and lassitude which resisted all attempts at healthy excitement.
These, of course, were not confined to the crew alone: out of twenty-four men, but five were without ulcerated gums and blotched limbs; and of these five, strange to say, four were cooks and stewards. All the officers were assailed. Old pains were renewed, old wounds opened; even old bruises and sprains, received at barely-remembered periods back, came to us like dreams. Our commander, certainly the finest constitution among us, was assailed like the rest. In a few days purpuric extravasations appeared on his legs, and a dysentery enfeebled him to an extent far from safe. An old wound of my own became discolored, and, curious to say, painful only at such points of old suppuration, three in number, as had been relieved by the knife. The seats of a couple of abscess-like openings were entirely unaffected and free from pain.
The close of the month found this state of things on the increase, and the strength of the party still waning.