As I stood upon a tall knob of hummock, the entire horizon seemed to be sending up, exhaling a bronzine smoke—not the lambent, smoky wreaths which I have compared to burning turpentine, but a peculiar russet brown smoke, tongued and wreathy when near, but at a distance rolling in cumulated masses. These seemed to cling at their bases to the surface from which they rose, like the discharges of artillery over water, or a locomotive steaming over a cold, wet meadow. They were wafted by the wind, so as to drive them out in lines two or three hundred yards long; but they clung tenaciously to the water and young ice, giving us a varying but always narrow horizon of smoke. The Rescue was enveloped with the heavy, sooty clouds of repeated broad-sides. If I had seen the flashing of guns or the glimmer of burning prairie-grass, I should have been less impressed; so strange, very strange, was this ordinary attendant on conflagration rolling in the midst of our winteriness.
EFFECT OF FROST-SMOKE.
"M
ARCH 20. Thursday, the 20th of March, opens with a gale, a regular gale. On reaching deck after breakfast, I found the wind from the southeast, the thermometer at zero, and rising. These southeast storms are looked upon as having an important influence on the ice. They are always warm, and by the sea which they excite at the southern margin of the pack, have a great effect in breaking the floes. Dr. Olrik told me that they were anxiously looked for on the Greenland coast as precursors of open water. The date of the southeast gale last year, at Uppernavik, was April 25th. Our thermometer gave +5° at noonday, +7° at one, and +8° at three o’clock!
“This is the heaviest storm we have had since entering Lancaster Sound, exactly seven months and a day ago. The snow is whirled in such quantities, that our thick felt housing seems as if of gauze: it not only covers our decks, but drives into our clothes like fine dust or flour. A plated thermometer was invisible fourteen feet from the eye: from the distance of ten paces off on our quarter, a white opacity covers every thing, the compass-stand, fox-traps, and all beyond: the Rescue, of course, is completely hidden. This heavy snow-drift exceeds any thing that I had conceived, although many of my Arctic English friends had discoursed to me eloquently about their perils and discomforts. As to facing it in a stationary position, nothing human could; for a man would be buried in ten minutes. Even in reaching our little Tusculum, we tumble up to our middle, in places where a few minutes before the very ice was laid bare. The entire topography of our ice is changing constantly.
“7 P.M. ‘The wind is howling.’ Our mess begin to talk again of sleeping in boots, and the other luxuries of Lancaster Sound. For my own part, better, far better this, with the spicy tingling of a crisis, than the corroding, scurvy-engendering sameness of the past two months. Every moment now is full of expectation.