“March 21. The wind changed this morning to the westward, and by daylight was blowing freshly. After breakfast, Murdaugh and myself started on a tramp to the ‘open water,’ to see the effects of the gale. The drift was beyond conception; sufficient, in many places, to have covered up our whole ship’s company. The wind made it as cold at -5° as I have seen it at -30°, and the fine snow pelted our faces; but the surface was frozen so hard that we walked over the crust, and in a little over half an hour we reached the lead.
“Planting a signal pole, with a red silk handkerchief as a mark, and taking compass-bearings to guide us back again, we began to look around us. Our expectations of hummock action were agreeably disappointed. We thought that the storm would have driven the ice from the southward, and that the change of wind would have marshaled opposing floes to meet it. But it was not so. Even the young, marginal ice, though warped, was unbroken. The pressure had evidently taken place, but with little effect. After the gigantic upheavings of Lancaster Sound, excited by winds much weaker, no wonder I was surprised. Upon thinking it over, I came to the conclusion that the absence of a point d’appui, either of land or land-ice, was the cause of these diminished actions. We were now in a great sea, surrounded by consolidated floes, and away from salient capes or shore-bound ice. The pressure was diffused throughout a greater mass, without points of special or even unequal resistance. If this reasoning holds, we will not experience the expected tumult until we drift into a region where forces are more in opposition; perhaps not until we reach the contraction of Davis' Straits.
“The young ice margin of this open lead had the appearance of a beautiful wave-flattened sand beach. The lead itself had opened so far that its opposite shores were barely visible. The wind checked the immediate formation of new ice; and, to our inexpressible joy, there, glittering in the cold sunlight, were little rippling waves. So long have we been pent up by this wretched circle of unchanging snow, that I make myself ridiculous by talking of trifles, with which you, milk-drinking, sun-basking, melted-water-seeing people at home can have no sympathy. In spite of the winds and the snow-drift, I could hear the babbling of these waves as they laughed in their temporary freedom.
“March 22, Saturday. I started again for the ice-openings. There had evidently been a good deal of commotion in the night; but nothing so violent as to negative my yesterday’s conclusions. Still there were hummocks of young tables, and some ugly twists of the beach line; and matters had not yet settled themselves into rest. As the great floe on which I stood traveled, under the influence of the west wind, obliquely eastward, I heard once more the familiar sounds of our noctes Lancastrianæ. The grating of nutmegs, the cork rubbing of old-fashioned tables, the young puppies, and the bee-hives; all these were back again; but we missed pleasantly the wailing, the howling, the clattering, the exploding din, which used to come to us through the darkness. The pulse-like interval was there too, like a breathing-time; but the daylight modified every thing, my feelings most of all. They became almost pleasant, as I listened, after a lullaby fashion, to the bees and puppies; and something very like gratitude came over me, as I thought of the uncertain gloom or palpable midnight which accompanied a few weeks ago the ‘voices of the ice.’ The thermometer was 21° below zero, and the wind blowing: naturally enough, my nose became a tallow nose in the midst of my reverie. So I rubbed the nose, blew the nose, buffeted my armpits until my fingers tingled, and then started off on a tramp.
“Seal were seen, curious as usual, but indulging in the weakness afar off. Presently two poor winter-mated little divers met my meat-seeking senses. One of these I killed with my rifle, covetously regretting that my one ball could not align his mate. This was the first game we had obtained since the fall: he was divided, poor fellow, between two of my scurvy patients. In getting this bird out, I came very near getting myself in; and that, when a ducking means a freezing, is no fun.
“10 P.M. To-night finds me knocked up. Be it known, that after crawling on my belly, not like the wisest of animals, for two hours, I came nearly within shot of a week’s fresh meat. The fresh meat dived, first shaking his whisker tentacles at my disconsolate beard, leaving me half frozen and wholly discontented. Fool-like, after the long walk back, the warming, the drying, and the feeding, I returned by the other long walk to the ice-openings, tramped for two hours, saw nothing but frost-smoke, and came back again, dinnerless, with legs quaking, and spirits wholly out of tune.
“Our drift to-day, at meridian, was in the neighborhood of 9 miles; our latitude was 71° 9′ 18″.
“March 23, Sunday. After divine service, started for the ice-openings. We are now in the centre of an area, which we estimated roughly as four miles from north to south, and a little more east and west. On reaching what was yesterday’s sea-beach, I was forced to recant in a measure my convictions as to the force of the opposing floes. Yesterday’s beach existed no longer; it was swallowed up, crushed, crumbled, submerged, or uplifted in long ridges of broken ice.
“The actions were still in progress, and fast intruding upon the solid old ice which is our homestead. The ice-tables now crumbling into hummocks were from eight to fourteen inches thick, generally ten. Not even in Lancaster Sound did the destruction of surface go on more rapidly. The wind was a moderate breeze from the northwest, and the floes were advancing on each other at a rate of a knot and a half an hour, building up hummock tables along their Hue of collision. Several rose in a few minutes to a height of ten or twelve feet. I have become so accustomed to these glacial eruptions, that I mounted the upheaving ice, and rode upon the fragments—an amusement I could hardly have practiced safely before I had studied their changes.
“The snow-covered level upon which Brooks and myself were walking was about thirty paces wide, between the older ice on one side and the encroaching hummock-line on the other. Upon our return, after a walk of a short half mile, we found our footsteps obliterated, and the hummock-line within a few yards of this older ice. Things are changing rapidly.