“March 27, Thursday. The sun shone out, but not as yesterday. The little cirrus clouds interfere with its brightness, and affect very perceptibly its warmth. To the eye, however, the day is undimmed.
“The wind, which we watch closely as the index of our ice-changes, our leading variety, came out at seven in the evening from the northward; and with it came a rise of black frost-smoke to the south, showing that the old ice-opening had gaped again. I had started before this at half past five, with old Blinn, my faithful satellite, for a bright plain, glittering in the low sunshine some three miles to the west, a new direction. We did not get back till eight.
“Let me make a picture for you without a jot of fancy about it, and you may get H. to put it into colors if he can. The sun was low, very low; and his long, slanting beams, of curious indescribable purple, fell upon old Blinn and myself as we sat on a crag of ice which overhung the sea. The chasm was perhaps a mile wide, and the opposite ice-shores were so painted by the glories of the sunshine, that they appeared like streaks of flame, licking continuous water. The place to which we had worked ourselves had been subjected to forces which no one could realize, so chaotic, and enormous, and incomprehensible were they. A line of old floe, eight feet thick and four miles long, had been powdered into a pedragal of crushed sugar, rising up in great efflorescing knobs fifteen and twenty feet high; and from amid these, like crystal rocks from the foam of a cataract, came transparent tables of blue ice, floating, as it were, on unsubstantial whiteness. Some of these blocks measured eight feet in thickness by twenty-two long, and of indeterminate depth, one side being obliquely buried in the mass. On one of these tables, that stretched out like a glass spear-point, directly over the water, were straddled your brother and his companion. Underneath us the narwhals were passing almost within pole-reach. As they rolled over, much after the fashion of our own porpoises, I could see the markings of their backs, and the great suction of their jaws throwing the water into eddies. Seal, breast-high, were treading water with their horizontal tails, and the white whale was blowing purple sprays into the palpable sunshine.
“March 23, Friday. I visited the western opening of yesterday. The sea has dwindled to a narrow lane, flanked by the heavy hummocks, whose rupture formed the sides. Although the aperture was so distant yesterday that I could barely see the further banks, here and there dotting the horizon, it has now closed with such nice adaptation of its line of fracture, that, but for a few yards of lateral deviation, this ‘yesternight sea’ would be nothing but a crack in the ice-field. The area of filmy ice that was between the edges of the lead had been thrust under the floe, thus aiding the process of re-cementation. These ice-actions are very complicated and various.
“Retracing my steps by a long circuit to the southward, I came to a spot where, without any apparent axis of fracture (chasm), the ice presented all the phenomena of table-hummocks. It was very old and thick, at least nine feet in solid depth. About a little circle of a hundred yards diameter, it had been thrown up into variously-presenting surfaces, with a marked bearing toward a focus of greatest energy and accumulation, presenting an appearance almost eruptive. The crushed fragments exuding and falling over, and rolling down toward the level ice, so as to cover it for feet in depth with powdery, granulated rubbish!”
M
Y journal for the closing days of March and the early one of April is full of varying drifts and alternating temperatures. Still, it seemed as if, by some gradual though scarcely explicable process, the work of our extrication was going on. Sometimes the wind would come to us from the southeast—the breaking-up wind as we called it, because as it subsided the reaction of the floes developed itself in fissures; but more frequently from the north, expediting our course to a more genial latitude. The floes themselves were, however, much more massive and gnarled than any we had seen before: every party that left the vessel for an ice-tramp came back with exaggerated impressions of the mighty energies that had hurled them together. We felt that it would have been impossible for any organized structure of wood and metal to resist such Maelstroms of solid ice as had left these memorials around us, and looked forward with scarcely pleasurable anticipations to the equivalent forces that might be required to obliterate them. Some extracts from my journal may show how far other causes were in the mean time operating our release.