“April 7, Monday. For the last fortnight the ice has been perceptibly moist at the surface. The open crack near our brig to the south has now been closed for nearly a fortnight; yet the snow which covers it is quite slushy. The trodden paths around our ship are in muddy pulp, adhering to the boots. All this can hardly be the direct influence of the sun upon the surface; for the thermometer seldom exceeds +16°, and is more generally below +10° at noonday. Yet this temperature has an evident influence upon the status of the ice, increasing its permeability, and permitting some changes analogous to thawing, but which I can not explain. May it be that the crystalline structure of the ice is undergoing some modification, that increases its capillarity, or develops an action like the endosmose and exosmose!
“It is a mere puzzle, of course, for we have not data enough to make it a question. Yet there is another like it that I can not help setting down. Can it be that our thermometers, so notorious in this Polar region for their imperfect coincidence with ‘sensations of cold,’ are equally fallacious as measures of absolute increments or decrements of sensible caloric? It will not do, I suppose, to admit such a supposition; yet the marvels which come constantly before me may almost justify it. You know that I am no heat-maker. Well, my winter trials, as you may imagine, have not increased my vital energies. Suppose me, then, as you knew me when I left New York. For the past week I have almost lived in the open air—genial, soft, bland, and to sensation just cool enough to be pleasantly tonic. I walk moderately, and am in comfortable, glowing warmth. I walk over the hummocks or ice floes, and am oppressed with perspiration and lassitude. This at a temperature of zero in the shade, and +11° in the sun! I can not realize it. To-day the thermometer gave +10° in the shade of the ship, obviously affected not a little by radiation, +34° in the sun over the ship’s painted side, +13° by my own observation of an instrument suspended at a distance from the ship, and under the same circumstances in the shade, zero! Yet the day seemed spring-like and delicious. The early breezes (8 A.M.) from the southeast came with a sensation of reviving coolness, although to their warmth we perhaps owed our sensations of pleasant heat. While I am writing, the skaters come in to say that ‘it is too warm to skate:’ yet the sun is low, and my shade thermometer gives some ten degrees below the point of freezing.
“I have often alluded to this discrepancy between our feelings and the recorded temperature. I have read of the same thing in the Arctic voyages, with a reference to contrast for the explanation. But I never until to-day realized so fully that we were warmed from within by a mysterious, and, I must believe, unknown system of functional compensation. I wish Liebig could make a Polar voyage! As you feel open-windowed at the first breaking-in day of spring, with your thermometers at vernal 60°, so feel I with the thermometer at zero!
“April 10, Thursday, 2 P.M. The south-easter blows on with steady endurance. It is now east by south; a snow-storm reminding me of home, so soft and flaky, drifting every where; and the thermometer rising steadily to +32° at noonday. Once more at the freezing point! it seems hard to realize. The decks are wet, the housing dripping, the snow adhesive and slushy.
“9 P.M. The gale continues. Our thermometer outside at a maximum of +33°. Every thing wet, warm, and summer-like.
“I have a story to tell—a foolish adventure; but I was ennuied past all bearing. Walking the deck, beast-like, in our damp cage, it occurred to me that I would climb the rigging. Climb the rigging I did; and, by a glimpse between the long wreaths of drift, saw Water! The temptation was a sore one: I yielded to it, came down from my perch, donned my seal-skin, shouldered my carbine, and walked off with my face toward the wonder. None of the crew would accompany me: my mess-mates did not volunteer: so I was alone.
“It was a walk to be remembered. Snow up to the neck; drift moist and blinding; and a gale, luckily not a cold one, in my face. But after a mile of such promenading as no other region can boast of, I reached the water at last. Water it was; dark, surging water; no pellicles of glazing ice; no sludgy streams of pancake; but the liquid element itself, such as we saw last summer, and you see every day, stretching out as broad as the Delaware, and in contrast with the snow at its margin as black as Styx.
“I took a good look at it, and turned to come back. The wind had wiped out my footsteps: all within the horizon was a waste of sleet. I had neither compass nor signal pole to show me the way; but I kept the gale behind me, and waded onward. I do not know how far I might have traveled before reaching the vessel; but I had buffeted the elements quite long enough to content me, when I heard Captain Griffin hailing me through the drift. He had been uneasy at my stay, and was out in search of me. We took a new departure together, were blown over a few times, and tumbled over, no matter how often; but we hit the ships to a notch.
“This crack is the old transverse one from northeast to southwest, off the Rescue’s port beam. The gale, with such a temperature, must be achieving much upon the ice to the southward. It can hardly reach men so imbedded as we are; but it may so break up the southern edge of the pack as to give us a ready drift, should we have a favoring wind. As it is, we are undoubtedly flicking it to the north again.
“April 15. The sun perceptibly warmer, and the indications of thaw unequivocal. To guard as far as we can against the chance of the two vessels being separated among the floes when the general break-up comes, we began a trench to-day from one to the other. It goes down through the snow to the solid ice; and we are going to strew rock-salt in it, remembering that even a slight scratch on the surface will determine the line of fracture. We will try it at any rate, even across the entire floe to the present seat of hummocking at the open water, though it is a distance of nearly or quite two miles. We are looking to our approaching disruption with absorbing interest; and whether our theories are good or bad, they give us something to think and talk about. Our ice-cutting machine belongs to the same family. We finished it to-day, and it will be tested to-morrow.