“Walked to the open water to the northward, nearly ahead of us. The leads were so frozen over as to bear me. Looking across the level, letting my eyes wander from tussock to tussock of entangled floe-ice, as they had grouped themselves in freezing, I heard the blowing of a narwhal, followed by the peculiar swash of squeezing ice. A short walk showed me some six or eight conical elevations, forced upward upon the recently-formed ice, evidently by a force protruding from beneath. While looking at these, the sounds, though seemingly further off, increased to such a degree that I was convinced the ice was in action, and started off to double a cape of hummocks and see the commotion. Our steward, Morton, a shrewd, observant fellow, who was with me, suddenly called out, ‘Look here, sir—here!’
“Each of these little cones was steaming like the salices or mud-volcanoes of Mexico, the broken ice on top vibrating, and every now and then tumbling, as if by some pulsatory movement below. Presently, in one concerted diapason, a group of narwhals, imprisoned by the congelation of the opening,[I] spouted their release, scattering spray and snow in every direction. I was not more than three yards from the nearest cone; yet I could see nothing of the animal except this jet.
[I] I found afterward from the Danes that they assemble in this way when extensive areas are frozen. Mr. Moldrup, of Godhaven, mentions fifty being killed at one of these congregations.
“The noise was so great that I could hardly make the steward hear me. It had, moreover, more of voice mingled with its sibilant ‘blow’ than I had ever heard—a distinct and somewhat metallic tone, thrown out impulsively, and yet with the crescendo and diminuendo of an expiration. According to the views of some systematic naturalists, the cetacea have, strictly speaking, no voice. This opinion admits of much modification. The white whale in Wellington Sound whistled while submerged and swimming under our brig; and, in the present singular case, the ejaculatory character of the tone sounded like a gigantic bark.[J]
[J] On this occasion, I heard the white whale singing under water—a peculiar note between the whistle and the Tyrolean yodel. Our men compared it to the Jew’s-harp. Once, off Cape James, it was so loud that we heard it in the cabin, as if proceeding from the cable-tier. I have often, in my walks over the ice-openings, been startled by the resemblance between the sudden spout of a near narwhal and the bark of an animal.
“May 1, Thursday. A little before ten this morning, the sun showed almost half its disk above the snow horizon, with his usual appanage of pearly opals and mellowed fire displayed about the southern heavens. At noon I walked out in the full glare, twenty-five degrees above the freezing-point on my face, and about as many below it on my back—a May-day frolic in the snow! The crisp covering, over which I used to skim along a few weeks ago, broke through with me at every step. It was just strong enough to tantalize and deceive. Never, in the warmest days of summer harvest-time, have I felt the heat so much as on this Arctic May-day; and yet no life, no organization carried me back to the spring-time of reviving nature. Even the tinnitus of the idle ear, that inner droning that sings to you in the silent sunshine at home, was wanting. In fact, the silentness was so complete, and the reflection from the snow so excessive, though I had a green rag over my face, that when I got far away, and out of sight of every thing but the interminable ice, it made me feel as if the world I left you in and the world about me were not exactly parts of the same planet.
“And so I traveled back to my sick men. God bless us! here are old Blinn, and Carter, and Wilson, all on my list for fainting spells: the same scurvy syncope our officers complain of. Captain Griffin fainted dead away, and Lovell complains of strange feelings. We need fresh food sorely. I hardly think any organized expedition to these regions was ever so completely deprived of anti-scorbutic diet as we are at this time.
“Midnight. My old scurvy symptoms, it may be, that keep me from sleeping. But I write by the light of the sun; and it really seems to me that there is a something about this persistent day antagonistic to sleep. The idea thrust itself upon me last summer. Thinking the fact over afterward, I referred it to habit, acting unphilosophically, as it is apt to do; and concluded that my sleeplessness was not connected directly with the augmented or continued light. But this is not so. I neither get to sleep so easily nor sleep as long, nor, indeed, do I seem to need the same quantity of sleep as when we had the alternation of light and darkness. On the other hand, I think our long Arctic night solicited a more than common ration of the same restorative blessing, though my journal has shown you that our waking energies during that period were not so heavily taxed as to require more than their usual intermission."
The day after this entry superadded the visitation of snow blindness to our trials. Four of the party were attacked severely, myself among the rest; so severely, indeed, as to make it impossible for me to write, and, what was much more important in the estimation of our scurvy patients, impossible for me to hunt. The brief notes which were made in my journal by the kindness of a brother officer speak of our sensible approach toward a final disengagement from the ice-field. Though the winds were generally from the southwest, our drift tended very plainly to the south: in one day, we reduced our latitude eighteen miles, passing at the same time nearly a degree of longitude, twenty-two miles to the east. The ice, too, was becoming more infiltrated, and the heavy snow-banks that surrounded our vessel were saturated with water. Spring was doing its office.