“The ice shows the advancing season. It is no longer splintery and quartz-like, spawling off under the axe in dangerous little chips; but sodden, infiltrated ice, such as we see in our ice-houses. The water has got into its centre, and the crowbars, after the sawing out, break it readily up for hauling upon the field. The process is this: First, we cut two parallel tracks, four feet asunder, through six and five feet ice, with a ten-foot saw; then lozenged diagonals; then straps (ropes) are passed around the fragments, and a block and line, nautice jigger, or watch tackle, made fast to the bowsprit, hauls the lumps upon the floe, where they are broken up by the ice bars. A formidable barricade of dirty ice, about the size and shape of gneiss building stones, is already inclosing our vessel. Many a poor fellow has had an involuntary slide-bath into the freezing mixture alongside; but in most cases without unpleasant consequences."
I remember only one serious exception. It was that of our heroine of the Thespian corps, Jim Smith. The immediate result for him was an attack of scurvy, so marked, yet so blended with the active symptoms belonging to arthritic disease, as to incline me to an opinion for the time that there may be such a thing as acute scurvy, or a sudden inflammatory sthenic action, whose characteristics are scorbutic. He had immediately stitch, dyspnœa, pains in the back and joints, and in the alveolar and extensor muscles, just as in his previous attacks of scurvy, but without fever. The day after, he was so distressed by his stitch, that I feared pleuritis. On looking at his shins, I found large purpuric blotches, which were not there a week before. I commenced the anti-scorbutic tyranny at once; and the next morning his gums bled freely, his pains left him, and he took his place again at the ice-saw.
“Several laridæ flew about us: I heard them to-day for the second time—pleasant tones, with all their discord. Do you remember the skylark’s song, ‘a dropping from the sky,’ in the ‘Ancient Mariner’? I thought of it this morning when the gulls screeched over our motionless brig.
“May 18, Sunday. First, of late, in my daily records is this glorious wind, still from the northwest, fresh and steady. It is, as is every thing else for that matter, a Godsend. To-day’s observation places us but thirty-two miles from Cape Searle, and seventy from Cape Walsingham, the abutting gates of Davis' Straits, where the channel is at its narrowest, and where our imprisonment ought to end.
“This welcome wind-visitor is still freshening: it is not perpetrating, I hope, an extra brilliancy before its congé.
“I found to-day a rough caricature drawing by one of the men: some of the mess call it a portrait of myself. By-the-way, suppose I tell you of my latest rig? Here it is. A long musket on shoulder; a bear-knife in the leg of the left boot; a rim of wolf-skin around my head, leaving the bare scalp with its ‘hairs’ open to the breeze; rough Guernsey frock, overlined by a red flannel shirt, in honor of the day on which thou shalt do no labor; legs in sailor pants of pilot cloth, slop-shop cut; feet in seal-hide socks or buskins, of Esquimaux fabric and Esquimaux smell; a pair of crimson woolen mittens, which commenced their career as a neck comforter; and a little green rag, the snow veil, fluttering over a weather-beaten face: place all this, for want of a better lay figure, on your brother of the Arctic squadron.
DR. KANE IN ARCTIC RIG.
“With a delicacy which may possibly do me discredit, I have never before alluded to the garniture of my outer man. I may as well tell the truth at once. We are an uncouth, snobby, and withal, shabby-looking set of varlets. L’illustre Bertrand would be a Beau Brummel alongside of us. We are shabby, because we have worn out all our flimsy wardrobes, and have of late resorted to domestic tailorization. We are snobby, because our advance in the new art does not yet extend to the picturesque or well-fitting. I wish some of my soda-water-in-the-morning club friends could see me perspiring over a pair of pants, dorcassing a defunct sock. We do our own sewing, clothing ourselves cap-à-pie; and it astonishes me, looking back upon my dark period of previous ignorance, to feel how much I have learned. I wonder whether your friend the Philadelphia D’Orsay knows how to adjust with a ruler and a lump of soap the seat of a pair of breeches?
“Why, I have even made discoveries in—I forget the Greek word for it—the art which made George the Fourth so famous. Thus a method, adopted by our mess, of cutting five pairs of stockings out of one hammock blanket—a thing hitherto deemed impossible—is altogether my own. In the abstract or speculative part of the profession, I claim to be the first who has reduced all vestiture to a primitive form—an integral particle, as it were. I can’t dwell on this matter here: it might, perhaps, be out of place; perhaps, too, attributed in some degree to that personal vanity almost inseparable from invention. I will tell you, however, that this discovered type, this radical nucleus, is the ‘bag.’ Thus a bag, or a couple of parallelogramic planes sewed together, makes the covering of the trunk. Similar bags of scarcely varied proportion cover the arms; ditto the legs; ditto the hands; ditto the head: thus going on, bags, bags, bags, even to the fingers; a cytoblastic operation, having interesting analogies with the mycelium of the fungus or the saccine vegetation of the confervas.