Adrift in the Arctic ice pack

by Elisha Kent Kane

“The walk over the snow to-night was very delightful. The opalescence, so painful to the eyes, had given place to a clear atmosphere; and the low sun was full of rich coloring. Land, too, that pleasing representative of the world we are cut off from, was refracted into grotesque knolls and long spires.

“The surface of the floes shows more and more the thawing influence of our sun, now half as high at meridian as in the torrid zone! The immediate surface to-day was often entire, though we plunged almost knee-deep in water below it. This you will easily understand when I tell you that the thermometer in the sun gave, for four successive hours to-day, a mean of nearly 80°. The surface thaw percolates through the loosely-compacted snow, and, forming a pasty substratum, is protected from re-freezing by the very snow through which it has descended. Our mean temperature of late has varied but little between 25° and 27° for any twenty-four hours.

“The infiltration of saline water through the ice assists the process of disintegration. The water formed by surface or sun thaw is, by the peculiar endosmitic action which I believe I have mentioned elsewhere, at once rendered salt, as was evident from Baumé’s hydrometers and the test of the nitrate of silver. The surface crust bore me readily this evening at a temperature of 21° and 19°, giving no evidences of thaw. Beneath, for two inches, it was crisp and fresh. As I tried it lower, cutting carefully with my bear-knife, it became spongy and brackish; at eight inches markedly so; and at and below twelve, salt-water paste. On the other hand, all my observations, and I have made a great many, prove to me that cold, if intense enough, will, by its unaided action, independent of percolation, solar heat, depending position, or even depth of ice, produce from salt water a fresh, pure, and drinkable element.

“May 31, Saturday. Walked to-night to the southward in search of seal: found the ice in motion, and had some difficulty in getting back. Wind from southward, and freshening, after a day of nearly perfect calm. The drift is somewhat to the eastward. The tables were heaping up actively, and the chewing process of demolition was in full energy among them. I have some hope that the action may extend itself to the core of our veteran floe-circle; but for the present it is confined to those peripheral adjuncts that have grown up around it in more recent freezings. A bird’s-eye view from the mast-head, corrected by my walks, enables me to map out its present shape with considerable accuracy."

The “month of roses” closed on us without adventure; but its last ten days were full of monitory changes. The increased temperature had been visibly acting upon the ice, softening down its rough angles, and reducing bowlders to mere knobs on the surface; its weary monotony becoming every day only more disgusting. From the 1st to the 19th we had drifted almost a hundred miles, and had been expecting daily to make the eastern shore, when land was reported ahead. It proved to be the Highlands around Cape Searle, about thirty-five miles off.

It was the first inbreak upon our desolate circle of ice and water that we had experienced in ninety-nine days. The hundredth gave us a complete range of dreary, snow-covered hills; but to men whose last recollections of terra firma were connected with the refracted spectres that followed us eighty miles from shore, just one hundred days since, the solid certainty of mountain ridges was inexpressibly grateful. We studied their phases, as we drew nearer to them, with an intentness which would have been ludicrous under different circumstances: every cranny, every wrinkle spoke to us of movement, of a relation with the shut-out world. Our drift which brought us this blessed variety was favored by an unusual prevalence of northwesterly winds. We made in the thirty-one days of May one hundred and ninety odd miles to the southward and eastward.

For the last four days of the month we were at the margin of the Arctic circle, alternating within and without it. We passed to the south of it on the 30th, to recross it on the 31st with an accidental drift to the northward. We were experiencing at this time the rapid transition of seasons which characterizes this climate. The mean of the preceding month, April, had been +7° 96'; that of May was 20° 22'—a difference of nearly twelve degrees. At the same time, there was a chilliness about the weather, an uncomfortable rawness, both in April and May, which we had not known under the deep, perpetual frosts of winter. Cold there seemed a tangible, palpable something, which we could guard against or control by clothing and exercise; while warmth, as an opposite condition, was realizable and apparent. But here, in temperatures which at some hours were really oppressing, 60° to 80° in the sun, and with a Polar altitude of 45°, one half the equatorial maximum, we had the anomaly of absolute discomfort from cold. I know that hygrometric conditions and extreme daily fluctuations of the thermometer explain much of this; but it was impossible for me to avoid thinking at the time that there must also be a physiological cause more powerful than either.

I have alluded in my journal to the return of the birds. They were most welcome visitors. Crowds of little snow-birds (Emberiza and Plectrophanes), with white breasts and jetty coverts, were attracted by the garbage which the thaw had reproduced around us, and twittered from pile to pile, chirping sweet music over their unexpected store-house. Some of the larger birds, too, were with us, returning to the mysterious North; the anatinæ, represented by the eiders (Somateria), followed by two of the uria genus, the grylle and the alke. We recognized the latter as our little fat friend of last summer, and gave him treatment accordingly. I shot thirty-three in one day, which my mess-mates made up to sixty.

The characteristic disease of May was the snow-blindness, severe and acute, leaving with some of us a disturbed, uncertain state of vision far from pleasing. The remedy most effective was darkness. A disk of hard wood, with a simple slit, admitting a narrow pencil of light, we found a better protection than the goggle or colored lens; the increased sensibility of the retina seeming to require a diminution of the quantity rather than a modification of the character of the ray. The slightest automatic movement varied, of course, the sentient surface affected by the impression.