Adrift in the Arctic ice pack

by Elisha Kent Kane

We moved so slowly that I had time to sketch several of these dreamy fabrics. The one which is engraved on the opposite page was an irregular quadrangle, projected at the extremity of a series of ice-structures, like the promontory that ends an isthmus: it was crowned with ramparts turreted by fractures; and at the water-line a great barreled arch went back into a cavern, that might have fabled as the haunt of sea-kings or smugglers. Another, much smaller, but still of magnificent size, had been excavated by the waves into a deep grotto; and the light reflected from the bay against its transparent sides and roofs colored them with a blue too superb for imitation by the brush or pencil.

In the morning of the 24th we made the pack; more to the south, therefore, than last year. It appeared at first like a firm neck, extending out among heavy bergs well into Haroë Island; and remembering our last year’s experience, we moved cautiously. But after a while, our captain, now perhaps the best ice-master afloat, determined on boring. The dolphin-striker was triced up, the boats were taken on board, and the old sounds of conning the helm began again. This time we were lucky. In four hours we were through the tongue of the pack, and out in nearly an open sea.

We did not move long, however, before the navigation became embarrassed. The ice between Cape Lawson and Storoë was too compact to be wedged aside; and after some rude encounters with the floes, and a narrow escape from a reef of rocks which Captain Graah’s charts do not mention, we found ourselves, on the 25th, nearly embayed by the noble headlands off Ovinde Oerme. The ice, in a horseshoe curve, completely shut us in to the north, and the tongue of the pack we had come through lay between us and the sea. The wind had left us. We were drifting listlessly in a glassy sea that reflected the green-stone terraces and strange pyramidal masses of its romantic shores.

We amused ourselves killing seals. There must have been hundreds of them of all varieties playing about us. Generally they were to be seen paddling about alone, but sometimes in groups, like a party of school-boys frolicking in the Schuylkill. One of their favorite sports was “treading water,” rising breast-high, keeping up a boisterous, indefatigable splashing, and stretching out their necks, as if to pry into the condition of things aboard ship. We compared their behavior to that of the timorous but curious natives, when the Europeans first met them in the waters of America; and in our intercourse with them, conformed accurately to the Spanish precedent.

Occasionally only we obeyed our “manifest destiny” with reluctance. Some of the younger of these poor sea-dogs had overmuch of the honest expression of their land brethren: the truncation of the muzzle in others, with no external ear showing behind it, set their faces in almost perfect and human-like oval. When one of these would come up out of the water near us, and, raising his head and shoulders, that stooped like those of a hooded Esquimaux, gaze steadily at us with his liquid eye, then diving, come up a little nearer and stare again; so drawing nearer and nearer, diving and rising alternately, till he came within musket range; it sometimes went hard to salute him with a bullet.

We shot, among others, a very large beast (P. barbata), lying upon a floating piece of ice. The captain’s ball went through his heart; and my own, equally deadly, within a few inches of it; but the unwieldy creature continued struggling to reach the water, until a shot from Mr. Lovell, close upon him, drove a musket-ball through his head. He measured eight feet from tip to tip, five feet eleven inches in his greatest circumference, and five feet six inches in girth behind the fore-flippers. His carcass was a shapeless cylinder, terminating in an awkward knob to represent the head.

We lost two seals by sinking. Hitherto, when killed on the instant by perforation of the brain or spinal marrow, they had invariably floated. But the rule does not hold always. I wounded one so as to carry away the crown of his skull, and Captain De Haven gave him a second shot from within a few yards directly through his head, and yet we lost him. As the balls struck, he discharged, almost explosively, a quantity of air, and went down like a loon. The whalers say, wound your seals; but my own experience is, that, if they are fat, it is best to kill them at once. A Danish boy, who had joined us by stealth at Disco, told us that the animal’s sinking was a proof that he had no blubber. He was probably right: we certainly did not secure any that were in good condition.

The next day gave us excitement of a different sort. We had been lying in the young ice-field, close under the southeast shore of Storoë, with the current setting strong toward it, and a grim array of bergs to the west of us. It was an ugly position; but we were fairly entangled, and there was no escape. Early in the morning, the wind freshened, and blew in toward the island; the ice piling against the rocky precipice under our lee, and opening in broken masses to windward. The Rescue managed to make fast to a crag between us and the shore, but our ice-anchors missed. At four in the afternoon we were within rifle-shot of the land, and still drifting; the wind a gale, and the sea-swell coming in heavily.

We stopped, of course, or there would have been an end of my journal. But for some hours things looked squally enough. Our soundings had become small by degrees and beautifully less, till they were down to thirteen feet; and the black wall looked so near that you could have hit it with a filbert. It could not have been fifty yards off, when we brought up on some grounded floe-pieces. By eleven, our warps had headed us to windward, and our bow was off shore. For once, at least, we owed our safety to the ice.