The Rescue followed a few hours after; and we took the direction of the pack together to the N.N.W. By the next day at noon we were within twenty-three miles of Uppernavik, but a belt of ice lay between. We anchored to a berg, and for two days waited patiently for an opening.
My mess-mates in the mean time went off on a hunt to a flat, rocky ledge, that showed itself inshore, and I amused myself with a tramp on the ice-island to which we were fast. I had for company a noble Esquimaux slut, that Governor Moldrup had enabled me to get at Disco, and a dog of the same breed belonging to Mr. Lovell. I do not know what has become of Hosky, as Mr. Lovell named his favorite; but my poor Disco fell a martyr to our Philadelphia climate and his Arctic costume together, some three days after we got home.
I had a quiet day’s walk. My companions rambled with evident glee over the peaks and ravines of their familiar element. It was a magnificent pile of frost-work. But these crystal palaces of the ice, like every thing else under this northern sky, deceive one strangely in their apparent size. We thought, when we anchored, that the berg was a small one; yet we coursed more than the third of a mile in almost a direct line before we reached its further edge.
ICE BOULDERS.
The pure surfaces which we traveled over were studded with irregular blocks of ice, evidently once detached and cemented on again. They varied in size and shape from a boy’s playing-marble to a haystack; and by their interesting distribution suggested most obtrusively the question of almost every Arctic traveler, how such fragments find their place on the plateau surfaces of the icebergs. I had answered the question for myself before; but I was glad to be consumed by the observations I made in the course of this excursion. When first the mass separates from the land-berg or glacier, it is accompanied by a large quantity of disengaged fragments, with all varieties of detritus; and during the alternate risings and sinkings that follow the fall into the sea, a great deal of this is caught by the emerging surface of the berg, and adheres to it. I noticed valleys, where the subsequent roll had rounded the masses, and grouped them into something resembling bowlder-drift. I had seen similar valleys in some of the large bergs of Duneira Bay, supplying a bed for temporary water-streams, in which the bowlders were beautifully rounded, and arranged in true moraine fashion.
Off Storoë, a white fox (C. lagopus) came to us on the loose ice: his legs and the tip of his tail were black. He was the first we had seen on the Greenland coast.
He was followed the next day by a party of Esquimaux, who visited us from Pröven, dragging their kayacks and themselves over seven miles of the pack, and then paddling merrily on board. For two glasses of rum and a sorry ration of salt-pork, they kept turning somersets by the dozen, making their egg-shell skiffs revolve sideways by a touch of the paddle, and hardly disappearing under the water before they were heads up again, and at the gangway to swallow their reward.
The inshore ice opened on the thirtieth, and toward evening we left the hospitable moorage of our iceberg, and made for the low, rounded rocks, which the Hosky pointed out to us as the seat of the settlement. The boats were out to tow us clear of the floating rubbish, as the light and variable winds made their help necessary, and we were slowly approaching our anchorage, when a rough yawl boarded us. She brought a pleasant company, Unas the schoolmaster and parish priest, Louisa his sister, the gentle Amalia, Louisa’s cousin, and some others of humbler note.
The baptismal waters had but superficially regenerated these savages: their deportment, at least, did not conform to our nicest canons. For the first five minutes, to be sure, the ladies kept their faces close covered with their hands, only withdrawing them to blow their noses, which they did in the most primitive and picturesque manner. But their modesty thus assured, they felt that it needed no further illustration. They volunteered a dance, avowed to us confidentially that they had educated tastes—Amalia that she smoked, Louisa that she tolerated the more enlivening liquids, and both that their exercise in the open air had made a slight refection altogether acceptable. Hospitality is the virtue of these wild regions: our hard tack, and cranberries, and rum were in requisition at once.