Through the first Antarctic night, 1898-1899

by Frederick Albert Cook

Snow-Goggles.

October, 1898.

It is but slowly that this blackness of the polar night is dissolved by the whiteness of the coming day. Until the first weeks of September we felt little of the cheering influence of the rising sun except for short, spasmodic periods. The human system accommodates itself sluggishly and poorly to the strange conditions of the polar seasons, and we, too, are slow in adapting ourselves to the awful despondency of the long winter night. It is possible to close your eyes and befog your brain after a time, when all the world is enveloped in prolonged darkness, but this is not physiological adaptation; it is abnormal education. We have all felt the effects of the night severely. The death of Danco, and also the insanity of a sailor, are due to this withdrawal of light. Now that the light is brightening every day, we are as backward in recuperating as we were in establishing a balance of living comfort during the vanishing dawn of the early night. The present cheering influence of the rising sun invites labour and frivolity. The soothing light of the long evening twilights invites repose. The change from day to night and from night to day, so long absent from our outlook, is now beginning to lighten the burdens of the weary mind and the aching muscles; elevating the depressed spirits of hope, augmenting the dwarfed courage, and raising the moral perceptions to the great life battle of work before us.

We have talked only of the discomforts of the night, and of the misery. The long unbroken darkness has not totally blinded us to its few real charms which are strikingly brought out by the awful contrasts of heat and cold, of light and darkness. As lovers of Nature, we found many pleasures for the eye and the intellect in the flashing aurora australis, in the play of intense silvery moonlight over the mountainous seas of ice, and in the fascinating clearness of the starlight over the endless expanse of driven snows. There was a naked fierceness in the scenes, a boisterous wildness in the storms, a sublimity and silence in the still, cold dayless nights, which were too impressive to be entirely overshadowed by the soul-despairing depression. The attractions of the polar night are not to be written in the language of a people who live in a land of sunshine and of flowers. They are found in a roughness, ruggedness, and severity, appreciated only by men who are fated to live in similar regions, on the verge of another world, where animal sentiments take the place of the finer, but less realistic human passions.

From May 31, when we were in latitude 71° 36′, a point farthest south, to September 16, when we were in latitude 69° 51′ 16″, we steadily and persistently drifted northward. The movement has been extremely slow, and at times we have been stationary, but we have not gone south with northerly winds. This we explain by the fact that new ice forms rapidly in the leads which open behind us, thus closing all the spaces. In a similar manner, but with many more interruptions, and with a much more rapid pace, we have drifted eastward during this time from longitude 87° 33′ 30″ to 82° 22′ 45″. The longitudinal drift, however, has changed with every direction of the wind. From this time until November 19, we drifted southward again, while still continuing our easterly drift.

October 15.—We are now able to read our thermometers and other instruments outside without artificial light from 2:30 A.M. to 9:30 P.M. The five hours of night are made so brilliant by the twilight during clear weather that we can read ordinary print all night. We no longer need lamps on board during the day, which is fortunate, for our stock of candles and petroleum is getting low. The snow in the night now assumes a noticeable brightness after a day of sharp sunshine. During the long night, and in the early days of spring when the sun was feeble, the snow was dull and black. The present change to a sort of phosphorescence I have ascribed to a kind of latent retention by the snow of the light of the sun. I have taken much interest in this phenomenon, and have recently made certain tests which seem to confirm my theory. For a number of days I have placed black cloths over certain smooth fields of snow. During the night I have removed these and invariably there has been a dark spot, corresponding to the size of the cloth, while the snow everywhere else was semi-luminous. This, in my estimation, proves that the snow absorbs and retains for a time certain rays of light.

There is now considerable life, but we must go far to find it. The leads are several miles from the ship. When we get to them they seem like huge endless rivers, winding through a white plain. On the banks are lines of pressure ridges, from two to twenty feet high. In these spaces of water are some freed icebergs and a few small pans of old ice; but the low temperature soon covers every bit of open sea with an even sheet of new ice, through which the whales and seals must force their blow-holes. Nature favours them by breaks here and there; but the steady, calm, cold weather of the present is opposed to much ice-movement, which accounts for the few breaks. All of the seals which have been seen since the months of April and May are crab-eaters (Lobodon Carcinophaga). They seem to travel in groups of from two to ten, and they follow the leads southward after every storm. The whales do the same, and when the new ice forms, and the retreat is cut off, they seek the regions about the icebergs where the retarding influence of the bergs in the drift causes enough commotion to keep spaces of water open. Failing in this, they break through the new ice by forcing their heads through it. It is a curious fact that, up to the present, we have seen only finback whales (Balaenoptera Sibbaldii) in the pack, but now we find an occasional bottlenose (Megaptera Boops) in the little lakes and streams. The convenience, which the whale and seal holes offer, made us think that perhaps penguins might utilise them as breathing spaces, but this never happened so far as our experience went. Penguins, being better able to move over the ice, have a wider range of habitation, and they always use open leads.

An Old Wind-swept Hummock.