November 25.—Latitude 70° 25′, longitude 83° 27′. For more than a week the sun has sailed around our heavens without setting, and thus we have entered upon our summer nightless days. We should have seen its warm glow at midnight and at midday, but we have not seen it at all, not even for one hour, during this time. By this I do not mean that it is dark; in fact, it is quite the contrary. It is too light. The sky has been constantly lined with thick clouds, and there has been an endless period of fog and snow; but under all of this opacity the light, by refraction from the cold mist and by reflection from the dazzling whiteness of the unbroken snow, has been so great that all who have not worn goggles have complained of incipient snow-blindness. At night, or during the sleeping hours, the men are compelled to hang black cloths over the ports to gain sleep and rest from the diffused, piercing light. Nearly every one is suffering, more or less, from insomnia, and the cases which have been mentally deranged before show new signs of disturbance. Thus, though the light, even during cloudy days, is too strong for our eyes, and at night too piercing to permit sleep we long, with an intensity impossible to describe, to see the unobscured face of the sun, and we hunger for its warm, life-giving rays.
November 26.—At last we have had a little direct sunshine, and what seems very strange is that this has come to us with continued northerly winds. Without exception thus far, the wind from this direction has been warm and humid, bringing clouds, snow, rain and everything to make life uncomfortable. We can only come to one conclusion, which is that we have been steadily driven south against the main body of a closer pack. The pack before us towards the open sea, of which there is perhaps not less than three hundred miles, has been driven together. With such a condition of things we might suppose that the wind would not be so thoroughly charged with pack vapour. But this is a hypothesis. The fact is that we have fair weather, which is unusual with wind from any direction but south, and we are feasting our souls on direct sunny rays, the first in weeks.
On January 1st, 1899, the Belgica was still Hopelessly Held in a Field of Ice Two Miles in Diameter, while within Two Thousand Feet there was a Long Open Expanse of Navigable Water.
There is a somewhat surprising movement in the individual masses of the pack, as is seen by the changing position of the various icebergs. In this movement there is regular order in the direction. It is not a motion like the entire drift of the main pack, to and fro in response to the wind. The Belgica, firmly held in the body of a floe whose general diameter has been about four miles, has turned her prow steadily with but very little interruption from south in May, to west in August, to north in October, and she is now 22° on her way to the east. From this we can draw only one conclusion—that there is a feeble under-current which, acting on the bergs, is the cause of local disturbance in every pack. Our observations thus far verify this curious suggestion. The floe in which we are fixed has no icebergs in its grasp, like many of the floes around us. If such a current existed it would not be propelled with the same force as the berg-charged floes, but with a tendency to lag behind an active mass to the one side would, by friction against its side, cause it to revolve. Such has been our experience. A group of floes, in which there have been several huge tabular bergs entangled, has slowly but persistently passed around our starboard, while we have turned in response to it; and as a final proof of this movement we have constantly observed the appearance of new bergs south, and the disappearance of old friends to the north.
The winter effects on the ship have been extremely injurious. Her hull has been subjected to very little pressure, but she has been unevenly covered with snow; the stern, buried and forced below her natural water-line, has made her leak; the bow has been exposed to the many alternate freezings and thawings; the rigging, for much of the time, has been loaded with a ponderous weight of accumulated hoar-frost which, with its continued movement in the never-ceasing storms, has weakened every fibre of rope, and now the burning sun splits the masts like sticks of green wood near a fire. The interior has also suffered great injury. The constant drying effects of the internal heat has split or cracked nearly every important beam, while the seams are everywhere wide open. There are two things we seldom have here which will certainly seem strange to my readers. They are sunshine and snow-showers. In a region where the sun does not set for a period of more than two months, one certainly has a right to expect fair and sunny days, and likewise in an area where the whole face of the earth, both land and water, is buried under a perennial sheet of snow one naturally expects to see frequent falls of heavy snow; but in reality, both sunshine and actual snow-showers are very rare, so much so that their appearance affords a special delight and a great surprise. To-day we have had the phenomenal pleasure of having both in one day. Real sunbeams in the morning, large and slowly falling flakes of snow in the afternoon. We have had appropriate music to celebrate the occasion and are happy.
Old Hummocks.
