View from the Top of a Tabular Iceberg.
January 1.—New Year’s Day passed like Christmas, with a special feast followed by anxious discussions as to the time of our prospective liberation. We are now doing much travelling over the pack-ice, studying the life and the ice-changes. The Belgica is about ready for the sea, so far as her internal arrangement is concerned, but outside there is nothing which promises a disruption of the ice in such a manner as to permit us to push out of it. The field, in which the bark is held, is still about two miles in diameter. The sun has reached its highest altitude and is sliding down the hillside of winter. We cannot hope that the fading days of summer will bring us relief, since the bright days of November and December were of so little avail in breaking the ice.
In October and November the ice separated, leaving wide open leads, often a mile in width, winding around the floes to the end of vision. If we had been free at this time, we might have gone farther south or north to the open sea in a short time, for we were then only about two thousand feet from a lead of navigable water. We are not now any closer, but the entire pack has changed since then. Around the bergs the ice is broken into small pans. There are a few fields about two miles in diameter, but the main body of the pack is made up of floes less than a half mile in diameter and with an average thickness of six feet. This smallness of the floes prevents severe pressure, but it gives the pack a sort of elasticity which opposes the formation of wide open leads necessary for navigation. We no longer see the great zones of tempting sea, but instead, only small lanes along the edge of the large fields. If, however, we were able to get into these we might take advantage with every shift of the ice to force our way into more favourable localities.
Since Christmas the weather has already become colder. New ice is forming every night, but early in the morning this thaws again and the snow of the pack is melting rapidly; the solid ice seems to lose little of its thickness, though it is becoming more porous and is more easily disrupted. By a series of holes drilled by Mr. Arctowski, he finds the general thickness to be 2.60 metres. This is nearly the same as I found it to be two months ago; from twenty-five measurements along fresh cracks it was 2.65. To-day there are many signs of pack movement, but for three weeks with the steady easterly winds we have moved south-westerly, holding the same relative position with our neighbouring icebergs. A sudden brisk westerly wind is sending us east and north rapidly. This wind does a triple service. It sends us north, it loosens the pack, and it breaks the floes. It is indeed a godsend so early in the new year, for we are already half expecting a prolonged ice-imprisonment through another year, and if for another year, perhaps for much longer.
At midnight we, of the cabin, went forward to surprise the crew. We took with us a liberal allowance of wine, also an abundance of cheese, ham, and biscuits for a lunch. The sailors received us with song and music, and then told us stories which were new to us, but had been told a hundred times in the forecastle. We in return did some speech-making, and a little story-telling, too. The meeting was certainly a success as an entertainment, and though the music was limited to accordions which, from the combined effects of cold, humidity, and rough usage, had many defects, we sat and listened to the discordant notes with real enjoyment.
Outside the scene was beautiful, the sun was in the south, low on the horizon, spreading golden rays over thin stratus clouds to the zenith. In the north the moon was high, and though somewhat paled by the sun it was bright, and stood out in the cold, cloudless blue like a ball of lustreless silver. The endless sea of ice under us was ridged by a line of pressure, at right angles to the line of force, which was from south-west to north-east, and separated by inky lanes of water parallel to the lines. The entire ice was a mass of quivering blue. It was thus midnight and midsummer, and New Year’s Day, and to this series of strange contradictions we owe the peculiar phenomenon of seeing both the sun and the moon at the same time, and that at a nocturnal scene.
CHAPTER XXIX
FREED FROM THE ICE-EMBRACES—RETURN TO CIVILISATION
January 5.—We are satisfied with the success of our mission to the present. We should like to terminate our campaign with a striking sweep of discoveries, such as marked our beginning last year, but such a hope is now quite beyond the range of possibility. Our provisions are nearly all used, and to penetrate again into another part of this ice-strewn sea, with our present equipment, would be injudicious. We are inclined to bundle our results, and quit the under-world of ice as soon as the ice breaks enough to give us freedom.