“We were obliged,” he continues, “several times the next day to bore through the young ice; for the low temperature continued, and our wind lulled under Cape Hotham. The night gave us now three hours of complete darkness. It was danger to run on, yet equally danger to pause. Grim water was following close upon our heels; and even the Captain, sanguine and fearless in emergency as he always proved himself, as he saw the tenacious fields of sludge and pancake thickening around us, began to feel anxious. Mine was a jumble of sensations. I had been desirous to the last degree that we might remain on the field of search, and could hardly be satisfied at what promised to realize my wish. Yet I had hoped that our wintering would be near our English friends, that in case of trouble or disease we might mutually sustain each other. But the interval of fifty miles between us, in these inhospitable deserts, was as complete a separation as an entire continent; and I confess that I looked at the dark shadows closing around Barlow Inlet, the prison from which we cut ourselves on the seventh, just six days before, with feelings as sombre as the landscape itself. The sound of our vessel crunching her way through the new ice is not easy to describe. It was not like the grinding of the old formed ice, nor was it the slushy scraping of sludge. We may all of us remember in the skating frolics of early days, the peculiar reverberating outcry of a pebble, as we tossed it from us along the edges of an old mill-dam, and heard it dying away in echoes almost musical. Imagine such a tone as this, combined with the whir of rapid motion, and the rasping noise of close-grained sugar. I was listening to the sound in my little den, after a sorrowful day, close upon zero, trying to warm up my stiffened limbs. Presently it grew less, then increased, then stopped, then went on again, but jerking and irregular, and then it waned, and waned, and waned away to silence.
“Down came the captain: ‘Doctor, the ice has caught us; we are frozen up.’”
In describing the discovery of new territory, Dr. Kane says:—
“On the 22d (September, 1850), our latitude was 75° 24´ 21´´. I now saw land to the north and west; its horizon that of rolling ground, without bluffs, terminating at its northern end. Still further on to the north came a strip without visible land, and then land again with mountain tops distant and ‘rising above the clouds.’ This last was the land which received from Captain De Haven the name of Mr. Grinnell.”
ALBERT LAND
The following year (1851) this same land was seen by Captain Penny, and named by him Albert Land. The Americans naturally supposed that when it was made known that this land had been discovered by De Haven about eight months before it was reached by Captain Penny, the name “Albert” would be dropped, and that of “Grinnell” substituted. This, however, was not done. A strange, and certainly not very honourable, feeling of jealousy seems to have induced the Admiralty and Geographical Society to shut their eyes to the fact that the discovery of the land was due to the Americans. This famous controversy resulted in bitter condemnation of the English authorities for injustice and partiality.
DE HAVEN EXPEDITION
But to return to Dr. Kane’s journal. On September 23, he pictures a fatal break-up of the ice:—
“How shall I describe to you this pressure, its fearfulness and sublimity! Nothing I have seen or read of approaches it. The voices of the ice and the heavy swash of the overturned hummock-tables are at this moment dinning in my ears. ‘All hands’ are on deck fighting our grim enemy.
“Fourteen inches of solid ice thickness, with some half dozen of snow, are, with the slow uniform advance of a mighty propelling power, driving in upon our vessel. As they strike her, the semi-plastic mass is impressed with a mould of her side, and then, urged on by the force behind, slides upward, and rises in great vertical tables. When these attain their utmost height, still pressed on by others, they topple over, and form a great embankment of fallen tables. At the same time, others take a downward direction, and when pushed on, as in the other case, form a similar pile underneath. The side on which one or the other of these actions takes place for the time varies with the direction of the force, and the strength of the opposite or resisting side, the inclination of the vessel, and the weight of the superincumbent mounds; and as these conditions follow each other in varying succession, the vessel becomes perfectly imbedded after a little while in crumbling and fractured ice.”