Stirling attacked this with fury. He felt the grip of winter in the air, and tiny patches of new ice were forming despite the rising sun. The sea, once frozen, would lock them in the North for many winters. The one way out was to crush the floes ahead.
The ship grounded on a hidden sand bar which jutted from the nearest land to starboard. Stirling gave the order which cleared it, but only after an anxious half hour of backing and plunging forward. He mopped his brow. The ice had drifted around the point and was bearing down on the ship. This time there seemed no escape. Reluctantly he gave the signal to cease the attempt, and climbed from the crow's-nest down the rigging. They were ice-bound in Barrow Strait.
The ship swung her jib boom toward the land and began drifting ashore. Stirling paused at the rail long enough to order the anchor dropped, then went aft as the Russians cut the deck lashings and began lifting the anchor.
The rattle of the rusty chain through the hawser woke him to the terror of the situation. Steam plumed from aft the funnel, but the screw was still. The engine-room crowd had emerged from the companion and were staring at the wilderness of ice and snow. The sea water overside and around the Pole Star was scummed with a film of mush ice.
The leader offered Stirling the chart when he reached the quarter-deck, and as he took it, he removed his mittens, and breathed upon his fingers. They tingled as he tracked the course of the ship from the mouth of the Mackenzie, and studied all that the chart had to tell him of the strait ahead.
The position of the Pole Star was desperate. The formation of heavy ice would press her ashore, and a shift of current or advancing floes was sure to wreck the ship.
Stirling raised his eyes and rolled up the chart, then passed it back to the leader with a shrug of his broad shoulders. The Ice Pilot braced his legs against a step, and his eyes swept along the deck. The revolutionists had gathered in the waist, and some were pointing to the land which lay to starboard, where green patches of moss showed upon the lowland, but the hills were crusted with perpetual snow. The weather side of the ridge showed deep gullies filled with black ice from which streams of water had issued, and then frozen. There was no sign of life, save an Arctic bird which wheeled in the sky and started toward the southward.
Helen Marr glided across the deck and came to Stirling's side, glancing up at him with wonder breaking through the beauty of her eyes. She had donned a sealskin cap and long coat, and her red lips and crimson cheeks struck him with the force of an accusation. He lowered his glance and stared at the deck.
"Can't we go on?" she asked, a tremor in her voice.
"Not now, Miss Helen. Perhaps the ice barrier will open by night, the current is still in our favour, but it's the wind that counts. See, it is toward shore. That brings the ice."