6. The arrangements of the officers’ mess-room are simple and in harmony with its purpose. Here stands a large table, used for study and for meals; the smaller berths, where the officers sleep, are round the sides of the mess-room—just large enough to enable a man to breathe in. There, in a recess between two pillars, an untold resource, the library (of about 400 volumes, chiefly scientific); close beside it the chronometers; and lastly, the inevitable evils, the medical stores, ranged round the mast. By the side of scientific works stand Petermann’s Mittheilungen; and between Milton’s Paradise Lost and Shakespeare’s immortal works, a whole tribe of romances, which were read with never-tiring delight. Our instruments, too, frosted with ice, are here, and a chest containing our journals. Once a month a cask, filled with wine—the chemical wine—concocted of snow, alcohol, tannin, sugar, and glycerine, was placed there. Dr. Kepes was not only our physician, but our wine brewer. One thing more we have to mention, which, alas! incommoded us much too little—wine; that is, wine made in Austria, from grapes. As we have already mentioned, the want of room in the cabin prevented our laying in a large stock, and the supplies we had were frozen in a cellar below the mess-room, about the middle of December, for the temperature of even this place was about 16° F. or 14° F. Each, however, had a bottle of rum as an allowance for eighteen days. But quite inexhaustible was the supply of our common drink—melted snow—a great jar of which, filled to the brim, stood always on the table. Under the cabin were our supplies of alcohol and petroleum, accessible only by well-fitting pipes, but possible volcanoes as far as our safety was concerned. From the accumulation of so many combustible materials, together with 20,000 cartridges, and with several lamps constantly burning, it is clear that the danger of fire was great. But once only had we an alarm from this source—when Carlsen caused us much trepidation by accidentally discharging a rifle in the cartridge magazine.
7. Let us now turn to the persons who occupied this mess-room. Marola, the steward, lights the lamp, and kindles the fire, and awakens those who were not already awoke by the smoke from the stove, with the cry, “Signori, le sette e tre quarti, prego d’alzarsi;” and after a pause of a quarter of an hour, during which the sleepers seem carefully to deny their existence, he startles this silence of indifference by the second call: “Colazion’ in tavola.” Out of every berth now comes forth its occupant, each in picturesque costume; costumes teach us how superficial after all is civilization in man!
8. The day’s work begins. The watch, as ever, walks the deck, lest the ice should slip away from the world unobserved; in the mess-room meanwhile calculations or drawing or writing are in full operation. Our daily meals consist of a breakfast of cocoa, biscuit, and butter; of a dinner of soup, boiled beef, preserved vegetables, and café noir, and of tea in the evening, with hard biscuit, butter, cheese, and ham. I would recommend potage instead of tea for the evening meal to all future expeditions. Many of the articles of food must be thawed before the process of cooking begins, the greater part of the provisions being frozen as hard as iron. The tins with preserved meat stand for hours in boiling water, and the things for supper on the cabin stove, in order to be thawed. A plate of cheese that steams, butter as hard as a stone, which has thrown off the salt it contained in great lumps from the action of frost, a ham as hard as the never-thawed ground of the Tundra of Siberia, form an icy repast, specially if we use knives, which are so cold that they often break with the least exertion of force. I will here notice the sanitary importance—insisted on by Parry and Ross—of fresh bread, which the cook in an Arctic ship should be able to bake about twice a week. On board the Tegetthoff we used at first Liebig’s “baking-powder,” but this from being kept too long gave such a disagreeable taste to the bread, that we gave it up and contented ourselves with a defective leaven.
DIVINE SERVICE ON DECK.
9. Every Sunday at noon we celebrated Divine Service. Under the shelter of the deck-tent, the Gospel was read to the little band of Christians gathered together by the sound of the ship’s bell, in all that grave simplicity which marked the worship of the early Christian Church. The Service over, we then sat down to the Sunday dinner, which was graced by a glass of wine and cake. Carlsen and Lusina were our guests by turns. Carlsen always appeared in his wig, trimmed with extra care, and on the high festivals of the Church decorated also with the cross of the order of St. Olaf. Lusina, our excellent-boatswain, was ready to talk with enthusiasm on any subject whatever, prefacing his stream of words with some sententious remark or with some far-fetched introduction. During our meals the conversation turned on our plans for the future; we talked of Polar bears; we discussed the question of the existence of Gillis’ Land and the possibility of our reaching Siberia; but very seldom did we venture to speak of what filled the minds of all—our captivity in the ice. Political combinations formed a favourite theme; and as we had some old numbers of the Neue Frei Presse on board, they furnished an inexhaustible source of topics for conversation. The events of the year 1870 were related as the latest news, and we thought anxiously of the issue of the war between Germany and France, and feared lest Austria should be compelled to take part in it.
10. After dinner came the hour for contemplation; in our lonely berths and by the side of our beds we sat down to brood—to listen to our watches beating seconds. The English Arctic expeditions, during the long period of their enforced leisure, found a great source of amusement and distraction in theatricals. But the ships of these expeditions had far larger crews than the Tegetthoff, and the men could be more easily spared for these recreations. But there were other reasons why we could not think of following the example of the English. Our situation during the first winter was far too serious for such things, and no other place for the theatre was at our disposal except the barricaded deck; and we should have had to sit there with a thermometer marking from 25° to 37° of cold, on the centigrade scale, and see how the actors and the audience suddenly rubbed their frost-bitten feet with snow! There was one other potent reason for this renunciation—our performances must have been in four different languages.
11. Monotonous beyond all monotony is life in the long night of a Polar winter, and exile can never on earth be so entire as here under the dreadful triumvirate—darkness, cold, and solitude. In such a life, the man who surrenders himself to idleness, or even to sleeping during the day, must necessarily be utterly demoralized. In fact, nothing can be more destructive to an expedition wintering in the Arctic regions than the indulgence of mental or bodily lassitude. The real ground of the failure of the attempts made in earlier times to winter in Jan Mayen and other places in the far North was probably the utter want of discipline. There is, however, a widely spread, though mistaken view, that the long day of Polar lands is oppressive to man. Nothing is more untrue; for not continual light, but constant darkness, is distressing. Continual daylight heightens the energies and vital powers; and yet, in our own first winter, it was less the darkness which wore us than the perpetual anxiety; when our greatest consolation was found in the Arabic proverb, “In niz beguzared” (This too will pass away), inscribed on our cabin wall.
12. After supper, before going to bed, we smoked our cigars in the shed over the cabin steps, with a thermometer from 25° to 37° below zero C., and talked pleasantly over bygone days, though our thoughts were not unmixed with gloomy forebodings, as we heard ever and anon the ominous sounds that issued from the moving ice. Existence on board a straining and groaning ship resembles life over a volcano. It was only after we had been some time in this ice-covered wooden grotto that the temperature rose, through our own heat, a few degrees, and it was certainly some testimony to the excellence of my down-quilted clothes that I could wear them in the cabin without being distressed by the heat, and yet I was able to sit the whole evening in this freezing hole without suffering from cold. A train-oil lamp sends out almost more smoke than light, and when the snow drifted, we had to contend with the importunities of the dogs, who seemed to regard the deck shed as a great dog-kennel. With a sudden rise of the outer temperature this shed became utterly uninhabitable, for its coating of ice then melted and fell down like rain.