CHAPTER X.
THE SUMMER OF 1873.
1. The time crept away with indescribable monotony. The crew performed their heavy labours, but of events there were none. The only change in our position was the constant decay of the buttresses and walls of ice, until the frozen sea lay like a snowy chaos before us. Pure sharp-edged ice was nowhere to be seen; the edges were no longer transparent; evaporation had transformed the surface into a kind of glacier-snow. June 1, we had the greatest degree of cold of the month, the thermometer marking 13° F.; but on the last day it rose to 32·2° F.; the mean temperature being 31·1° F. Every week brought us promises of summer. On the 1st the black-bulb thermometer reached 98° F.; on the 14th rain fell for the first time; on the 16th the temperature at 9 o’clock A.M., was 41·5° F., on the 26th 46·4° F., and on the 29th even 50·2° F. On these days the air seemed to have the pleasant mildness of southern climes, and when there was no wind we felt an oppressive sultriness. Wreaths of mist moved along the icy wastes which glowed with sunlight, while the long dark lines of ice-wall lay in deep shadow. The air was filled with flocks of birds; day and night we heard the shrill cries of the Robber-gulls, ever and anon mingled with the barking of the dogs in full pursuit of them. Flocks of rotges congregated without fear in the narrow basins of distant “leads;” and the “great gulls,” shunning companionship, sat for hours on the top of an ice-cliff, or in the middle of a floe.
2. No one who has not actually seen it, can imagine the blaze of light in the Arctic regions on clear days, or the glow which floats sometimes over the cold white ice-floes, with their outlines in constant vibration, while refraction transforms the icebergs into a variety of shapes. The sun’s power is sometimes so great as to blister the skin in a few hours, and the glare from snow and ice produces snow-blindness, if the eyes be not carefully protected. At a little distance the sea appears to be of a deep black colour, though it still preserves its ultramarine hues in the narrow “leads;” even the pure blue of the heavens may be called almost black when compared with the dazzling sheen of the ice. In the middle of June there was an incessant dripping and oozing in the ice-world, and streams of thaw-water flowed into the open fissures. By the end of the month the surface of the ice resembled snow; and even at some depth it was viscous, instead of brittle and hard as glass, as it is during the colder season. Streams of thaw-water ran through the softened and saturated snow. Small lakes were formed on the levels, and swamps of snow, wearing a traitorous exterior, surrounded their borders. In the summer of 1873 we observed a vertical decrease of five or six feet in the thickness of the ice; but this diminution in thickness was from the surface downwards, while in the sea itself there was little or no thawing, because the temperature of its surface was still below zero. The moisture, from which there was no escape, became exceedingly troublesome. In spite of our stout leather boots we had never the comfort of dry feet during the whole of the summer, and this we felt the more, as our labours to free the ship, which we had commenced at the beginning of May, necessitated our being constantly amid the snow and ice.
3. At the end of May the ship began slowly to settle, and the water rose between the ice and the hull on the fore-part of the ship. But we soon discovered that these small changes would not suffice to free us from our prison-house, but that we must ourselves endeavour to loosen the fetters which held us fast, if it were only to banish gloomy thoughts of the future by action of some kind or other. Hence constant digging, sawing, and blasting on our floe, through May, June, July, and August—labours in which the whole crew of the ship, with the exception of the sick and of the cook, took part; labours, alas! which admonished us of the impotence of man when he contends against the power of Nature. Only on the port side of the ship were our efforts to dig through the floe at all successful; on the starboard side the floe had been so enormously increased by the tables of ice forced upon one another, that we had not pierced through the ice after sinking a shaft eighteen feet deep; and at last the water, forcing itself through the pores of the ice, compelled us to desist from the labour of sinking deeper. The process of sawing was possible only where we had broken through the ice—that is, on the port side; yet even there the great thickness of the floe necessitated the construction of longer instruments, for which the iron casing of the engine-room had to furnish the material. The difficulty of sawing increases with the thickness of the ice in an almost incredible manner. It is easy enough to cut through a floe, four or five feet thick, but to break up one, eight or ten feet thick, is a matter of great difficulty. Our saws too, even when they were lengthened, permitted a play of only a foot; and their twisting, as they cut deep, proved a great hindrance. Besides, when we had cut to the depth of a fathom, the saws were always frozen fast, and when we attempted to free them by blasting they were very often broken in pieces. But even the sections, made with so much difficulty, often proved to be quite useless, as they were frozen together again by broken ice left in the cut. Blasting with gunpowder proved as ineffectual as in the previous year; in fact, the process was only applicable to ice-blocks which had been loosened by sawing, and which could not be broken up by the crow-bar alone.
4. By the middle of June we were at last convinced that the thickness of the ice rendered it impossible to join together, by sawing, the two-and-twenty holes which we had dug out round the ship. Henceforward our labours were confined to the formation of a basin at the fore-part of the ship. Although we saw the impossibility of liberating the vessel, as long as she rested on a mountain of ice, we hoped that the basin would help to break up the floe, and that the Tegetthoff would of itself return to its normal position. The gliding down of the ship, raised as it was, to its natural water-line might indeed easily end in a catastrophe, but we braved this peril when we thought of the vain attempts we had made to free her. Though the ship sunk so much in the course of the summer, that its height above the water-line was a little more than two feet in the fore-part of the ship, and three feet in the after-part, this circumstance in our favour was outweighed by the disadvantage of the rapid melting away of the ice at its sides. The ship, freed from its covering of ice, stood so high above it, that in order to guard against the danger of its overturning we were obliged, in the second half of the summer, to shore it up by strong timbers fastened to its masts. It looked no longer like a ship, but like a building ready to fall in! In the middle of July Lieutenant Weyprecht ordered Krisch, the engineer, to construct heavy chisels and borers to ascertain the thickness of the ice. After long and hard labour, we found that after boring through several ice-tables, to a depth of twenty-seven feet, we still struck on ice! Every attempt, therefore, to break through this accumulation had to be given up, and we contented ourselves with leading the basin we had formed on the fore-part round the larboard side of the ship. On the 27th of the month, twenty tons of coal were removed to the ice, in order to lighten the ship as much as possible, and every day we had to look to the props which steadied the ship, as the melting of the ice rendered them unsafe. In the following weeks, the bows continued to sink into the water, while the after-part as a natural consequence was raised up.
5. Even in the month of July, the weather was generally gloomy and unsettled. We had several times two or three inches of snow, and the showers were mingled with mist, rain, and snow, as had been the case in June. The winds were generally from the west; the mean temperature of the month was 34·7° F.; on the 8th of July, the black-bulb thermometer marked 108° F., and the temperature in the shade at the same date amounted to 34° F. But neither wind nor temperature made any change in our position. The sun on which our liberation depended was seldom visible; and the winds on which we had counted failed to blow. For weeks we watched for the formation of fissures round the ship. Fissures indeed were formed, but at such a distance that they were utterly useless to us. On the 16th of June, one opened towards the south-east; but it was at least two miles distant, and in the middle of July it was only half a mile nearer to us. Nothing, absolutely nothing, was to be seen from the deck but ice, and Klotz, coming down one day from the top-sail yard, described our position with a melancholy laconic brevity: “Nix als Eisch, und nix als Eisch, und nit a bisserl a Wosser. (Nothing but ice, ice everywhere, and not a patch of water.)” Amid such impressions all hope gradually left us. The drifting of the ice ceased to animate our hopes. Even the approach of a fissure on the 29th of July to the distance of three-quarters of a mile, in consequence of heavy gales from the south and west, ended in miserable disappointment. A movement in the ice which began a little way off on the 6th of August resulted only in the diminishing of our floe. There was no essential change in the remainder of this month, except that the monthly mean temperature fell to 32·7° F. We had the greatest extreme of heat on the 4th of August, 41·9° F.; but on the last day of the month we had 5·7 degrees of cold.
6. For some time we had been surprised by the appearance of a dark mass of ice, the distance of which prevented us from making a closer acquaintance with it. Our life on the narrow space of our floe had quite assumed the character of that of mere insects, who dwell on the leaf of a tree and care not to know its edges. Excursions of one or two miles were regarded as displaying an extraordinary amount of the spirit of enterprise and discovery. On the 14th some of us pushed on for about four miles to the group of ice just mentioned, and discovered it to be a very large iceberg. Two moraines lay on its broad back. These were the first stones and pieces of rock we had seen for a long time, and so great was our joy at these messengers of land, that we rummaged about among the heaps of rubbish, with as much zeal as if we had found ourselves among the treasures of India. Some of the party found what they fancied to be gold (pyrites), and gravely considered whether they would be able to take a quantity of it back to Dalmatia. Although the glaciers of Novaya Zemlya could not shed icebergs of such magnitude as that on which we now stood, we all held it for certain that it had come from thence. Not one of us had the least presentiment that it could belong to new lands, to which at that time we were near. Even the other icebergs which we discovered in increasing numbers on the following days, did not as yet speak to us the language of a message to fill us with hope and ardour. Our walk to the “dirt iceberg” was an event in our monotonous life, and was often repeated. These expeditions enabled us also to form some conception of the size of our floe, the diameter of which could not be less than six or seven miles.
7. August 18—the birthday of his Majesty our Emperor,—the ship was dressed with flags, the only form left to us of expressing our loyalty. Our dinner was as sumptuous as the circumstances permitted, though fasting would have been more appropriate, as the third day after this was the anniversary of that sad and gloomy day on which we were inclosed in the ice. In order to visit an iceberg which lay to the north-west of us, we ventured beyond our floe for the first time, and passed over a fissure to some drifting ice-floes which lay in the way. A seal lying on the ice was immediately attacked by our dogs, but succeeded after many efforts in reaching its hole. From the top of the iceberg, which was about sixty feet high, we discovered that the few openings in the ice were not navigable “leads,” but isolated holes utterly unconnected, and therefore useless for navigation.
8. We had continually drifted, since the beginning of February, first to the north-west and then to the north, with few modifications; at that date, we had reached our greatest East Longitude, and winds appeared as before to be the main cause of this drifting. At the end of that month there was a succession of calms, and we lay almost motionless in latitude 79°, and longitude 71°. The subjoined table shows our change of place in the following months.