With the last of the flood-tide the ice pressed in upon us still harder, jamming the Roosevelt solidly but not seriously against the ice-foot; and anticipating still further pressures, I had the edge of the ice-foot throughout the Roosevelt’s length chopped away on an incline to the water level, so that the ship might rise more easily to pressure. A fine snow fell throughout the day. At midnight of the 5th, the sun’s disk was apparently about two-thirds below the horizon. The fine snow continued during the sixth and the ice remained unchanged. After supper water pools off-shore were visible from the summit of the hill. There was evidently sufficient slack in the ice for a fresh southerly wind to form a good shore lead. On the sixth, I sent two parties of three hunters each, with supplies for ten days, out for musk-oxen, one party going southeast, the other southwest. Other Eskimos were sent out for hare. On the seventh it cleared sufficiently to give us our first view of Cape Hecla and the United States Range. September 8th was a brilliant day; three Eskimos came in from Black Cliffs Bay with twenty-three hare aggregating two hundred and eleven pounds. This made the number of hare killed along here nearly one hundred. The Eskimos were started at overhauling sledges and making harnesses. The 9th was a wonderfully mild day of brilliant sunshine for this time and place. Sent a party to Porter Bay, just south of Cape Hecla, the objective point I have in view for the Roosevelt—a beautiful little bay which I examined in 1902, with southern exposure and protected from the running ice. A position here would place us right at the beginning of our work, would be convenient to the musk-ox haunts of Clements Markham Inlet, and would be little or no farther than Sheridan from the musk-ox preserves of the Lake Hazen region. The dogs were all put ashore and found the beds of dry gravel along the shore a much more comfortable sleeping-place than the damp deck.
On the 10th, the temperature rose to 20° and damp snow fell during the night and day. Early in the morning of the 11th, a fresh southerly wind commenced, accompanied by a heavy drift and a lane of water formed a few hundred feet outside of the Roosevelt extending close past the point of Sheridan and on to Belknap. But the ice which held us against the ice-foot remained firmly fixed and we were unable to get into the water. In the evening it had closed again.
Started a party of three Eskimos off for Markham Inlet after musk-oxen. After dinner three Eskimos came in with the meat of four musk-oxen killed in Rowan Bay, and in the evening the Porter Bay party returned with the meat and skins of seven reindeer killed in a valley on Fielden Peninsula. These, the first specimens of this magnificent snow-white animal, were from a herd of eleven surprised in a valley close to Cape Joseph Henry, and among the seven was the wide-antlered buck leader. These beautiful animals, in their winter dress almost as white as the snow which they traverse, were later found scattered over the entire region from Cape Hecla to Lake Hazen, and westward along the north Grant Land coast, over fifty specimens in all being secured. The party reported Porter Bay still filled with the unbroken ice of the previous winter, and therefore impracticable for our winter quarters. The night of the 11th was a perfect Arctic autumn night. To the south over the land the sky pearl-white; west and northwest, about the couchant mass of Cape Joseph Henry, orange-yellow; north, over the Polar Sea, gray-white; east and southeast the snow-clad Greenland coast lay under the purple shadows of the coming “Great Night.” On the 12th a fresh southerly wind set the snow drifting savagely on all the uplands, flung out a long snow-banner from the summit of Rawson, and formed a broad lane of water reaching from behind Rawson past us and on toward Cape Henry. During the 12th and the 13th every effort was made with pickaxes and dynamite to effect a passage to this water, but without success. On the 14th, I sent a party of four Eskimo hunters off to Lake Hazen. Since our arrival, the Eskimos, when not otherwise engaged, were getting the supplies from the main and after holds up on deck, in readiness for landing as soon as it was settled where our winter quarters would be.
About 10 P. M. of the 16th, as I was on the bridge taking a look about before turning in, a large floe moving on the flood-tide pivoted around the point of Sheridan and crashed into the smaller ice about the ship, driving it bodily before it. At the first shock the Roosevelt reeled and shook a bit, then heeled slightly toward the crowding ice and turned it under her starboard bilge. Standing on the starboard end of the bridge and looking down upon the ice the sensation was much like that of being on a large sledge moving over the ice, so rapidly did the rounding side of the Roosevelt turn the ice under her. Once or twice she hung for an instant and quivered with the strain, then heeled and turned the ice under again. This continued until a corner of the floe itself, some portions of which were higher than the rail, came full against the Roosevelt’s starboard side amidships, with no intervening cushion of smaller ice and held the ship mercilessly between its own blue side and the unyielding face of the ice-foot. Its slow resistless motion was frightful yet fascinating; thousands of tons of smaller ice which the big floe drove before it, the Roosevelt had easily and gracefully turned under her sloping bilges, but the edge of the big floe rose to the plank sheer and a few yards back from its edge, was an old pressure ridge which rose higher than the bridge deck. This was the crucial moment. For a minute or so, which seemed an age, the pressure was terrific. The Roosevelt’s ribs and interior bracing cracked like the discharge of musketry; the deck amidships bulged up several inches, while the main rigging hung slack and the masts and rigging shook as in a violent gale. Then with a mighty tremor and a sound which reminded me of an athlete intaking his breath for a supreme effort, the ship shook herself free and jumped upward till her propeller showed above water. The big floe snapped against the edge of the ice-foot forward and aft and under us, crumpling up its edge and driving it inshore some yards, then came to rest, and the commotion was transferred to the outer edge of the floe which crumbled away with a dull roar, as other floes smashed against it, and tore off great pieces in their onward rush, leaving the Roosevelt stranded but safe.
When the tide turned on the ebb the ship settled down again considerably but never floated freely again until the following summer. Anticipating further pressure with following tides, and to provide against the contingency of the ship being rendered untenable, the work of putting some coal and all supplies and equipment ashore was commenced at once and prosecuted without interruption by the officers, crew, and Eskimo men, women, and children, for some thirty-six hours. Planks were put from the rail to the ice-foot on the port bow, quarter and amidships, and the boxes of provisions slid down these, when men took them and put them back from the edge of the ice-foot, where the women loaded them upon sledges and pushed them beyond any danger of loss by disruption of the ice-foot itself. This work was greatly expedited from the fact that practically all the supplies had been taken out of the holds during the previous days and were lying on deck. While the work was in progress one of the Eskimos of my southwest scouting party came in on foot reporting twenty-one musk-oxen killed in Porter Bay. The next night there was a brief and not serious pressure, then the ice about the ship quieted down again, though it ran strongly with the tides some fifty yards outside of us.
Of course this occurrence put all ideas of any farther advance out of question, and the usual routine fall work of an Arctic expedition and preparation for wintering were inaugurated. Hunting parties of the Eskimos were kept constantly in the field, covering the country north to Clements Markham Inlet and south to Wrangel Bay and Lake Hazen. The results of these parties were satisfactory, considerable numbers of musk-oxen and reindeer being secured. Almost every day one or two hunters went out from the ship and in this way some hundred or more hare were secured in the immediate vicinity. But musk-oxen were to be our mainstay, and while my confidence that we should find numbers of these animals within a comparatively short distance of the ship was justified by events I still recognised that our main source of supply must be the drainage basin of Lake Hazen, the northern portion of which, covering the southern slopes of the United States Range, had not been drawn upon by me while at Fort Conger between 1899 and 1902.
This region was now tapped with great success by parties travelling directly overland from the ship to Lake Hazen.
The boxes of provisions which had been landed were fashioned by the crew into three box-houses, a large one some thirty feet long by fifteen feet wide which, roofed with the spanker and fitted with a stove and fuel, was to serve as an immediate refuge in case of mishap to the ship, and two smaller ones. The larger tents were also set up ashore, the boats turned bottom up and the barrels arranged in such a way as to serve as wind shelters for the dogs. Later on houses and tents were heavily banked with snow. All the heavy ice next to the ship on the starboard side was cut down on a gentle slope ending at the water level against the ship’s side, and a bank of small fragments of ice filled against the ship her entire length to serve as a cushion. On top of this a wall of snow blocks was built as high as the rail and from the mainmast to the mizzenmast as high as the top of the deck house. The deck was covered deep with snow and the forward and after deck-houses covered and banked in with the same. No attempt was made to house in the deck with sails, but snow vestibules or entrances were constructed at all of the outer doors.
The Eskimo men when not in the field were occupied in making sledges and harnesses, each man his own sledge, and with the waning of the light, I had a fleet of some twenty-five sledges in commission. Attempts were made to hoist the rudder on deck so that it could be repaired, but without success.
Marvin erected a tide gauge on the ice-foot protected by a snow igloo, and took tidal observations during a period in excess of a lunar month.