The design of the Roosevelt was based upon twenty years of actual experience afloat and ashore in the very region where she was to be used. I had reversed all previous practice in regard to polar ships, and had made this one a powerful steamer with auxiliary sail power instead of a sailing-ship with auxiliary steam-power. I had seen her keel fashioned and laid, I had seen her ribs grow in place, I had seen them clothed with planks, the steel-clad stem and stern shape themselves, had seen every timber put into place and every bolt driven. I felt that I had beneath my feet a magnificent tool and fighting machine that would put me within striking distance of the pole.
Innumerable conversations during a number of years with all kinds of intelligent, well-read people have shown me conclusively that outside of the scientist, the geographer, and those who have made a study of polar exploration, the average person has no idea whatever of the real character of polar ice.
Perhaps the most general impression—I shall not call it idea, because it is not definite enough for that—is that the ice of the polar ocean is a smooth, even, permanent surface, and that the terrible cold of that region was the principal reason why it was not traversed long ago. Others think that this ice is snow-covered, and still others are far enough advanced to think of it as rough, hummocky, or even ragged, but yet as fixed as land itself.
Ideas as to the thickness of the ice are equally wrong, varying from a few feet to a conception of the entire polar ocean as solid. Most people take it for granted that the ice has been formed by the freezing of the ocean water.
The character of ice varies in different portions of the polar regions. North of Spitzbergen and Franz-Josef-Land and the long stretches of the Siberian coasts there may be even in midwinter miles of ice of a few inches or a foot or two in thickness. This, however, the navigator of a ship rarely sees, as it has either been broken up by the wind or melted by the sun before the season of navigation begins.
In Melville Bay and the channels of the North American archipelago, like Lancaster Sound and Jones Sound and their western extensions, ice forms early in the autumn and continues to increase in thickness through the winter until it reaches a thickness of six or eight feet or, in the fresher waters near the coast of North America, nine feet in thickness.
Some of this ice, with the advent of summer, slowly melts in place and disappears. Most of it, however, gradually decreases in thickness as spring progresses, becomes perforated with holes where the warmer and fresher water from the melting snow on its surface bores through, and then moves off in great fields sometimes miles across.
Ice of this kind, encountered in July or August, presents about the simplest form of ice-work. Two or three well-directed blows at full speed by a ship like the Roosevelt will often start a crack across a field a mile or more wide through which the ship can slowly crowd her way. Or continuous ramming will result in progress, from half to a full ship’s length being gained at a blow.
Such ice presents no menace at any time to a ship like the Roosevelt, as it cannot crush her, and is simply irritating because of the slow progress it causes and the persistent way in which it drags along the ship’s side. In ice like this the monotony is often relieved by the cry of “Nannook!” (bear), from the masthead, and the resulting scurry over the ice in pursuit of the animal.
North of Greenland and Grant Land, from their northern shores to the pole, the character of the ice of the polar ocean is entirely different. In my final journey to the pole less than one-tenth of the ice traversed was ice formed by the freezing of the ocean surface, and more than nine-tenths was fresh-water ice, great fields, some of them of astonishing thickness, broken off from the low, undulating glaciers of northern Grant Land and Greenland, and the “glacial fringe” which skirts all those northern coasts.