At this season of the year a returning ship should never stop in a deep bay, should, if possible, not got caught over night in loose ice, and should always have full steam up.
DRYING SAILS ON THE “ROOSEVELT” AT CAPE SHERIDAN
SHEAR-POLES FOR HANDLING THE “ROOSEVELT’S” INJURED RUDDER
The key to all polar work is ice navigation. It has made possible the attainment of the north and south poles and the solution of many other mysteries of the surrounding regions which have baffled scientists for hundreds of years. It is ice navigation which puts an expedition where it can do its work, puts it within striking distance of its objective, and without this key the knowledge which the world now has of polar conditions and geography would be comparatively little.
The history of ice navigation dates back to the latter part of the fifteenth century, when for the first time the arctic circle was penetrated by Sebastian Cabot. What ice navigation was in the earliest days it is almost impossible to imagine, though some of the old chronicles give here and there a glimpse of it, and the narrative of Barents’s voyage helps us to form an idea. It is no wonder that in the little craft of those days the terrors of the ice to first adventurers loomed as terrible as the horrors of our childhood ghost-stories.
With the growth of the whale fisheries in Baffin and Hudson Bays, the navigation of the ice by the Scottish and American sailors in the first whalers, square-rigged sailing-ships, became a science, and the way in which those ships were worked through tortuous leads under sail was almost unhuman, if some of the stories are believed. With a strong breeze, these ships could even at times do a bit of ramming, backing their sails to give them sternway, and then squaring them forward to go ahead. But when there was no wind, then they were often laboriously “tracked” by their crews walking along the ice; that is, towed along like canal-boats with a tow-rope. At other times a small anchor would be carried out ahead as far as the longest hawser on board, hooked in a hole cut in the ice, and the ship slowly warped up to it by working the windlass.
When the ice was in small pieces, the crew would get out with long poles and push piece after piece behind the vessel, enabling her to move slowly ahead. Often, however, hours and even days of laborious work would be set at naught by a shift of the wind or a movement of the ice setting the ship back for miles.
This use of poles to push the ice aside was the custom even up to very recent times. I recall how the Windward, in August, 1898, coming out of Etah Harbor, was obliged to force her way through a stream of ice two or three miles in width. The engine power of the Windward was pronouncedly weak, and we were obliged to resort to this method to get the ice out of the way, so that she might strike feeble blows at the firmer cakes.