In loose ice or in one season’s ice or in any kind of ice in the open sea a ship like the Roosevelt may be regarded as immune.
Really serious conditions are those met in threading a way through a succession of big floes of heavy ice in contracted channels where the tides run rapidly, and where the impingement of one floe against an unyielding headland may cause a jam extending for miles, the floes coming together like the cars of a long freight train in a head-on collision.
Under these conditions the movements of the floes are watched with hawk eyes, and if it is seen that the ship is going to be caught between two of the fields, she is made fast in a concavity in the edge of one floe or the other, with a point of ice ahead and astern to take the brunt of the pressure. Then, if there is time and the floes are very heavy, the crew go out onto the ice with pick-axes and bevel down the edge of the floe against the ship’s side to assist her in rising.
This beveling of the edge of the ice next to the ship’s side was always done when the Roosevelt was made fast against the face of the ice-foot in an exposed position. Sometimes charges of dynamite in line a few yards away from the ship will shatter the edge of the floe and form a cushion of smaller pieces for the ship to be forced against.
With skill and good judgment it is often possible to drive the ship into a sheltered pool where three floes coming together form a deadlock, expending their force against each other while the ship lies in a little ice-locked pool of water as in a natural harbor. Sometimes this harbor opens with change of the tide. Often it grows smaller and smaller till it disappears; but time is thus given to make the ship secure, and sometimes, by placing dynamite to smash off a corner and having full steam on to jump the ship through before the floes close again, escape is effected.
The Roosevelt’s most serious times were at the northern entrance to Kennedy Channel, where at the neck of the funnel there is a grinding hell of great ice-fields crowding one another on the rush of the spring-tides in their eagerness to get south. A memorable instance was her thirty-five-hour battle across the channel from Cape Sumner to Wrangel Bay August, 1905, a distance of fifteen miles.
Two crucial situations are when, with the unbroken face of a big floe on one side, the point or corner of another on the other side catches the ship. In this situation, if the ship does not rise, she is lost. The other is when a big field, with the weight and pressure of miles of ice behind it, comes slowly rotating along the shore with resistless force. Every effort should be made to get outside of such a floe. If this is impossible, then the ship should be driven into a niche of the ice-foot, if possible in the lee of some stream delta, made fast with every line, and the edge of the ice-foot abreast of the ship beveled down as low as possible to facilitate the ship’s rising on it.
The Roosevelt had two or three very close calls of this kind on her upward voyages, the ice pressing up over the ice-foot and piling up on the cliffs a few hundred yards ahead or astern of her. I recall one instance where with the glasses I saw from the crow’s-nest huge ice-blocks climb fifty feet up the cliffs at a point a mile or so ahead of us at the very place where some hours earlier I had thought of making the Roosevelt fast to await the turn of the tide. Fortunately I had decided to take no chances, and had retreated a mile or so to a safer position.
THE “ROOSEVELT” STEAMING THROUGH THE ICE-PACK