I have thought, if I should go north again, that I would try a search-light for the autumn return voyage. In thick fog, of course, such a light would be of little or no use.
A trick that is sometimes of considerable value in squeezing through the ice is to use the ship as a big pinch bar to separate two cakes of ice. With the stem forced into the crack between the cakes, the engines are driven ahead full speed and the wheel thrown hard over alternately to port and starboard. In this way the bows are gradually forced farther and farther in until the ice has been pried apart, and the ship squeezes through.
Streams of ice in the open sea are a pronounced comfort in heavy weather. If the ship is on the lee side, she can steam along in smooth water, with the wind blowing a howling gale, the ice acting as a breakwater. If she is on the weather side, a ship like the Roosevelt can force her way into the pack and lie in comfort. This is often a distinct help with a deeply loaded ship on the upward voyage.
In the one season’s ice of Melville Bay a ship may often force her way through mile after mile by continuous repeated blows like a drill or well-borer, smashing the ice into small pieces for some feet or yards at every blow. But once past Cape Sabine there is no more of this. Then it needs skill as well as power, and progress is a matter of dodging, turning, squeezing, twisting, rushing along a narrow lane of water and striking sledge-hammer blows at points or masses of blue granite; then, when further progress is absolutely impossible, banking fires to save coal and waiting for the next round.
THE “ROOSEVELT” LASHED TO THE ICE FOOT
IN THE CROW’S NEST
It needs incessant watching of every move of an enemy with a myriad tricks and resources, and then instant decision,—“pep,” as my young friend Borup would have put it,—and a little courage.
In all my experiences I recall nothing more exciting than the thrill, the crash, the shock of hurling the Roosevelt, a fifteen-hundred-ton battering-ram, at the ice to smash a way through; or the tension of the moments when, caught in the resistless grip of two great ice-fields, I have stood on the bridge and seen the deck amidships bulge upward and the rigging slacken with the compression of the sides; or have listened to the crackling fusillade of reports, like an infantry engagement, from the hold, and felt the quivering of the whole ship like a mighty bowstring, till she leaped upward, free of the death-jaws, and the ice in snarling turmoil met beneath her keel and expended its fury upon itself.