Numbers of failures and catastrophes in polar work are directly attributable to the unsuitable model of the ship. Particularly striking examples of this were the Polaris and the Jeannette. Neither of these ships should ever have been allowed to go into the ice, as their straight sides gave them no possible chance to lift when squeezed by the ice, and their destruction was only a matter of time, when they should be squarely caught between two floes. In the case of the Jeannette Melville’s engineering skill postponed the catastrophe for a time, but the final result was inevitable.
The Esquimaux of the Ziegler Expedition and the Duke of the Abruzzi’s Stella Polare were scarcely better, but the skill of the Italians enabled their ship to pull through and bring the party home.
Virtually all the ships used in the history of ice navigation have been the sailing-vessels built in Scotland, Norway, and the United States for the whaling and sealing industries. These whalers were short, stocky, heavily sparred, and square rigged. The Victory, used by John Ross, in 1829, was fitted with auxiliary steam-power, and was the first attempt to utilize such motive power for ice work. The innovation of steam with paddle-wheels, than which nothing could have been more impracticable for ice navigation, proved a decided failure, and the engine was finally torn out and thrown overboard, and the voyage continued under sail.
The Norwegians operating in the waters about Spitzbergen, Jan Mayen, and Nova Zembla; the Americans, in Bering Sea and Hudson Bay, encountered ice conditions strikingly different from those met by the Scotch whose region of operations was chiefly in Davis Strait, Baffin Bay, Lancaster Sound, together with their tributaries, and the seas about eastern Greenland. Broadly speaking, the work of Norwegians and Americans was carried on among floes and broken ice drifting in open seas, through which they had to thread their way, while the Scotch in Melville Bay encountered an almost solid stretch of one season’s ice, and in the narrow, landlocked channels to the westward the currents of which are notoriously strong, they had to contend with old and heavier ice. Some one has very aptly said that American whalers used steam to avoid ice, the Scotch, to go into and through it.
STEM, FOREFOOT, AND BOW FRAMES
January 11, 1905
MASSIVE KING-POST TRUSSES STRENGTHENING THE “ROOSEVELT’S” SIDES AGAINST ICE PRESSURE
The horizontal timber in center of picture is 14 in. × 16 in.