THE MIDNIGHT SUN AS SEEN IN THE WHALE SOUND REGION
It must be remembered that during all this time we were in the region of constant daylight, in the season of the midnight sun. Sometimes the weather was foggy, sometimes cloudy, sometimes sunny; but there was no darkness. The periods of day and night were measured only by our watches—not, during the passage of these channels, by sleeping and waking, for we slept only in those brief intervals when there was nothing else to do. Unresting vigilance was the price we paid for our passage.
Bartlett's judgment was reliable, but the cabin had no attraction for me when the ship and the fortunes of the expedition were swaying in the balance. Then, too, when the ship was butting the ice, the shock of the impact would have made Morpheus himself sit up and rub his eyes every few minutes.
Owing to the stupendous and resistless character of the heavier ice, a ship would be utterly helpless if she were ever caught fairly and squarely between two giant floes. In such a case there would be no escape for any structure which man could design or build. More than once a brief nip between two big blue floes has set the whole one hundred and eighty-four-foot length of the Roosevelt vibrating like a violin string. At other times, under the pressure on the cylinders of the by-pass before described, the vessel would rear herself upon the ice like a steeplechaser taking a fence. It was a glorious battle—this charging of the ship against man's coldest enemy and possibly his oldest, for there is no calculating the age of this glacial ice. Sometimes, as the steel-shod stem of the Roosevelt split a floe squarely in two, the riven ice would emit a savage snarl that seemed to have behind it all the rage of the invaded immemorial Arctic struggling with the self-willed intruder, man. Sometimes, when the ship was in special peril, the Eskimos on board would set up their strange barbaric chant—calling on the souls of their ancestors to come from the invisible realm and help us.
Often on this last expedition of the Roosevelt, as on the former one, have I seen a fireman come up from the bowels of the ship, panting for a breath of air, take one look at the sheet of ice before us, and mutter savagely:
"By God, she's got to go through!"