Petersen tells me the same warm S.E. wind suddenly sweeps over Upernivik in midwinter, bringing with it abundance of rain; and that it always shifts to the S.W., and then the temperature rapidly falls: this is precisely the change we have experienced in lat. 75°. I believe a somewhat similar, but less remarkable, change of temperature was noticed in Smith's Sound, lat. 78¾° N.
25th.—Mild "Madeira weather," as Hobson calls it, temperature up to +7°. By my desire Dr. Walker is occupied in making every possible experiment upon the freezing of salt water; the first crop of ice is salt, the second less so, the third produces drinkable water, and the fourth is fresh. Frosty efflorescence appears upon ice formed at low temperatures in calm weather—it is brine expressed by the act of freezing. We need not wonder that dogs, when driven hard over this ice, which soon cuts their feet, suffer intense pain, and often fall down in fits; nor that snow, falling upon young (sea) ice, wholly or partially thaws, even when the temperature is but little above zero; when near the freezing-point the young ice thus coated over becomes sludgy and unsafe.
THE DOGS' SORTEE.
29th.—Keen, biting, N.W. winds. No cracks in the ice, therefore no seals. Grey dawn at ten o'clock, and dark at two. The moon is everywhere the sailor's friend, she is a source of comfort to us here. Nothing to excite conversation, except an occasional inroad of the dogs in search of food; this generally occurs at night. Whenever the deck-light, which burns under the housing happens to go out, they scale the steep snow banking and rush round the deck like wolves. "Why, bless you, Sir, the wery moment that there light goes out, and the quartermaster turns his back, they makes a regular sortee, and in they all comes." "But where do they come in, Harvey?" "Where, Sir? why everywheres; they makes no more to do, but in they comes, clean over all." Not long ago old Harvey was chief quartermaster in a line-of-battle ship, and a regular magnet to all the younger midshipmen. He would spin them yarns by the hour during the night-watches about the wonders of the sea, and of the Arctic regions in particular—its bears, its icebergs, and still more terrific "auroras, roaring and flashing about the ship enough to frighten a fellow"!
PROXIMITY OF OPEN SEA.
30th.—Severe cold has arrived with the full moon; eight days ago the thermometer stood at the freezing-point, it is now 64° below it! So dark is it now that I was able to observe an eclipse of Jupiter's first satellite before three o'clock to-day. For the last two months we have drifted freely backwards and forwards before N.W. and S.E. winds; each time we have gained a more off-shore position, being gradually separated further and further from the land by fresh growths of ice, which invariably follow up every ice-movement. In this manner we have been thrust out to the S.W. 80 miles from the nearest land, and into that free space which in autumn was open water, and which we then vainly struggled to reach.
That the ice has been most free to move in this direction is additional evidence of the recent proximity of an open sea, and shows that in all probability—I had almost said certainty—we should have sailed, or at least drifted into it, had it not been for those enemies to all progress, the grounded bergs.