Hamilton backs the bear to take a picador and horse under each arm, and the bull in his teeth, and our young Spaniards are a little offended at the picture, mais nous verrons, perhaps as soon as next year, if De Gisbert comes north hunting another season before the Spanish Government expedition starts.
We continue to make our way towards the edge of the ice through the mist, till we come to quite an open space of several miles in width, where the slight roll from south-west tells us of the open sea to come, and we talk of our hopes of a smooth crossing to the north of Norway. The Dons make preparation for retirement, and divide their beer, apples and chocolate, kindly offering us a share. With great forethought they have preserved these provisions against the expected confinement. But I trust it may be sunny and smooth, for their sake.
This day, the 5th of August, it is really hot in the sun, and there is a light air behind us, and there is only a very long, almost imperceptible swell—the sea silky blue, with delicate ripples, and the pans of floe ice are moving visibly, slightly dipping and rising, and the blue sea swells green over their white, as they rise, and hundreds of little streams run off them like icicles. “This end of the garden” is to-day very fresh and delicious, and after all these weeks of fog and nasty weather we hang up our bodies, as it were, to dry, and lay out our souls to the sun and thank the Creator for life. Life in a fog in the Arctic in the part where we have been is small beer, it is impossible to be truly thankful for the permanent possibility of sensation.
CHAPTER XXXV
After several weeks’ trying to get through the ice we failed to get ashore, owing to there being twenty to sixty miles of fixed land ice, and now have worked our way back eastward through three hundred miles of pack and floe ice. By luck we might have found part of the coast free of ice, or only a few miles of it, but apparently, instead of this drifting south and giving some rain to the British Isles, southerly and easterly winds have held back the South Polar ice-drift. Eight to ten miles off the coast of Shannon Island, on the north-east of Greenland, was as far west as we could press; other navigators have taken almost the same course and have found as little as only fifteen miles of ice to shove through between Norway and Greenland.
Yesterday we got the open sea and swell and now, as I write, we have come in contact with ice from north of Spitzbergen, and the ice from Siberia coming round north and south of Spitzbergen, and it is so plentiful that we are obliged to go north-east to find an opening easterly.
All afternoon we have been trying to find an opening and till six or seven could not see a way through, and ice coming from north jammed us considerably, but it was light pack, not more than four or five deep, so our ship, little as it is, was able to hold her own. You could by its thin and flat appearance at once distinguish the Spitzbergen ice from older, heavier polar ice, which we just left to the west.
Now, at seven in the evening, we have struggled through, and are leaving all Arctic ice behind. The pieces get smaller and smaller as we approach the open sea, till at the sea-edge there is only a margin of, say, a mile or so, studded with small pieces a few feet wide, and then again there is a further margin still smaller, remnants that were once hummocks or even parts of some iceberg. Then even these faint sentinels of the Arctic fade away behind us in a pale line, and we are free and in a handsome, rolling, free-born, deep-sea true-blue ocean swell. Everyone is pleased. One is bound to admit that at any time in the ice there is, especially to one who knows about it, an indefinable sense of strain. This strain, slight as it is, expresses itself in our crowd. De Gisbert is playing “The Cock o’ the North” on the mouth melodeon, with great go; the writer has just adapted the old sea chantey to the bagpipes, “What shall we do with a Drunken Sailor,” and a violent desire to excel at lasso-throwing has seized Archie, and so on.