A Year with a Whaler

by Walter Noble Burns

I was pleasantly surprised by the temperatures encountered in the Arctic. We were in the polar ocean until early in October, but the lowest temperature recorded by the brig's thermometer was 10 degrees below zero. Such a temperature seems colder on sea than on land. Greater dampness has something to do with it, but imagination probably plays its part. There is something in the very look of a winter sea, yeasty under the north wind and filled with snowy floes and icebergs, that seems to congeal the marrow in one's bones. In the cold snaps, when a big wave curled over the bows, I have seen it break and strike upon the deck in the form of hundreds of ice pellets. Almost every day when it was rough, the old Arctic played marbles with us.

What with the mists, the cold rains, the sleets and snows and flying spray, the brig was soon a mass of ice. The sides became encased in a white armor of ice which at the bows was several feet thick. We frequently had to knock it off. The decks were sheeted with ice, the masts and spars were glazed with it, the shrouds, stays, and every rope were coated with ice, and the yard-arms and foot-ropes were hung with ice stalactites. One of the most beautiful sights I ever saw was the whaling fleet when we fell in with it one cold, gray morning. The frost had laid its white witchery upon the other ships as it had upon the brig, and they glided through the black seas, pallid, shimmering, and phantom-like in their ice armor—an armada of ghostly Flying Dutchmen.

The brig was constantly wearing and tacking on the whaling grounds and there was considerable work to be done aloft. By the captain's orders, we did such work with our mittens off. Hauling bare-handed on ropes of solid ice was painful labor, and "Belay all!" often came like a benediction to souls in torment. Then we had much ado whipping our hands against our sides to restore the circulation. After Big Foot Louis had frozen a finger, the captain permitted us to keep our mittens on.

Work aloft under such conditions was dangerous. Our walrus-hide boots were heelless and extremely slippery and our footing on the foot-ropes was precarious. We had to depend as much upon our hands as upon our feet to keep from falling when strung out for reefing along the topsail yard. Many were the slips and hair-breadth escapes. It seems now, on looking back on it, almost miraculous that some of us green hands did not tumble to our death.

We saw whales frequently. Sometimes the boats were lowered half a dozen times a day. Often we spent whole days in the boats, and even in our skin clothes it was freezing business sitting still on the gunwale of a beam-ended boat driving along at thrilling speed in the teeth of an Arctic gale. Our skipper was a good gambler, and he lowered whenever there was an off chance to bag a leviathan.

As we worked to the westward, twin peaks rose out of the sea ahead of us. Covered with snow and ice, they stood out against the sky as white as marble. It was our first glimpse of Herald Island, in latitude 71 degrees north. We sailed north of the island and close to it. It looked forbiddingly desolate. Along the shores there was a rampart of black rock. Nowhere else was a glimpse of earth or herbage of any sort. The island was a gleaming white mass of snow and ice from the dark sea to the tips of the twin mountains. It was discovered in 1849 by Captain Kellett of the English ship Herald and named after his vessel. Captain De Long, leader of the ill-fated Jeanette expedition, was frozen in close to the island in the winter of 1880. He found polar bear plentiful and trapped and shot a number.

Here at Herald Island we fell in with eighteen ships of the whaling fleet—all that had cruised to the westward—and it was only by good luck that some of them did not leave their hulks on those desolate shores. The polar pack rested solidly against the island's western end and curved in a great half-moon to the north and east. The pocket thus formed between the island and the ice looked good for whales and the ships hunted it out carefully.

Far to the eastward, a long arm of ice reached out from the pack and grasped the island's eastern end. This arm was perhaps a mile wide. It barred our passage back to the open sea. The ships had been caught in a trap. They were bottled up in a hole of water perhaps a hundred square miles in extent. Busy on the lookout for whales, the captains of the fleet did not realize the situation for several hours. When they discovered their predicament, they hurried to the crow's-nests with glasses to try to spy out an avenue of escape. Sail was cracked on. The ships began to fly about like panic-stricken living creatures.

The great polar pack was pressing rapidly toward the island. Unless the ships escaped, it seemed likely they would be securely hemmed in before night. In this event, if they escaped wreck by ice pressure they faced the prospect of lying still in an ice bed until the pack broke up in the spring.