Read Ebook: Adrift in the Arctic Ice Pack from the history of the first U.S. Grinnell Expedition in search of Sir John Franklin by Kane Elisha Kent Kephart Horace Editor

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"I killed to-day my first polar bear. We made the animal on a large floe to the northward while we were sighting the western shores of Wellington, and of course could not stop to shoot bears. But he took to the water ahead of us, and came so near that we fired at him from the bows of the vessel. Mr. Lovell and myself fired so simultaneously, that we had to weigh the ball to determine which had hit. My bullet struck exactly in the ear, the mark I had aimed at, for he had only his head above water. The young ice was forming so rapidly around us that it was hard work getting him on board. I was one of the oarsmen, and sweated rarely, with the thermometer at 25?.

"On the way back I succeeded in hitting an enormous seal; but, much to my mortification, he sunk, after floating till we nearly reached him.

"How very much I miss my good home assortment of hunting materials! We have not a decent gun on board; as for the rifle I am now shooting, it is a flintlock concern, and half the time hangs fire."

The next morning found me at work skinning my bear, not a pleasant task with the thermometer below the freezing point. He was a noble specimen, larger than the largest recorded by Parry, measuring eight feet eight inches and three quarters from tip to tip. I presented the skin, on my return home, to the Academy of Natural Sciences at Philadelphia.

The carcass was larger than that of an ordinary ox fatted for market. We estimated his weight at nearly sixteen hundred pounds. In build he was very solid, and the muscles of the arms and haunch fearfully developed. I once before compared the posterior aspect of the Arctic bear to an elephant's. All my mess-mates used the same comparison. The extreme roundness of his back and haunches, with the columnar character of the legs, and the round expansion of the feet, give you the impression of a small elephant. The plantigrade base of support overlapped by long hair heightens the resemblance. The head and neck, of course, are excluded from the comparison.

At five in the afternoon we succeeded in reaching within a quarter of a mile of the shore off Barlow's Inlet, and made fast there to the floe. This inlet is but a few miles from Cape Hotham, and is marked on the charts as a mere interruption of the coast line. Parry, who named it, must have had wonderfully favoring weather to sight so accurately an insignificant cove. He was a practiced hydrographer.

The limestone cliffs rise on each side, forming stupendous piers gnarled by frost degradation, between which is the entrance, about a quarter of a mile wide. The moment our little vessel entered the shadow of these cliffs, a quiet gloom took the place of bustling movement. We ground our way into the newly-formed ice, and, after making a couple of ships' lengths, found ourselves within a sort of cape of land floe, surrounded by high hummocks and anchored bergs. It was a melancholy spot; not one warm sun tint; everything blank, repulsive sterility.

"Our situation might be regarded as an ugly one in some states of the wind, but for the solid main floe to the north of us. This projected from the cliff, which served as an abutment for it; and, after forming a sort of cape outside of our position, extended with a horseshoe sweep to the northward and eastward, as far as the eye could reach, following the trend of the shore. It formed, of course, a reliable break-water. Commodore Austin's vessels were made fast to it some distance to the north and east of us.

"The barometer had given us, in the early morning of the 4th, 29.90, since when it rose steadily till the 5th, at 6 A.M., when it stood 30.38. For the next twenty-four hours it fluctuated between .33 and .37; but at 6 A.M. of the 6th, it again began to rise; by midnight, it had reached 30.44; and before ten o'clock P.M. of the 7th, it was at the unwonted height of 30.68. At 2 P.M. the wind had changed from S.S.E. to N.N.E., and went on increasing to a gale.

The summer was now leaving us rapidly. The thermometer had been at 21? and 23? for several nights, and scarcely rose above 32? in the daytime. Our little harbor at Barlow's Inlet was completely blocked in by heavy masses; the new ice gave plenty of sport to the skaters; but on shipboard it was uncomfortably cold. As yet we had no fires below; and, after drawing around me the India-rubber curtains of my berth, with my lamp burning inside, I frequently wrote my journal in a freezing temperature. "This is not very cold, no doubt"--I quote from an entry of the 8th--"not very cold to your forty-five minus men of Arctic winters; but to us poor devils from the zone of the liriodendrons and peaches, it is rather cold for the September month of water-melons. My bear with his arsenic swabs is a solid lump, and some birds that are waiting to be skinned are absolutely rigid with frost."

In the afternoon of this day, the 8th, we went to work, all hands, officers included, to cut up the young ice and tow it out into the current: once there, the drift carried it rapidly to the south. We cleared away in this manner a space of some forty yards square, and at five the next morning were rewarded by being again under weigh. We were past Cape Hotham by breakfast-time on the 9th, and in the afternoon were beating to the west in Lancaster Sound.

"The shores along which we are passing are of the same configuration with the coast to the east of Beechy Island; the cliffs, however, are not so high, and their bluff appearance is relieved occasionally by terraces and shingle beach. The lithological characters of the limestone appear to be the same.

"We are all together here, on a single track but little wider than the Delaware or Hudson. There is no getting out of it, for the shore is on one side and the fixed ice close on the other. All have the lead of us, and we are working only to save a distance. Ommanney must be near Melville by this time: pleasant, very!

"Closing memoranda for the day: 1. I have the rheumatism in my knees; 2. I left a bag containing my dress suit of uniforms, and, what is worse, my winter suit of furs, and with them my double-barrel gun, on board Austin's vessel. The gale of the 7th has carried him and them out of sight.

"11 P.M. Captain De Haven reports ice forming fast: extra anchors are out; thermometer +8?. The British squadron, under Austin, have fires in full blast: we are without them still.

"12 M. In bed, reading or trying to read. The gale has increased; the floes are in upon us from the eastward; and it is evident that we are all of us drifting bodily, God knows where, for we have no means of taking observations.

So in the original. Evidently a misprint.--

"The lowest temperature last night was +5?, but the wind makes it colder to sensation. We are grinding through newly-formed ice three inches thick; the perfect consolidation being prevented by its motion and the wind. Even in the little fireless cabin in which I now write, water and coffee are freezing, and the mercury stands at 29?.

"The navigation is certainly exciting. I have never seen a description in my Arctic readings of any thing like this. We are literally running for our lives, surrounded by the imminent hazards of sudden consolidation in an open sea. All minor perils, nips, humps, and sunken bergs are discarded; we are staggering along under all sail, forcing our way while we can. One thump, received since I commenced writing, jerked the time-keeper from our binnacle down the cabin hatch, and, but for our strong bows, seven and a half solid feet, would have stove us in. Another time, we cleared a tongue of the main pack by riding it down at eight knots. Commodore Austin seems caught by the closing floes. This is really sharp work.

It could not be my office to discuss the policy of this step, even if the question were one of policy alone. But it was one of instructions. The Navy Department, imitating in this the English Board of Admiralty, had, in its orders to our commander, marked out to him the course of the expedition, and had enjoined that, unless under special circumstances, he should "endeavor not to be caught in the ice during the winter, but that he should, after completing his examinations for the season, make his escape, and return to New York in the fall." In the judgment of Commodore De Haven, these special circumstances did not exist; and he felt himself, therefore, controlled by the general terms of the injunction. I believe that there was but one feeling among the officers of our little squadron, that of unmitigated regret that we were no longer to co-operate with our gallant associates under the sister flag. Our intercourse with them had been most cordial from the very first. We had interchanged many courtesies, and I should be sorry to think that there had not been formed on both sides some enduring friendships.

"We were now homeward bound, but a saddened homeward bound for all of us. The vessels of our gallant brethren soon lost themselves in the mist, and we steered our course with a fresh breeze for Cape Hotham.

"We changed our course, ran in, and determined to convince ourselves of their character, and perhaps to speak them. The fog, however, closed around them. Still we stood on. Presently, a flaw of wind drove off the vapor; and upon eagerly gazing at the spot, now less than three miles off, no vessels were to be seen.

"Some large hummocks of grounded ice were near them, and we try to convince ourselves that they may have been closed in by changes in our relative positions; but this is hard to believe, for we should have seen their upper spars above the ice. I gazed long and attentively with our Fra?nhofer telescope, at three miles' distance, but saw absolutely no semblance of what a few minutes before was so apparent."

We were obliged several times the next day to bore through the young ice; for the low temperature continued, and our wind lulled under Cape Hotham. The night gave us now three hours of complete darkness. It was danger to run on, yet equally danger to pause. Grim winter was following close upon our heels; and even the captain, sanguine and fearless in emergency as he always proved himself, as he saw the tenacious fields of sludge and pancake thickening around us, began to feel anxious. Mine was a jumble of sensations. I had been desirous to the last degree that we might remain on the field of search, and could hardly be dissatisfied at what promised to realize my wish. Yet I had hoped that our wintering would be near our English friends, that in case of trouble or disease we might mutually sustain each other. But the interval of fifty miles between us, in these inhospitable deserts, was as complete a separation as an entire continent; and I confess that I looked at the dark shadows closing around Barlow's Inlet, the prison from which we cut ourselves on the seventh, just six days before, with feelings as sombre as the landscape itself.

The sound of our vessel crunching her way through the new ice is not easy to be described. It was not like the grinding of the old formed ice, nor was it the slushy scraping of sludge. We may all of us remember, in the skating frolics of early days, the peculiar reverberating outcry of a pebble, as we tossed it from us along the edges of an old mill-dam, and heard it dying away in echoes almost musical. Imagine such a tone as this, combined with the whir of rapid motion, and the rasping noise of close-grained sugar. I was listening to the sound in my little den, after a sorrowful day, close upon zero, trying to warm up my stiffened limbs. Presently it grew less, then increased, then stopped, then went on again, but jerking and irregular; and then it waned, and waned, and waned away to silence.

Down came the captain: "Doctor, the ice has caught us: we are frozen up." On went my furs at once. As I reached the deck, the wind was there, blowing stiff, and the sails were filled and puffing with it. It was not yet dark enough to hide the smooth surface of ice that filled up the horizon, holding the American expedition in search of Sir John Franklin imbedded in its centre. There we were, literally frozen tight in the mid-channel of Wellington's Straits.

"I make a formal note of this circumstance, trivial as it may be; for at first Franklin rose to my mind, as possibly signalizing up Wellington Channel."

Cape Hotham was at this time nearly in range, from our position, with the first headland to the west of it; and our captain estimated that we were about thirty miles from the eastern side of the strait. The balloon was to leeward, nearly due north of us, more so than could be referred to the course of the wind as we observed it, supposing it to have set out from any vessel of whose place we were aware. It appeared to me, the principal one, about two feet long by eighteen inches broad; its appendage larger than an ordinary dinner-plate. The incident interested us much at the time, and I have not seen any thing in the published journals of the English searchers that explains it.

THE region, which ten days before was teeming with animal life, was now almost deserted. We saw but one narwhal and a few seal. The Ivory gull too, a solitary traveler, occasionally flitted by us; but the season had evidently wrought its change.

The following Sunday, the 15th, was signalized by the introduction of a bright new "Cornelius" lard lamp into the cabin, a luxury which I had often urged before, but which the difficulties of opening the hold had compelled the captain to deny us. The condensation of moisture had been excessive; the beams had been sweating great drops, and my bedding and bunk-boards bore the look of having been exposed to a drizzling mist. The temperature had been below the freezing point for a week before. The lamp gave us the very comfortable warmth of 44?, twelve degrees above congelation. It was a luxury such as few but Arctic travelers can apprehend.

For some days after this, an obscurity of fog and snow made it impossible to see more than a few hundred yards from the ship. This little area remained fast bound, the ice bearing us readily, though a very slight motion against the sides of the vessel seemed to show that it was not perfectly attached to the shores. But as I stood on deck in the afternoon of the 16th, watching the coast to the east of us, as the clouds cleared away for the first time, it struck me that its configuration was unknown to me. By-and-by. Cape Beechy, the isthmus of the Graves, loomed up; and we then found that we were a little to the north of Cape Bowden.

The next two days this northward drift continued without remission. The wind blew strong from the southward and eastward, sometimes approaching to a gale; but the ice-pack around us retained its tenacity, and increased rapidly in thickness.

Yet every now and then we could see that at some short distance it was broken by small pools of water, which would be effaced again, soon after they were formed, by an external pressure. At these times our vessels underwent a nipping on a small scale. The smoother ice-field that held us would be driven in, piling itself in miniature hummocks about us, sometimes higher than our decks, and much too near them to leave us a sense of security against their further advance. The noises, too, of whining puppies and swarming bees made part of these demonstrations, much as when the heavier masses were at work, but shriller perhaps, and more clamorous.

I was aroused at midnight of the 16th by one of these onsets of the enemy, crunching and creaking against the ship's sides till the masses ground themselves to powder. Our vessel was trembling like an ague-fit under the pressure; and when so pinched that she could not vibrate any longer between the driving and the stationary fields, making a quick, liberating jump above them that rattled the movables fore and aft. As it wore on toward morning, the ice, now ten inches thick, kept crowding upon us with increased energy; and the whole of the 17th was passed in a succession of conflicts with it.

The 18th began with a nipping that promised more of danger. The banks of ice rose one above another till they reached the line of our bulwarks. This, too, continued through the day, sometimes lulling for a while into comparative repose, but recurring after a few minutes of partial intermission. While I was watching this angry contest of the ice-tables, as they clashed together in the darkness of early dawn, I saw for the first time the luminous appearance, which has been described by voyagers as attending the collision of bergs. It was very marked; as decided a phosphorescence as that of the fire-fly, or the fox-fire of the Virginia meadows.

Still, amid all the tumult, our drift was toward the north. From the bearings of the coast, badly obtained through the fogs, it was quite evident that we had passed beyond any thing recorded on the charts. Cape Bowden, Parry's furthest headland, was at least twenty-five miles south of us; and our old landmarks. Cape Hotham and Beechy, had entirely disappeared. Even the high bluffs of Barlow's Inlet had gone. I hardly know why it was so, but this inlet had somehow or other been for me an object of special aversion: the naked desolation of its frost-bitten limestone, the cavernous recess of its cliffs, the cheerlessness of its dark shadows, had connected it, from the first day I saw it, with some dimly-remembered feeling of pain. But how glad we should all of us have been, as we floated along in hopeless isolation, to find a way open to its grim but protecting barriers.

I return to my journal.

"We are now, poor devils! drifting northward again. Creatures of habit, those who were anxious have forgotten anxiety; glued fast here in a moving mass, we eat, and drink, and sleep, unmindful of the morrow. It is almost beyond a doubt that, if we find our way through the contingencies of this Arctic autumn, we must spend our winter in open sea. Many miles to the south. Captain Back passed a memorable term of vigil and exposure. Here, however, I do not anticipate such encounters with drifting floes as are spoken of in Hudson's Bay. The centre of greatest cold is too near us, and the communication with open sea too distant.--

"I was in the act of writing the above, when a startling sensation, resembling the spring of a well-drawn bow, announced a fresh movement. Running on deck, I found it blowing a furious gale, and the ice again in motion. I use the word motion inaccurately. The field, of which we are a part, is always in motion; that is, drifting with wind or current. It is only when other ice bears down upon our own, or our own ice is borne in against other floes, that pressure and resistance make us conscious of motion.

"The ice was again in motion. The great expanse of recently-formed solidity, already bristling with hummocks, had up to this moment resisted the enormous incidence of a heavy gale. Suddenly, however, the pressure increasing beyond its strength, it yielded. The twang of a bow-string is the only thing I can compare it to. In a single instant the broad field was rent asunder, cracked in every conceivable direction, tables ground against tables, and masses piled over masses. The sea seemed to be churning ice.

"No snow until afternoon. Thermometer, maximum 22?, minimum 19?, mean 20? 35'. Wind gentle, and now nearly calm, from southward and eastward to southward.

"About tea-time , the sun sufficiently low to give the effects of sunset, we saw distinctly to the north by west a series of hill-tops, apparently of the same configuration with those around us. The trend of the western coast extending northward from the point opposite our vessel receded westward, and a vacant space, either of unseen very low land or of water, separated it from the Terra Nova, which we see north of us. Whether this Grinnell Land, as our captain has named it, be a continuation of Cornwallis Island or a cape from a new northernland, or a new direction of the eastern coast of North Devon, or a new island, I am not prepared to say. We shall probably know more of each other before long.

"The beautifully clear sky with which the day opened gave us another opportunity of seeing the unvisited shores of Upper Wellington Sound. Our latitude by artificial horizon was 75? 24' 21'' N., about sixty miles from Cape Hotham. Cape Bowden, on the eastern side, has disappeared; and on the west, Advance Bluff, a dark, projecting cape, from which we took sextant angles, was seen bearing to the west of south. To the northward and westward low land was seen, having the appearance of an island, and mountain tops terminating the low strip ahead. The trend of the shore on our left, the western, is clearly to the westward since leaving Advance Bluff. It is rolling, with terraced shingle beach, and without bluffs. It terminates, or apparently terminates, abruptly, thus:

after which comes a strip without visible land, and then the mountain tops mentioned above. Beyond this western shore, distant only seven miles, we see mountain tops, distant and very high, rising above the clouds.

I have followed my journal literally. I find, however, in my copy of the log-book, below the entry of the watch-officer which mentions this island, a note made by me at the time: "I can see no island, but simply this prolongation or tongue."

"Toward the north and a little to the west is a permanent dark cloud, a line of stratus with a cumulated thickening at the western end. This is the same during sunshine and snow-storm, night and day. It is thought by Captain De Haven to be indicative of open water. It may be that Cornwallis Island ends there, and that this is a continuation of the present channel trending to the westward. Or this dark appearance may be merely the highland clouds over the mountains seen on Sunday; but De Haven suggests that it is rather a vacant space, or water free from ice; the exemption being due to the island and adjacent western shore , acting as a barrier to the northern drift of the present channel."

I AM reluctant to burden my pages with the wild, but scarcely varied incidents of our continued drift through Wellington Channel. We were yet to be familiarized with the strife of the ice-tables, now broken up into tumbling masses, and piling themselves in angry confusion against our sides--now fixed in chaotic disarray by the fields of new ice that imbedded them in a single night--again, perhaps, opening in treacherous pools, only to close round us with a force that threatened to grind our brigs to powder. I shall have occasion enough to speak of these things hereafter. I give now a few extracts from my journal; some of which may perhaps have interest of a different character, though they can not escape the saddening monotony of the scenes that were about us.

I begin with a partial break-up that occurred on the 23d.

"Fourteen inches of solid ice thickness, with some half dozen of snow, are, with the slow uniform advance of a mighty propelling power, driving in upon our vessel. As they strike her, the semi-plastic mass is impressed with a mould of her side, and then, urged on by the force behind, slides upward, and rises in great vertical tables. When these attain their utmost height, still pressed on by others, they topple over, and form a great embankment of fallen tables. At the same time, others take a downward direction, and when pushed on, as in the other case, form a similar pile underneath. The side on which one or the other of these actions takes place for the time, varies with the direction of the force, the strength of the opposite or resisting side, the inclination of the vessel, and the weight of the superincumbent mounds; and as these conditions follow each other in varying succession, the vessel becomes perfectly imbedded after a little while in crumbling and fractured ice.

"Perhaps no vessel has ever been in this position but our own. With matured ice, nothing of iron or wood could resist such pressure. As for the British vessels, their size would make it next to impossible for them to stand. Back's 'Winter' is the only thing I have read of that reminds me of our present predicament. No vessel has ever been caught by winter in these waters.

"We are lifted bodily eighteen inches out of water. The hummocks are reared up around the ship, so as to rise in some cases a couple of feet above our bulwarks--five feet above our deck. They are very often ten and twelve feet high. All hands are out, laboring with picks and crowbars to overturn the fragments that threaten to overwhelm us. Add to this darkness, snow, cold, and the absolute destitution of surrounding shores.

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