by Ice! [V2. 0]
During the four days I stayed with the Kalatdlits of Syd Kap I learned many things: how to find a seal under the ice and harpoon him; how not to set my dog onto a bear (a live dog is much more useful than a dead bear); how to trap and kill arctic foxes; where the fishing was best around where the boat was hidden; where to find blueberries in the early spring; and a lot more advice on how to live in intense cold without a gun.
No matter how interested I was in their culture, it was tiring to be among people whose language I did not understand. Besides, I was concerned about Cresswell and anxious to get back to Nelson. So on the fourth "day" Untuk gathered an umiak paddling party of eight women and four men to return me to the boat, promising that he would send a party to visit me every month, if the weather was good.
I said my goodbyes to Untuk and his family, which was a big job, as he had eight children and six grandchildren, and returned in the umiak to Cresswell beach, where, after sliding along in the dark across the sea ice and brash, I donned the snowshoes which Untuk had presented to me and sloshed away up to the boat. The breeze was onshore, and as I said goodbye to the women, who stayed in the boat, I could hear Nelson barking, almost a mile away. He had my scent and knew I was returning.
As the four men and I clambered around the gap in the rock line, I had a shock, for at first I could not see the boat. Then a piece of sailcloth caught my attention. She was almost completely buried in a snowdrift. There was only a slight rise in the snow to show where she was! I scrambled along the top of the drift and up to the fluttering sailcloth. There, inside, on deck, Nelson was jumping up and down with joy and relief.
I made the Kalatdlit men some tea, gave them ten cans of corned beef and some sugar, then, as they tied on their snowshoes, bade them goodbye. They all grinned and waved as they disappeared around the gap between the boulders.
I surveyed the scene. I had chosen my hibernation hole well, for on the seaward side of the boulders great hummocks of ice had been forced up the beach by the pressure of the icebergs calving off the Elv glacier to the east. But the boat lay peaceful and unharmed, under three feet of snow. I cleared a hole for the stovepipe chimney, then went below. It was mid-November.
For the whole of the arctic winter I ventured very little out of the boat. When the wind dropped I would go out on the drift in my snowshoes, for exercise, or, if it was calm weather, to perform ablutions. The rest of the time I carried out boat maintenance chores inside the boat, in the warmth, slept, ate sparingly, and read a great deal (I went through the whole of Shakespeare twice). I listened to the radio for a couple of hours each day only, as I had to conserve the batteries. I also knitted two pairs of socks and one jersey. I had brought back from Syd Kap a stone seal-oil lamp and some oil, and this I rigged up, with a chimney passing through a wooden porthole "dummy" shield, to give me longer hours of light, for my kerosene ration only allowed four hours of lighting per twenty-four.
Sometimes I would see the awesome sight of the aurora borealis, the northern lights, great streaks of colored lights shooting through the blackness of the arctic sky, and I learned to watch for high cirrus clouds after the northern lights, which always indicated a storm pending. Then, cozily tucked up in my warm woolen indoor clothing and insulated by the mutton cloths tacked around the cabin and the yard-deep snow outside on deck, I would read by the light of my seal-oil lamp. Every few weeks, just as Untuk had promised, the Kalatdlits would come in their umiak to see me—sometimes only two or three, sometimes six or seven—and we would sit around for a few hours talking in poor Danish or sign language. But I learned to make them laugh, and they seemed to enjoy their visits as much as I did.
December came, then January and February and March. By early April the snowdrift around the boat had mostly blown away. In late February the sun reappeared—a wondrous sight, the first rays of light in the southeast sky, after almost four months of absolute night—and the ice out in the fiord started to break away from the shore. It was time to think about refloating the boat.
But first I delved into the chart locker and studied all my Arctic charts. I had failed to beat Nansen by going up the Greenland coast; now I would try the same route as he had.
The Gulf Stream, as it passes northwestward across the North Atlantic, sends an offshoot into the Arctic between Iceland and Britain. The warming effect of this water, coming all the way from the Caribbean, makes for much less ice to the north of Norway than is the case off Greenland. The ice line is much further north, and there are drastically fewer icebergs.
The warm current gradually cools as it heads north of Norway, then passing around the islands of Svalbard (or Spitsbergen), it turns north, then northwest, towards the very high latitudes near the pole, moving the vast ice fields with it. If I could get Cresswell onto that ice field, the chances were that the movement of the ice would carry her further north than Nansen's ship Fram had reached. The estimated rate of current is twenty-five sea-miles a day, with the ice drift a good deal less, about six miles a day, and so if I wintered out over 1960 to 1961 on the ice, I would stand a very good chance of getting beyond latitude eighty-four north. The current from the Norwegian side of the pole turns southwest somewhere due north of Iceland and joins the southbound Greenland current, upon whose ice pack I had already had one free ride.
I made up my mind to get out of the Scoresby Sund as early as possible in May and to make for Svalbard. It would be somewhat risky passing through the eastern Greenland ice floes, but once out and as far east as the eastern tip of Iceland, the Gulf Stream offshoot would take me rapidly to Svalbard. Then I could tackle the Arctic region from a point further north.
I turned to find Nelson lying on the floor looking at me. He was absolutely fed up, as his only exercise had been walking round and round the deck under the tent and jumping up and down the companionway ladder. He could not go out in the snow yet, for fear of sinking into a hole. As I looked at him, his tail thumped on the floorboard. I patted him. "One good thing about not being able to go 'ashore,' mate; you won't get a bloody tapeworm!"
Nelson got up slowly and walked to his favorite spot, between the table and the forward bulkhead. Then, with a sigh, he laid his head down to doze again.
The next day, with two visiting Kalatdlits, I started digging a passage through the packed snow, now about three feet deep, and prepared to move the boat out of her nest. We unfroze the blocks and set the masts and spars out, then reversed the earlier hauling procedure. By April fifteenth we were hacking away at the small hummocks of ice down by the shore, then, on the eighteenth, at the sea ice to clear a passage through. When she was sitting with her bows over the fiord edge, we took the long storm line out and tied it right around a small berg about as big as a house. Heaving against that, the berg was soon aground and we had a good "deadman" to haul the boat against. By April twentieth Cresswell was back in the water, and on the twenty-first we hauled up the masts and rigged her for sailing.
Then, after resetting the stove up in the engine compartment, I rested three days, before setting off to try to reach the radio station it Scoresby Sund. The first place I made for, however, was Syd Kap, where all the Kalatdlits came onboard, men, women, and kids, and bade me a grand farewell. Their umiak escorted me about ten miles down the fiord, and then they turned and waved through the pale twilight of the weeks-long arctic dawn.
They were the last human beings I was to see for another fifteen months.
I met an ancient man who mushed
With Peary to the Pole. Said I:
"In all that land so hushed
What most inspired your soul?"
He looked at me with bleary eye,
He scratched a hoary head:
"You know that Sourdoughs jest cain't lie,
So here's the dope," he said.
"I saw it clear, I raised a cheer,
I knowed the prize was won;
The huskies too, like wind they flew—
Them critters sure could run.
The light w
as dim, the site was grim,
But sunshine swept my soul,
To see—each husky lift a limb
And... irrigate the Pole.
Robert Service from "My Husky Team."
21
Across the Arctic Ocean
It is estimated that more icebergs flow out of Scoresby Sund than out of any other stretch of coast in the world. But in late April, with the spring thaw not yet set in, there were very few, and they were fairly small, not more than half-a-mile long and around four hundred feet high, moving slowly out to sea. The shore and pack ice, however, were jammed up solid against the coasts, out to a distance of ten miles or so; further out, the great floes and mighty bergs moved across the horizon. It was light for most of the twenty-four hours, a grey, funereal light as the weakling sun tried to penetrate the thick cloud cover. Low clouds hovered halfway up the giant cliffs, obscuring the peaks six thousand feet above the grey waters and dull ice.
When I reached the northern exit of the Sund, I found that the ice stretched out even further to sea than it had back in October—so far that there was no chance at all of communicating with the Danes. I was not too concerned, as I had sent a message to them through the Kalatdlits that I would try to get out of the Sund and make my way to Jan Mayen Island at the end of April. They, in turn, had sent a message advising against sailing too soon, as the exit from the great fiord was almost blocked by ice. But I realized that they were accustomed to dealing with the movement of much bigger craft, and, as they had said that there were leads through the blockage, I decided to have a go at escaping from the Greenland fiord. If I could get far enough to the east, beyond the ice line, and pick up the offshoot of the Gulf Stream, I stood a good chance of getting much further north, to Svalbard. There I could wait a while; then, in the late summer, when the ice line had receded to its northernmost point, I could emerge from hiding and head into the pack for the winter.
I rested the "night" under the lee of the ice piled up off Kap Brewster. It was far too deep there to anchor, so I landed on one of the floes, jumping from the boat onto the slippery ice in my sealskin boots, a sledgehammer tucked under my jerkin and an iron spike tied to my shoulders. Slithering around in the slushy snow, I drove the spike two feet into the ice, then tied the boat up. The wind held the boat off the floe; if another floe did touch Cresswell, she just swung around out of the way, sometimes quite violently, sometimes softly. With the southwest breeze, bitterly cold, blowing stronger as Cresswell sailed out of the lee of the mountains of Knud Rasmussen Land, I started to pick my way through the ever-increasing number of huge floating floes, swirling round slowly as the Greenland current picked them up and pushed them south.
Way out on the northeast horizon a great gap had shown in the southward-advancing ice field, so on the second of May I made my way out to sea. There was a good, strong, thirty-knot wind blowing from the southwest, and with all sail crowded, I made swift passage. Out to the north, through the grey gloom, I could see distant icebergs, mighty masses of ice, like mountains, under the low, black, heaped-up clouds. But when the sun shone it was gloriously free sailing.
My plan was simple. If I got stuck in the ice, the current would carry me south. When the Greenland current met the Gulf Stream, the ice would break up and I could escape. If I was too far south, I would head from wherever I escaped to Iceland, and so on north from there. But if I could avoid being trapped, I would keep on eastward and meet the warmer Gulf Stream current in the waters northeast of Iceland.
After all the maintenance work done while she was aground in Schuchert Elv, the boat was in good shape, and I was well rested. The Kalatdlit had carried in stores for me, bought from the wireless station, and so there was now many months' supply of food onboard, plus fifty pounds of seal blubber and a hundred pounds or so of dried frozen fish—cod, halibut, and other kinds. My water supply was no problem, as the tops of the ice floes were almost devoid of salt. I was well rested, in fact too rested—for the last month or so, before launching the craft, I had been hard put to find enough work to fill my waking moments.
The wide, eastward-running gap turned north on the fourth of May. It was about eight miles wide. Here I was forced to make one of those decisions which a skipper has to make and which makes him a skipper. The question was whether to head north along the lead, or south, with it. I was now, by dead reckoning, about 150 miles east of the Liverpool Land coast of Greenland. All the ice, floes, bergs, and brash were moving south at a rate of around one knot. The patch of open water I was in was also moving south or southeast. To the east, the horizon was one solid line of ice. There might, or there might not be, a gap leading eastward further to the north of me. This was not certain.
I made the decision. I handed all the sail except the mizzen and turned the boat's head to point in line with the middle of the lead, southeast. She drifted on the current at almost the same rate as the ice surrounding her. By fiddling around with the mizzen and rigging the storm-jib forward, together with lashing the wheel, I arranged it so that the boat would hold herself roughly on course. Then I settled down to bide my time.
On the eighth of May I celebrated my thirty-sixth birthday by baking a small cake, which Nelson shared. As the heating stove was set up in the engine compartment, I was sleeping and warming myself there. Only six feet by five, it was nowhere near as roomy and comfortable as the cabin, but I managed to make a cozy enough berth by taking up the cabin floorboards and fixing them up across the beam of the engine room. In the cabin, with only the kerosene cooking stove to heat up the compartment, I found that water vapor formed on the top and sides of the cabin. Once the stove was turned off, this turned to ice, and when cooking recommenced and the cabin warmed up again, the ice melted, making everything damp—the bedding, my clothes, books, charts, everything. Then, when cooking was over, this dampness again turned into ice. It was like living alternately in a meat-market cold room and a Turkish bath. The most time I could spend on deck in one spell was about fifteen minutes in my normal seagoing, cold-weather clothes. Otherwise, it meant donning the full arctic Eskimo suit, which had to be removed below when I was in the engine compartment or I would start to sweat. This was dangerous, because as soon as I had been on deck for a few minutes, the sweat would start to freeze.
While the boat drifted in the calm water between the distant ice fields, I rigged the solid fuel stovepipe to pass through the cockpit. Now I could at least warm part of my body even when on deck. The extension to the stovepipe I made with cans, wired together and stuck with strong glue. During the winter months I had collected a great pile of driftwood and this kept dry in the bottom of the engine compartment, as an emergency fuel supply. I reckoned that if I kept the stove going for two spells of three hours each over the coming winter, I would have enough fuel to last for one year, possibly more.
The next few days were pleasant enough, despite the snow. There wasn't much movement inside the floating ice fields, and though the wind blew hard, there was a flat sea.
I drifted with the Greenland current for eight days, keeping an eye astern for floes and bergs which might overtake my rate of drift and collide with Cresswell. I spent much of the time fishing, but caught only two small halibut. My attempts at shrimp-catching were no more successful—out this far from the coast the shrimp are much deeper—but I managed to catch about one plateful in a week.
A very careful eye had to be kept on the ice growing on the masts and rigging, especially when any kind of wind was blowing. When sleet and snow fell, ice grew on the rigging wires at the rate of about a quarter of an inch a minute. Then I had to climb the main and mizzenmast every hour or so with a small ax and chop loose the ice, to prevent too much weight accumulating aloft. If this was not done, the "black ice" (as it is called) would continue to grow around the wires. The weight of the ice eventually would be greater than the weight of the keel and ballast, and the boat would overturn. No one can live for more than a few seconds in the icy cold water of the Greenland current.
/>
I lashed a small hammer to a long pole and, in calm weather, used that to knock the black ice off the rigging. But in heavy wind it was impossible to use, and then it was a matter of slowly and carefully hauling myself up with the mainsail halyard on a bosun's chair, knocking the stuff off as I ascended. I dared not start at the top, in case the extra weight of my body at the masthead, along with the ice, should cause the boat to capsize. Climbing up a wildly swinging mast covered with ice, in a high wind, is a real circus performance.
During sleet and snowfalls, which were often heavy, the snow would land on deck and, unless shifted immediately, would turn into ice. It was a continuous effort. But most of the time the wind was slight, and it was a matter of clearing the rigging only twice every twenty-four hours.
On about the eighteenth of May I got a sun sight which put me 250 miles east-southeast of Scoresby Sund. The ice to the east was loosening up. I decided to have a go at following a long eastward gap. The wind was in the northwest, and again I crowded sail. The next day at 0400 hours, under the light of the midnight sun, I saw ice only to the west of me. After another twenty-four hours with no sight of anything but small floes, I realized that I was in the clear. I had broken through two hundred miles of massed, moving ice. Immediately I changed my course northeast, for Jan Mayen Island.
By this time it was daylight for twenty-four hours. The skies had cleared, and the wind was from the southwest. I stayed in the cockpit, huddled against the stovepipe when it was warm, two blankets thrown over my Eskimo suit when it was not. It was good sailing, except for the cold. In fact it was so good that when I reached the point where I could have headed north, on the meridian of Jan Mayen, I decided to press on to the northwest. I could have done with the rest and human contact in Jan Mayen, but I wanted to reach Svalbard while this rare good weather persisted, so as to get to the edge of the ice field before the summer retreat north commenced. In this way I anticipated good prospects of reaching further than eighty-four degrees north.