Tristan Jones

by Ice! [V2. 0]

  I watched the broken-up bits of the great pack ice field as they floated by the island—long ice fields, several miles across, which took hours to pass; "ice cakes" only as big as a motor car; chunks and the slushy "brash," melting on the sides of the larger floes and sinking into the ocean. On many of the floes and fields, there were seals, sometimes in small groups, sometimes alone, and I watched them through the binoculars as they woke from their brief naps and popped their heads up for a startled look about for marauding bears.

  Over to the west, as soon as the sky clouded over, a strange phenomenon appeared. A perfectly recognizable map of the terrain below was reflected on the white bases of the clouds. It tallied up quite well with the information I had on the charts. Water of the fiords and leads showed up black on the surface of the clouds, while the ice and snow was a mottled grey color, and the vegetation, lichen on the rocks ashore, reflected a yellow or brown. It was as if someone was holding a huge mirror in the sky. This is what the Danes called the "ice-blink."

  "Very useful," I said to Nelson. Now I knew how to find a good water lead in cloudy weather.

  By this time I had taken to wearing snow goggles, because the summer sunlight, which strikes a glare through the dry, clean air, made the ice of the floes shimmer with blinding light. After suffering a headache, I soon realized that snow blindness is in fact the result of eyestrain caused by the constant, instinctive seeking of shadows which, because of the angle of the sun's rays, are almost nonexistent. Man's greatest aid to judging distance, in normal conditions, is the effect of light and shadow. If the shadow effect is changed, as it is, for example, in moonlight, or under fluorescent lighting, then our eyes search continually for the normal references, straining themselves to gauge distance. The effect of the reflection of light from the ice is also a cause of blindness, but a minor one compared to trying to find normal seeing distance in abnormal conditions.

  The thought of the continual procession of bergs and ice fields across the top of the world, for thousands of square miles, was, at first, somewhat terrifying. I was relieved that there was no one else with me. Eventually I realized that the so-called Arctic hysteria, the feeling of panic which exploring parties have reported, is, in fact, only a form of mass hysteria transmitted from one nervous member of a group to the others. Being alone, I stood a much better chance of avoiding this affliction. I decided to consider only the immediate environment, and to hell with the rest of the Arctic. That could look after itself.

  When I left the ice-floe off Bontekoe and headed north for the radio station at Myggbukta, it was obvious that I stood no chance at all of getting to the shore. The ice was one solid frozen mass of heaped-up, stranded floes and bergs, with ledges and needlepoints jumbled up higgledy-piggledy into the sky as far as the eye could see. The nearest I could approach the shore of Gausshalv Island, where the radio station was located, was about thirty miles, and I dared not chance walking over the shore ice for that distance. I decided to carry on north.

  Here I had to turn my course east, out into the ocean, towards the moving continent of pack ice floating down from the North Pole, looking like an army on the move—horsemen and gun carriages, coaches and long lines of foot soldiers marching across the rim of the world.

  After heading east for forty miles offshore, I eventually found the edge of the fixed mass of shore ice and, picking my course carefully, headed again north. There was little wind on this passage, and progress was painfully slow. I did not use the engine, as I wished to conserve fuel for emergencies, in case I was trapped in thin ice. The wind was so weak that it took me almost ten days to cover the eighty miles to latitude seventy-four, away out over the ice piled up on the Home Foreland. I was still in an area where the British Liverpool expedition of 1824 had left marks, right up the coast, in the names of headlands and islands.

  At latitude seventy-four progress was almost halted altogether, for the pack ice was much closer to the shore ice, and the shore lead, so-called (though it was anything up to two hundred miles out to sea), was very indistinct. Many times I headed up one lead only to find myself in the middle of a solid field of ice many times bigger than a New York City block. Then I would have to turn the boat around and motor out against the southerly breeze, running with the current to escape the mass of ice closing around the boat.

  It was now the first week in August, and there was already a noticeable change in daytime temperatures. After two more weeks of struggling to find my way through this maze of icy jigsaw puzzles, the wind changed to the north and the temperature fell below freezing. I donned my fawnskin underwear, a shirt and an extra jersey, the Eskimo-made caribou-skin jerkin and trousers, and the sealskin boots.

  Until the eighth of August there had been light twenty-four hours a day. After that the sun was down below the horizon for rapidly increasing periods of time, so that by the end of August, daylight and darkness each took half of every twenty-four hours, as they do below the equator. As the skies were mostly clear of cloud, I was still getting quite accurate sun sights. However, I had difficulty in finding my course through the ice, for there was rarely any ice-blink, which would have indicated water passages.

  I reached Pendulum Island, at latitude seventy-four, forty-five north, on August 18, and, to my delight, found clear water running north, ahead. There were still many, many ice floes around, and after a brief rest (tied up against a floe in fairly open water), I pushed on, ever north, using the engine, as there was rarely room to beat against the wind. Progress was slow, as the engine was only ten horse-power and Cresswell was heavy with stores. Hammering against the strong north wind and current, I could not make more than two knots over the ground, and most of that to east or west, dodging the floes and bergs, which were becoming disturbingly frequent, especially at the end of the easterly legs.

  When I reached the edge of the shore ice, off Kap Philip Broke, the southeastern cape of Shannon Island, at latitude seventy-five north, I saw my first polar bear. They are difficult to spot except when they are fairly close, say about three hundred yards. The dirty yellow color of their fur blends in perfectly with ice which is more than one season old, but I happened to be scanning the inshore side of the ice, as best I could, with the binoculars, when suddenly a slight movement in one hummock of piled-up floe caught my eye.

  It is difficult to gauge distance in clear air over ice, but I reckoned he was about two hundred yards from the boat, walking on all fours. From fore to aft he was all of ten feet long, and he looked as if he weighed a ton. By this time, with the wind coming south off the ice, Nelson had picked up his scent and went rigid, sniffing the air, the classic pose of the hunting Labrador. When he sighted the bear with his one eye, he jumped and disappeared down below.

  I had been warned about bears out on the ice by the Danes in Scoresby Sund. They had told me that a polar bear ashore was, like the grizzly bear out of the woods, a timid beast, who would avoid any encounter with an enemy. But once out on the floes, he was king of all he surveyed. He had only seals and wolves (possibly) to deal with, and he became a hungry, arrogant, violent, very dangerous wild beast, whose weight alone was enough to knock the life out of the strongest man. I put Cresswell on a broad reach, out to the east, adjusted the sails, for there was a perfectly clear stretch of water ahead on that course, then went below to make hot chocolate and warm myself.

  "Thank God there's water between us and him," I said to Nelson, who was cowering under the cabin table. He bumped his tail in the floorboards. But I was disturbed by the thought that if I did not fetch Kap Bismarck and got stuck in the southward drifting ice pack, one of these brutes, or maybe even more than one, might get wind of us and attack.

  By August 30 I was on latitude seventy-five degrees fifty minutes north—only sixty miles south of Kap Bismarck and safety. But try as I would to find a clear passage, it was almost impossible. Stretched right across the northern horizon was a solid barrier of piled up shore ice, rising in hummocks up to three hundred feet above the ocean le
vel, along with a moving mass of pack ice and bergs, some of the latter up to nine hundred feet high and three miles from bow to stern.

  Choosing one seemingly promising narrow lead running slightly west of north, hardly wider than three times the beam of Cresswell I pressed on. By now the tops of the ice floes were well above deck level of my boat. I was, therefore, most of the time protected from the wind to about a third of the way up the mast. The engine was pushing the boat at four knots over the ground, going flat out, while the ice floes, moving on the current, were traveling at around a knot and a half. Our combined speed, therefore, was around six and a half knots—eight land miles per hour. All day, all night, for two days, I stayed at the wheel continuously, without a break, wending my way through these never-ending walls of gleaming ice as high as a garden wall, sometimes in a narrow passage hardly wide enough for the boat, sometimes in wide stretches.

  I was still cold, even though I had thrown two blankets over my Arctic clothing and rigged up a windshield of canvas, forward of the wheel, to keep off the boat's own wind, created by her speed. The rigging was frosting up. This was a great worry. Every time I reached a stretch of wide lead or clear water, I had to lash the wheel, leave the boat at the mercy of the current, climb the masts, and knock off the ice with a small ax.

  Doing this became a nightmare of cold and superhuman effort, short of sleep as I was. High up the mast the north wind blew intensely cold, frosting up all my clothes, with my breath forming an inch-thick layer of solid ice over the thick scarf tied up around my head between the goggles and the collar of my jerkin.

  Not to have knocked the ice off the rigging would have been to commit suicide. It formed so quickly in the wind that within three hours it could create such a weight high up on the craft that it would overcome the weight of the ballast in the keel and capsize her. Cresswell would sink immediately. If I did not drown right away, I would freeze to death. If I managed to clamber onto the floe, I would both freeze and starve to death anyway in a long, protracted agony over a couple of days. Getting rid of the ice was a matter of staying alive.

  By the morning of September l, I was almost falling asleep on my feet. I had reached latitude seventy-six degrees ten minutes north. Bismarck station was a mere thirty miles away. Perhaps there was just enough clear water ahead to make it to Bismarck and sleep in safely. Perhaps around this next cape of ice, perhaps around the corner of that berg, the ice would clear just enough to get me thirty miles. Thirty miles in an ocean-crossing sailing yacht was a mere six hours' normal sailing; in a motor car, half an hour on a good road. Thirty miles—the difference between safely for the duration of the bitterly cold winter, and extreme discomfort, danger, and possibly even death, a cold, lonely death, in the ice. I pressed on, more by willpower now, for my physical strength was ebbing with lack of sleep. I was about three hundred miles nearer the Pole than the northernmost tip of Alaska.

  Suddenly, my fate was decided for me, though I did not realize it at the time. The lead I had followed for the past day of cold torture ended up in a perfect wall of ice. I turned a corner, and there I was, like being in a harbor. By this time my fuel stock was so low, and the engine so cold, that getting out of this impasse under power was out of the question. I decided to take a chance. I tied the boat by a bowline only from the end of the cul-de-sac and went to sleep. I slept four hours, dead to the world.

  When I awoke, feeling much stronger and more confident, I climbed onto the floe. Earlier it had been difficult to mount the floe to drive the stake in, as I had to cut steps out of the side with an ax in order to get on top. I had been too weak to jump up. Now it was much easier, and the sky had lightened into a grey twilight. The wind, however, was still screaming over the floes from the north, and once on top of the floe, it was a job to remain upright.

  I looked first to the north; what I saw was one of the bitterest, most disappointing sights I have ever seen in my life.

  There, only forty yards from where I stood, on the other side of an isthmus joining two huge fields of jammed-up pack ice that stretched away as far as I could see east and west, northeast and southwest, was another lead heading north, and away, at the end of it, at its mouth, was a great stretch of clear water right across the north horizon!

  "Goddamn it, bugger it, and blast it!" I cursed myself, the floes, the forty yards, everything. Then, more in anger than in desperation, I clambered back onboard, grabbed the big tree-felling ax, and started to hack away at the ice. But after a few minutes the foolishness of trying to carve through a forty-yard-thick wall of ice twelve feet deep became obvious. I sat down on the ice. Tears were futile in this temperature, for they would freeze as soon as they left my eyes. Then I thought of what would happen if these two fields of ice, each higher than the boat, came together.

  There was only one solution, for sailing back south was out of the question. It would take days to overtake the miles and miles of ice fields, and during those days they could crush together anyway, especially if the westerly field hit the fixed shore ice. I would not stand a chance. If I stayed where I was, I was a dead man; if I tried to sail south, I was probably a dead man. The third alternative, difficult though it might be, was the only solution. I must try to get the boat up onto the ice floe, about seven feet above sea level. But how?

  There was only one possible way. I must hack a slipway out of the ice, wide enough for Cresswell's hull to slide up, then I must lighten her bows, get her bows onto the ice whilst the stern was still loaded and low in the water, then unload all her other gear, and drag the empty hull up the incline.

  And this is what I set to doing. I hacked away with the ax and shifted tons of ice, solid hard ice, until, after nine days' steady hard labor, I had a "ramp" leading from just below water level, back through the ice floe at a steady incline of about twenty-five degrees, back almost to the other side of the ice-floe isthmus. I worked all the daylight hours, axing, throwing, shoveling, slashing, until a fairly smooth ramp was created.

  On the ninth of September I unloaded all the stores, all the sails, all the tools off the boat, having made a ladder out of some spare lumber, so I could climb off the deck straight onto the "deck" of the floe.

  With the forefoot now above the waterline, I turned the boat bows onto the ramp and dragged her until the keel, just an inch of it, was resting on the ice. Then, I started to unload the midship parts of the boat, lifting the forefoot even higher above the bottom edge of the ice ramp.

  Then, with much labor, I dug a five-foot hole in the ice at the inner end of the ramp, and into this I dropped the eighty-pound hurricane anchor. The chain from the anchor was secured to a three-inch-diameter nylon storm running line, a hundred fathoms of it—six hundred feet. I filled the anchor hole up with salt water and had a short sleep after a hearty meal of corned beef, rice, and porridge.

  When I awoke the salt water in the anchor hole had frozen solid, and I had a good "deadman" to pull the boat up against. I had no winches in Cresswell, so the whole thing had to be done with blocks and tackles, five of them, six-inchers, with three sheaves apiece. I dug footholds into the top of the floe, reeved the storm line through the blocks, and set to pulling four and a half tons up the twenty-five-degree incline. It took me five days to get the forefront up to the chain, a matter of twenty-eight yards or so. The bottom of the keel was then only about a foot below the top of the floe. She was out of danger. She was sitting almost on top of the ice, exposed to a bitter cold wind, covered in frost and driven ice, but she was safe. That was the main thing. Wearily I reloaded my stores onboard, except for some of the cartons of corned beef, which would take up valuable space in the cabin. These I covered with an old sail, pegged down into the ice. Then I noticed that the northern exit from the floe had jammed up solidly with ice floes.

  "One good thing about this situation, old son," I said to Nelson, as I clambered below to get a long rest, "at least we don't have to worry about the rigging freezing up now." But the ice would still have to be knocked off r
egularly, at least twice a day, to prevent its weight snapping the masts.

  I made a big pot of burgoo, so I could rest thoroughly during the next day or two, and tacked up all my mutton cloths on the inner lining of the hull around the cabin, then fixed felt pads over the portholes and the skylights, while the tiny cabin warmed up with the heat of the cooking. Then I went topsides to have a last look around.

  The wind had died at last, and there was little noise except for the distant cracking and crunching of the ice. The sun had dropped over the southwest horizon, changing the sky to pale blue, deepening into turquoise, Prussian blue, then Stygian black. In the north and east the stars shone so bright, so close, that it seemed as if they hung around my shoulders. The dryness of the atmosphere made the rays of the stars diffuse into each other. The effect was like standing under a great chandelier of a billion-trillion shining candles.

  I decided it was too cold to piss in the open air. I would do it in the big wine demijohn, hermetically sealed, which I used in inclement weather. I touched the mizzen shrouds with my mittened hands. Small bits of glistening ice fell off the rigging wire. I made a mental note to clean my ice goggles later. I had removed them, for the twilight was deepening. The smell of a good stew simmered up the companionway hatch.

  Although I had failed to reach Nansen's latitude of eighty-four degrees north, I had got very close—within eight degrees. I had reached a point only 850 miles from the North Pole itself, and despite the potentially terrifying situation Cresswell had been in only two weeks previously, she was now reasonably safe, unless the ice under her broke up.

  As I turned to go below, I saw the bear. Twelve feet long, padding silently, swiftly over the snow-laden ice. He was only fifty yards away, coming straight at the boat!

  Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed,

  The dear repose for limbs with travel tired;

  But then begins a journey in my head