by Ice! [V2. 0]
There were five cans of corned beef and three of beans in my pack, four packets of cigarettes and two pounds of sugar, which I had hoped to exchange with the Eskimos for useful items like seal oil. There was the harpoon, a can opener, a flashlight and a seaman's clasp knife, and six boxes of matches. And that was it. The chances of Eskimos coming within sight of me during the next few months were nil. There was only one thing for it, I must dig my way out through the snowdrifts!
I clambered again onto the top of the boulders and looked around. The nearest other rocks clear of snow were down towards the shore, about half a mile downhill, as far as I could tell in the darkness.
Back down in the rock crevice, I opened up two cans of corned beef, laid the food down on the icy stone, and opened up the cans with the can opener, flattening them until they were sheets of thin metal. Then I punched holes in the metal with the seaman's knife. The next bit was tricky, because it meant completely undressing, cutting thin strips of my fawnskin underpants, made like long Johns, and getting dressed again fast. The cold, as I took the clothes off, burned me all over.
With the thin ships of leather I lashed the plate metal to my harpoon handle. Now I had a primitive shovel. Then I set the sleeping bag, with its orange cover, out on the snow, pegged with slivers of wood hacked from the harpoon handle, as a signal for any casual observers from the air or the sea, and started shoveling. I made up my mind to follow a strict schedule: six hours' shoveling, back to the '"cave," an ounce of brown sugar, a quarter of a can of beans, a spoonful of corned beef, two hours' sleep, then back to shoveling. I reckoned that if I followed this schedule, there was a good chance of reaching the lower boulder crop inside a week. That is, if the drifts were not deeper down on the lower stretches.
I started shoveling at 0600 hours on the first of November. It was heavy work, for I had to dig a path about four feet wide at the top, narrowing to about a foot where I could walk on the packed snow. At first I made my way forward at around fifty yards a session, then the snowdrift depth shallowed off to about ten feet, and I drove forward at one hundred yards a shift by 1200 hours on the third of November. But I was not very happy, because the heavy work and expenditure of energy without adequate replacement were beginning to tell. Sleeping inside the rock cleft, I was reasonably warm as long a I stayed still, but if I moved in my sleep the heat from my body melted the thin layer of ice inside the bag, making everything damp. This dampness in turn evaporated with the heat driven off and formed more ice on the part of the bag I was not resting against.
By the fifth of November I began to slow down. My determination to get out of my snow prison had not diminished, but it was obvious, from the ground I was covering, that I was sleeping longer and digging less. Once I conked out for five hours. Very unusual for me, and an obvious sign that something was wrong. Then sitting on the rock bed in utter silence, I heard it. A plane!
I grabbed the paper bag which the sugar had been in and went outside, onto the inner end of my dug channel. The bag was fairly large, of brown paper, and I had smeared it with grease from the corned beef and left sugar grains stuck to it. As the plane passed over the Schuchert Elv, from east to west, low over the water, I lit the paper bag and tied it to the end of the shovel. In the windless night it burned brightly for about a minute. After my eyes recovered from the glare of my signal, I peered after the plane. It carried on its course for a full minute. Exhausted and bitterly disappointed, I sat down on the snow, determined to dig on. By this time I had about two thousand feet, maybe seven hundred yards, still to go to the rock outcrop on the shore. I stretched up above the level of the snow, balancing on a rocky ledge protruding from the base of the home boulder, gazing after the plane. He had changed course!
He was coming straight for me. I kept shining the flashlight directly at him, and when he passed over the shore, his big landing lamp replied, shining a beam down on me, then on the trail I had so laboriously dug through the snow. Then he sent a white flare into the black sky, a parachute flare, which for a full five minutes lit up the whole scene, like daylight. He waggled his wings, then turned to the southwest, still shining his spotlight on my boulders.
I had been seen! To celebrate I ate a whole can of corned beef, then smoked a cigarette. "Shall I just sit here and wait?" I wondered. Then the answer came loud and clear—"No! Keep moving, keep digging. It's probably the one thing that's kept you alive and sane, so keep at it!"
The Eskimos arrived three hours later. I saw their long umiak wend into the shore ice. They clambered over the ice and the rocks, then four of them, mere black dots on the white snow surface, made their way, waddling on snowshoes, to the lower end of my trench. They came trudging up the trench, grinning. Two of them spoke Danish. "Goddag, Goddag'." they cried, grinning all over their faces.
I grabbed the mitten of the first one to arrive and shook it. I was too excited to speak, anything else but English.
"Jesus Christ, mates, am I pleased to see you!"
All four grinned as they recovered my gear and fitted a pair of snowshoes on my feet. Then we set off down the trench. I tapped the rock-solid sides of the trench as we came to the far end. "It's a long way to Tipperary," I said, quietly. The Eskimo leader, Untuk, looked at me quizzically. I offered him an ounce of frozen brown sugar from my jerkin pocket. He accepted it, smiling, sniffed it, tasted it, then swallowed the lot, patting me on the shoulder.
I wasn't too concerned about Nelson. He wouldn't starve; he knew where the burgoo pot was, and there were plenty of peanuts in the engine compartment, where I'd left the hatch loose so he could get at them if I was away too long. But I reflected what a bloody fool I'd been, not to have brought the alarm flares, pistol, and snowshoes with me, and how lucky I was.
Wise men make life happier and more endurable by tightening their troubles with remembrances of their blessings, whereas most people, like sieves, let the worst things remain and stick to them while the best slip through.... And as for the things which are not by their nature evil but are made painful wholly and entirely by sheer imagination, we should treat them as we do the masks that frighten children—bring them near, put them in the children's hands and turn them over until we accustom them not to mind them. So by bringing our trouble close to us and using our reason we may discover how ephemeral and flimsy and exaggerated it is.
Plutarch, 'Exile."
20
Safe and Sound
When the four Eskimo rescuers and I reached the edge of the shore, clambering over the rocky boulders and over the jumbled-up shore ice, then trudging another half-mile over the flat cake ice out on the water's edge, we met up with a waiting party of six more—three men and three women—though to be truthful I couldn't for the life of me tell the difference until they started to talk. They were all dressed more or less the same, all of fairly short stature, all with the same chubby faces. Carefully they handed me into the boat, where there were three more women. Then, with a female hugging each side of me and blankets thrown over my shoulders, we set off, with the women paddling the umiak out to sea, until they had enough sea room to hoist the sail.
The chief of the crew, who seemed also to be the oldest (though it is difficult to tell with Eskimos, as they do not show signs of age until well into their fifties), asked me in Danish how many passings of the moon I had been stranded. I counted up and it came to eight. Eight days! Then I came to the conclusion that if I had not attempted to dig my way out, if I had just sat there, moping, hoping for rescue, I probably would not have survived. The cold alone, after two hours' sleep, was enough to make one wish to die. The action made effort, effort made heat. The action also stopped me from feeling too sorry for myself, and self-pity is very dangerous.
He patted my head, then felt under my mouth-scarf, of thin silk, which was covered with a layer of ice. He felt all around my face, then, coming to my beard, let out a yell and laughed. I dropped the scarf and the beard fell out, all ten inches of it. The Eskimos burst out chartering and laughing, until
I covered my face again from the cold.
As we made our way down the Schuchert Elv fiord, dodging bergs and floes, I observed the umiak and how it was handled. The ladies sat on each side of me, paddling and warming my uncovered hands on their stomachs. Perhaps inspecting the boat would keep my mind off where my hands were.
The Eskimo boats, the umiak and the kayak, are not just vessels made to float and move through the water. They are highly efficient machines. They belong to the same family of membrane and frame vessels as did the ancient Irish curragh and the British coracle, which themselves were highly efficient, ocean-worthy vessels.
The curragh had more or less the same lines and appearance as the Iroquois bark canoe, but the umiak has the characteristics of the dory, one of the most seaworthy of all vessels. Therefore it follows that as the dory is more efficient than the bark canoe, especially in any kind of rough sea, then the Eskimo umiak must be more seaworthy than the ancient curragh.
Like the dory, the umiak is double-ended. The keel is carved out flat from a piece of driftwood and so are the pieces of wood lashed from fore to aft along the gunwale which keep the frames in position. The Eskimos told me that some of the umiak lashings are of long strips of whalebone, but the one I was in had rawhide lashings, very well served and tied.
I noticed that the men did not paddle the boat, but only steered or handled the sails. I later found that the Eskimos consider paddling to be women's work, and they even call the umiaks "the women's boats." The kayaks, smaller, more fragile, and much harder to handle, were known as "the men's boats," though I did occasionally see women handling kayaks at Syd Kap.
At Syd Kap I watched how the skin boats are made. When a seal is caught and killed, the skin and blubber is removed. The Eskimos put the skins into tubs until the hair rots away on one side and most of the blubber on the other. When the boatbuilder guesses that the rotting is enough, he scrapes the hair from one side and the blubber from the other. The skins are sewn together while still wet, the seams overlapping, and the stitching very fine indeed. The thread used is seal sinew, which swells when wet.
Then the pliable, wet skins are stretched over the frame of the boat. When a kayak is sewn together, the two sides must be held while the last seam is sewn. This is because the kayak is an enclosed vessel, about as wide as a coffin and twice as long. The wet sealskin cover is sewn up reasonably tight, and when it dries becomes as taut and resonant as a drumhead. Umiaks may be built of large sealskins, walrus or white whale hides, and it is a tough job to stretch these hard skins tight enough. This is done by pulling the skins over the gunwale of the frame and overlapping it back onto its own part, then sewing one part to the other.
Before the Eskimo launches his skin boat, he leaves it out in the rain or snow for a while, to dampen it. After that it is as tight as a drum and no water will leak in. Because the sinews, with which the skins are sewn, rot after three or four days in fresh water, the skin boat is dragged onshore to dry out, turned upside down and placed on stones to allow ventilation. Overnight the sinews are restored, and the boat is good for another three or four days. When the boats are not in use, they are taken ashore and stood on their sides as extra protection from the wind. In salt sea water the umiak or the kayak stitching will last for ten days before having to be completely redried.
The Eskimos told me that the umiaks made of walrus skin are not as good as those made of white whale hide. The walrus skin rots faster and is much harder to stitch. The average life of an umiak is about three years in fresh water, but longer in sea water. The kayaks last a shorter time, but this is probably because they are used more often.
The umiaks I saw at Syd Kap carried an amazing cargo load, sometimes as much as four tons. The thirty-five-footers carried up to twenty passengers. This is because of their high sides. They could come right inshore because of their flat bottom and could be dragged up on the ice because of their light weight when unloaded; no more than half a ton. I realized that in choosing Cresswell for the Arctic cruise I had unwittingly followed the path of the umiak, for Cresswell, too, had all these attributes, with the exception of the light weight—being constructed of wood, she was heavier.
On the way to Syd Kap the umiak was forced by piled-up pack ice to take a detour down a lead quite close to the shore. She grazed a sharp rock which put a gash into her starboard bow. I was amazed to see one of the women get out a sewing needle made of whalebone, some sinew from a seal, a small sealskin patch, lean over the bow, and sew a patch on!
The sail used was a square sail, and I wondered if the Eskimos had learned of that from the Norsemen, or whether they had figured it out before the arrival of the Scandinavians. The Eskimos told me that they had tried out fore-and-aft sails, but that with an umiak they were dangerous in the swift gusts of the fiords, and that some fore-and-aft-rigged boats had been lost, but hardly any square-riggers.
I learned later that when the Eskimos take the umiaks up the rivers, if they come to a shallow part, they half unload the umiak, with its four-inch draft, then they get out into the water and lift the boat over the shallows! When they haul against the current, they secure the towing line halfway up the mast at one end, then to a dog team or some men at the other.
When we came out into the open, wide waters of the Halls Bredning fiord, where there was quite a sea, the women inflated eight sealskin bags and tied them to the hull outside the boat, four a little aft of the bows and four a little forward of the stem. This was to prevent the boat from being swamped. With so little wood in the frame, if she were swamped she'd go down like a brick unless she had buoyancy. The sealskin bags gave her an added 250 pounds of buoyancy each. I watched carefully, storing all these ideas at the back of my mind. As the roughness of the sea increased, a sealskin flap, which had been hanging down all round the inside of the freeboard, was raised and tied to the wooden rail fixed round the boat above the gunwale. They had even thought of the weathercloth! The dodger!
Once up, the weathercloth flaps were held in place by sticks jammed between the gunwale and the rail. All very seamanlike and simple.
But the most original thing about the skin boats is that if someone is stranded in one, or wrecked on one of the many rocks or ice floes, he need not starve. He can eat the uncured hide of which the boat is made! There's enough food in an umiak to last ten men for a month! True, it would be tough and taste like old rope, but hunger knows no taste.
There were only three huts in the Eskimo settlement, and these were almost completely surrounded by walls of turf bricks, about five feet high, acting as windbreaks. On arrival a meal was prepared of the two large codfish caught on the expedition. As guest of honor, following the Eskimo custom, I got the head. This I ate with relish. It was the first warm food I had had in over ten days.
The proper name of the people of the East Greenland Arctic is Kalatdlit, and this is how they refer to themselves. The meaning of Kalatdlit is not clear, but the meaning of Eskimo is. It means "eater of raw meat," and the Kalatdlit find this very insulting.
After the fish head, which I ripped from the bones, eyes and all, boiled salmon was served by the women, but I thought it unwise to eat too much after having had so little for so many days. I therefore asked for only a small portion. The Kalatdlit understood my reasons for this, and also for turning down an offering of raw narwhal blubber.
Around the inside of the wooden hut, there were pictures from Danish magazines and newspapers. Three small stone oil lamps burned seal oil, with a little wisp of black smoke rising from each one into the rafters above. There was a fairly large potbellied stove of iron, the only white man's influence I saw in Syd Kap, with the exception of the magazine pictures. Everything else had been made, caught, killed, or grown there.
Untuk, the chief, told me that caribou head and fish head are the best food, rabbit the worst. He gave me to understand that if one eats nothing but rabbit for six weeks one will die. Of course he's right. There's no fat on a rabbit. He showed me a caribou head ready for
eating the next day. It had been skinned and two rawhide sinews threaded through the nostrils, from which it could be hung over an open fire outside.
It was interesting to see the Kalatdlits drying the fish in one of the other huts. They had mainly cod and salmon, which they first gutted, then took out the backbone with the head. The rest of the fish was split and the two halves tied together with sinew at the tail. The head and backbone were hung separately, those of the small fish for the dogs to eat and the larger ones for the old people. They did not salt the fish because any flesh, meat or fish or fowl, which is salted soon loses its antiscorbutic power.
Scurvy results partly from not eating enough food with the necessary antiscorbutic ingredients. Salt kills these. This is probably the reason for the many cases of whole ships' crews' dying of scurvy in the old days. Their main diet was salt beef and pork. Their main antidote to scurvy was lime juice, which is just about useless for anything except a thirst quencher! The way to combat scurvy is to cook food only as long as is necessary to make it digestible, or to make it taste pleasant, and to eat only enough salt to replace that lost by sweating. The cures for scurvy are many. If fresh fruit and vegetables are available, they will do the trick (if only because they do not have the antiscorbutics cooked out of them); but if, as in the Arctic, fruit and vegetables are not readily available, then raw meat (except rabbit) or bone marrow will serve the purpose.
Death by scurvy is by no means the most unpleasant death, at least with respect to pain. There is, in fact, hardly any suffering right up until the last few hours, except perhaps a mild form of toothache. But the last hours are distressing, as death is usually from internal hemorrhaging caused by broken blood vessels flooding the stomach and lungs, thus causing you to drown, as it were, in your own blood. The first symptoms are purple gums, loose teeth, and muscle ache. There are few other signs until close to death, for bowel elimination and even digestion remain normal throughout the whole process.
