by Ice! [V2. 0]
I hurried back to the warmth. There were a couple of dead spots on my cheeks, which did not feel my tears as I thought of other Christmases and the cheerful company of my sailor mates and the lasses we had loved.
Back in the galley, with the stove lit, I removed my goggles and warmed up my face. I inspected myself in the small looking glass. I looked wretched. Then I looked down at Nelson. Looking into the mirror, I said, "Right, you bastard, less of that crap, there's things to be done."
"What?" I asked myself.
"Well, for a start, feed the bloody dog."
"Right." I was getting to know me alright, and I was getting me shaped up, keeping control. But it was hard; it was terribly difficult to hold back the floodgates of self-pity and awful, soul-shrinking loneliness, and I took more and more to watching the stars and listening to their message in the stillness between raging blizzards.
After hot tea, ground-up peanuts, and porridge, I turned in, my head feeling the bump of the loaded Very pistol, broken at the breech, under the pillow. The whole time the boat was in the ice I was wary of a bear attack. If the bear off Greenland had been so aggressive while there was plenty of food available to him in the shape of fish and seals, what the devil would they be like out here, where there was apparently nothing?
All the time, in the ice, I was never very far from my ax, my hammer, a rope, and the Very pistol. Even time I left the boat, for whatever reason, even if it was only for ablutions on the calm, clear nights, my ax, my compass, the Very pistol, snowshoes, and two days' food went with me. Thick sheets of slashing snow and ice came down so fast that even yards away from the boat it was easy to be caught out and not be able to find the way back. Then it was necessary to find some kind of shelter under a cocked-up ice ledge and await the blizzard's tempering. But every move more than two yards from the boat was studied, even direction noted. I could not leave a lamp lit on the boat. For one thing, my fuel stock was low; for another, it would hardly show more than ten yards in a blizzard. Also I did not want to attract any possible prowlers, especially if I was absent from the boat. My shelter, my food, my warmth, my life. The center of my icy cold world. Each time I left the boat, I unwound a long line behind me, to show me the way back.
So the long, long procession of dark hours passed, week after week. I made it a rule to go over to the western ice-floe field whenever it was calm. Now it was a half-solid frozen mass, and I tried to follow the movement of the ice. It was always moving, not only en masse, everything together, but also bits and pieces, some as big as a city block, against the others. The Brittania-Berg moved clockwise, crushing into the western floes, which in turn had slowly transmitted the tremendous pressure of the berg onto the flat ice steppe beyond. Cracks and crevasses changed continuously towards the west of the boat, and this was where my attention was riveted, because I reckoned that when the breakup came (if it ever did), it would loosen the heavy floes and open a passage to the southwest.
Nine times out of ten, storms and blizzards were introduced by a display of power and light beyond imagination, as the northern lights flashed through the sky, like the fireworks of the gods, sending showers and fountains of streaking, liquid sparks across the black arch of the arctic sky. Hours later the wind started up—first a low moaning in the rigging, then rising to a whistle. This was the signal to batten everything down. Then the roar built to a scream of satanic anger. The vessel shook as the wind tore at the masts, trying to pluck them out of the snowbound hull. Now and again I peeped through the doghouse portholes, lifting the inch-thick felt insulators. Outside, a blinding white sheet of the wall of hell was zinging past the ice field, with the top ice breaking off under the strength of the mighty wind. On rare occasions I would brave the blast, well shielded with two extra blankets tied around my caribou-skin clothes, and through a tiny gap for my eyes, watch the ice blow over the top of Brittania-Berg, like a continuous spray of steam, clear over the top of the boat, onto the western side of Cresswell bay, where it filled the recently opened crevasses, changing the whole appearance of the ice-floe field.
Then I lit the seal-oil lamp and, putting some of my rapidly diminishing charcoal on the heating stove, settled down to read. This was my only relief from the arctic conditions of cold, anxiety, loneliness, and, when the weather was bad, idleness. My radio had given up the ghost just after Christmas, and though I fiddled with it for hours, it simply refused to speak to me any more. I came to the conclusion that the severe dampness in the cabin had got to one of the transistors. But after drying out all my volumes, I had plenty to read, and I was cozy enough, with the little stone lamp sending up its slow, tiny, wavering column of black smoke into the corned-beef-can chimney, and Nelson lying under the table, against my feet, with a bone held between his good paw and the stump of the missing limb.
Tiring of reading by the fitful lamp, I made plans for the long dawn, due to arrive about the end of February. I made ready a long line and a block, to fix a pulley up the steep northern slope of "England" on the Brittania-Berg. I made a new signal flag out of an ancient cockpit cover which I painted yellow and nailed to a frame. I hammered all my old empty food cans flat, then wired and glued them together, to make a sun reflector, a sort of heliograph. This was about a yard square, and I made a hole in it so I would be able to sight it at an airplane, and polished it, with emery paper and sand out of the bilge, until it shone like a mirror. When the sun rose high and the temperatures climbed, I planned to paint the big boat cover yellow and to make a separate signal to peg down onto the ice, away from the boat, out of the old awning. The food stores, in their boxes, together with the empty boxes, I pegged out in groups on the western side of the bay, while the ice held, to spell S.O.S. in Morse code, so it might be sighted from afar in the air.
Once a month, when the weather was calm, I baked bread, using the pressure cooker as an oven. I became quite expert at this, and the snow mixed with evaporated milk seemed to give the bread a good, light texture.
I do not know exactly what the lowest temperature I experienced was, as the alcohol in my outside thermometer had dropped out of sight by October, but I did find out later, from the Norwegian air force, that a plane within a hundred miles of my estimated position on New Year's Day of 1961 had registered, very close to sea level, something in the region of sixty-four degrees below zero Fahrenheit! Inside the cabin, with a domestic thermometer, I was able to raise the temperature as high as thirty-eight degrees Fahrenheit, but this was only for about five hours out of twenty-four. The rest of the time the temperature averaged around twenty-five degrees Fahrenheit.
The effects of cold and enforced idleness resulted in a slowing down of my whole system. I was not aware of this until one day I noticed that Nelson seemed to be moving much faster than he normally did. He was like a beast in an old-fashioned silent movie, jerking around, very fast. I stared at him for a while, then at myself, in the newly made sunlight reflector. It occurred to me that what had happened was that it was I who had slowed down; everything about me. This was interesting, and I lumbered over to the navigation cupboard and, after a few moments' thought (actually it was more like an hour), took out the chronometer to wind it up. I stared at it. Not only could I see the second hand moving fast, but I could see the minute hand moving quite steadily, and the hour hand moving! Time had warped my senses! I put the chronometer back and sat down to think this one out.
Was it the cold that was slowing me down? The loneliness? The enforced idleness? The diet? I puzzled out the reasons for a while, then decided to tackle the problem from another angle. Did the slowing down matter? Not if I was idle; in fact it was probably a good thing. Yes, if I had to get something done, and double-yes when and if the time ever came to get the boat out of this deathtrap.
From then on I made a conscious effort to increase the speed of all my movements and tried to vary my diet. Daily, I ate about eight ounces of greasy, rubbery seal blubber, raw. If it kept the Kalatdlits from getting scurvy, it would do the same for me. I
left off frying food, even though I had still a good supply of lard on board, and tried to eat as much canned food as I could stomach, merely thawed out in the frying pan. I did these things by instinct, for I had never studied dietary rules, apart from getting hold of enough food to stay alive.
One thing I did learn during those months in the ice: the average westerner eats far too much and overcooks his food. I learned to eat what the body needed and no more, and to expend the energy given by the food before the next meal.
The other thing I learned was to play chess against myself without cheating. I had had a game going ever since I settled down in the ice, back in August, but it had been desultory, for I had to leave the board after each move and wait a week until I had forgotten the moves that I:a was going to make, then tackle the last move of I:a with I:b's fresh approach. The snag was that by the time I:b was ready to play his move, I:a had forgotten the moves in his future sequence of play. Gradually, however, over the weeks, the forgetting period of both the I's shrunk, and by December I could completely separate the two sets of tactics, blocking out I:a or I:b at will. At first this frightened me, and I gave up the game for a few days. But then I came to the conclusion that no human is only one "set of thoughts," that there are many sides to us, and so set to finish the game. Then a further complication arose, disturbing the first, until I became used to it. Not only were I:a and I:b well matched, but I was completely unbiased to either of them, merely watching the game from a spectator's point of view, objectively, forming separate and distinctive ideas as to what the future moves should be, yet not giving I:a or I:b a clue as to these thoughts. I cast encouragement or disapproval on both I:a and I:b as the move was made, without fear or favor.
One night, in between watching I:a form his strategy against the wily countermoves of I:b, I had to clamber topsides and shake the black ice off the loosened standing rigging wires, perform ablutions, and take my ghostly trek around the ghastly perimeter of smoking ice, watching the shooting stars fall from the heights of my mind and the stars and moon reflected on shining ... shoulders ... soldier boulders armies ... dark winter's general campaign ... over frozen steps ... stepping-in-step across instant ... bleached white covers ... coniferous Conestoga wagons ... wagons-lits ... no wheels wheeling ... blue shadows lined ... maligned ... tramlines ... butcher's apron... ridged ice below ... five-day growth ... frostbitten jaws ... skull... icy white frozen ... skull... icicles upside-down in the empty eyesockets staring at bicycles cyclic cyclops... traffic lights ... policemen's whistles gristle ... southwest blizzards ... gizzards, fried fish ... chips smell... smelt... from the ... Brittania-Berg, Nelson limping after me through the knee-high sheet of blown snow, beast snapping at my idol's legs with ... walrus teeth and wasn't... it... hot... in ... the ... bath tonight... because Ulli is waiting ... in the cabin ... game just go on play up play up ... I:a will move this pawn into that floe there ... capture the queen-boat... Cresswell-Andromeda ... two ice chisels ... whoops! don't lose the hammer... Christ that's a hell of an angle... it will need two ... hundred ... feet ... inch-and-a-half-nylon-line-in-the-spring, tra-la-la ... "I:b, you fucking idiot, why did you move that bloody rook, your knight is day and day is night" ... cold ... cold ... and—!"Jesus Christ!" I must have fallen flat on my face into the bilge of the cabin, onto the slushy ice in the bilge, hot-shocked into sanity with heart-freezing fear. Nelson gasped—the boat was moving upwards and onto her side! Outside the sky seemed to be caving in with noise! The deck shot up, lifting me bodily.
"Holy fuck!" I staggered, drunkenly, to the hatchway, trying to keep upright in the wildly heaving cabin. Then, turning around and screaming, I grabbed the chessboard as it slid across the table and heaved it against the forward bulkhead. Now the boat was rearing up, up by the bow, sinking down, down by the stern. Out in the cockpit after what seemed like an aeon, I ripped the snowcover to one side.
The ice field was in a frenzy of movement all around, as far as I could see through the driving snow. I shook my head and looked again, horrified, just in time to see all the food boxes, two-thirds of my meager stock, slide down a tilted floe into a widening crevasse and disappear as if swallowed by some murderous, greedy beast. The noise was deafening. Cracks, thunder, explosions, then great loads of falling ice, in barrowioads at a time, truckloads, falling vertically down from the sky onto the heaving hull.
Barrowioads? Truckloads? What in the name of God?
I looked up. The sight I saw will haunt me until the last flicker of light leaves my weather-wracked soul. The Brittania-Berg was capsizing! It was turning over on its side, with "Wales," a great mass of ice, thousands of tons of the stuff, slowly falling, two hundred feet above the boat. Directly above the boat, and coming straight down onto the top, while Cresswell was being dragged by the shifting ice under her, right into the maw under the mountain of ice!
Was I going crazy? I shook my head as the boat was flung forward and upward again. No, I wasn't. This nightmare was for real!
What is a woman that you forsake her,
And the hearth-fire and the home-acre,
To go with the old grey Widow-maker?
She has no house to lay a guest in—
But one chill bed for all to rest in,
That the pale suns and the stray bergs nest in.
She has no strong white arms to fold you,
But the ten-times-fingering weeds to hold you—
Out on the rocks where the tide has rolled you.
Rudyard Kipling, from "Harp Song of the Dane Women."
24
Under the Ice
How long I stood gazing straight upwards, horror-struck, I do not know. By the time I came to what senses I had left, my mittens were frozen to the guardrail and the ice on my snow goggles had completely obscured my vision. I remember thinking that this was death, this was the end. I just stood there, unseeing, with Cresswell steadily tilting up at the bow, waiting for her to go right over, hoping she would, before the great ice-crash came and blotted out the world, but this was more of a vision than a thought, more like a sideways glance than a direct stare.
Suddenly Cresswell gave a great lurch downwards at the bow, then froze. The racket around me was mind numbing; it was as if all the tortured souls in hell were screaming for mercy at the feet of Almighty God. It was not only the volume of noise, it was the awful agony, the groans, the crashes, the grinding suffering of it all.
I found myself working to free one hand from the rail, which took a century, then fisting the ice from my goggles. Just as they were clear and the world changed from dirty black to blinding white again, the boat gave another lurch, again the bows were thrown high up, and again they smashed down. Even through the roars, bangs, and groans of the ice my ears picked up the splintering crack as the bowsprit smashed off, and the clatter of the forestay as it swung wildly, free now, and smashed against the doghouse. But I was not looking at the bow; my eyes were riveted on the berg. It suddenly stopped dropping and, with an almighty lurch, reared back again, hesitated for two or three seconds, then slowly settled down, coming to a halt with the peak of "Wales" at an angle about forty degrees from the vertical. There it hovered, 150 feet over the top of the masts. And stayed there! Bobbing.
Slowly I became aware of Nelson's whimpering and agitation, as he valiantly tried to keep his balance on the ice-covered deck of the heeled-over boat. I looked again at the berg around the boat. It was a shambles. The capsizing of the berg had meant that the wide ledge below the "Wales" peak had left a great gap under the overhanging summit. The pressure of the ice floes piled up against the western steppe had suddenly been released, and the whole mess had moved to the east, to take up the vacant space under the ice. With it, the boat had moved, the after line snapping like a piece of knitting wool. The forward mooring line, pegged to the edge of the berg's lower edge, had gone completely slack and was now hanging down vertically. With the pounding and smashing of the ice against the boat, the propeller, useless anyway with a bent shaft,
had been snapped away. Fortunately, I had been able to unship the rudder before the boat had iced in. Now she was lying on her port side, at an angle of thirty-five degrees from the vertical, with her bow flung up, and the deck about forty degrees from the horizontal.
All around the ice was settling down again, and I realized that it would soon solidify into a frozen mass once more, until the berg moved over again onto the boat. My first resolution, once sanity returned, was to shift out of the boat as soon as the ice froze and make a refuge on the flat frozen steppe over to the west, from where I could watch both the berg and the boat. My second resolution was to cut my daily food ration down by a half. That would give me supplies for six months. I looked quickly at Nelson. "Then it'll be your turn, old son," I thought. He rubbed his good paw over his eyes. His tears were freezing, too.
Aware of the bitter cold, and giving one last look up at the tip of the ice peak hovering right overhead, I clambered below to survey the scene. It was chaos-clothes, books, charts, chess pieces, pans, cutlery, everything, lying wet in the icy slush of the bilges.
I set to picking up the bits and pieces of civilization out of the mucky slush. The first thing I did was to make a horizontal platform for the heating stove. Using the floorboards from the engine compartment, I wedged them up with emptied boxes. Then I shortened the smoke-pipe and, finding some dry charcoal, soon had a little fire going to dry out all the gear. Then I mustered all the available food and worked out how to make it last for eight months. The collection was pitiful. Some seal blubber, six twenty-pound bags of peanuts, four pounds of sugar, twenty pounds of rice, thirty pounds of porridge, a block of salt, eighteen pounds of flour, twenty pounds of tea, ten pounds of cocoa, twenty cans of evaporated milk, twenty-four small cans of sardines, and eighteen large cans of beans, with twenty-two medium-sized cans of corned beef. I noted it all down, then, looking up at Nelson, thought "and you." He wagged his tail. And I did something I thought I'd never do again. I grinned at him. His tail bumped the deck.
