by Ice! [V2. 0]
I set to, tired and worn-out as I was, to tidy up the cabin. "Bugger it, mate," I said to him, as he lay down by the stove, out of the way. "If we're going to go, let's bloodywell go shipshape and Bristol fashion." I found that some sugar, out of the ready-use tin, had fallen under the navigation shelf, into the bilge. I spooned it out and set it on a tin plate to dry.
Then, when the cabin was squared away, I clambered up the crazily leaning companionway for a last look around. The first thing I looked at this time was not the ice around the boat. That had subsided now, and all was quiet, except for the faint hum of a low breeze through the rigging. My eyes went straight up vertically above my head, to the three thousand tons of hanging death hovering there. Polaris had shifted on its two-degree circular course around the celestial pole. Now it was over the peak of ice and shining through it. I gazed at the sight, fascinated.
As I watched, the first glares of the northern lights shot through the sky right above the hanging ice. Again I was petrified; would a strong wind blow the berg right over? Then the pyrotechnics of the heavens played across the night sky, sending sharp stabs of light into the Brittania-Berg, spears and daggers of pure energy. These, once they hit the ice, changed direction, scattering into the heart of the mass. I was fascinated, then wonder-struck, then delighted, so much that I yelled with pure joy at the sight, at the thought that the Spirit of the Universe was sending me this signal, this life, right across the vastness of space, just for me!
How long I was up there, gazing like an idiot at this display of awful power, I will never know, but finally I made my way below, intoxicated with the visual poetry of it all. Nelson opened his eye as I slithered down the drunkenly leaning hatch. "Well, old son, to die after seeing that—fuck it, if's worth it!"
Then I lay down on the level planks in front of the warm stove and went to sleep, thinking how beautiful, how very beautiful life is, so full of wonder.
The next "morning" was the twenty-fifth of January, and after the initial shock of finding the boat on her side and remembering the nightmare of the previous hours, I again stepped outside.
The berg was still there, all that ice straight overhead. It was steady and the ice all around was frozen solid, from the base of the berg to the ice field in the west. It was fairly clear by the starlight, and I looked over to the southwest. There, far up on the tilted ice mass of "England" hill, drooped the signal flag, hanging down right over the ice two hundred feet below. What had once been the high peak of the berg was now the side, fifty feet below the new peak! I grinned at the memory of having risked my life to reach the peak to plant the signal so many weeks before, when there was light in the world—and—I looked again at the peak of "Wales," then at the gap between it and "Scotland," to the north.
I peered, then removed the goggles.
There was—there was—light in the sky! A faint yellowish tinge, a mere touch of a glimmer of a glow! Not silver this time—gold! It was the sun, though still below the curve of the world. It was sunlight! It could not be the moon, for she was low in the ice rim to the west. It was Sol, it was light, and warmth; and the same light shone so far away on trees and unimaginable green things, grass and hedgerows, houses and—people! And it made the sea blue and green and the corn waving gold in the fields, and it was shining here, in this frozen hell of slow death, and it was shining for me! It was telling me that I would live and that I would follow it again and again, just as other men would follow other stars until the very hem of time turned into itself. The sight moved me to dance a slippery jig on the crazily canted deck. I shook the black ice free of the shrouds, shouting for joy. I rushed back, slithering, to call Nelson out. As he hobbled up the ladder, I grabbed his head and faced him to the whisps of gold in the black, star-studded sky. "There, it's there, old son, bloody daylight. We'll get out. We'll sodding well get out, I know we will!" Nelson jumped up and down as best he could.
By this time my position was approximately seventy-eight, forty latitude and one degree ten minutes east of the Greenwich Meridian. The whole ice mass was moving slowly but steadily southwest. I considered to myself that at this rate something was bound to happen during the next four months, as long as the direction and speed of the flow were maintained, and that that something was the gradual breakup of the ice floes on the edges of the field, then of the field itself. But if the direction changed to north again, I was probably a dead man, unless I could attract attention from some stray plane during the daylight season. Chances were that I was a dead man anyway, because if the weather deteriorated and piled more snow and ice on top of the Brittania-Berg it would capsize onto the boat. There was not much point in making a camp on the ice, because if the boat went I would not survive more than a few days in the ice. I had to stay with her and build a stack of wood close to her, laced with oil and covered from the snow, ready to light as a signal should I hear a plane.
I came to the conclusion that my best chance of getting out of this mess was to stick with Cresswell, keeping a close eye on the berg, and then if it seemed ready to capsize further, try my luck on the ice. But the dice would be loaded against me down to the quick.
I reckoned that February fourth would see the actual sunrise, and to watch it I scrambled for sixteen hours over the new jumble of piled ice, to a position north of "Scotland" peak. There I sheltered from the westerly wind and patiently waited for four hours until I saw the blood red glow, a tiny sliver of light, over the vast ice field to the southeast. Then, exhilarated, I clambered and slithered back for ten hours to the boat, and slept.
I made my mind up not to neglect the gear on the boat, and the first task towards this end, as soon as twilight filled the eastern half of the black dome of the sky, was to repair the bowsprit, which I did by gluing on a scarf made from one of the floor boards, and refix the spar to the knightheads. As the repaired sprit was slightly shorter than the original, I then had to shorten the forestay, which took several days, as it was difficult to splice wearing two pairs of mittens and working on a frozen wire. I could not get the forestay down to work below, because the mast was canted at an angle, and I dared not try climbing it as it was slippery with quick freezing ice.
By March first, twilight was upon us, and the ice mass was moving faster. My position was now seventy-eight, fifteen north; zero degrees, sixteen minutes west. After a storm which lasted from March tenth to the fifteenth, I clambered out onto the western floe field and, looking far to the south through the binoculars from a high hummock, saw that the edges of the mass were indeed starting to break up. By March thirtieth, as the warmer water of the Gulf Stream offshoot passed under the ice field, the breakup began in earnest. From my lookout point, I found that the distance from where I stood, just near the southern tip of the Brittania-Berg, out to the "open" water (that is, ice with leads running between the floes) had diminished to approximately six miles. By April fifteenth, with the sun higher in the sky and more accurate sextant shots possible, the distance to the nearest open lead was about three miles from Brittania. The explosions of the separation of the floes could be heard from every direction around the clock. By May first, with the floes on the eastern side of Brittania-Berg opening up and drifting away to the south, the pressure was off the berg. It started to move, slowly at first, no more than a couple of feet a day, then more rapidly, two, four, six yards a day, in a counterclockwise direction. I was out at all hours, taking bearings on Gibraltar Point with the hand-bearing compass and noting the great mass of ice overhanging the boat gradually moving to the east. By the twenty-fifth of April the ice-in-the-sky was clear of the bow of the boat, and by the first of May the ice around the boat began to break up. On the eighth of May I celebrated my thirty-seventh birthday with an extra ration of seal blubber.
On the fifteenth of May, Cresswell suddenly fell down into a crevasse which opened below her. The shock was not too great, for, pitched bows up as she had been during the great upheaval, the stern was close to water level. The crevasse opened up from the west, a
nd when it reached the stern, the boat, with a rumble, slid down into water. I anxiously searched below for leakage, but there seemed to be none or very little. The hull had held! I set to rigging spars and sails, tightening up the shrouds.
All this time I had been scrimping on food, eating no more than one small meal daily, with Nelson the same. It was no good getting out of the ice only to starve to death at sea. But now that the ice, was breaking up, with cracks leading right out of the "bay" to the open sea only two miles away, I needed to build up my strength. So I increased my seal-blubber ration from eight ounces to ten, and the porridge from four ounces to six, while halving Nelson's ration of porridge for burgoo.
On June third, with a southeasterly storm heaving up the western floe field, it started to break up. The noise was enough to prevent any sleep; warily I watched for the slightest chance of springing the trap. By the tenth of June, after a long spell of high wind, which changed to a northerly, the ice floes southwest of Cresswell opened up and floated away like fishing boats leaving harbor on the evening tide.
The next day I managed to drag Cresswell astern by jumping onto the loose ice floes and pulling her with a mooring line, after cutting the bowline loose. Gradually, I maneuvered the boat until the bows were facing southwest. Then, driving the crowbar into a football-field-sized floe, I secured the boat's bowline and waited for the floe to move out when the wind dropped or shifted. The boat was a lot higher out of the water, for the food stores and ship's gear lost in the upheaval, together with food consumed for the past year, accounted for well over two tons. But weight lost meant easier hauling, and I soon had her ready to exit.
The southwest wind persisted for three days, pushing back loose floes into the open lead and jamming up the escape route. For three sunny days I waited patiently, willing the wind to change, while Nelson moped on deck, hungry on short rations. I put two lines over the side, baited with seal blubber.
Suddenly the wind dropped. We waited. One more day, the whole sunny night, half the next day. I was asleep in the now much warmer cabin when it happened. A slight judder on the bowline. I was awake instantly. I crowded up the ladder. She was moving—she was heading out—with the great silver gleaming ice floe blinding me until I got the goggles over my head. She was moving out! Ahead of our "tug" the whole ice floe pack was shifting forward, away from the great ice-field plateau. Behind us were a hundred smaller floes, one of which was pushing against our rudderless stern. I didn't care. We were moving.
At the moment we rounded the south end of the Brittania-Berg, one of the fishing lines jerked. With a muffed whoop, I leapt for it. There was a nice fat cod. Nelson scampered for joy as I held it up, shining in the sunlight. "Bugger it, old son, underway or not, this is going in the pot!" I left the boat to fend for herself and lit the stove. With the pot steaming merrily, I dashed topsides to look around and found we were going at a surprising rate away from the ice field, at least a knot and a half. The smell of cooking fish wafted through the companionway. Soon the pan was out on the bridge deck, with the pair of us scoffing cod-flesh straight off the bone. We finished it all-flesh, eyes, head, liver, fins; the whole fifteen pounds of it—the finest meal we had seen for months. We drooled over it, tearing the flesh away from the bones. The berg, and the three hills of death, dropped astern. We were still surrounded by great ice floes on all sides, and our position would be highly dangerous if a storm blew up, but I wanted to be well clear of the berg before turning to the southeast, to thread a way through the massive jigsaw of floes.
"Well, mate, that's that!" I said to Nelson, as we glanced back at the monstrous gravestone we had so narrowly escaped. "Now we'll get some sea time in!"
Come cheer up, my lads, 'tis to glory we steer,
To add something new to this wonderful year,
'Tis to honor we call you, as free men, not slaves,
For who are so free as the sons of the waves?
Chorus:
Heart of oak are our ships, heart
of oak are our men;
We always are ready, steady, boys, steady;
We'll fight and we'll conquer again and again!
Royal Navy song, eighteenth century. It is the lower-deckmen's
marching tune.
25
By the Skin of My Teeth
Being underway was the most immense relief imaginable. Free at long, long last, after one year and a day locked in the ice field, 366 days—staring death right in its grisly skull-sockets. Even though the chance of collision with a floe was possible if a heavy wind piped up, I felt so unburdened, for the first three or four days, that I found myself taking risks which normally I never would dream of, steering straight for a floe, missing its leeward side by a matter of feet, and crowding on sail in forceful gusts.
The boat leaked like a sieve. The whole line of the garboard strake, where the hull joined the keel, had had the caulking shaken almost completely out of it during the wicked battering by the ice in the Brittania-Berg capsize. I had to pump her out almost continuously, though in calm weather I could take a rest, letting the boat take in two feet of freezing cold water. Then I would don my sea boots, reaching up to my thighs, go below the cockpit floorboards, and bucket the water out. It was heavy work and left no time for desperation or fear.
As soon as the wind picked up, I inflated the rubber dinghy below in the cabin, for extra flotation, just in case I fell asleep or was knocked unconscious. This made life below difficult, with a seven-foot dinghy stuck into the living space, but somehow I managed. It was cold, wet, miserable work, a great expenditure of my body's strength, meager as it was by this time. Mainly, it was willpower that enabled me to start bucketing once again.
I looked up at Nelson sniffing around the horizon during one spell of backbreaking bucketing. "Yes, you old bugger," I yelled at him, "and if you had two bloody forelegs, you'd be down here too." He frowned and again turned his snout to the far horizon, pretending to ignore me.
My position, when I broke out of the ice, was about 185 miles west-southwest of the main settlement of Svalbard, Kongsfjorden (King's Bay). As this was the nearest human abode, this is where I steered for, with a slight to moderate southwest wind pushing Cresswell before it over a kindly sea. On June thirteenth, four days after emerging from the ice trap, I obtained a position fix. I was only fifty miles from safety! The weather was much warmer now, some degrees above freezing for hours at a stretch. Becalmed from the thirteenth to the sixteenth, I managed to bail enough water out of the thawing tanks to wash three shirts, together with underwear and long sea-boot stockings. I used salt water to get the worst grime out, then rinsed them in fresh water. Then I trimmed my beard, which was all of nineteen inches long. It had served as a chest-warmer during the winter! Then my hair, which was down around my shoulders. It took me hours to unmat the hair and wash it before I could cut it, as the scissors were blunt and the whetstone was worn away entirely. The spare knife sharpener had gone to a watery grave with the other lost stores under the Brittania-Berg. This was the first time I had doffed the Eskimo-rig since entering the icecap, except for the three times I had had to remove it to peel off a sweat-frozen shirt. The fawnskin underwear came off like it was my skin itself peeling from my body, and underneath I was lily-white, while my face, around the eyes, was almost black. Naked, I looked like something out of a nudist-camp harlequin party. My weight had diminished, of course, but what I had been eating must have been good, for I'd no sunken gums, loose teeth, or falling hair, sure signs of scurvy. I was eliminating liquids about an hour after drinking and solids about twelve hours after eating, and my body muscles were like high-tensile steel wires. At first, my normal sea vision suffered. This ability always surprises landsmen (I can, after a day or two at sea, read a ship's name from four miles distance). I knew this was the result of being in the dark cabin, straining my eyes with the seal-oil lamp, and, outside, wearing the snow goggles. But slowly my vision returned. My hearing was most acute. I was so accustomed to listening
for the slightest boat noise or other unnatural sound, such as a possible airplane, that I could hear every one of the hundreds of separate wooden joints working in the hull. My sense of smell was almost as good as Nelson's. I was well rested, the boat steering herself, now clear of ice floes except for the odd maverick. I was warming up some porridge for peanut burgoo, when I smelt fish. It could not have been from the shore, as the wind was still southwest. I hopped topsides and looked around. There was nothing but a lone ice floe to the north. But I clearly smelled fish! Nelson was straining his nose around the compass, and finally settled for a direction to the west-southwest-by-west from our position. I stared hard, but, seeing nothing, went below to finish cooking the scrimpy meal.
By this time all the canned food had been eaten, with the exception of six cans of corned beef and six of sardines. We were down to porridge, peanuts, flour (I was out of yeast), and lard, together with the remnants of the seal blubber, about twelve pounds, stinking to high heaven. I fished diligently the whole time after leaving the ice, but caught only the cod on the way out and two small, poor-looking creatures the names of which I know not. They were so ugly that I was suspicious of them. I fed a boiled morsel of one to Nelson. He got sick, and I threw them back into the Arctic Ocean and gave him an extra helping of peanut burgoo.
Eating solids in the form of seal blubber, we both had the runs, but the color was not bad, and now that it was warmer, we could shit over the side, to leeward, without fear of frostbite, which was a great luxury.
