However, no anxieties then pressed on the minds of those gallant men; “large water ” was all they thought of; give them that, and Behring’s Straits in their ships was still their destination.
The sun has ceased to set, night is as the day, the snow has long melted off land and floe, the detached parties have all returned to their ships, yards are crossed, rigging set up, sails bent, the graves of their shipmates are neatly paved round, shells from the bay are prettily arranged over the sailor’s last home by some old messmate. Franklin, with that Christian earnestness which ever formed so charming a trait in his character, selects, at the request of his men, epitaphs which appeal to the hearts of all, and perhaps no finer picture oould be conceived than that firm and veteran leader leading his beloved crews on to the perilous execution of their worldly duty, yet calmly pointing to that text of Holy Writ in which the prophet warrior of old reminded his people of their God, “Choose ye this day, whom ye will serve.”
The garden on Beechey Island refuses to yield any vegetables from the seeds so carefully sown in it; but the officers have brought and transplanted within its border every tuft of saxifrage and pretty anemone and poppy which can be found. The pale pink of the one and delicate straw colour of the other form the only pleasing relief from the monotonous colouring of the barren land. Sportsmen return and declare the game to be too wild for farther sport; but cheer all by saying that the deer and hare have changed their coats from white to russet colour; the ptarmigan’s brood have taken wing, the wild duck has long since led her callow young to the open lakes, or off to “holes of water” which are rapidly increasing under cliffs and projecting headlands — all the signs denote that the disruption of the frozen surface of the sea is at hand.
The day of release arrives: in the morning a black sky has been seen over the eastern portion of Barrow’s Straits, that together with a low barometer indicates a S.E. breeze. The cracks which radiate over the floes in every direction gradually widen, then close again, and form “heavy nips,” in which the fearful pressure occasions a dull grinding noise. Presently the look-out man on Beechey Island throws out the signal. The floes are in motion! A loud hurrah welcomes the joyful signal — a race for the point to see the destruction of the ice. It moves indeed. A mighty agency is at work; the floe heaves and cracks, now presses fearfully in one direction, and then in another; occasionally the awful pressure acting horizontally upon a huge floe-pieoe makes it, though ten feet thick, curve up in a dome-like shape. A dull moaning is heard as if the very ice cried mercy, and then, with a sharp report, the mass is shivered into fragments, hurled up one on top of the other. Water rapidly shows in all directions, and within twenty-four hours there is quite as much sea seen as there was of ice yesterday. Yet the ice-fields in bays and inlets are still fast; this is the land-floe, and in that of Beechey Island the ships are still fast locked; but anticipating such would be the case, all the spring long men have been carefully sprinkling ashes, sand, and gravel over the ice in a straight line from the Erebus and
Terror to the entrance of the bay. The increased action of the sun upon these foreign substances has occasioned a rapid decay of the floe beneath them, and it only needs a little labour to extricate the expedition.
“Hands cut out ships!” pipes the cheery boatswain. A hundred strong hands and a dozen ice- saws are soon at work, whilst loud song and merriment awaken the long silent echoes of Beechey Island. The water is reached, the sail is made, the ships cast to the westward, and again they speed towards Cape Walker.
If we open a chart of the Arctic Regions,* it will be observed that westward and northward of the Parry Islands there is a wide sea whose limits are as yet unknown, and the ice which incumbers it has never yet been traversed by ship or sledge.
All those navigators, Collinson and McClure in their ships, and M‘Clintock and Mecham with their sledges, who have with much difficulty and danger skirted along the southern and eastern edge of this truly frozen sea, mention, in terms of wonderment, the stupendous thickness and massive proportions of the vast floes with which it is closely packed. It was between this truly polar ice and the steep cliffs of Banks’s Land that Sir Robert McClure fairly fought his way in the memorable voyage of the Investigator. It was in the narrow and tortuous lane of water left between the low beach line of North America and the wall of ice formed by the grounded masses of this fearful pack that the gallant Collinson carried, in 1852 and 1853, the Enterprise by way of Behring’s Straits to and from the farther shores of Victoria Land; and it was in the far north-west of the Parry group that M4Clintock and Mecham, with their sledges in 1853 gazed, as Parry had done five-and-thirty years before, with astonishment on that pack-ice to which all they had seen in the seas between Prince Patrick’s Land and the Atlantic was a mere bagatelle. It is not that the cold is here more intense, or that the climate is more rigorous, but this accumulation of ponderous ice arises simply from the want of any large direct communication between that portion of the Polar Sea and the warm waters of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. Behring’s Strait is the only vent in a south- westerly direction, and that strait is so shallow that this polar ice (which has been found to draw as much as sixty and eighty feet of water, and to have hummocks upon it of a hundred feet in height), generally grounds in it, until thawed away by the action of the Pacific gulf stream; and, on the other hand, towards the Atlantic Ocean, the channels, as it will be observed, are most tortuous and much barred with islands. The grand law of nature by which the ice of our Northern Pole is ever flowing towards the torrid zone, holds good, however, within the area to which we are alluding; and in spite of all obstacles, and although the accumulation of ice every winter exceeds the discharge and destruction, still the action is even southerly, as in the seas of Spitzbergen and Nova Zembla. The slow march of this ice-stream is, however, far more like that of the ice from some
- Mr. Arrowsmith, of Soho Square, has published an excellent and cheap general map, on a small scale, which will be found very correct.
