CHAPTER VI.

LIFE ON BOARD THE “TEGETTHOFF.”

1. Like a spectre in white, the ship stretches out her arms, as if in silent complaint, towards the heaven, and rests, in cruel mockery of her destiny, on a mountain, not of water, but of ice, and seems like a building ready to fall in. A wall of snow and ice surrounds her hull, snow lies thick on her deck, and her rigging is stiffened in icy lines. Could we see through her sides, we should then behold four-and-twenty men parted off in two spaces under the suns of two lamps. Let us inspect them, and first the cabin of the officers in the after-part of the ship.

2. Neither few nor slight were our struggles to remedy the various inconveniences which we encountered; their enumeration here is meant to aid the experience of future adventurers. Though our arrangements were far from complete or perfect, we had never to complain of the discomforts which previous expeditions, even the second German expedition to Greenland, had to endure from the excessive condensation of moisture. Against this enemy we protected ourselves by the snow wall which we raised round the ship, by covering in the deck windows of the cabin, by lining our quarters with vulcanized india-rubber, by sheds built over the cabin stairs, all acting as condensers. Before, however, I enter on the unavoidable inconveniences to which we were exposed by the formation of ice, or by damp and the sudden change of temperature, I would preface my remarks by observing, that all these discomforts and inconveniences are to be endured far more easily than would seem possible to the reader, and that life on board a ship of a North Pole expedition, under normal circumstances, is free from annoyances worthy of mention.

3. It is a matter of the last importance to keep the air pure and wholesome, and to maintain an equable warmth in the quarters of the officers and crew. The accumulation of moisture and consequent congelation in them is an inconvenience which requires incessant watchfulness to avert.[18] The destruction of the snow wall which surrounded the ship increased the condensation; for that snow covering was nothing but a greatcoat for the ship and those on board. In the beginning of November 1872 the frost on the bulk-heads of the berths, and on those parts of the cabins which were impervious to warmer air, was very perceptible. The bed-clothes were frozen at night to the sides of the ship, the iron knees of the beams—not, alas! covered with felt—gleamed like stalactites, small glaciers were formed under the berths, and even in October the skylight was frozen, inches thick. Every rise in the temperature caused this formation of ice to fall down like a “douche,” and with the opening of a door a white vapour, even in October, streamed along the deck. We prevented the increase of moisture by cutting the openings in the deck, over which we placed two chimneys, each a foot high and covered with a thin metal cap. We boarded up the skylight, leaving a lid by which to air the cabin. But in spite of all this the variations of temperature within our quarters were extraordinary. If the heat of the air in the middle of the cabin and on a level with our heads rose from -2° F. to 76° F.—our usual mean temperature—it amounted on the floor to a little above 34° F., and fell during the night not unfrequently below freezing-point.

4. But the greatest inconvenience perhaps with which we had to contend, arose from the removal of the protection of the tent roof, which was stretched over the after-part of the ship. The want of this prevented our walking on the deck in bad weather, and it also hindered perfect ventilation, which could only be secured, with the constant heat which was maintained below, by keeping the deck windows open. Warming the air from underneath the floor of the cabin would possibly be preferable to the best stove. We had the stove of Meidingen of Carlsruhe, the excellence of which had been tested on the _Germania_. This stove consumed only 20 lbs. of coals daily, with a thermometer at -13° F., and after the adoption of certain arrangements to save the fuel, its consumption amounted to only 12 lbs. Even in the coldest period of the winter we never consumed more than 4½ cwt. in a month. The lighting of the messroom and quarters of the men was effected by petroleum, the daily consumption of which amounted to about 2⅔ lbs. Altogether there were in the ship two large and two small lamps, besides the deck-lantern, which were burning day and night. The berths were lighted with train-oil; for special purposes, such as drawing, candles were used.

5. The stove had one troublesome enemy in the shape of a hole, as big as a man’s head, in the door of the mess-room, through which a cold stream of air poured itself; and as the ship dipped forward considerably, and the hearth was only about a foot above the floor of the mess-room, this stream filled the whole space with a lake of cold air from three to four feet deep. Hence, while in the berth close by the stove there was a temperature ranging between 100° F. and 131° F., in the other, there was one which would have sufficed for the North Pole itself. In the former a hippopotamus would have felt himself quite comfortable, and Orel, the unhappy occupant of it, was often compelled to rush on deck, when the ice-pressures alarmed us, experiencing in passing from his berth to the deck a difference of temperature amounting to 189° F. In the other berth of the mess-room, water, lemon-juice, and vinegar froze on the floor. Those who occupied it, as they lay in beds, or those who sat at the table to read, were in a cold bath reaching up to their neck. But the hole was an indispensable necessity, for it was better to endure the discomfort even of such a draught than to impede ventilation. Other causes, too, disturbed the equilibrium of temperature. At night the stove was sometimes, from sanitary considerations, not lighted, and then all had to sleep in that cold bath. With the increase of cold and wind, our inconveniences often assumed somewhat ludicrous forms. Some passages from my journal will make this clear:—“When any come below the temperature falls. If the door be opened there rolls in a mass of white vapour; if any one opens a book which he has brought with him, it smokes as if it were on fire. A cloud surrounds those that enter, and if a drop of water falls on their clothes, it is at once converted into ice, even at the stove. Frequently the upper stratum of air in the mess-room becomes so heated, that the deck light has to be opened, and then it rises up, like smoke out of a chimney, to blend itself with the cold air without.”

6. The arrangements of the officers’ mess-room are simple and in harmony with its purpose. Here stands a large table, used for study and for meals; the smaller berths, where the officers sleep, are round the sides of the mess-room—just large enough to enable a man to breathe in. There, in a recess between two pillars, an untold resource, the library (of about 400 volumes, chiefly scientific); close beside it the chronometers; and lastly, the inevitable evils, the medical stores, ranged round the mast. By the side of scientific works stand Petermann’s _Mittheilungen_; and between Milton’s _Paradise Lost_ and Shakespeare’s immortal works, a whole tribe of romances, which were read with never-tiring delight. Our instruments, too, frosted with ice, are here, and a chest containing our journals. Once a month a cask, filled with wine—the chemical wine—concocted of snow, alcohol, tannin, sugar, and glycerine, was placed there. Dr. Kepes was not only our physician, but our wine brewer. One thing more we have to mention, which, alas! incommoded us much too little—wine; that is, wine made in Austria, from grapes. As we have already mentioned, the want of room in the cabin prevented our laying in a large stock, and the supplies we had were frozen in a cellar below the mess-room, about the middle of December, for the temperature of even this place was about 16° F. or 14° F. Each, however, had a bottle of rum as an allowance for eighteen days. But quite inexhaustible was the supply of our common drink—melted snow—a great jar of which, filled to the brim, stood always on the table. Under the cabin were our supplies of alcohol and petroleum, accessible only by well-fitting pipes, but possible volcanoes as far as our safety was concerned. From the accumulation of so many combustible materials, together with 20,000 cartridges, and with several lamps constantly burning, it is clear that the danger of fire was great. But once only had we an alarm from this source—when Carlsen caused us much trepidation by accidentally discharging a rifle in the cartridge magazine.

7. Let us now turn to the persons who occupied this mess-room. Marola, the steward, lights the lamp, and kindles the fire, and awakens those who were not already awoke by the smoke from the stove, with the cry, “Signori, le sette e tre quarti, prego d’alzarsi;” and after a pause of a quarter of an hour, during which the sleepers seem carefully to deny their existence, he startles this silence of indifference by the second call: “Colazion’ in tavola.” Out of every berth now comes forth its occupant, each in picturesque costume; costumes teach us how superficial after all is civilization in man!

8. The day’s work begins. The watch, as ever, walks the deck, lest the ice should slip away from the world unobserved; in the mess-room meanwhile calculations or drawing or writing are in full operation. Our daily meals consist of a breakfast of cocoa, biscuit, and butter; of a dinner of soup, boiled beef, preserved vegetables, and _café noir_, and of tea in the evening, with hard biscuit, butter, cheese, and ham. I would recommend _potage_ instead of _tea_ for the evening meal to all future expeditions. Many of the articles of food must be thawed before the process of cooking begins, the greater part of the provisions being frozen as hard as iron. The tins with preserved meat stand for hours in boiling water, and the things for supper on the cabin stove, in order to be thawed. A plate of cheese that steams, butter as hard as a stone, which has thrown off the salt it contained in great lumps from the action of frost, a ham as hard as the never-thawed ground of the Tundra of Siberia, form an icy repast, specially if we use knives, which are so cold that they often break with the least exertion of force. I will here notice the sanitary importance—insisted on by Parry and Ross—of fresh bread, which the cook in an Arctic ship should be able to bake about twice a week. On board the _Tegetthoff_ we used at first Liebig’s “baking-powder,” but this from being kept too long gave such a disagreeable taste to the bread, that we gave it up and contented ourselves with a defective leaven.

9. Every Sunday at noon we celebrated Divine Service. Under the shelter of the deck-tent, the Gospel was read to the little band of Christians gathered together by the sound of the ship’s bell, in all that grave simplicity which marked the worship of the early Christian Church. The Service over, we then sat down to the Sunday dinner, which was graced by a glass of wine and cake. Carlsen and Lusina were our guests by turns. Carlsen always appeared in his wig, trimmed with extra care, and on the high festivals of the Church decorated also with the cross of the order of St. Olaf. Lusina, our excellent-boatswain, was ready to talk with enthusiasm on any subject whatever, prefacing his stream of words with some sententious remark or with some far-fetched introduction. During our meals the conversation turned on our plans for the future; we talked of Polar bears; we discussed the question of the existence of Gillis’ Land and the possibility of our reaching Siberia; but very seldom did we venture to speak of what filled the minds of all—our captivity in the ice. Political combinations formed a favourite theme; and as we had some old numbers of the _Neue Frei Presse_ on board, they furnished an inexhaustible source of topics for conversation. The events of the year 1870 were related as the latest news, and we thought anxiously of the issue of the war between Germany and France, and feared lest Austria should be compelled to take part in it.

10. After dinner came the hour for contemplation; in our lonely berths and by the side of our beds we sat down to brood—to listen to our watches beating seconds. The English Arctic expeditions, during the long period of their enforced leisure, found a great source of amusement and distraction in theatricals. But the ships of these expeditions had far larger crews than the _Tegetthoff_, and the men could be more easily spared for these recreations. But there were other reasons why we could not think of following the example of the English. Our situation during the first winter was far too serious for such things, and no other place for the theatre was at our disposal except the barricaded deck; and we should have had to sit there with a thermometer marking from 25° to 37° of cold, on the centigrade scale, and see how the actors and the audience suddenly rubbed their frost-bitten feet with snow! There was one other potent reason for this renunciation—our performances must have been in four different languages.

11. Monotonous beyond all monotony is life in the long night of a Polar winter, and exile can never on earth be so entire as here under the dreadful triumvirate—darkness, cold, and solitude. In such a life, the man who surrenders himself to idleness, or even to sleeping during the day, must necessarily be utterly demoralized. In fact, nothing can be more destructive to an expedition wintering in the Arctic regions than the indulgence of mental or bodily lassitude. The real ground of the failure of the attempts made in earlier times to winter in Jan Mayen and other places in the far North was probably the utter want of discipline. There is, however, a widely spread, though mistaken view, that the long day of Polar lands is oppressive to man. Nothing is more untrue; for not continual light, but constant darkness, is distressing. Continual daylight heightens the energies and vital powers; and yet, in our own first winter, it was less the darkness which wore us than the perpetual anxiety; when our greatest consolation was found in the Arabic proverb, “_In niz beguzared_” (_This too will pass away_), inscribed on our cabin wall.

12. After supper, before going to bed, we smoked our cigars in the shed over the cabin steps, with a thermometer from 25° to 37° below zero C., and talked pleasantly over bygone days, though our thoughts were not unmixed with gloomy forebodings, as we heard ever and anon the ominous sounds that issued from the moving ice. Existence on board a straining and groaning ship resembles life over a volcano. It was only after we had been some time in this ice-covered wooden grotto that the temperature rose, through our own heat, a few degrees, and it was certainly some testimony to the excellence of my down-quilted clothes that I could wear them in the cabin without being distressed by the heat, and yet I was able to sit the whole evening in this freezing hole without suffering from cold. A train-oil lamp sends out almost more smoke than light, and when the snow drifted, we had to contend with the importunities of the dogs, who seemed to regard the deck shed as a great dog-kennel. With a sudden rise of the outer temperature this shed became utterly uninhabitable, for its coating of ice then melted and fell down like rain.

13. The effect of the long winter night is even greater on the body than on the mind, because of the insufficient opportunities for exercise. Middendorf contrasting the influence of climate on men remarks:—“I consider travels in cold regions, even in the most unfavourable conditions of climate, to be far less dangerous to life than travels under the tropics. The former certainly are unutterably more miserable, but as certainly less deadly. I say this notwithstanding the danger which threatens ships when they penetrate far within the realms of ice. We are never secure from sudden and deadly attacks of illness in tropical countries, but the longer we remain in them the less is the danger; whereas the high North deteriorates the constitution of the blood, and after three winters, very few can stand a fourth.” To the influences of Polar life detrimental to health must be added the constant hindrance to perspiration from wearing an extra quantity of woollen clothing—more or less hurtful as it is more or less waterproof—the want of fresh animal and vegetable food, and last, but not least, the periodic departure of light and warmth.

14. Our sanitary condition during the two winters we spent on board the _Tegetthoff_ was not altogether satisfactory. Scorbutic affections of the mouth and diseases of the lungs appeared sometimes in distressing shapes, and scarcely a day passed in which we had not one or two on the sick-list. I believe, however, that our trying situation had far more to do with these evils than the southern blood and breeding of our people. The incessant watchfulness and care of Dr. Kepes left nothing undone which would counteract the evil influences to which we were exposed. The berths of the crew were changed in rotation, and those which were exposed to the greatest accumulation of ice were dried by warm air conveyed through movable pipes. Want of exercise, constant change of temperature, depression of mind, the periodic scarcity of fresh meat, were the causes of the scurvy. In our first winter it appeared only in the more crowded quarters of the crew. It was then also that the first symptoms of lung-disease appeared in Krisch, the engineer, which he probably contracted from “catching cold.” From that time he liked to sit by the stove and always complained of cold. Our supplies of preservatives against, and remedies for scurvy were rather limited, although we had at our disposal several hundred tins of preserved vegetables, a cask of cloud-berries (_Rubus chamæmorus_), which we had brought from Tromsoe, and above a hundred bottles of lime-juice. Wine also is an important preservative; we therefore served out to the crew, notwithstanding our small supply, twice a week, not Kepes’ artificial, but real wine—at the rate of two bottles for eighteen men. No doubt scorbutic symptoms would have been far more general and severe, had we not been fortunate enough to shoot no less than sixty-seven Polar bears, a larger number than had fallen to any previous expedition. It was more a sign of our good intentions to leave nothing undone or untried in our efforts against this malady, than any actual service it was to us, that we sowed cress and cabbage—radishes did not succeed—in a bed which we suspended over the stove. It was interesting, however, to observe how the little plants of cress, with every change of position, always turned to the light of the lamp, growing to the height of three inches, and in spite of their brimstone colour retaining the true cress flavour.

15. The use of the bath tends greatly to promote health, for without it the skin of the body has no other stimulant; but the insecurity of our position rendered bathing sometimes a somewhat doubtful enjoyment. I remember many cases, when some of us, while bathing in the cold dark washing place in lukewarm water an inch deep, were alarmed by a sudden pressure of ice. Ultimately we gave up this practice, finding that it produced a troublesome amount of damp.

16. To a stranger, who should have visited us during this winter, nothing in the ship would have been so surprising and interesting as a visit to the quarters of the crew. Except for an hour, from five to six o’clock in the evening, when they were encouraged to take exercise in the open air, the rest of their time was spent in school, or in the duties of the watch, or in the work of the ship. Our supply of Slavonic books was unfortunately not very ample, and besides, not all the crew were able to read; the greater therefore was their tendency, like men of southern climes, to harmless noise, and I believe that some of our people, during the whole expedition, never ceased to speak. Here I beg to insert some passages from my journal:—“Passing by the steaming kitchen, we enter their messroom. Here in a narrow space we find the toilers of the sea and the mountains—eighteen in number. A little band of Dalmatians who for the first time encounter darkness and cold, the horrors of which are increased tenfold to men born and bred in the sunny South. Truly it could be no little thing to such men to be torn from sleep almost every night by the movement of the ice, to sit day after day in the long night of winter without any real intellectual occupation, and yet not to become demoralized, but remain calm and composed, and ever ready to obey and oblige. Can anything higher be said in their praise? Those men slept, each by himself, in a double row of berths; only Lusina the boatswain, and Carlsen the harpooner, who had circumnavigated Spitzbergen and Novaya Zemlya, occupied a separate partition. The clatter of the tongues of so many vehement Southerners was like the sound made by the smaller wheels of a machine, while the naive simplicity of the grave Tyrolese came in between times, like the steady beat of a great cog-wheel. It was a miniature reproduction of the confusion of tongues of Babel. Lusina speaks Italian to the occupants of the officers’ cabin, English with Carlsen, French with Dr. Kepes, and Slavonic with the crew. Carlsen had adopted for the ‘Slavonians,’ as he called our people, a kind of speech compounded of Norwegian, English, German, Italian, and Slavonic. The crew, with the exception of the two Italians, speak Slavonic among themselves. The head of the little German colony is the cook, a Styrian; his heart is better than his culinary skill, for only too readily he leaves his work to be done by the stove. There is also among them a Moravian, Pospischill, the Vulcan of the ship; but we must return to the predominant race—the Slavonic. There is Lukinovich, a very Harpagon, always collecting, finding treasures in nails, empty bottles, lamp wicks, and searching even under the snow for articles wherewith to fill his sack—the sack which he was one day to leave behind him, much against the grain, when we abandoned the ship. There is Marola, the steward, and Fallesich, who had worked at the Suez Canal; these are our great singers. Then Palmich with his lance, the man whose zeal never bated, and whose very glance transfixed everything; Vecerina, the Job of the party, and the merry Titans, Sussich and Catarinich; Latkovich and Lettis, ‘the philosophers;’ Stiglich, the immovable confessor of passive obedience and the unlawfulness of resistance; Zaninovich, the ‘pearl;’ Haller the herdsman and Klotz the prophet. Five of these men had run away from their wives. Klotz the prophet was under all circumstances, not indeed the most useful, but the most interesting person of this little community. A lofty calm worthy of an Evangelist graced his outer man; of still greater stature than Andreas Höfer, he wore, like him, a large black beard. As a hunter, a guide, a collector of stones, and a lonely enthusiast, he had moved about the mountains of his home, leading a life of visions. At home he was regarded as an incomparably bold mountaineer, and the ropes of the ship were to him so many convenient foot-paths. His reputation as a physician in his native land was great, and on board ship he failed not with his good offices. Haller, his fellow-countryman, shared with Klotz the office of armourer, and the duties of hunter and driver of the sledge-dogs; and when we began our sledge journeys, both of them were ready to relieve others in dragging. Both had served in the army, Klotz on the Tonale, Haller on the Stelvio, and in 1868 the latter had been my useful companion when I was engaged in the survey of the Ortler and Adamello Alps. ‘The philosophers’ of our party, Latkovich and Lettis, had drawn a fine distinction between the different layers of ice, according as they contained a greater or less amount of saline matter: _Ghiaccio della prima_ and _Ghiaccio della seconda qualità_.”

17. To obviate as far as possible the evils of too much leisure among the men, a school was instituted at the beginning of the January of the second year; Lieutenant Weyprecht, Brosch, and Orel undertook the Italians and Slavonians, and I the Tyrolese. To avoid all confusion I retired with my smaller body of pupils to the shed on deck. Here, with the thermometer at 25° to 37° below zero C., the seed of wisdom was sown in the hearts of these sons of nature; but alas! the climate was not favourable to its growth. After many painful disillusions, the Pole was ascertained to be the intersection of lines in a point, of which nothing was to be seen in reality. If in this little lecture-room an exercise had to be examined, and the scholars were obliged to hold in their breath, in order that the teacher, who spoke out of a cloud, might be able to see the slate; or when the pupils engaged in a division sum had suddenly to stop to rub their hands with snow, was it a matter of wonder if the school did not flourish exceedingly?

18. The food of the crew consisted principally of preserved meats, different kinds of pulse, and the products of the chase, amounting on an average to two bears a week. Bear-flesh, roasted, was liked by all; the seal was at first despised, till necessity corrected taste. Besides artificial wine, water was their strongest drink.