CHAPTER V.

AMONG THE ICE-FIELDS OF MELVILLE BAY.

I was much disappointed that we could not prolong our stay in the vicinity of the Devil’s Thumb. But our situation there was indeed a hazardous one. The ice was crowding about us all the time, and, driven by a three-knot current that whirled it round in the wildest manner, it was not surprising that the captain should declare the Thumb to be no proper place for the _Panther_. Accordingly, after doing the best we could hydrographically, topographically, and artistically, we crawled out while the chance was good and steamed northward into the pack.

To describe our adventures of the next few days would be to repeat much of what I have said before about the pursuit of bears and encounters with ice-fields. Neither ice-navigation nor bear-hunting can present much of variety. Even to ourselves both became monotonous in the end; and we even received the cry of “bears” without excitement, and were knocked off our legs by the thumping of the _Panther_ against the ice without emotion.

Besides the bears and an occasional seal (none of which were we lucky enough, however, to shoot), we saw no living thing except an occasional flock of little auks, or rotche, as they are called by the whalers. These are the cunningest little divers imaginable. They are family relations of the lumme already described; and, although only about one-third the size, are like them in color. The water is alive with shrimps about a quarter of an inch in length; and these little birds, whose flight is very rapid, come from the distant land to feed. Myriads of them whizzed over us, affording a fine opportunity for the sportsman. Sometimes large flocks of them would alight upon the water and, after satisfying their appetites, would crawl out upon the ice, and, sitting along the margin of it, dry themselves in the warm sun.

Our hunts after seals were most tantalizing. Great numbers of them came up out of the water, and stretching themselves on the ice in the blazing sunshine, went to sleep there. But they were all too shy for us. We approached them with steamer and with boat, but it was of no avail. If they did not sleep with one eye open, they certainly never slept with both ears shut; and long before they had come within effective range of our rifles, they were off the ice and into the water, and although they might bob up and down in the sea, looking at us within a distance of fifty yards or so, they were always careful not to expose themselves long enough to allow of our drawing a sight on them.

The weather was superb; for the most part the air was entirely calm, and in the perpetual sunshine our enjoyment was uninterrupted. Sometimes we were beset among the ice-fields, once or twice drifted upon an iceberg while we were helplessly involved among heavy floes, and there was therefore enough of danger to deprive the days of absolute stupidity. This ice-navigation, is never wholly free from hazard, and nothing can be more treacherous than the movements of the pack. Great skill and caution are always necessary on the part of the officers of the ship, and, since we were out of sight of land much of the time for several days, the mate had no temptation to indulge his favorite pastime of sounding with the _Panther’s_ keel. He would, indeed, be at all times a capital sailor but for his weakness for running the ship ashore.

I have, unhappily, none of those harrowing adventures to record which usually make up the accounts of Melville Bay voyagers. Once only did we encounter a real “nip.” The _Panther_ was then pretty badly squeezed, and we had a lively exhibition of the power of the closing ice-field. Strong though the _Panther_ was, we could readily see that she would be as an egg-shell in the hand if caught where the ice was in rapid movement. Fortunately it was only a revolving floe which beset us, and not the moving pack that was passing down bodily.

At length, after winding and twisting about to our hearts’ content, and having seen the Melville Bay pack and the Melville Bay icebergs in every aspect possessing interest for us, the _Panther_ was brought up alongside a heavy floe many miles in extent, and there she was, for the last time, made fast. A consultation revealed the fact that no one cared particularly to go any farther. A meridian altitude fixed our position at latitude 75°, near the Sabine Islands—farther in the direction of the North Pole, certainly, than any pleasure-seekers had ever gone before in that quarter. We were at least a hundred miles within the “pack,” and every one was abundantly satisfied with his performances, whether they had been sporting, artistic, scientific, or what not.

Our last day, tied up to the old floe, was a memorable one in our calendar. The temperature was quite warm, at one time reaching 60° in the shade, and, exposed as we had been so long, this seemed to us a sultry heat. And this was the more strange that we were in the midst of a perfect forest of icebergs. The floe to which we lay moored was, so far as the eye could perceive, limitless in extent—the thickness was about two and a half feet, and for the most part it was as level as the sea in a calm. The snows of winter had melted from its surface, and here and there the water had gathered in shallow pools, giving something the appearance of a marsh. Through the field numerous icebergs protruded, like huge rocks rising above a plain; the universal whiteness, broken only by the deep blue of the water, produced a glare that was sometimes painful to the eye, and, when the sun was shining at its brightest, quite overpowering.

Our people amused themselves in various ways. Some carried out boards from the ship, and, dropping them upon the ice, went soundly to sleep upon them in the hot sun. Others played foot-ball; while some exercised their skill with pistol and rifle upon a target painted with ink upon the side of a berg. Others, again, ran foot-races, and all hands made the most of the strange and unusual situation. There were neither bears nor seals to attract to more serious pastime, and no living thing besides ourselves was seen in this brilliantly illuminated wilderness except a flock of rotche, which came from the northward, and dropped down in the sea only a little way from us. Afterward they climbed out of the water and stood in a row, bolt upright, on the edge of the ice, staring at us in a most cunning and saucy manner. No doubt they had come from the extensive rookeries on the north side of Melville Bay, where the shore is for miles and miles literally alive with them.

While the idlers were thus amusing themselves, the artists were busy enough and, for myself, I found sufficient occupation in measuring and closely examining an iceberg which lay partly imbedded in the floe about two hundred yards from us. It was a very remarkable berg, both in form and dimensions, though, in the latter particular, many that I have seen exceeded it. Its greatest height, determined from a carefully measured base-line, was 230 feet, and its extreme length 1040 feet. We called it “the ruined castle,” and, indeed, there was only required a very slight assistance from the imagination to complete the outlines of an ancient work of defense turned adrift upon the sea in some unaccountable manner, as if to make room for more modern inventions. I estimated its cubical contents at fifty millions of tons.

Our castled iceberg can hardly be appreciated even by a detailed description, for it is difficult to describe so grand an object even by contrasting it with familiar things. In the first place, there was an open portal and a lowered draw-bridge; but the latter did not look very secure, being but a portion of the ice-field on which we stood, that had been crowded into the opening. So we did not venture upon the passage, but rather gazed through the archway at the blue sky beyond, until the curiosity was satisfied, when we walked as far around the ruin as the nature of the ice would allow. The rear proved to be much lower than the front; and, in fact, the front and one side presented from both points of view a no bad imitation of a lofty wall (now partly crumbled down), which had once been the half of the wall inclosing the central space, or court-yard, to which the portal led. This space was about one-eighth of a mile in diameter, and was very rough and rugged, and it lay some fifty to eighty feet above the sea-level. When the sun came around to that side, and shone down upon that part of the wonderful ruin, and we stood upon the ice-field in front and in deep shadow, looking through the open portal, the effect was most enchanting; and it is, indeed, impossible to conceive of any thing more delightful in the way of light and shade and color than it presented. When the sun was shining on the ice, as seen through the portal, the surface had the appearance of delicate white satin. The shadows were the most tender and delicious azure, while in those places where the ice-field was removed from the berg, and an overhanging portion of it received the reflected light from the water below, the color was the most perfectly transparent green that can be imagined.

I have so many times described these icebergs in all their varying characters, that any thing more might seem like too much; but I can not pass from the description of this castle-like natural formation without alluding to the wonderful variety of shapes assumed by these floating ice-mountains. There is scarcely a conceivable form that I have not seen: birds and savage beasts and effigies of domes and towers, and other objects, animate and inanimate, are seen continually. Human faces stare at you on every side; huge busts of men and forms of women I have often observed; and once a giant statue stood against the sky, outrivalling the famous Colossus of Rhodes, which it imitated in form and size.