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One day the fisher-boys ran out on to the breakwater in playtime. A boat had just come in through the pack-ice with a gruesome cargo five frozen men, one of whom was dead and lay in the fire-engine house, while the four others had been taken into various cottages, where they were being rubbed with ice to draw the frost out of them.
There is always, as we have said, a large quantity of floe and pack-ice in the polar seas, which becomes incorporated with the new ice of the succeeding winter; and not infrequently whale and discovery ships get frozen into the pack, and remain there as firmly embedded as if they lay high and dry on land.
Pack-ice is "close" or "tight" if the floes constituting it are in contact; "open" if, for the most part, they do not touch. In both cases it hinders, but does not necessarily check, navigation; the contrary holds for "Drift-ice". Loose open ice, where the area of water exceeds that of ice.
Pack-ice was met almost at the antarctic circle, but Scott gradually worked the vessel through the pack and reached the base of Mount Terror where he landed a party. Then with the remainder of his men he coasted eastward along the great ice barrier for five hundred miles.
The course was now directed for Robertson Bay, and after some difficulty, owing to the reappearance of loose streams of pack-ice, the ship was eventually steered into the open water within the bay. It was on this spit that the expedition sent forth by Sir George Newnes and commanded by Borchgrevink spent their winter in 1896, the first party to winter on the shores of the Antarctic Continent.
But this particular man undoubtedly did wake the strong dark feelings that sleep in the heart; his eyes were very singular and powerful; his voice from a whisper ran gathering, like snow-balls, and crashed, as I have heard the pack-ice in commotion far yonder in the North; while his gestures were as uncouth and gawky as some wild man's of the primitive ages. Well, this man what was his name?
Then the ship would become unmanageable and drift away, with the possibility of getting excessive sternway on her and so damaging rudder or propeller, the Achilles' heel of a ship in pack-ice. While we were waiting for the weather to moderate and the ice to open, I had the Lucas sounding-machine rigged over the rudder-trunk and found the depth to be 2810 fathoms.
The meeting with the imposing colossus had another significance that had a stronger claim on our interest the pack-ice could not be far off. We were all longing as one man to be in it; it would be a grand variation in the monotonous life we had led for so long, and which we were beginning to be a little tired of.
However sleepy and grumpy one may be, a gulp of hot coffee quickly makes a better man of one; therefore coffee for the night watch was a permanent institution on board the Fram. By about Christmas we had reached nearly the 150th meridian in lat. 56° S. This left not much more than 900 miles before we might expect to meet with the pack-ice.
Ross greatly desired to plant at the south magnetic pole the flag that had been displayed at the north magnetic pole in 1831, but he was unfortunately caught in the pack-ice and compelled to abandon the attempt. Two volcanic mountains were discovered on an island near Victoria Land. These mountains Ross named Erebus and Terror from the two ships in which he sailed.
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