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Updated: May 24, 2025
I was tired and slept soundly, and consequently knew nothing about it until morning, which dawned brightly and with a light breeze, under which we passed up to the first ice-pack I had ever seen. While engaged in conversation an inexperienced hand at the wheel brought us so close to a small cake of ice, about the size of a schooner, that collision was inevitable.
All was silence and security; but even while I thought that here at least Nature ruled supreme, Art sent to my listening ear, upon the dense night air, the shrill whistle of the steam-freighter, trying to enter the ice-pack several miles down the river.
After calling at the Auckland Islands and at Campbell Island, Ross again steered for the South, and the Antarctic Circle was crossed on New Year's Day, 1841. The ships were now faced by the ice-pack, but to Ross this was not the dangerous enemy it had appeared to earlier explorers with their more weakly constructed vessels.
It was not till some time later that we heard from the South that our trusty craft had been picked up some three hundred miles to the southward and westward, well out in a heavy ice-pack, and right in amongst a big patch of seals, away off on the Atlantic. The whole of the bay ice had evidently gone out together, taking the ship with it, and the bay had then neatly frozen over again.
In the Arctic winter all was frozen into an unending plain of snow, broken by distorted hummocks of ice, and here and there showing the frowning rocks of a mountainous country swept clean by the Arctic blast. In the winter deep night and intense cold settled on the scene. But in the short Arctic summer the ice-pack moved away from the shores.
Although the sky was overcast, it was broad daylight, the daylight of a dull winter afternoon, and as the cutter passed along, Colwell could recognize the familiar landmarks of the year before; the long sweep of the rocky coast, with its ice-foot spanning every cove, the snow gathered in the crevices, the projecting headlands, and the line of the ice-pack which had ground up the "Proteus," dimly seen in the mists to the north, across the tossing waters of Kane Sea.
"Yes, and another beyond farther down amongst that ice-pack! Do you see?" "Where?" Mick Kennedy trained his one eye like a fieldpiece upon the locality suggested. "Where? Yes! I see them now both of them. Blair's own horse, if he had one, is probably in there too, somewhere." Meanwhile Stetson had been scrutinizing the spot on the river's face from which had come the puff of smoke.
But rejoicings over the breaking-up of the ice were brief; in four-and- twenty hours the island was hemmed in on every side by the ice-pack, so that there was not a speck of open water to be seen. And then the snow began. "We really thought it was time to begin work on the land," said the people; but they could put up with the cold there was still time enough.
The whole ice-pack seemed one vast plain, like a bleak moorland in winter, only with little hillocks of ice here and there called hummocks, for the flat pieces of ice were all frozen hard together, and Ara wondered where "Greenland's icy mountains" had all got to. There were no bears about to-day, and no seals, only the sea-birds that went wheeling and screaming about them in thousands.
Two years after, no word having been heard of her meanwhile, the inevitable relief expedition was sent out the steamer "Rodgers," which after making a gallant dash to a most northerly point, was caught in the ice-pack and there burned to the water's edge, her crew, with greatest difficulty, escaping, and reaching home without one ray of intelligence of DeLong's fate.
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