Polar Exploration. William Speirs Bruce

the ship's mainmast-head.

      In technical whalers' language we "fastened on to the floe" that night and lay there during the whole of Christmas Day, the only day of rest we had for the next two months. The scene was of wonderful beauty, and I cannot do better than quote the graceful description by the able artist-chronicler of the voyage.

      "Those who have felt," says Burn Murdoch (From Edinburgh to the Antarctic, by W. G. Burn Murdoch), "the peace of a summer night in Norway or Iceland, where the day sleeps with wide-open eyes, can fancy the quiet beauty of such a night among the white floes of the Antarctic. To-day has passed, glistering in silky white, decked with sparkling jewels ​of blue and green, and we thought surely we had seen the last of Nature's white harmonies; the evening came, pensive and soothing and grey, and all the white world changed into pale violet, pale yellow, and rose.

      "A dreamy stillness fills the air. To the south the sun has dipped behind a bank of pale grey cloud, and the sky above is touched with primrose light. Far to the north the dark, smooth sea is bounded by two low bergs, that stretch across the horizon. The nearest is cold violet white, and the sunlight strikes the farthest, making it shine like a wall of gold. The sky above them is of a leaden, peacock blue, with rosy cloudlets hanging against it—such colouring as I have never before seen or heard described. To the westward, across the gulf, we can just distinguish the blue-black crags jutting from the snowy lomonds. Little clouds touched with gold and rose lie nestling in the black corries, and gather round the snowy peaks. To the south, in the centre of the floe, some bergs lie cold and grey in the shadow of the bank of clouds. They look like Greek temples imprisoned for ever in a field of snow. A faint cold air comes stealing to us over the floe: it ripples the yellow sky reflection at the ice-edge for a moment, and falls away. In the distance a seal is barking—a low muffled sound that travels far over the ​calm water, and occasionally a slight splash breaks the silence, as a piece of snow separates from the field and joins its companion pieces that are floating quietly past our stern to the north—a mysterious, silent procession of soft, white spirits, each perfectly reflected in the lavender sea.

      "Nature sleeps—breathlessly—silent; perhaps she dreams of the spirit world, that seems to draw so close to her on such a night.

      "By midnight the tired crew were all below and sound asleep in their stuffy bunks. But the doctor and I found it impossible to leave the quiet decks and the mysterious daylight, so we prowled about and brewed coffee in the deserted galley. There we watched the sun pass behind the grey bergs in the south for a few seconds, and appear again, refreshed, with a cool silvery light. A few flakes of snow floated in the clear, cold air, and two snowy petrels, white as the snow itself, floated along the ice-edge.

      "A cold, dreamy, white Christmas morning—beautiful beyond expression."

      These lines recall to me that wonderful scene, more charming and restful than many another Arctic and Antarctic scene I have seen since. The dignity, the solemn grandeur, the colour, and the marvellous silence all helped to leave a lasting impression upon me, and, in spite of many discomforts, difficulties, and ​dangers that I have had to face since in the north and the south, it is this wonderful picture and others like it that call me back again.

      I have given this picture as an artistic presentation, and now I am going through the rather ruthless process of analysing the subjects in the picture. In the first place, every one will agree that we were, without doubt, in what might be fairly described as the Antarctic Regions, although, when the Balæna lay anchored to impenetrable ice on Christmas Day, we were outside the Antarctic Circle by two and a half degrees, or 150 miles. The first definition therefore defining the Antarctic Regions as lying within the Antarctic Circle breaks down completely, just as it did ten years later when on board the Scotia we met with impenetrable ice not very far south of latitude 59° S. to the east of the South Orkneys, or when, during the winter of 1903, the Scotia was frozen up for eight months in Scotia Bay, which is situated between 60 and 61 degrees south latitude.

      Mention has been made of icebergs, of field ice, of floe ice, and of pack ice. Let me explain what these terms mean. It has been shown that there is a great area of land, probably one great continent, round about the South Pole. This continent is surrounded by the Great Southern Ocean, and, over the region occupied by that ocean, within the average limit of ​floating ice, there are even in summer time wintry conditions; so much so that most of the precipitation that occurs is in the form of snow instead of rain. In midsummer, when cruising in the vicinity of the Antarctic continent, blizzards off the land cause the temperature to fall even below zero Fahrenheit, and in winter on Antarctica itself a temperature has been recorded as low as 68 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, or 100 degrees of frost. The lowest air-temperature has been recorded at Verkhoyansk in Siberia, namely, −90° F., or 122 degrees of frost. From this it will be seen that, as most of the Antarctic land lies well within the Antarctic Circle, practically all precipitation must be in the form of snow, and that little melting takes place except where the sun gets very favourable play. On black rocks the sun's heat may be absorbed, and in sheltered corries, where there may be considerable melting, resulting in the formation of small burns and tarns.

      On the rocks a few lichens will grow; on softer, more crumbly, and flatter expanses a few mosses may thrive, and amongst these mosses and in the tarns a few minute forms of animal and vegetable life will flourish, which have sharp alternate spells of activity or passivity according as the temperature is above or below the freezing-point.

      ​

      CHAPTER III LAND ICE

       Table of Contents

      Under the conditions of low temperature which have been described, even if there is only a very slight snowfall in the heart of Antarctica, there must be a constant accumulation of snow upon the land. This snow by its own incumbent weight gets compressed into ice, which fills corries and glens, and covers any flat land there may be with a great depth of solid ice. But the accumulation cannot go on indefinitely, and the ice begins to flow, first down the steeper glens, then down even the least inclined stretches of the land, forced by the great mass of ice always accumulating from behind. It may even get pushed over flat if not actually rising ground, and eventually reaches the sea. If the sea be shallow it may push out a considerable distance from the land, ultimately floating free from the bottom. Fresh snow is all the while falling, and adding to the whole. Blizzards come and drive the powdery loose snow from one place to another, and the hard-driving wind binds the powder ​into solid ice. Imagine all this on an enormous scale! Not over an area of a dozen or a hundred, or even a thousand square miles, but over an area as large as Europe and Australia combined, then we have a picture of what is happening over the length and breadth of Antarctica! The ice thus accumulated from snowfall, thus consolidated from loose snow into solid ice by pressure, gets pushed ultimately into the sea. Let me indicate what happens by referring for a moment to a phenomenon with which all of us are familiar. A snowstorm whitens all the country round and every roof has a coating of snow some six inches thick. The snow gets bound together and remains a more or less solid covering on the roof, till one day it slips off from various causes in irregular pieces, all about six inches thick and perhaps several feet across, and crashes down on the roadway beneath. But if the eaves of the roof dipped into water at that level, then this great sheet of icy snow would, when slipping from the roof, float off on the surface of the water. The floating sheets of icy snow—"floating ice islands"—would be of various areas, but they would all be flat-topped, and of a uniform thickness of six inches, the sides would be more or less perpendicular, and the greater part of the thickness would be below the surface of the ​water, the amount depending on the solidity of each sheet of icy snow, but possibly one inch might be above water to five inches below. Magnify your roof, magnify your ice covering which has slipped off the roof and floated off into the water, magnify your snowfall of a single night into that of more than a thousand years, make every inch of thickness 100 feet, and you have models on a scale of 1 to 1,200 of Antarctic icebergs, at least as far as shape is concerned. The mode of formation also is somewhat similar to that of the Antarctic icebergs, although probably the great ice-fields