The Last Three Days at the Pumps

Farther forward, the dog team drivers attached a large piece of canvas to the port rail, turning it into a sort of chute down to the ice alongside the ship. They took the 49 huskies from their kennels and slid each one down to the men waiting below. Normally, any activity like this would have driven the dogs mad with excitement, but somehow they seemed to sense that something very extraordinary was happening. Not a single fight broke out among them, and not one dog attempted to break away.

Perhaps it was the men’s attitude that influenced them; they worked with deliberate urgency, barely speaking to one another. However, there was no display of alarm. Apart from the movement of the ice and the sounds from the ship, the scene was one of relative calm. The temperature was eight and a half degrees below zero, and a light southerly wind was blowing. Overhead, the twilight sky was clear, but far away to the south, a gale was approaching, though it probably wouldn’t reach its position for at least two days.

Its approach was hinted at by the movement of the ice, which stretched as far as the eye could see and for hundreds of miles beyond that. The pack was so immense and tight that even though the gale had not yet reached them, the distant pressure of its winds was already crushing the floes together. The entire surface of the ice was in chaotic motion; it looked like an enormous jigsaw puzzle, the pieces stretching away to infinity and being shoved and crunched together by some invisible, irresistible force.

The impression of its titanic power was heightened by the unhurried deliberateness of the motion. Wherever two thick floes came together, the edges butted and ground against each other for a time. Then, when neither showed signs of yielding, they would rise slowly and often quiveringly, driven by the implacable force behind them. Sometimes, they would stop abruptly as the unseen force seemed to mysteriously lose interest. More frequently, though, the two floes—often ten feet thick or more—would continue to rise, tenting up until one or both broke and toppled over, creating a pressure ridge.

There were sounds of the pack in motion—the basic noises of grunting and whining of the floes, along with the occasional thud as a heavy block collapsed. In addition, the pack under compression seemed to produce an almost limitless repertoire of other sounds, many of which seemed strangely unrelated to the noise of ice under pressure. Sometimes, there was a sound like a gigantic train with squeaky axles being shunted roughly about, with a great deal of bumping and clattering. At the same time, a huge ship’s whistle blew, mingling with the crowing of roosters, the roar of distant surf, the soft throb of an engine far away, and the moaning cries of an old woman.

In the rare periods of calm, when the movement of the pack subsided for a moment, the muffled rolling of drums drifted across the air. In this universe of ice, nowhere was the movement greater or the pressure more intense than in the floes attacking the ship. Nor could her position have been worse. One floe was jammed solidly against her starboard bow, another held her on the same side aft, and a third drove squarely in on her port beam opposite. Thus, the ice was working to break her in half directly amidships.

On several occasions, she bowed to starboard along her entire length. Forward, where the worst of the onslaught was concentrated, the ice was inundating her. It piled higher and higher against her bows as she repelled each new wave until it gradually mounted to the bulwarks, then crashed across the deck, overwhelming her with a crushing load that pushed her head down even deeper. Thus held, she was even more at the mercy of the floes driving against her flanks.

The ship reacted to each fresh wave of pressure in different ways. Sometimes she simply quivered briefly, like a human being might wince if seized by a single stabbing pain. Other times, she wrenched in a series of fierce jerks, accompanied by anguished outcries. On these occasions, her three masts whipped violently back and forth as the rigging tightened like heartstrings. But most unbearable for the men were the times when she seemed like a huge creature suffocating and gasping for breath, her sides heaving against the strangling pressure. More than any other single impression in those final hours, all the men were struck—almost to the point of horror—by the way, the ship behaved, like a giant beast in its death agonies.

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