Globalization of the United States, 1789-1861

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Kane, Elisha Kent. Arctic Explorations: The Second Grinnell Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin, 1853, ’54, ’55. Cincinnati: Applegate and Co., 1857.

Elisha Kent Kane. Arctic Explorations: The Second Grinnell Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin, 1853, '54, '55. Philadelphia: Childs and Peterson...., 1857. 1:Titlepage.

If so many other American explorers had encounters with supposed “savages,” Kane had his own dramatic encounters with perilous icebergs in the Arctic Ocean.

Read a passage from the book

“August 19, Friday. — The sky looks sinister: a sort of scowl overhangs the blink under the great brow of clouds to the southward. The dovekies seem to distrust the weather, for they have forsaken the channel; but the walrus curvet around us in crowds. I have always heard that the close approach to land of these sphinx-faced monsters portends a storm. I was anxious to find a better shelter, and warped yesterday well down to the south end of the ledge; but I could not venture into the floes outside, without risking the loss of my dearly-earned ground. It may prove a hard gale; but we must wait it out patiently.

“August 20, Saturday, 3 1/2 P.M. — By Saturday morning it blew a perfect hurricane. We had seen it coming, and were ready with three good hawsers out ahead, and all things snug on board.

“Still it came on heavier and heavier, and the ice began to drive more wildly than I thought I had ever seen it. I had just turned in to warm and dry myself during a momentary lull, and was stretching myself out in my bunk, when I heard the sharp twanging snap of a cord. Our six-inch hawser had parted, and we were swinging by the two others; the gale roaring like a lion to the southward.

“Half a minute more, and ‘twang, twang!’ came a second report. I knew it was the whale-line by the shrillness of the ring. Our noble ten-inch manilla still held on. I was hurrying my last sock into its sealskin boot, when McGary came waddling down the companion-ladders: — ‘Captain Kane, she won’t hold much longer: it’s blowing the devil himself, and I am afraid to surge.’

“The manilla cable was proving its excellence when I reached the deck; and the crew, as they gathered round me, were loud in its praises. We could hear its deep Eolian chant, swelling through all the rattle of the running-gear and moaning of the shrouds. It was the death-song! The strands gave way, with the noise of a shotted gun; and, in the smoke that followed their recoil, we were dragged out by the wild ice, at its mercy.

“We steadied and did some petty warping, and got the brig a good bed in the rushing drift; but it all came to nothing. We then tried to beat back through the narrow ice-clogged water-way, that was driving, a quarter of a mile wide, between the shore and the pack. It cost us two hours of hard labor, I thought skilfully bestowed; but at the end of that time, we were at least four miles off, opposite the great valley in the centre of Bedevilled Reach. Ahead of us, farther to the north, we could see the strait growing still narrower, and the heavy ice-tables grinding up, and clogging it between the shore-cliffs on one side and the ledge on the other. There was but one thing left for us; — to keep in some sort the command of the helm, by going freely where we must otherwise be driven. We allowed her to scud under a reefed foretopsail; all hands watching the enemy, as we closed, in silence.

“At seven in the morning, we were close upon the piling masses. We dropped our heaviest anchor with the desperate hope of winding the brig; but there was no withstanding the ice-torrent that followed us. We had only time to fasten a spar as a buoy to the chain, and let her slip. So went our best bower!

“Down we went upon the gale again, helplessly scraping along a lee of ice seldom less than thirty feet thick; one floe, measured by a line as we tried to fasten to it, more than forty. I had seen such ice only once before, and never in such rapid motion. One upturned mass rose above our gunwale, smashing in our bulwarks, and depositing half a ton of ice in a lump upon our decks. Our stanch little brig bore herself through all this wild adventure as if she had a charmed life.

“But a new enemy came in sight ahead. Directly in our way, just beyond the line of floe-ice against which we were alternately sliding and thumping, was a group of bergs. We had no power to avoid them; and the only question was, whether we were to be dashed in pieces against them, or whether they might not offer us some providential nook of refuge from the storm. But, as we neared them, we perceived that they were at some distance from the floe-edge, and separated from it by an interval of open water. Our hopes rose, as the gale drove us toward this passage, and into it; and we were ready to exult, when, from some unexplained cause, — probably an eddy of the wind against the lofty ice-walls, — we lost our headway. Almost at the same moment, we saw that the bergs were not at rest; that, with a momentum of their own they were bearing down upon the other ice, and that it must be our fate to be crushed between the two.

“Just then, a broad sconce-piece or low water-washed berg came driving up from the southward. The thought flashed upon me of one of our escapes in Melville Bay; and as the sconce moved rapidly close alongside us, McGary managed to plant an anchor on its slope and hold on to it by a whale-line. It was an anxious moment. Our noble tow-horse, whiter than the pale horse that seemed to be pursuing us, hauled us bravely on; the spray dashing over his windward flanks, and his forehead ploughing up the lesser ice as if in scorn. The bergs encroached upon us as we advanced: our channel narrowed to a width of perhaps forty feet: we braced the yards to clear the impending ice-walls.

“....We passed clear; but it was a close shave, — so close that our port quarter-boat would have been crushed if we had not taken it in from the davits, — and found ourselves under the lee of a berg, in a comparatively open lead. Never did heart-tried men acknowledge with more gratitude their merciful deliverance from a wretched death....

“The day had already its full share of trials; but there were more to come. A flaw drove us from our shelter, and the gale soon carried us beyond the end of the lead. We were again in the ice, sometimes escaping its onset by warping, sometimes forced to rely on the strength and buoyancy of the brig to stand its pressure, sometimes scudding wildly through the half-open drift. Our jib-boom was snapped off in the cap; we carried away our barricade stanchions, and were forced to leave our little Eric, with three brave fellows and their warps, out upon the floes behind us.

“A little pool of open water received us at last. It was just beyond a lofty cape that rose up like a wall, and under an iceberg that anchored itself between us and the gale. And here, close under the frowning shore of Greenland, ten miles nearer the Pole than our holding-ground of the morning, the men have turned in to rest.

“I was afraid to join them; for the gale was unbroken, and the floes kept pressing heavily upon our berg, — at one time so heavily as to sway it on its vertical axis toward the shore, and make its pinnacle overhang our vessel. My poor fellows had but a precarious sleep before our little harbor was broken up. They hardly reached the deck, when we were driven astern, our rudder splintered, and the pintles torn from their boltings.

“Now began the nippings. The first shock took us on our port-quarter; the brig bearing it well, and, after a moment of the old-fashioned suspense, rising by jerks handsomely. The next was from a veteran floe, tongued and honeycombed, but floating in a single table over twenty feet in thickness. Of course, no wood or iron could stand this; but the shoreward face of our iceberg happened to present an inclined plane, descending deep into the water; and up this the brig was driven, as if some great steam screw-power was forcing her into a dry dock.

“At one time I expected to see her carried bodily up its face and tumbled over on her side. But one of those mysterious relaxations, which I have elsewhere called the pulses of the ice, lowered us quite gradually down again into the rubbish, and we were forced out of the line of pressure toward the shore. Here we succeeded in carrying out a warp, and making fast. We grounded as the tide fell; and would have heeled over to seaward, but for a mass of detached land-ice that grounded alongside of us, and, although it stove our bulwarks as we rolled over it, shored us up.”

I could hardly get to my bunk, as I went down into our littered cabin on the Sunday morning after our hard-working vigil of thirty-six hours. Bags of clothing, food, tents, India-rubber blankets, and the hundred little personal matters which every man likes to save in a time of trouble, were scattered around in places where the owners thought they might have them at hand. The pemmican had been on deck, the boats equipped, and every thing of real importance ready for a march, many hours before.

During the whole of the scenes I have been trying to describe, I could not help being struck by the composed and manly demeanor of my comrades. The turmoil of ice under a heavy sea often conveys the impression of danger when the reality is absent; but in this fearful passage, the parting of our hawsers, the loss of our anchors, the abrupt crushing of our stoven bulwarks, and the actual deposit of ice upon our decks, would have tried the nerves of the most experienced icemen. All — officers and men — worked alike. Upon each occasion of collision with the ice which formed our lee-coast, efforts were made to carry out lines; and some narrow escapes were incurred, by the zeal of the parties leading them into positions of danger. Mr. Bonsall avoided being crushed by leaping to a floating fragment; and no less than four of our men at one time were carried down by the drift, and could only be recovered by a relief party after the gale had subsided.

As our brig, borne on by the ice, commenced her ascent of the berg, the suspense was oppressive. The immense blocks piled against her, range upon range, pressing themselves under her keel and throwing her over upon her side, till, urged by the successive accumulations, she rose slowly and as if with convulsive efforts along the sloping wall. Still there was no relaxation of the impelling force. Shock after shock, jarring her to her very centre, she continued to mount steadily on her precarious cradle. But for the groaning of her timbers and the heavy sough of the floes, we might have heard a pin drop. And then, as she settled down into her old position, quietly taking her place among the broken rubbish, there was a deep-breathing silence, as though all were waiting for some signal before the clamor of congratulation and comment could burst forth.