Page:The open Polar Sea- a narrative of a voyage of discovery towards the North pole, in the schooner "United States" (IA openpolarseanarr1867haye).pdf/343



The track before me looks unpromising enough. After the party was housed, I climbed up to a considerable eminence, and have had the melancholy satisfaction of looking out over the ugliest scene that my eye has ever chanced to rest upon. There was nothing inviting in it. Except a few miles of what has evidently, up to a very late period of the fall, been open water, which has frozen suddenly, there is not a rod of smooth ice in sight. The whole Sound appears to have been filled with ice of the most massive description, which, broken up into a moving "pack" in the summer, has come down upon this Greenland coast with the southerly setting current, and has piled up all over the sea in a confused jumble. I know what it is from having crossed it in 1854; and if it is as bad now as then (and it appears to be much worse) there is every prospect of a severe tussle.

April 7th.

Did anybody ever see such capricious weather as this of Smith Sound? It is the torment of my life and the enemy of my plans. I can never depend upon it. It is the veriest flirt that ever owned Dame Nature for a mother.

We camped in a calm atmosphere, but in the middle of the night—bang!—down came a bugle-blast of Boreas, and then the old god blew and blew as if he had never blown in all his life before, and wanted to prove what he could do. We could hardly show our noses out of doors, and have lain huddled together in this snow den all day,—a doleful sort of imprisonment. It is with much difficulty that we have got any thing to eat, and we never should if I had not turned cook myself, and shown these inno