minutes later we were lying on the surface of the Arctic Ocean, just under two hundred and fifty miles from the Pole.
The rafted, twisted ice-pack reared up into contorted ridges almost fifty feet in height, towering twenty feet above the top of the sail, so close you could almost reach out and touch the nearest ridge. Three or four of those broken and fantastically hummocked icehills we could see stretching off to the west and then the light of the floodlamp failed and we could see no more. Beyond that there was only blackness.
To the east we could see nothing at all. To have stared out to the east with opened eyes would have been to be blinded for life in a very few seconds: even goggles became clouded and scarred after the briefest exposure. Close in to the
Dolphin’s
side you could, with bent head and hooded eyes, catch, for a fleeting part of a second, a glimpse of black water, already freezing over: but it was more imagined than seen.
The wind, shrieking and wailing across the bridge and through raised antennae, showed at consistently over 60 m.p.h. on the bridge anemometer. The ice-storm was no longer the gusting, swirling fog of that morning but a driving wall of stiletto-tipped spears, near-lethal in its ferocity, high speed ice-spicule lances that would have skewered their way through the thickest cardboard or shattered in a second a glass held in your hand. Over and above the ululating threnody of the wind we could hear an almost constant grinding, crashing and deep-throated booming as millions of tons of racked and tortured ice, under the influence of the gale and some mighty pressure centre, heaven knew how many hundreds of miles away, reared and twisted and tore and cracked, one moment forming another rafted ridge as a layer of ice, perhaps ten feet thick, screeched and roared and clambered on to the shoulders of another and then another, the next rending apart in indescribably violent cacophony to open up a new lead, black wind-torn water that started to skim over with ice almost as soon as it was formed.
‘Are we both mad? Let’s get below.’ Swanson cupped his hands to my ear and had to shout, but even so I could hardly hear him above that hellish bedlam of sound.
We clambered down into the comparatively sudden stillness of the control room. Swanson untied his parka hood and pulled off scarf and goggles that had completely masked his face. He looked at me and shook his head wonderingly.
‘And some people talk about the white silence of the Arctic. My God, a boilermaker’s shop is like a library reading-room compared to that lot.’ He shook his head again. ‘We stuck our noses out a few times above the ice-pack last year, but we never saw anything like this. Or heard it. Wintertime, too. Cold, sure, damned cold, and windy, but never so bad that we couldn’t take a brief stroll on the ice, and I used to wonder about those stories of explorers being stuck in their tents for days on end, unable to move. But I know now why Captain Scott died.’
‘It is pretty nasty,’ I admitted. ‘How safe are we here, Commander?’
‘That’s anybody’s guess,’ Swanson shrugged. ‘The wind’s got us jammed hard against the west wall of this polynya and there’s maybe fifty yards of open water to starboard. For the moment we’re safe. But you can hear and see that pack is on the move, and not slowly either. The lead we’re in was torn open less than an hour ago. How long? Depends on the configuration of the ice, but those polynyas can close up damned quickly at times, and while the hull of the
Dolphin
can take a fair old pressure, it can’t take a million tons of ice leaning against it. Maybe we can stay here forhours, maybe only for minutes. Whichever it is, as soon as that east wall comes within ten feet of the starboard side we’re dropping down out of it. You know what happens when a ship gets caught in the ice.’
‘I know. They get squeezed flat, are carried round the top of the world for a
The rafted, twisted ice-pack reared up into contorted ridges almost fifty feet in height, towering twenty feet above the top of the sail, so close you could almost reach out and touch the nearest ridge. Three or four of those broken and fantastically hummocked icehills we could see stretching off to the west and then the light of the floodlamp failed and we could see no more. Beyond that there was only blackness.
To the east we could see nothing at all. To have stared out to the east with opened eyes would have been to be blinded for life in a very few seconds: even goggles became clouded and scarred after the briefest exposure. Close in to the
Dolphin’s
side you could, with bent head and hooded eyes, catch, for a fleeting part of a second, a glimpse of black water, already freezing over: but it was more imagined than seen.
The wind, shrieking and wailing across the bridge and through raised antennae, showed at consistently over 60 m.p.h. on the bridge anemometer. The ice-storm was no longer the gusting, swirling fog of that morning but a driving wall of stiletto-tipped spears, near-lethal in its ferocity, high speed ice-spicule lances that would have skewered their way through the thickest cardboard or shattered in a second a glass held in your hand. Over and above the ululating threnody of the wind we could hear an almost constant grinding, crashing and deep-throated booming as millions of tons of racked and tortured ice, under the influence of the gale and some mighty pressure centre, heaven knew how many hundreds of miles away, reared and twisted and tore and cracked, one moment forming another rafted ridge as a layer of ice, perhaps ten feet thick, screeched and roared and clambered on to the shoulders of another and then another, the next rending apart in indescribably violent cacophony to open up a new lead, black wind-torn water that started to skim over with ice almost as soon as it was formed.
‘Are we both mad? Let’s get below.’ Swanson cupped his hands to my ear and had to shout, but even so I could hardly hear him above that hellish bedlam of sound.
We clambered down into the comparatively sudden stillness of the control room. Swanson untied his parka hood and pulled off scarf and goggles that had completely masked his face. He looked at me and shook his head wonderingly.
‘And some people talk about the white silence of the Arctic. My God, a boilermaker’s shop is like a library reading-room compared to that lot.’ He shook his head again. ‘We stuck our noses out a few times above the ice-pack last year, but we never saw anything like this. Or heard it. Wintertime, too. Cold, sure, damned cold, and windy, but never so bad that we couldn’t take a brief stroll on the ice, and I used to wonder about those stories of explorers being stuck in their tents for days on end, unable to move. But I know now why Captain Scott died.’
‘It is pretty nasty,’ I admitted. ‘How safe are we here, Commander?’
‘That’s anybody’s guess,’ Swanson shrugged. ‘The wind’s got us jammed hard against the west wall of this polynya and there’s maybe fifty yards of open water to starboard. For the moment we’re safe. But you can hear and see that pack is on the move, and not slowly either. The lead we’re in was torn open less than an hour ago. How long? Depends on the configuration of the ice, but those polynyas can close up damned quickly at times, and while the hull of the
Dolphin
can take a fair old pressure, it can’t take a million tons of ice leaning against it. Maybe we can stay here forhours, maybe only for minutes. Whichever it is, as soon as that east wall comes within ten feet of the starboard side we’re dropping down out of it. You know what happens when a ship gets caught in the ice.’
‘I know. They get squeezed flat, are carried round the top of the world for a
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