The Open Polar Sea: A narrative of a voyage of discovery towards the North pole, in the schooner "United States"Hayes, I. I. (Isaac Israel)
History
The Open Polar Sea: A narrative of a voyage of discovery towards the North pole, in the schooner "United States"
Hayes, I. I. (Isaac Israel)
Arctic regions; United States (Schooner)
A fine day's run. We had some smooth ice, and got on briskly. Jensen's
snow-blindness has disappeared, and our route having led us over
old floes, his leg has not hurt him much and has improved. He is
now digging a pit for our night shelter, and sings a Danish song as
cheerily as the grave-digger in Hamlet. Knorr and McDonald are chopping
up the cakes of desiccated beef for the dogs; and the wolfish brutes
fill the air with the most hideous cries. The spectral pack of the wild
Hartz huntsman never split the ear of belated traveler with more awful
sounds than those which come from the throats of my wild beasts at
this present moment. The wretches would eat us up if we gave them the
least chance. Knorr stumbled among the pack yesterday, while feeding
them, and, had not McDonald pounced upon them on the instant, I believe
they would have made a meal of him before he could rise.
[Sidenote: THE "DELECTABLE MOUNTAINS."]
The hour is exactly midnight, and, for the first time since starting,
I write in the open air. The temperature is only one degree below
zero, and a more beautiful sunshine never was beheld. This vast sea
of whiteness, this great wilderness of glittering peaks, possesses a
stern, quiet sublimity that is wonderfully imposing. The mountains
before us, unlike those of the Greenland coast, stand up in
multiplied lines of heaven-piercing cones, looking like giant stacks
of cannon-balls, sprinkled with snow. The midnight sun streams over
them from the north, and softens their outlines through tinted vapors
which float from the eastward. Oh! that I was across the barrier that
separates me from that land of my desires! Those mountains are my
"delectable mountains,"--the fleecy clouds which rest upon them are the
flocks of the "city" of my ambitious hopes--the mystic sea which I am
seeking through these days of weariness and toil.
I have had some fine sights and excellent solar bearings from a
position determined by solar altitude, and am now firmly convinced that
a Sound opens westward from Smith Sound, overlooked by me in 1854; and
that the whole coast of Grinnell Land was placed by me too far south.
May 5th.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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