The fateful disaster of October 15, 1872, which led to the Tyson floe-drift occurred in the midst of a dark winter night when a snow-filled hurricane wind drove huge icebergs through the solid and seemingly impenetrable ice-field in which the _Polaris_ was fast beset. As if by magic the solemn, quiet calm of the polar night was broken by a series of tornado-like gusts, and soon the responsive ice-field quivered as though upcast by a marine earthquake. The howlings of the wind were broken by horrible groanings from the moving polar pack, while now and then arose deafening sounds, as of a cannonade, from the explosions of the ice-surface. It takes much to move to fear men long in arctic service, but the quiet ship life was stirred into startled action when heavy floes near the ship began to split into countless fragments. One and all knew that the long-dreaded peril was upon them--the disruption of the polar pack. For weeks they had watched with pleasure the changing lights and reflected tints from their azure-colored neighbors--the tall, white sentinels of the arctic seas. After pleasure the pain, and now with terror they saw the pale blue icebergs of enormous size--wind-driven and slow-moving--plough their way serenely through the main pack of flat-topped paleocrystic floes scores of feet in thickness. Under these awful pressures the huge floes, as they met, crumbling at the edges, threw up vast masses of broken ice which in long pressure-ridges acted as buffers. Caught in this maelstrom of whirling, upturning ice the _Polaris_ was bodily lifted many feet, quite out of the water, so that she careened on her beam ends. In this crisis, amid intense excitement, some one cried out that the ship's sides were broken in and that she was making water freely. At this Buddington shouted: "Work for your lives, boys! Throw everything overboard"--meaning the emergency packages of stores and provisions which for weeks had been kept ready on deck in view of possible and sudden shipwreck. Stores, clothing, records, boats, food, and other articles were frantically cast upon the main floe to which the ship was secured by ice-anchors. Fearing that the _Polaris_ would soon sink and carry down in her final plunge everything near her, Captain Tyson busied himself in removing and piling together, at a safe distance, the scattered stores. While thus engaged the main pack loosened up near the _Polaris_. The ice pressures slowly relaxed, the pressure-ridges dropped apart, and the ship, slipping down into the sea, dragged her ice-anchors, broke her hawser, and was driven out of sight--disappearing almost in the twinkling of an eye, as it seemed to the dazed men yet on the floe.