Chapter 20 Chapter 20 Blanche

(front missing) He and Rhett were able to complete the task of steering the two ships south and west, more than two hundred and fifty miles from where they first wintered (near Beech and Devon Islands), and Blanche was pleased. quite proud.But on the other hand, Thomas Blange cursed himself as a fool and a villain, because with his help, the two ships and the one hundred and twenty-six souls on board had come to this ghost place. The two ships could have retreated from Devon Island, out of Lancaster Sound, and down Baffin Bay, even if they had to wait two or three cold summers before escaping the ice.Beach Island's cove protected two ships from a whole expanse of sea ice.The ice in Lancaster Sound will melt sooner or later.Thomas Blange knew the ice well, and it behaved exactly as polar ice behaved: dangerous, deadly, life-threatening with a wrong step or hesitation, but predictable.

But the ice is different here, Blanche thought.He stamped his feet in the dark stern to keep his feet from freezing, watching the lantern lights shine on port and starboard, and saw Barry and Humph walking with shotguns.The ice here was different from those in his experience. Fifteen months ago, long before the ship was frozen here, he and Rhett had warned Sir John and the two captains.Go for it, Blanche suggests.He agreed with Crozier that they needed to turn around and slip away while there were still some unfrozen waterways, and use their maximum steam power to sail to the unfrozen waters closest to the Busia Peninsula that long ago in September.The waters were close to a known coast, at least to former Royal Explorers and whaling veterans like Blanji, the eastern coast of Busia.It was almost certain that the water would have remained liquid there for a week, maybe two, of that missed September.

Even if they were blocked by ice mounds and old ice packs (Red called them spiral ice packs), there was no way to use steam power to sail north along the coast again, at least in what Ross called "King William Land". Under protection, they will be countless times safer than they are now.Now they knew that the landmass was low, frozen, wind-swept, and often struck by lightning, but enough to shelter both ships from the arctic storm that the demons sent to keep blowing from the northwest , blizzard and severe cold, and there is no need to face the continuous attack of sea ice. Blanche had never seen ice like this.One advantage of stacking ice is that it will drift, even if your ship freezes like a Mauser bullet into an iceberg.The two ships appear to be frozen, but are actually moving.In 1837, while Blanche was still working as an ice and snow expert on the American whaling ship Pleuriba, winter approached with a roar on August 27, surprising everyone, including the experienced The American One-Eyed Captain, who was then frozen in Baffin Bay, a few hundred miles north of Disco Bay.

The next Arctic summer was abysmal, almost as cold as this (1847) summer, with none of the melting ice, warming of the air, or return of birds and wildlife that a summer should have had.Fortunately the whaler Pleuriba was on a predictable patch of ice, and she drifted southward for more than seven hundred miles.By late summer they had reached the edge of the ice before sailing south through seas of floating sponge ice, narrow channels, and self-opening cracks in the ice that the Russians call polynyas.At last the whaler reached the unfrozen waters and sailed southeast to the harbor of Greenland for the ship to be refitted.

But Blanche knew that in this God-forsaken white hell, things couldn't be compared.The ice here, as he had described it to the captains a year and three months ago, was more like an endless river of ice pushed from the North Pole.Moreover, there is a large piece of Canadian polar land that has not been marked on the map to the south of them, the King William landmass to the southwest, and the inaccessible Busia Peninsula to the east and northeast, so the ice here cannot really drift. Rhodes, Fitzgerald, Rhett, and Blanky have repeatedly performed the sextant positioning method of stars and sun, and they just tirelessly revolve around a circle with a circumference of fifteen miles, just like Two flies nailed to a metal music disc - people in the conference room below have long since given up listening to the music on the turntable - can't go anywhere, always return to the same place again and again .

This vast expanse of ice is more like the drift ice near the coast that Blanji experienced, except that the ice that surrounds the ship at sea here is twenty to twenty-five feet thick, unlike ordinary drift ice. Only three feet thick.The ice here was so thick that the two captains could not keep clear the fire escapes that every ship trapped in the ice sea should keep clear all winter. The ice here doesn't even allow them to bury the dead. Suspecting that he has become a tool of evil, or just a tool of stupidity, Thomas Blanji used his professional skills as an ice and snow expert for more than 30 years to make one hundred and twenty-six people make an impossible trip. After traveling more than two hundred and fifty miles on the ice, I came to a place where I could only sit and wait.

Suddenly there was a scream, followed by the sound of a shotgun firing.Another scream.