Volume CXXXIII, Number 5 October 10, 2003 f

The Nautilus moves on to Greenland
KATHRYN OSTROFSKY
COLUMNIST

The Fourth of July brought yet more exquisite and colorful wonders. The men aboard the Nautilus celebrated the nation's 84th birthday with a rousing oration, a patriotic poem, and the sweet music of a single flute. The only tradition that any one of them might have missed from this ocean-bound celebration was the excitement of ending the day with a show of fireworks.

A 1964 Portland Press Herald article claims (although I haven't yet found it corroborated) that Mother Nature compensated for the celebration's lack of pyrotechnics by putting on its own light and color show. That night, the men aboard the Nautilus saw a spectacular display of Aurora borealis, the Northern Lights, glowing in the sky and shimmering off the cool black water.

Other amusements occasionally brightened the day to day lives of the men. At Red Rocks, Labrador, for example, the group had a very faithful and well meaning, yet scientifically ignorant, guide by the name of Soggy-Cleech. The writer of the Williams Quarterly article mentions that Soggy-Cleech at one point "made tea of my botanical specimens to my horror and his disgust."

The Straight of Belle Isle, situated between the northern tip of Newfoundland and the eastern tip of Labrador, connects the Gulf of St. Lawrence with the Atlantic Ocean. Nearing the end of the Gulf and the start of the straight, the Nautilus moored in the harbor of Bonne-Espérance, Good Hope, on July 7, 1860. Here, off the Labrador coast, the Nautilus left ashore a scientific research party. The ship dropped off seven men, including Alpheus Packard, at a Mission House overlooking a bay full of fishing vessels working hard for the summer's catch.

Waiting for a greeting from Mr. Carpenter, who ran the Mission House, the men described the clouds of insects in Labrador. The mosquitoes "commenced their assault," and "joined with myriads of black flies, more nimble and quite bloodthirsty, the battle against them becomes hopeless. After spending a relaxing Sabbath with Mr. Carpenter, the men went back to the Nautilus, giving direct orders to the Labrador Party not to come aboard the ship lest it be more difficult for them to grow accustomed to their new home.

Meanwhile, the Nautilus prepared to take the remainder of its crew above the Arctic Circle, to the coast of Greenland. The Williams Quarterly articl says, "on Tuesday morning the anchor was weighed and with a stiff breeze we passed out between the islands." The boys busied themselves with writing a little newspaper titled "The Nautilus," which "like the Icelandic papers, appeared just as often as we had items to fill it; a hint worthy of notice to all journalists who are compelled to bring out their papers at stated times whether they have news or not."

The crew eagerly awaited July 18, the morning of a "great eclipse," and hoped that favorable winds would place them past the line of total obscuration. Although the winds obeyed, the clouds did not and "the morning of the eclipse brought with it one of the severest storms we encountered during the whole voyage."

Later that day, as the crew on the little schooner neared the shore of the great island and tried to land off Julians-haab, they encountered trouble. A massive ice-pack stood in their way, "a dense wall" that, as Captain Ranlett remarked, looked "as though it might stretch to the North pole." The captain steered the Nautilus to Fiskernaes, but to no avail.

Even though they were still about 100 miles from shore, the ice would not let them get any closer to Greenland's southern harbors. After sailing as close to the edge of the ice pack as safety would permit, Captain Ranlett "found himself suddenly embayed in the ice which was closing down upon him so rapidly that it required all his skill to work the vessel clear." He steered the ship around the iceberg through gale force winds, "the ice in its wild dashings" providing a grand site for all those not too sea-sick to come to the deck.

The Williams Quarterly writer recounts the storm: "Scarcely had we cleared the ice," he writes, "when the gale suddenly increased, and at the time of the eclipse it was in its fury. If we did not see the eclipse we shall not be in danger of forgetting the eighteenth of July, 1860."

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