CLOSE QUARTERS WITH ICE 101 



"Chief, you've got to keep her moving until I 

 give you word, no matter what happens." 



Sometimes the ship would get stuck between the 

 corners of two floes which were slowly coming together. 

 At such a time a minute is an eternity. I would call 

 down the tube to Wardwell, "You've got to jump her 

 now, the length of fifty yards," or whatever it might 

 be. And I could feel the ship shaking under me as 

 she seemed to take the flying leap, under the impulse 

 of live steam poured directly from the boilers into the 

 fifty-two-inch low-pressure cylinder. 



The engines of the Roosevelt have what is called 

 a by-pass, by which the live steam can be turned into 

 the big cylinder, more than doubling the power of 

 the engines for a few minutes. This simple bit of 

 mechanism has saved us from being crushed flat by 

 the ice on more than one occasion. 



The destruction of a ship between two ice floes is 

 not sudden, like her destruction by a submarine mine, 

 for instance. It is a slow and gradually increasing 

 pressure from both sides, sometimes till the ice meets 

 in the vitals of the ship. A vessel might stay thus, 

 suspended between two floes, for twenty -four hours 

 — or until the movement of the tides relaxed the pres- 

 sure, when she would sink. The ice might open at 

 first just sufficiently to let the hull go down, and the 

 ends of the yards might catch on the ice and break, 

 with the weight of the water-filled hull, as was the case 

 with the ill-fated Jeannette. One ship, in the Gulf 

 of St. Lawrence, was caught in the ice and dragged 

 over the rocks like a nutmeg over a nutmeg grater. 

 The bottom was sliced off as one would slice a cucumber 



