44 THE FRIENDLY ARCTIC 



moving at a speed no greater than six miles an hour, would ordi- 

 narily be accompanied by something of a shock. This was not so 

 in our case. The bottom here is soft mud, for this is the mouth 

 of the Colville River and the depth may not vary as one steams 

 directly towards land more than a foot or two to the mile. As we 

 were not steaming directly towards land (except for the little delta 

 island that lay ahead), the depth may have been changing even 

 less than a foot per mile. In this way the keel had commenced 

 cutting the mud so gradually and gently that the ship was brought 

 to a full stop without anybody but Murray realizing it. He 

 noticed it because he was near the stern dredging for marine life 

 and his dredge rope had slackened. He had then gone to the 

 stern and had seen that the propeller was churning up mud and that 

 the ship had stopped. 



We have just said that there is practically no tide in this region. 

 Normal tide varies during the twenty-four hours only by some six 

 or eight inches. But there is at certain times what we call a 

 "storm tide." It seems that when a strong southwest or west wind 

 begins to blow in the region of Bering Straits, it produces (through 

 barometric variation of pressure, perhaps) a wave that moves east- 

 ward and reaches the Colville delta- or Herschel Island, possibly 

 eight to twelve hours ahead of the storm itself. This rise of water 

 that presages a strong sou'wester may sometimes amount to as 

 much as five feet, and even in a moderate southwest wind the rise 

 may be a foot or two. There is a corresponding fall with or before 

 a northeast wind, these two being the directions of the main winds 

 in this locality. Now it happened, luckily for us, that a storm 

 tide was coming in from the southwest, so that after an hour or 

 two aground the water rose enough to float us. As we made our 

 way to seaward, this time casting the lead every few minutes and 

 steaming carefully, we had to go a mile or more before we got 

 an extra foot of water under our keel. 



From the Colville delta eastward the ice kept getting thicker. 

 There was a light breeze from the northwest bringing it in slowly 

 from abroad. Finally, it became impenetrable. We might now 

 have turned the ship to seaward, on the theory commonly held in 

 the north Atlantic that the farther away from land you are, the 

 better the chance of finding the ice scattered and conditions permit- 

 ting navigation. 



There was also the Alaska or Beaufort Sea theory. For years 

 I had been listening to the tales of local captains, telling that when 

 they first navigated these waters after serving their apprenticeship 



