DRIVEN BY THE STORM 
41 
occurred here and there and had protruding edges, 
submerged and hidden, like the long, underwater 
arm that ripped the side out of the Titanic . Every 
moment the Karluk was in danger of being tossed 
up on one of these heavy floes and left stranded, 
to break up like a ship wrecked on a beach, or of 
being flung against the ice bodily like a ship 
thrown by wind and waves against a cliff. At any 
moment, too, the ice-floe might smash up and re¬ 
lease her to the peril of being crushed by the im¬ 
pact of the floating fragments. We all slept with 
our clothes on—when we slept at all—and kept the 
boats loaded with supplies, ready to be lowered at 
an instant’s notice. 
The drift of the Karluk was a much worse ex¬ 
perience than the voyage of the Roosevelt through 
Kennedy Channel from Kane Basin into the Arctic 
Ocean. The waters traversed by the Roosevelt 
were, of course, narrower than Beaufort Sea and 
they were filled with floating icebergs and floe-ice, 
but there we had continuous daylight and could 
see what we were doing and, also, knew definitely 
where we were headed, whereas in the Karluk we 
might drift in the ice even to destruction, unable to 
do anything to save the ship. The Roosevelt , to be 
sure, as I have said, was built for pushing through 
the broken ice but I very much doubt whether, 
even she, once frozen in like the Karluk s would 
