Читать книгу Beyond Adventure - Roy Chapman Andrews - Страница 22

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On July 16, 1905, the Roosevelt sailed north, with "Bob" Bartlett as captain. Peary took aboard fifty Eskimos and two hundred dogs; they made the ship a bedlam at all hours of the day and night. When the Roosevelt entered the pack ice surging down Smith Sound, Peary wrote: "In all my experience, I recall nothing more exciting than the thrill, the crash, the shock of hurling the Roosevelt, a fifteen-hundred-ton battering ram, at the ice to smash a way through, or the tension of the moments when, caught in the resistless grip of two great ice fields, I have stood on the bridge and seen the deck amidships slowly bulge upward, and the rigging slacken with the compression of the sides . . .

"Again, I can see Bartlett up in the crow's nest, at the head of the swaying mast, jumping up and down like a madman, swearing, shouting to the ship, exhorting it like a coach with his man in the ring."

The battle of the ship against the ice, as she forced her way through Kennedy and Robeson Channels, is an epic of polar history. She did not escape undamaged. Once, a sudden swirl of the current smashed her against the ice foot and ground her, bumping hard, along its face. In a few minutes the back of the rudder had been twisted and the steel tiller rods snapped. But she got away before the ice caught her, and lay up at Cape Brevoort for five days while the damage was repaired. Her supreme test came in crossing to the west side of Robeson Channel, not far from the entrance to the Arctic Ocean. Peary was a writer of great ability, and I cannot resist quoting another passage from his description of the ship which he had conceived and built. He says: "The Roosevelt fought like a gladiator, turning, twisting, straining with all her force, smashing her full weight against the heavy floes whenever we could get room for a rush, and rearing upon them like a steeple-chaser taking a fence. Ah, the thrill and tension of it, the lust of battle, which crowded days of ordinary life into one.

"The forward rush, the gathering speed and momentum, the crash, the upward heave, the grating snarl of the ice as the steel-shod stem split it as a mason's hammer splits granite, or trod it under, or sent it right and left in whirling fragments, followed by the violent roll, the backward rebound, and then the gathering for another rush, were glorious . . ."

"At such times everyone on deck hung with breathless interest on our movements, and as Bartlett and I clung in the rigging I heard him whisper through clenched teeth . . .'Give it to 'em, Teddy! Give it to 'em!'"

At the end, when they had crossed to the Grinnell Land coast, and were resting in a pool of open water in Wrangel Bay, Peary wrote: ". . . the battle has been won by sheer brute insistence and I do not believe there is another ship afloat that would have survived the ordeal.

"Bartlett and I went to our rooms, worn with the long tension, and I fell asleep instantly."