Notes from an Arctic diary

Johann Miertsching. “Notes from an Arctic diary” in Sunday at home: a family magazine for Sabbath reading. 31 Jan. - 18 Apr. 1861.

When the Investigator was abandoned, McClure collected his officers’ journals, and mislaid them, perhaps to avoid revelations of the hardship and near disaster suffered at Mercy Bay. Alexander Armstrong, the ship’s surgeon, managed to keep and publish his rather bitter account; and Johann Miertsching, a German missionary who was the Inuit translator, published his. It appeared in German and French, but only excerpts appeared in English, serialized in The Sunday at Home. A full English translation was not published until 1967.

December 6th [1851] As our stock of candles is very small, we therefore pass a great part of our time in darkness. Our principal occupations are walking and sleeping; reading and writing are out of the question, as we have hardly light enough for the most necessary duties. Wolves howl round the ship....

September 9th [1852] To-day the captain summoned the crew on deck, and told them he was now convinced that the ice would not break up this year; we must therefore pass another winter here. He charged them not to let their spirits sink.... He added that we had now for a year subsisted on less than our usual rations.... In order to make the slender store last till next summer, it would be necessary now to reduce the allowance a little more, but that would suffice for the period of total inactivity.... One could see many dismal faces, but there was nothing to be done but to yield to necessity.