By the first of October, a week since their floe had fractured free and begun to drift on its own, he noted that the crashing, rupturing floes were encroaching all around the ship, the “seething masses of ice battling for supremacy” creating so much noise in its shearing that it drowned out the sound of the wailing winds. McKinlay found the noise at times deafening, at times wondrously musical, describing “thunderous rumbles … coming from all directions; rending, crashing, tearing noises; grating, screeching; toning down to drumming, booming, murmuring, gurgling, twanging—all the sounds of a
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