What a picture. I’m an icebreaker sailor, and it amazes me anyone attempted any arctic/antarctic passages in wooden ships.
I’ve personally experienced what a 20 knot onshore breeze and a multiyear iceflow can do to a ship. We’d break ice backing and ramming all morning (with the daylight hours waning every day) and pass Dead Horse to our left. We’d secure from ice ops, wake up and Dead Horse is five degrees off our port bow.
We did that for a week straight before deciding we should take our chances and go clockwise around North America through the NW Passage.
I think it was believed at the time that wooden hulls (suitably reinforced) were more resilient than steel to pressure from sea ice - they had a certain amount of 'give', whereas with steel the rivets simply popped (or did with the riveting technology of the time). Also you could (up to a point) repair a wooden hull. Most of the polar explorers at the time seem to have preferred wooden hulls, although they could have had steel if they wanted.