FROM 87° 6′ TO THE GREENLAND COAST
From the time we left Storm Camp on the upward march the wind had blown
with greater or less force, but without interruption, from a little
south of true west. Now as we retraced our steps it blew quartering in
our faces, and accompanied by a fine drift of snow, cut like red-hot
needles. We had already made a good day’s march. Now we had to duplicate
it without rest or food. When at last we stumbled into camp I was nearly
blind from the effects of the cutting snow and wind, and completely done
up with the long continued exertion. The interest and excitement of the
advance were gone, the reaction had come, and my feet dragged like lead.
As a matter of fact the return journey, after the eagerness and
excitement of pushing ahead is over, is always the hardest part of the
work. Of the fourteen cracks and narrow leads passed in this last forced
march, all but three had changed pronouncedly in the few hours elapsing
between our outward and return march, and two or three of them had moved
to such an extent that we had some difficulty in picking up our trail on
the southern side of them. Once inside the igloo and the oil stove
started to make our tea, I rolled on the sleeping platform in agony,
with my burning eyes, and let Ahngmalokto make the tea. For an hour or
more I feared that the cutting wind and snow, together with the strain
upon my eyes in taking the observations, had given me an acute attack of
snow-blindness, but I repeatedly buried my eyes in the freezing snow
until the eyelids were numb, and after a time experienced sufficient
relief, so that my utter weariness sent me to dreamless sleep. All
regrets and disappointment had to yield temporarily to the imperious
demand of the overworked body.
At this camp we took a full sleep, the last for several days, then
hurried on at top speed. Deep in my heart I still had a lingering hope,
fathered of course by the wish, that Marvin might have crossed the big
lead before the storm came on, might have found Storm Camp, and left
provisions there for us in accordance with my instructions left at the
Storm Camp igloos. I was very anxious, therefore, to keep our outward
trail, as far as Storm Camp, and now that the number of my dogs had been
reduced, and some of my sledges discarded, I had spare men, and
selecting two of the most experienced trailers among my Eskimos, I
brought them alongside of me a few hundred yards in advance of the
sledges. Thus we travelled, the three of us, with our eyes fixed upon
the ice ahead, noting each faintest indication of the trail. Whenever
the trail was faulted by the movement of the ice, we spread out in
skirmish line and veered to the right, to the southwest, until we found
it again. When we came to a crack or lead too wide to jump the sledges
across, one of my Eskimos started to the right at once on the run, the
other to the left, and the one first finding a practicable crossing
signalled to the sledges in the rear, in the usual Eskimo way, with
waving arm, and the sledges made directly for him, we crossed the lead,
picked up the trail on the southern side and went on. In this way the
sledges lost no time, and we were able to keep as rapid a pace on the
return as on the outward march, in spite of the movement of the ice and
the necessity of keeping the trail. The three of us frequently ran for
considerable distances, in order to keep a sufficient space between us
and the sledges to enable us to reconnoitre the leads before the sledges
came up. At the end of every march we stumbled into our old igloos
utterly exhausted, with eyes aflame from the wind and driving snow, but
thanking God that we did not have to put ourselves to the additional
effort of building igloos.
As in our outward so in our return journey, scarcely for an hour did the
wind cease its infernal rush and hiss and assault upon our faces. The
last march into Storm Camp, which we reached God only knows how, was in
the teeth of another blinding western blizzard with driving snow,
through which none but an Eskimo, and a very good one at that, could
have kept the trail for five minutes. Of course I found no provisions
here. Our igloos were lined with frost crystals and nearly filled with
drifting snow, but they were havens of refuge from the howling elements
outside, which were more than appreciated. Ootah was the happiest man in
the party. Just before reaching the igloos he had spied a small fragment
of pemmican, a crumb from somebody’s lunch dropped off the last sledge
when we started north from Storm Camp, and he had pounced upon it and
swallowed it just as if he were an Eskimo dog. At Storm Camp we were
held twenty-four hours by the continuance of the gale, the ice groaning
and grinding in the familiar way, then resumed our march with the number
of my dogs still further reduced. From here I set a “bee-line” course
for the nearest part of the Greenland coast. I alone of the party knew
how far we had drifted and that our salvation now lay in the direction
of the Greenland coast and its musk-oxen. My Eskimos thought we were
coming down on the Grant Land coast which we had left; in fact, by some
strange perversion of ideas, they were all fixed in their belief that we
had been drifting westward. The only reason for this was that the ice on
the northern side of the “big lead” had (so they said) before I joined
them at the lead, been drifting pronouncedly westward.
When we reached the region where my two Eskimos had been stopped in
their attempt to bring up the cache from the “big lead,” I was not
surprised at the expressions of amazement and almost horror with which
they had returned to me. There was no open water now, but the chaos of
shattered and upheaved ice which stretched away to the southward was
indescribable. Through this our progress was naturally slow, but one
grim and exhausting march, during which the pickaxes were constantly in
use, carried us through.
In the third march from Storm Camp we crossed the scar of the “big
lead.” By scar I mean where the edges of the “big lead” had been driven
together and had frozen fast. There was no mistaking it, and I foolishly
allowed myself to be encouraged by the thought that this obstacle was at
last behind us and no longer to be feared. I should have known better
than to feel this way, for I certainly had sufficient Arctic experience
to know that one should never feel encouraged at anything nor ever
expect anything in these regions except the worst. On the second march
south of the scar we came upon a region of huge pressure ridges running
in every direction. It was an ominous sign, and I was not surprised a
few hours later when an Eskimo whom I had sent in advance to reconnoitre
a trail for the sledges, signalled to me from the summit of a pinnacle
“open water.” When I climbed to his side there was our friend the “big
lead,” a broad band of black water, perhaps half a mile in width, lying
across our path and reaching east and west farther than I could see. The
lead here was thirty to forty miles farther south than where we had
crossed it on the upward journey, but it was the same lead.
I turned east keeping an Eskimo scouting close to the lead in search of
a practicable crossing while the sledges advanced parallel to the lead
but at some distance from it, where the going was a little better.
Once he raised our hopes by signalling that he had found it: but when
the sledges came up the place was impracticable. The next day we
continued eastward and found a mixture of half-congealed rubble ice,
barely sufficient to support us, spanning the lead. The sledges were
hurried on to this and we were within a few yards of firm ice on the
south side, when our bridge failed us, and the ice under us began to go
apart. It was a rapid and uncertain but finally successful scramble to
get back. We camped on a piece of big floe bounded on one side by the
steadily widening lead, and on the other three by rafters of Alpine
character. Here we remained, drifting steadily eastward, watching the
lead slowly widen, as it had done on the upward march.
On the upward march, when we were delayed at the “big lead,” in the
brilliant, bitter, March days, and the ice on the distant northern side
appeared to my eager eyes like the promised land, I had given it the
name “The Hudson.” Now as we lay in this dismal camp, watching the
distant southern ice beyond which lay the world, all that was near and
dear, and perhaps life itself, while on our side was only the
wide-stretching ice and possibly a lingering death, there was but one
appropriate name for its black waters—“the Styx.”
Each day the number of my dogs dwindled and sledges were broken up to
cook those of the animals that we ate ourselves. But here let me say
that personally I have no objection whatever to dog, if only there is
enough of it. Serious Arctic work quickly brings a man to consider
quantity only in connection with the food question. One day leads formed
entirely around the ice on which we were, making it an island of two or
three miles’ diameter.
Later, two Eskimo scouts whom I had sent east to reconnoitre the lead
came hurrying back breathless, with the report that a few miles from
camp there was a film of young ice extending clear across the lead—now
something over two miles wide—which they thought might support us on
snowshoes. No time was lost in hurrying to the place when it was evident
to us all that now was our chance or never, and I gave the word to put
on snowshoes and make the attempt. I tied mine on more carefully than I
had ever done before. I think every other man did the same, for we felt
that a slip or stumble would be fatal. We had already tested the ice and
knew it would not support us an instant without snowshoes.
When we started it was with Panikpah, lightest of us all and most
experienced, in the lead, the few remaining dogs attached to the long
broad-runner sledge—the “Morris K. Jesup”—following him, and the rest of
the party abreast in widely extended skirmish line, fifty to sixty feet
between each two men, some distance behind the sledge. We crossed in
silence, each man busy with his thoughts and intent upon his snowshoes.
Frankly I do not care for more similar experiences. Once started, we
could not stop, we could not lift our snowshoes. It was a matter of
constantly and smoothly gliding one past the other with utmost care and
evenness of pressure, and from every man as he slid a snowshoe forward,
undulations went out in every direction through the thin film incrusting
the black water, The sledge was preceded and followed by a broad swell.
It was the first and only time in all my Arctic work that I felt
doubtful as to the outcome, but when near the middle of the lead the toe
of my rear kamik as I slid forward from it broke through twice in
succession, I thought to myself “this is the finish,” and when a little
later there was a cry from someone in the line, the words sprang from me
of themselves: “God help him, which one is it?” but I dared not take my
eyes from the steady, even gliding of my snowshoes, and the fascination
of the glassy swell at the toes of them.
When we stepped upon the firm ice on the southern side of the lead, the
sighs of relief from the two men nearest me in the line on either side
were distinctly audible. I was more than glad myself. The cry I had
heard had been from one of my men whose toe, like mine, had broken
through the ice.
To give an illustration of the temperament of my Eskimos, the
temperament which fits them so especially for Arctic work, the Chief
Engineer of the _Roosevelt_ was rather a heavy man, weighing something
over 235 pounds; and as we stooped untying our snowshoes, one of my men,
Ahngmalokto, turned sidewise to me and said, “Pearyaksoah, if the Chief
had been with us, he would be down there now (indicating the depths
below us), wouldn’t he?” And Ahngmalokto was entirely right.
When we stood up from unfastening our snowshoes, and looked back for a
moment before turning our faces southward, a narrow black ribbon cut the
frail bridge on which we had crossed, in two. The lead was widening
again and we had just made it.
The ice on the southern side of the lead was an awful mess, and we
climbed to the top of the highest upheaved mass of it to see if we could
make out any practicable route through. To and beyond the horizon
extended such a hell of shattered ice as I had never seen before and
hope never to see again, a conglomeration of fragments from the size of
paving stones to literally and without exaggeration the dome of the
Capitol, all rounded by the terrific grinding they had received between
the jaws of the “big lead” when its edges were together and shearing
past each other. It did not seem as if anything not possessing wings
could negotiate it, and I turned to my men to say a few encouraging
words, but caught a glint in their eyes and a setting of the jaws, such
as I had noticed before when they and I had been mixed up with a roaring
herd of infuriated bull walrus or facing a wounded polar bear, and I
shut my mouth and said nothing, for I knew words were not necessary.
During this march and the next and part of the next, we stumbled
desperately southward through this frozen Hades, constantly falling and
receiving numerous uncomfortable bruises. My uncushioned stumps seemed
to catch it especially, and it is no exaggeration to say that at our
first camp my jaws were actually aching from the viciousness with which
I had repeatedly ground my teeth together during the march.
On the next march after we emerged from the southern edge of the zone of
shattered ice, we made out the distant snow-clad summits of the
Greenland mountains, and this improved the spirits of my men. One or two
of them had said while waiting north of the lead, that they could see
land clouds from one of the high pinnacles close by the lead, but I
could make out nothing, and the other Eskimos were not sure of it. There
could be no mistake in the matter now, and from here on the going
improved. There were very few leads and these narrow and finally
disappearing, there was no perceptible movement of the ice, and I
recognised that we were now under the shelter of Cape Morris Jesup, and
no longer in danger of drifting past it and out into the East Greenland
Sea.
In the next march after sighting the land, we came upon the trunk of a
tree embedded in a large floe. The part projecting from the ice was
about nine or ten feet long, and the diameter at the ice level some ten
or twelve inches. The wood was soft, apparently fir, and a small
specimen was taken to permit of possible identification later on.
The land seemed bewitched and appeared every night to move away from us
as far as we had advanced the day before. Slowly, however, its detail
sharpened, and I headed directly for the rolling bit of shore at Cape
Neumeyer, where I was positive we would find a few hare and hoped that
we might find musk-oxen round in Mascart Inlet.
Finally, we dragged ourselves on to the ice-foot at Cape Neumeyer and
inside of an hour had four hare, and very delicious they were, even
though unassisted by such frills as salt or fire.
Just before reaching the land we crossed a fresh sledge trail running
parallel with the land and heading east. For a moment I thought it might
be a party looking for us, but an inspection of the trail showed at once
that it meant trouble. There were three light dogs attached to a single
sledge followed by four men walking slowly and with irregular steps. I
thought it might be Marvin and his party, and as soon as we had had a
few hours’ sleep, I sent Ootah and Ahngodoblaho eastward on the trail to
find out just what it did mean. The next day they returned with Clark
and his three Eskimos. They, like us, had been driven eastward, had come
down upon the Greenland coast, and Clark’s Eskimos like mine, possessed
with the crazy idea that they had drifted westward and were coming down
“the back side of Grant Land,” as they expressed it, had insisted on
turning east and were going directly away from the ship. My two men had
found them a few miles east of our camp in what would have been their
last camp. They were exhausted, had lived for a few days upon their
spare skin boots, had with them three apologies for dogs which they were
about to kill, and a little later would have come the finish. With new
life given by the news that I was so near, they had summoned energy
enough to walk to our camp, but they came in skull-faced and wavering in
gait. Fortunately I could give them something to eat, as more hare had
been killed since the two men went out. I had also sent two men, with an
exhausted dog for rations, round into Mascart Inlet to look for
musk-oxen, and while awaiting their return, I climbed to the highest
point in the neighbourhood of the Cape, after sending out two other
Eskimos for hare, where I could examine the going as far as Britannia
and Beaumont Islands. I was very thankful to see that the edge of the
bay-ice was farther off than in 1900, and that the surface across the
bays was smooth and level. I knew that it was likely to be more or less
soft, but we had our snowshoes with us, and it is surprising what
distance men with a little dogged sand in them can cover, even though
half-starved and almost exhausted, when it is simply a matter of
throwing one’s weight forward a little and sliding one snowshoe past the
other, until the last minute of endurance is reached. My Mascart Inlet
men came back unsuccessful, but the two hare-hunters brought in six, and
this made things look somewhat brighter. As can readily be understood,
however, the addition of four starving men to my party of eight
half-famished ones in no way lightened my responsibilities. One thing
was in my favour. The sledge journey along this coast in 1900 had shown
me the places where the musk-oxen which must be our salvation would most
likely be found, and leaving Cape Neumeyer, I led the trail past the end
of Ellison Island, and thence through the channel between Britannia
Island and Nares Land, in order to examine the coast from Nares Land to
Cape May.