UP TO CAPE YORK
On Sunday, July 19, we sent a boat ashore at Point Amour Light with
telegrams back home--the last. I wondered what my first despatch would
be the following year.
At Cape St. Charles we dropped anchor in front of the whaling station.
Two whales had been captured there the day before, and I immediately
bought one of them as food for the dogs. This meat was stowed on the
quarter-deck of the _Roosevelt_. There are several of these "whale
factories" on the Labrador coast. They send out a fast steel steamer,
with a harpoon gun at the bow. When a whale is sighted they give chase,
and when near enough discharge into the monster a harpoon with an
explosive bomb attached. The explosion kills him. Then he is lashed
alongside, towed into the station, hauled out on the timberways, and
there cut up, every part of the enormous carcass being utilized for some
commercial purpose.
We stopped again at Hawks Harbor, where the _Erik_, our auxiliary supply
steamer, was awaiting us with some twenty-five tons of whale meat on
board; and an hour or two later, a beautiful white yacht followed us in.
I recognized her as Harkness's _Wakiva_ of the New York Yacht Club.
Twice during the winter she had lain close to the _Roosevelt_ in New
York, at the East Twenty-fourth Street pier, coaling between her
voyages; and now, by a strange chance, the two vessels lay side by side
again in this little out-of-the-way harbor on the Labrador coast. No two
ships could be more unlike than these two: one white as snow, her
brasswork glittering in the sun, speedy, light as an arrow; the other
black, slow, heavy, almost as solid as a rock--each built for a special
purpose and adapted to that purpose.
Mr. Harkness and a party of friends, including several ladies, came on
board the _Roosevelt_, and the dainty dresses of our feminine guests
further accentuated the blackness, the strength, and the not over
cleanly condition of our ship.
We stopped once more at Turnavik Island, a fishing station belonging to
Captain Bartlett's father, and took on a consignment of Labrador skin
boots, for which we should have use in the North. Just before reaching
the Island we encountered a furious thunderstorm. It was the most
northerly thunderstorm which I remember having experienced.
I recall, however, that on our upward voyage in 1905 we ran into very
heavy thunderstorms with electrical displays quite as sharp as any
encountered in Gulf storms on voyages in southern waters, though the
storms of 1905 were met in the neighborhood of Cabot Strait, far south
of those of 1908.
Our voyage to Cape York was a peaceful one, lacking even the small
excitement of the same journey three years before, when, not far from
Cape St. George, all hands were startled by an alarm of fire which
started in one of the main deck beams from the uptake of the boilers.
Nor were we so plagued with fog in the early stages of our journey as we
were in 1905. In fact, every omen was auspicious from the very start, so
auspicious indeed that perhaps the more superstitious of the sailors
thought our luck was too good to last, while one member of our
expedition was continually "knocking on wood," just as a precaution, as
he expressed it. It would be rash to say that his forethought had much
to do with our success, but it eased his mind, at all events.
As we steamed steadily northward the nights grew shorter and shorter,
and lighter and lighter, so that when we crossed the Arctic Circle, soon
after midnight on July 26, we were in perpetual daylight. I have crossed
the Circle some twenty times, going and coming, so the fine edge of that
experience has been somewhat dulled for me; but the arctic "tenderfeet"
among my party, Dr. Goodsell, MacMillan, and Borup, were appropriately
impressed. They felt as one feels in crossing the equator the first
time--that it is an event.
The _Roosevelt_, steaming ever northward, was now well on her way to one
of the most interesting of all arctic localities. It is the little oasis
amid a wilderness of ice and snow along the west coast of northern
Greenland midway between Kane Basin on the north and Melville Bay on the
south. Here, in striking contrast to the surrounding country, is animal
and vegetable life in plenty, and in the course of the last hundred
years some half dozen arctic expeditions have wintered here. Here, too,
is the home of a little tribe of Eskimos.
[Illustration: SNOWY OWL, CAPE SHERIDAN]
[Illustration: BRANT-GOOSE]
[Illustration: SABINE'S GULL]
[Illustration: RED-THROATED DIVER, MALE AND FEMALE]
[Illustration: KING EIDER, DRAKE]
This little refuge is about a 3,000 mile sail from New York and about
2,000 miles as the bird flies. It is about 600 miles north of the Arctic
Circle and about half way from that great latitudinal mark to the Pole
itself. Here the great arctic night averages one hundred and ten days in
winter, during which time no ray of light falls upon the sight, save
that of the moon and the stars, while in summer the sun is visible every
moment for an equal number of days. Within the limits of this little
country is found the favorite haunt of the reindeer, which find
sufficient pasturage. But we are interested for the present in this
unique spot only in passing and for the reason that here we picked up
the little denizens of the frigid zone who were to help us in our
struggle farther north.
Before we reached this odd little oasis, but several hundred miles
beyond the Arctic Circle, we came to a most significant point in our
upward journey, marking as it did the grimness of the task before us. No
civilized man can die in this savage Northland without his grave having
a deep meaning for those who come afterwards; and constantly, as we
sailed on, these voiceless reminders of heroic bones told their silent
but powerful story.
At the southern limit of Melville Bay we passed the Duck Islands, where
is the little graveyard of the Scotch whalers who were the pioneers in
forcing the passage of Melville Bay and who died there, waiting for the
ice to open. These graves date back to the beginning of the nineteenth
century. From this point on, the arctic highway is marked by the graves
of those who have fallen in the terrible fight with cold and hunger.
These rude rock piles bring home to any thoughtful person the meaning of
arctic exploration. The men who lie there were not less courageous, not
less intelligent, than the members of my own party; they were simply
less fortunate.
Let us look along that highway for a moment and consider these
memorials. At North Star Bay are one or two graves of men from the
British ship _North Star_, which wintered there in 1850. Out on the Cary
Islands is the nameless grave of one of the ill-fated Kallistenius
Expedition. Still farther north, at Etah, is the grave of Sontag, the
astronomer of Hayes's Expedition; and a little above it, that of Ohlsen
of Kane's party. On the opposite side are the unmarked places where
sixteen of Greely's ill-fated party died. Still farther north, on the
eastern or Greenland side, is the grave of Hall, the American commander
of the Polaris Expedition. On the western, or Grant Land side, are the
graves of two or three sailors of the British Arctic Expedition of 1876.
And right on the shore of the central Polar Sea, near Cape Sheridan, is
the grave of the Dane, Petersen, the interpreter of the British Arctic
Expedition of 1876. These graves stand as mute records of former efforts
to win the prize, and they give a slight indication of the number of
brave but less fortunate men who have given the last possession of
mortal life in their pursuit of the arctic goal.
The first time I saw the graves of the whalers on Duck Islands I sat
there, in the arctic sunlight, looking at those headboards, sobered with
a realization of what they meant. When I first saw Sontag's grave, at
Etah, I carefully replaced the stones around it, as a tribute to a brave
man. At Cape Sabine, where Greely's party died, I was the first man to
step into the ruins of the stone hut after the seven survivors were
taken away years before--the first man, and I stepped into those ruins
in a blinding snowstorm late in August, and saw there the mementos of
those unfortunates.
Passing the Duck Islands on the upward voyage, approaching Cape York in
1908, and thinking of the graves there, I little dreamed that a loved
member of my own party, Professor Ross G. Marvin, who ate at my table
and acted as my secretary, was fated to add his name to this long list
of arctic victims, and that his grave, in uncounted fathoms of black
water, was to be the most northerly grave on this earth.
We reached Cape York on the first day of August. Cape York is the bold,
bluff headland which marks the southern point of the stretch of arctic
coast inhabited by my Eskimos, the most northerly human beings in the
world. It is the headland whose snowy cap I have seen so many times
rising in the distance above the horizon line of Melville Bay as my
ships have steamed north. At the base of the headland nestles the most
southerly of all the Eskimo villages, and it has marked the point of
meeting, year after year, between the members of this tribe and myself.
At Cape York we were on the threshold of the actual work. I had on board
the ship when I arrived there all the equipment and assistance which the
civilized world could yield. Beginning there, I was to take on the
tools, the material, the personnel, that the arctic regions themselves
were to furnish for their own conquest. Cape York, or Melville Bay, is
the dividing line between the civilized world on the one side and the
arctic world on the other--the arctic world with its equipment of
Eskimos, dogs, walrus, seal, fur clothing, and aboriginal experience.
Behind me lay the civilized world, which was now absolutely useless, and
which could give me nothing more. Ahead of me lay that trackless waste
through which I must literally cut my way to the goal. Even the ship's
journey from Cape York to winter quarters on the north coast of Grant
Land is not "plain sailing"; in fact, it is not sailing at all during
the later stages; it is jamming and butting and dodging and hammering
the ice, with always the possibility that the antagonist will hit back a
body blow. It is like the work of a skilled heavy-weight pugilist, or
the work of an old Roman fighter with the cestus.
Beyond Melville Bay the world, or what we know as the world, is left
behind. On leaving Cape York, we had exchanged the multifarious purposes
of civilization for the two purposes for which there is room in those
wide wastes: food for man and dog, and the covering of miles of
distance.
Behind me now lay everything that was mine, everything that a man
personally loves, family, friends, home, and all those human
associations which linked me with my kind. Ahead of me lay--my dream,
the goal of that irresistible impulse which had driven me for
twenty-three years to measure myself, time after time, against the
frigid _No_ of the Great North.
Should I succeed? Should I return? Success in the attainment of 90°
North would not inevitably carry with it the safe return. We had learned
_that_ on recrossing the "big lead" in 1906. In the Arctic the chances
are always against the explorer. The inscrutable guardians of the secret
appear to have a well-nigh inexhaustible reserve of trump cards to play
against the intruder who insists upon dropping into the game. The life
is a dog's life, but the work is a man's work.
As we steamed northward from Cape York, on the first day of August,
1908, I felt that I was now in truth face to face with the final
struggle. Everything in my life appeared to have led up to this day. All
my years of work and all my former expeditions were merely preparations
for this last and supreme effort. It has been said that well-directed
labor toward a given end is an excellent kind of prayer for its
attainment. If that be so, then prayer has been my portion for many
years. Through all the seasons of disappointment and defeat I had never
ceased to believe that the great white mystery of the North must
eventually succumb to the insistence of human experience and will, and,
standing there with my back to the world and my face toward that
mystery, I believed that I should win in spite of all the powers of
darkness and of desolation.