KNOCKING AT THE GATEWAY TO THE POLE
From Etah to Cape Sheridan! Imagine about three hundred and fifty miles
of almost solid ice--ice of all shapes and sizes, mountainous ice, flat
ice, ragged and tortured ice, ice that, for every foot of height
revealed above the surface of the water, hides seven feet below--a
theater of action which for diabolic and Titanic struggle makes Dante's
frozen circle of the Inferno seem like a skating pond.
Then imagine a little black ship, solid, sturdy, compact, strong and
resistant as any vessel built by mortal hands can be, yet utterly
insignificant in comparison with the white, cold adversary she must
fight. And on this little ship are sixty-nine human beings, men, women,
and children, whites and Eskimos, who have gone out into the crazy,
ice-tortured channel between Baffin Bay and the Polar Sea--gone out to
help prove the reality of a dream which has bewitched some of the most
daring minds of the world for centuries, a will-o'-the-wisp in the
pursuit of which men have frozen, and starved, and died. The music that
ever sounded in our ears had for melody the howling of two hundred and
forty-six wild dogs, for a bass accompaniment the deep, low grumbling of
the ice, surging around us with the impulse of the tides, and for
punctuation the shock and jar of our crashing assaults upon the floes.
We steamed northward into the fog beyond Etah, Greenland, on the
afternoon of August 18, 1908. This was the beginning of the last stage
of the _Roosevelt's_ journey. All now on board would, if they lived, be
with me until my return the following year. As an ungentle reminder of
what was ahead of us, though going at half speed because of the fog, we
struck a small berg a little way out from the harbor. Had the
_Roosevelt_ been an ordinary ship instead of the sturdy ice-fighter that
she is, my story might have ended right here. As it was, the shock of
the impact jarred things considerably. But the berg suffered more than
the ship, which only shook herself like a dog coming out of the water,
and with the main mass of the berg swaying heavily on one side from the
blow we had given it, and a large fragment we had broken off churning
the water on the other side, the _Roosevelt_ scraped between them and
went on.
This little incident made a strong impression on the new members of my
party, and I did not think it necessary to tell them that it was only a
mosquito bite to the crunching and grinding between the jaws of the
heavier ice that was in store for us a little farther on. We were
working in a northwesterly direction toward the Ellesmere Land side, and
headed for Cape Sabine, of terrible memories. As we steamed on, the ice
became thicker, and we had to turn south to get out of the way of it,
worming our course among the loose floes. The _Roosevelt_ avoided the
heavier ice; but the lighter pack she shoved aside without much
difficulty. South of Brevoort Island we were fortunate in finding a
strip of open water, and steamed northward again, keeping close to the
shore.
It must be remembered that from Etah to Cape Sheridan, for the greater
part of the course, the shores on either side are clearly visible,--on
the east the Greenland coast, on the west the coast of Ellesmere Land
and Grant Land. At Cape Beechey, the narrowest and most dangerous part,
the channel is only eleven miles wide, and when the air is clear it
almost seems as if a rifle bullet might be fired from one side to the
other. These waters, save in exceptional seasons, are filled with the
heaviest kind of ice, which is constantly floating southward from the
Polar Sea toward Baffin Bay.
Whether this channel was carved in the solid land by the force of
pre-Adamite glaciers, or whether it is a Titanic cleft formed by the
breaking off of Greenland from Grant Land, is a question still
undetermined by geologists; but for difficulty and danger there is no
place to compare with it in the whole arctic region.
It is hard for a layman to understand the character of the ice through
which the _Roosevelt_ fought her way. Most persons imagine that the ice
of the arctic regions has been formed by direct freezing of the sea
water; but in the summer time very little of the floating ice is of that
character. It is composed of huge sheets broken off from the glacial
fringe of North Grant Land broken up by contact with other floes and
with the land, and driven south under the impetus of the violent flood
tides. It is not unusual to see there ice between eighty and one hundred
feet thick. As seven-eighths of these heavy floes are under water, one
does not realize how thick they are until one sees where a huge mass, by
the pressure of the pack behind it, has been driven upon the shore, and
stands there high and dry, eighty or a hundred feet above the water,
like a silver castle guarding the shore of this exaggerated and
ice-clogged Rhine.
The navigation of the narrow and ice-encumbered channels between Etah
and Cape Sheridan was long considered an utter impossibility, and only
four ships besides the _Roosevelt_ have succeeded in accomplishing any
considerable portion of it. Of these four ships, one, the _Polaris_, was
lost. Three, the _Alert_, the _Discovery_, and the _Proteus_, made the
voyage up and back in safety; but one of those, the _Proteus_, was lost
in an attempt to repeat the dash. The _Roosevelt_ had on the expedition
of 1905-6 made the voyage up and back, though she was badly smashed on
the return.
Going north, the _Roosevelt_ of necessity followed the coast a portion
of the way, as only close to the shore could any water be found which
would enable the ship to advance. With the shore ice on one side, and
the moving central pack on the other, the changing tides were almost
certain to give us an occasional opportunity to steam ahead.
This channel is the meeting place between the tides coming from Baffin
Bay on the south and from Lincoln Sea on the north, the actual point of
meeting being about Cape Frazer. South of that point the flood tide runs
north, and north of it the flood tide runs south. One may judge of the
force of these tides from the fact that on the shores of the Polar Sea
the mean rise is only a little over a foot, while in the narrowest part
of the channel the tide rises and falls twelve or fourteen feet.
As a rule, looking across the channel, there seems to be no
water--nothing but uneven and tortured ice. When the tide is at the ebb,
the ship follows the narrow crack of water between the shore and the
moving pack of the center, driving ahead with all her force; then, when
the flood tide begins to rush violently southward, the ship must hurry
to shelter in some niche of the shore ice, or behind some point of rock,
to save herself from destruction or being driven south again.
This method of navigation, however, is one of constant hazard, as it
keeps the vessel between the immovable rocks and the heavy and rapidly
drifting ice, with the ever-present possibility of being crushed between
the two. My knowledge of the ice conditions of these channels and their
navigation was absolutely my own, gained in former years of traveling
along the shores and studying them for this very purpose. On my various
expeditions I had walked every foot of the coast line, from Payer Harbor
on the south to Cape Joseph Henry on the north, from three to eight
times. I knew every indentation of that coast, every possible shelter
for a ship, every place where icebergs usually grounded, and the places
where the tide ran strongest, as accurately as a tugboat captain in New
York harbor knows the piers of the North River water front. When
Bartlett was in doubt as to making a risky run, with the chance of not
finding shelter for the ship, I could usually say to him:
"At such and such a place, so far from here, is a little niche behind
the delta of a stream, where we can drive the _Roosevelt_ in, if
necessary"; or:
"Here icebergs are almost invariably grounded, and we can find shelter
behind them"; or:
"Here is a place absolutely to be shunned, for the floes pile up here at
the slightest provocation, in a way that would destroy any ship afloat."
It was this detailed knowledge of every foot of the Ellesmere Land and
Grant Land coasts, combined with Bartlett's energy and ice experience,
that enabled us to pass four times between this arctic Scylla and
Charybdis.
The fog lifted about nine o'clock the first night out, the sun peeped
through the clouds, and as we passed Payer Harbor, on the Ellesmere Land
side, we saw, sharply outlined against the snow, the house where I
wintered in 1901-2. A flood of memories rushed over me at sight of the
place. It was in Payer Harbor that Mrs. Peary and my little daughter had
waited for me, on the _Windward_ from September, 1900, to May, 1901, the
ice being so heavy that year that the ship could neither reach Fort
Conger, three hundred miles beyond, where I was, nor regain the open
water to the south and return home. That was the spring when I had been
obliged to turn back at Lincoln Bay, because the exhaustion of my
Eskimos and dogs made a dash for the Pole impossible. It was at Payer
Harbor that I had rejoined my family; it was at Payer Harbor that I had
parted from them, determined to make one fight more to reach the goal.
"One fight more," I said in 1902; but I had only reached 84° 17´.
"One fight more," I had said in 1905; but I had only reached 87° 6´.
And now, at Payer Harbor again, on August 18, 1908, it was still "One
fight more!" Only this time I knew it was the last, in truth, whatever
the result.
At ten o'clock that night we were steaming past the desolate, wind-swept
and ice-ground rocks of Cape Sabine, the spot that marks one of the most
somber chapters in arctic history, where Greely's ill-fated party slowly
starved to death in 1884--seven survivors only being rescued out of a
party of twenty-four! The ruins of the rude stone hut built by these men
for shelter during the last year of their lives can still be seen on the
bleak northern shore of Cape Sabine, only two or three miles from the
extreme point. It is doubtful if a more desolate and unsheltered
location for a camp could be found anywhere in the arctic regions, fully
exposed to the biting winds from the north, cut off by the rocks back of
it from the rays of the southern sun, and besieged by the ice pack
surging down from Kane Basin in the north.
I first saw the place in August, 1896, in a blinding snowstorm, so thick
that it was impossible to see more than a few yards in any direction.
The impressions of that day will never be forgotten--the pity and the
sickening sense of horror. The saddest part of the whole story for me
was the knowledge that the catastrophe was unnecessary, that it might
have been avoided. My men and I have been cold and have been near to
starvation in the Arctic, when cold and hunger were inevitable; but the
horrors of Cape Sabine were not inevitable. They are a blot upon the
record of American arctic exploration.
From Cape Sabine north there was so much open water that we thought of
setting the lug sail before the southerly wind; but a little later the
appearance of ice to the north caused us to change our minds. About
sixty miles north of Etah, we came to a dead stop in the ice pack off
Victoria Head. There we lay for hours; but the time was not altogether
wasted, for we filled our tanks with ice from a floe.
In the afternoon of the second day out, the wind came on strong from the
south, and we slowly drifted northward with the ice. After some hours,
the wind began to form pools of open water through the pack, and we
steamed westward toward the land, with the spray flying clear across the
decks. An Eskimo declared that this was the devil spitting at us. After
a few miles, we ran into denser ice and stopped again.
Dr. Goodsell, MacMillan and Borup were busy storing food and medical
supplies in the boats, to be ready for an emergency. Had the _Roosevelt_
been crushed by the ice or sunk, we could have lowered the boats at a
moment's notice, fitted and equipped for a voyage, and retreated to the
Eskimo country--thence back to civilization on some whaler, or in a ship
which would have been sent up with coal the following year by the Peary
Arctic Club, though that, of course, would have meant the failure of the
expedition.
In each of the six whale-boats were placed a case containing twelve
six-pound tins of pemmican, the compressed meat food used on arctic
expeditions; two twenty-five pound tins of biscuit; two five-pound tins
of sugar, a few pounds of coffee and several cans of condensed milk; an
oil stove and five one-gallon tins of oil; a rifle with one hundred
rounds of ammunition and a shotgun with fifty rounds; matches, a
hatchet, knives, a can opener, salt, needles and thread; and the
following medical supplies: catgut and needles, bandages and cotton,
quinine, astringent (tannic acid), gauze, plaster-surgical liniment,
boracic acid, and dusting powder.
The boats were swung at the davits, with a full complement of oars,
mast, sails, etc., and the emergency outfit above described would have
fitted them for a voyage of a week or ten days. On leaving Etah the
essential items of supplies, such as tea, coffee, sugar, oil, pemmican,
and biscuit, had been stowed on deck, close to the rail on both sides,
ready instantly to be thrown over the rail onto the ice, in case the
ship should be crushed.
Every person on board, both the men of the ship and the Eskimos, was
ready with a little bundle packed to get right over the side at a
moment's notice, after lowering the boats and throwing onto the ice the
essential supplies stowed near the ship's rail. Nobody thought of
undressing regularly; and the bathtub in my cabin might as well have
been a trunk, for all the time I dared to spend in it between Etah and
Cape Sheridan.