ARCTIC ICE SLEDGING AS IT REALLY IS
Perhaps it will assist the reader to form a more vivid picture of the
sort of work that now lay before the expedition and which the expedition
eventually performed, if an effort is made to make him understand
exactly what it means to travel nearly a thousand miles with dog sledges
over the ice of the polar pack. In that belief, I shall at this point
endeavor to describe as briefly as is consistent with clearness the
conditions that confronted us and the means and methods by which those
conditions were met.
Between the winter quarters of the _Roosevelt_ at Cape Sheridan, and
Cape Columbia, the most northerly point on the north coast of Grant
Land, which I had chosen as the point of departure for the ice journey,
lay ninety miles in a northwesterly direction along the ice-foot and
across the land, which we must traverse before plunging onto the
trackless ice fields of the Arctic Ocean.
From Cape Columbia we were to go straight north over the ice of the
Polar Sea,--four hundred and thirteen geographical miles. Many persons
whose memories go back to the smooth skating ponds of their childhood,
picture the Arctic Ocean as a gigantic skating pond with a level floor
over which the dogs drag us merrily--we sitting comfortably upon the
sledges with hot bricks to keep our toes and fingers warm. Such ideas
are distinctly different from the truth, as will appear.
There is no land between Cape Columbia and the North Pole and no smooth
and very little level ice.
For a few miles only after leaving the land we had level going, as for
those few miles we were on the "glacial fringe." This fringe, which
fills all the bays and extends across the whole width of North Grant
Land, is really an exaggerated ice-foot; in some places it is miles in
width. While the outer edge in places is afloat and rises and falls with
the movement of the tides, it never moves as a body, except where great
fields of ice break off from it and float away upon the waters of the
Arctic Ocean.
Beyond the glacial fringe is the indescribable surface of the shore
lead, or tidal crack--that zone of unceasing conflict between the heavy
floating ice and the stationary glacial fringe. This shore lead is
constantly opening and shutting; opening when there are offshore winds,
or spring ebb-tides, crushing shut when there are northerly winds or
spring flood-tides. Here the ice is smashed into fragments of all sizes
and piled up into great pressure ridges parallel with the shore.
The ice is smashed into these pressure ridges by the sheer and
unimaginable force with which the floes are driven against the edge of
the glacial fringe, just as farther out the pressure ridges are caused
by the force with which the great floes themselves are crushed and
smashed together by the force of the wind and the tides.
These pressure ridges may be anywhere from a few feet to a few rods in
height; they may be anywhere from a few rods to a quarter of a mile in
width; the individual masses of ice of which they are composed may vary,
respectively, from the size of a billiard ball to the size of a small
house.
Going over these pressure ridges one must pick his trail as best he can,
often hacking his way with pickaxes, encouraging the dogs by whip and
voice to follow the leader, lifting the five-hundred-pound loaded
sledges over hummocks and up acclivities whose difficulties sometimes
seem likely to tear the muscles from one's shoulder-blades.
Between the pressure ridges are the old floes, more or less level. These
floes, contrary to wide-spread and erroneous ideas, are not formed by
direct freezing of the water of the Arctic Ocean. They are made up of
great sheets of ice broken off from the glacial fringe of Grant Land and
Greenland, and regions to the westward, which have drifted out into the
polar sea. These fields of ice are anywhere from less than twenty to
more than one hundred feet in thickness, and they are of all shapes and
sizes. As a result of the constant movement of the ice during the brief
summer, when great fields are detached from the glaciers and are driven
hither and thither under the impulse of the wind and the
tides--impinging against one another, splitting in two from the violence
of contact with other large fields, crushing up the thinner ice between
them, having their edges shattered and piled up into pressure
ridges--the surface of the polar sea during the winter may be one of
almost unimaginable unevenness and roughness.
At least nine-tenths of the surface of the polar sea between Cape
Columbia and the Pole is made up of these floes. The other one-tenth,
the ice between the floes, is formed by the direct freezing of the sea
water each autumn and winter. This ice never exceeds eight or ten feet
in thickness.
The weather conditions of the fall determine to a great extent the
character of the ice surface of the polar sea during the following
winter. If there have been continuous shoreward winds at the time when
the increasing cold was gradually cementing the ice masses together,
then the heavier ice will have been forced toward the shore; and the
edges of the ice-fields farther out, where they come in contact, will
have piled up into a series of pressure ridges, one beyond the other,
which any one traveling northward from the land must go over, as one
would go over a series of hills.
If, on the other hand, there has been little wind in the fall, when the
surface of the polar sea was becoming cemented and frozen over, many of
these great floes will have been separated from other floes of a like
size and character, and there may be stretches of comparatively smooth,
young, or new, ice between them. If, after the winter has set in, there
should still be violent winds, much of this thinner ice may be crushed
up by the movement of the heavier floes; but if the winter remains calm,
this smoother ice may continue until the general breaking up in the
following summer.
But the pressure ridges above described are not the worst feature of the
arctic ice. Far more troublesome and dangerous are the "leads" (the
whalers' term for lanes of open water), which are caused by the movement
of the ice under the pressure of the wind and tides. These are the
ever-present nightmare of the traveler over the frozen surface of the
polar ocean--on the upward journey for fear that they may prevent
further advance; on the return journey for fear they may cut him off
from the land and life, leaving him to wander about and starve to death
on the northern side. Their occurrence or non-occurrence is a thing
impossible to prophesy or calculate. They open without warning
immediately ahead of the traveler, following no apparent rule or law of
action. They are the unknown quantity of the polar equation.
Sometimes these leads are mere cracks running through old floes in
nearly a straight line. Sometimes they are zigzag lanes of water just
wide enough to be impossible to cross. Sometimes they are rivers of open
water from half a mile to two miles in width, stretching east and west
farther than the eye can see.
There are various ways of crossing the leads. One can go to the right or
the left, with the idea of finding some place where the opposite edges
of the ice are near enough together so that our long sledges can be
bridged across. Or, if there are indications that the lead is closing,
the traveler can wait until the ice comes quite together. If it is very
cold, one may wait until the ice has formed thick enough to bear the
loaded sledges going at full speed. Or, one may search for a cake of
ice, or hack out a cake with pickaxes, which can be used as a ferry-boat
on which to transport the sledges and teams across.
But all these means go for naught when the "big lead," which marks the
edge of the continental shelf where it dips down into the Arctic Ocean,
is in one of its tantrums, opening just wide enough to keep a continual
zone of open water or impracticable young ice in the center, as occurred
on our upward journey of 1906 and the never-to-be-forgotten return
journey of that expedition, when this lead nearly cut us off forever
from life itself.
A lead might have opened right through our camp, or through one of the
snow igloos, when we were sleeping on the surface of the polar sea.
Only--it didn't.
Should the ice open across the bed platform of an igloo, and precipitate
its inhabitants into the icy water below, they would not readily drown,
because of the buoyancy of the air inside their fur clothing. A man
dropping into the water in this way might be able to scramble onto the
ice and save himself; but with the thermometer at 50° below zero it
would not be a pleasant contingency.
This is the reason why I have never used a sleeping-bag when out on the
polar ice. I prefer to have my legs and arms free, and to be ready for
any emergency at a moment's notice. I never go to sleep when out on the
sea ice without my mittens on, and if I pull my arms inside my sleeves I
pull my mittens in too, so as to be ready for instant action. What
chance would a man in a sleeping-bag have, should he suddenly wake to
find himself in the water?
The difficulties and hardships of a journey to the North Pole are too
complex to be summed up in a paragraph. But, briefly stated, the worst
of them are: the ragged and mountainous ice over which the traveler must
journey with his heavily loaded sledges; the often terrific wind, having
the impact of a wall of water, which he must march against at times; the
open leads already described, which he must cross and recross, somehow;
the intense cold, sometimes as low as 60° below zero, through which he
must--by fur clothing and constant activity--keep his flesh from
freezing; the difficulty of dragging out and back over the ragged and
"lead" interrupted trail enough pemmican, biscuit, tea, condensed milk,
and liquid fuel to keep sufficient strength in his body for traveling.
It was so cold much of the time on this last journey that the brandy was
frozen solid, the petroleum was white and viscid, and the dogs could
hardly be seen for the steam of their breath. The minor discomfort of
building every night our narrow and uncomfortable snow houses, and the
cold bed platform of that igloo on which we must snatch such hours of
rest as the exigencies of our desperate enterprise permitted us, seem
hardly worth mentioning in comparison with the difficulties of the main
proposition itself.
At times one may be obliged to march all day long facing a blinding
snowstorm with the bitter wind searching every opening in the clothing.
Those among my readers who have ever been obliged to walk for even an
hour against a blizzard, with the temperature ten or twenty degrees
_above_ zero, probably have keen memories of the experience. Probably
they also remember how welcome was the warm fireside of home at the end
of their journey. But let them imagine tramping through such a storm all
day long, over jagged and uneven ice, with the temperature between
fifteen and thirty degrees _below_ zero, and no shelter to look forward
to at the end of the day's march excepting a narrow and cold snow house
which they would themselves be obliged to build in that very storm
before they could eat or rest. I am often asked if we were hungry on
that journey. I hardly know whether we were hungry or not. Morning and
night we had pemmican, biscuit and tea, and the pioneer or leading party
had tea and lunch in the middle of the day's march. Had we eaten more,
our food supply would have fallen short. I myself dropped twenty-five
pounds of flesh between my departure from the ship and my return to it.
But fortitude and endurance alone are not enough in themselves to carry
a man to the North Pole. Only with years of experience in traveling in
those regions, only with the aid of a large party, also experienced in
that character of work, only with the knowledge of arctic detail and the
equipment necessary to prepare himself and his party for any and every
emergency, is it possible for a man to reach that long sought goal and
return.