RETURN TO KINGS BAY
All appearances were convincing that the weather had finally broken
up, but a charm seemed to lie upon King James Land this year, for next
morning (August 7) was fine as ever, with skies brilliantly clear. The
white fog still covered the bay and the glacier’s foot, but retreated
before us as we advanced on the downward journey, for which the time
had now come. Instead of going far out on to the glacier, as in our
ascent, we kept a more direct course, for crevasses that are too
wide to drag sledges over when going uphill are passable on the way
down. The sledges had to make many a downward jump, and were greatly
strained, but we reckoned they would hold out to the coast, and so let
them take their luck. It was none of the best. A certain broad crevasse
opposed to our advance its yawning chasm, whose higher side was much
above the lower. The first sledge took the jump safely, but the second
landed heavily on its nose, and one runner snapped in half. We tied it
up with string, but the jagged edge greatly increased the friction
during the remainder of the journey. Near the Pretender we re-entered
the circuit of the nesting birds, and found their feathers at every
step of the way. A solitary fulmar sitting on the ice only stirred
when we approached him within two yards. Then he flapped his wings and
ran, gradually rising into the air and helping himself up by beating
the ground with his feet, the action used by fulmars when they rise
from water. He did not fly far, for he was obviously ill. Doubtless a
glaucous gull presently put an end to his existence.
Having kept along the left side of the glacier, we came, at the foot of
the Pretender, as we knew we must, to a steep ice staircase, a slope of
about 200 feet, broken by a series of large crevasses. A longitudinal
fold in the ice, caused by the narrowing of the glacier at this point,
added a more complex irregularity to the step-like descent. This was
the worst place we had to convey sledges over on the glaciers of
Spitsbergen; nor shall I attempt to describe our labours. The sledges
were slung across some crevasses, let down over others, gingerly
conducted along ridges of ice narrower than themselves, with profound
chasms on each side, hauled round the flanks of seracs, and otherwise
forced forward as circumstances decreed. Once only did a misfortune
occur, and then the fault was mine. The slope was very steep, and
there was a crevasse in the way. Nielsen got on to its lower lip and
began lifting the bow of the sledge forward by means of the drag-rope.
I was hanging on behind with the pick-end of the ice-axe hitched into
the stern. Just at the critical moment something gave way. The ice-axe
slipped out; I fell backwards; the sledge lumbered down. That it
would go right into the crevasse and be utterly lost seemed certain.
But no! it merely turned a somersault and wedged itself in between
two projecting noses of ice, which held it firmly, till, with the
assistance of the others, we brought it safe to land. Shortly afterward
the site of Pretender Camp was reached, and our little heap of stores
found undisturbed by foxes or birds.
We knew that the most tiresome part of the day’s journey was yet
to come; the lunch-halt was consequently prolonged. To the foot
of Pretender Pass the way was easy enough, but beyond that point
difficulties were bound to accumulate, for the glacier became so
crevassed as to be impassable even for men without sledges, whilst,
instead of snow-slopes along the left bank, there was a widening
lateral moraine. Fortunately we found an irregular belt of snow between
the ridge of this moraine and the _débris_-slope behind it; along that
belt we were able to make intermittent advance, though the snow was
freely strewn with blocks of stone, over and around which, up and
down and in and out, the sledges had to be lifted and dragged. We were
thankful even for this small mercy, seeing that, if the snow had not
been there, we must have raised the sledges bodily and carried them
more than a mile over the nastiest kind of moraine. As it was, we had
to carry them for several short spells. How easy it looks on paper!
Four men, one at each corner of the sledge; they lift her, and along
she goes. But in practice, when the ground to be traversed consists of
loose rocks, each about the size of a man’s head, with ice below them,
sloping this way and that, uphill two yards, downhill three yards, now
tilted to the right, now to the left, some one is always stumbling.
They jog one another from side to side. The weight gets bandied about
and heaved in all directions, so that each wastes most of his work in
counter-balancing the unintentional irregularities of his fellows’
efforts. A halt had to be made halfway along, but we vowed to finish
this horrible part of the route before camping. The stove was lit
and cocoa brewed to put heart into the men; then on again, plunging,
tripping, twisting ankles, barking shins, till at last there came a
practicable though lumpy stretch of ice alongside the moraine, and we
could launch the sledges on it and haul them forward with less toil.
We were close to the angle where Kings and Highway glaciers join,
and the lateral moraines of both, uniting at the promontory of the
dividing mountain, flow out as a medial moraine, and are carried on by
the glacier and ultimately dumped over the ice-cliff into Kings Bay.
We crossed this medial moraine at the earliest convenient place, then
followed along beside it till near midnight, when somebody, turning
round to survey the view, found it beautiful, and proposed that camp
should be pitched straightway.
The air was crisp and cold. The sun shone golden in the north, just
tinged with the first promise of its winter setting. The mellow light
flooded with unusual glory of colour the many-tinted rocks of the
Crowns and Pretender, grouped together in fine assemblage between the
two great glaciers, now both at once beheld back to their highest
snowfields. Such purples as the autumnal midnight sun pours out on the
so-called Liefde-Bay sandstones of Spitzbergen had no rival even in
the richest product of Tyrian skill. All night long the glacier worked
and cracked beneath us in its onward flow, squeezing its slow way down
through the narrowing channel. Loud reports disturbed our slumbers, and
at an early hour brought us back to consciousness of the beauty of the
world and the continuing loveliness of the weather.
The sky remained clear, and the white fog brooded over the waters of
the bay, when the men started down with the sledges, leaving us to sit
awhile on convenient rocks, smoking and enjoying the splendid scenery.
Presently we also set forth, not down, but across Highway Glacier to
examine the rocks of its left bank. A very large lake-basin had to be
crossed at the margin of the ice. It proved to have been drained by the
biggest ice-tunnel I ever saw, a cavern at least fifty feet in diameter
and more than a hundred yards long. I bolted into it, under the stones
perched loosely on its brow, and took some photographs of the weird
grotto, whilst Garwood climbed the riskily loose cliff behind and
hunted for fossils. Keeping across the mouth of a minor side glacier,
we came to the moraine crossed by us with so much trouble on the upward
way. The great hollow beyond it was now perceived to be another and
yet larger lake-basin, drained in its turn by the ice-cañon which had
formed one of our first considerable impediments. This lake-basin is
more than half a mile in length, and some hundreds of yards wide. It
lies at the foot of Mount Nielsen. Here, losing sight of Garwood, I
turned to seek the sledges. Not finding them, and being too cold to
loiter about, I walked briskly on down the foot of the glacier, and
did not halt till the base camp was reached. It remained just as we
left it, thank goodness! But it must have had a narrow escape, for, at
some time during our absence, a flood of water came down the fan on
which it stood, cutting a new channel, whose still wet margin ran less
than a hand’s breadth from the angle of the tent. Had the channel been
deflected a couple of yards, all our goods would have gone to sea!
The roof of fog was overhead, yet the view was most beautiful, for
the sun shone through holes in it upon the glacier’s terminal cliff,
barring it with vertical bands of light and colour. There were stripes
of purple, violet, green, blue, and white, made by the staining of the
ice with stone _débris_, or by new fractures manifesting the varying
transparency of the mass, or by the play of light and shadow upon it.
The jagged hills looked down through holes or behind veils of mist. The
water was absolutely calm, but more thickly covered with broken ice
than when we last beheld it; in fact, over great areas, the floating
blocks seemed to form a continuous ice-covering. In calm weather this
mattered little, but if a northerly wind set in, all the ice would be
driven and packed down upon us, and we should be imprisoned, who could
say for how long? Obviously, therefore, it would be our business to
shift camp as soon as possible to some more favourable situation.
Long I sat in the tent-door gazing at the view and dreaming. What
changes had taken place here since Professor Sven Lovén’s visit
in 1837, the first visit of any man of science to this part of
Spitsbergen! The island of which he wrote so fully, with its
“diminutive Alps” and moraines, was separated from the glacier at that
time by a channel of open water 1000 feet wide; now the glacier almost
surrounds it and has buried out of sight the ground on which he stood.
It had already done so before Nordenskiöld’s visit in 1861, since when
no considerable changes have taken place. This is only one of many
instances of glacial advance during the present century. A comparison
between the seventeenth and eighteenth century Dutch charts and the
maps of the present day proves the general truth of this observation.
The development seems to be still in progress. Witness the great
glacier-front which has descended into Agardh Bay since 1871, and over
which we went in crossing the Ivory Gate last year. Glaciers which end
in shallow waters must, indeed, be advancing slowly as they fill up the
bay heads, but this does not suffice to explain so great an advance as
that of the Kings Glacier between 1837 and 1861.
The arriving sledges, dragged by men soaking with perspiration, stopped
these meditations. Both sledges were on the point of breaking up,
such had been the strain upon them during the last fortnight. They
were extra strongly built, and the runners were protected with metal
sheaths, yet there was not a sound joint left in them. The metal had
all been scraped and torn away, the runners smashed up. If ordinary
arctic travel were as rough as this work over crevassed inland
glaciers, such a sledging expedition as Nansen made from the _Fram_
would be impossible, for no sledge could hold out a tenth part of his
course. Our sledges, moreover, were lightly laden with about a third of
the normal arctic load. Had they been heavier, they could not have been
dragged along at all, or if forced forward they would have broken up
the first day.
It is only on returning to the coast that one obtains a correct
realisation of the silence of the higher regions. The glacier-front
kept “calving”; the floating ice kept cracking up and turning over;
there was a noisy torrent flooding down close to camp. Stones fell;
waves broke on the shore. Such noises for a long time drove sleep
away. When I did slumber it was to dream of glacier-lakes bursting, of
avalanches falling, and other catastrophes.
Next day we had the boat to drag down to the sea--two hours’ work--all
our baggage to overhaul, pack, and portage, so that it was late in the
afternoon before we were ready to sail. The long hours of work were
enlivened by the charm of the scenery beneath the grey roof of sea-fog,
which still remained just where it had hung for so many days. The
variety of effects was extraordinary, for there was no wind to move the
fog, nor sunshine coming through it. The floating ice sometimes stood
out white against the purple background and dark sky, sometimes dark
against a white curtain of mist, and sometimes it glittered behind
a vaporous veil. The water was now dark, like lead, now bright as
burnished steel. There was continual change, yet no visible cause for
change. Out into this fairy region of calm water and pure ice at last
we rowed in search of new scenes, new beauty, and new delights.
Our first goal was one of Lovén’s Islands, away out in the midst of
the bay, right over against the ice-cliff of the Kings Glacier. To
reach this we had to row through a bed of water so closely covered with
broken ice that a way was made for the boat by pushing the fragments
asunder. They were of all sizes and colours. Surfaces that had been
exposed to the air for some time were white, as all ice becomes
under such conditions. Others newly cloven, or that had formed till
recently the submerged face of floating blocks, were blue or green.
There were pink pieces, dusted over with sandstone _débris_; but the
majority of the small blocks, and most were small, were crystal clear,
like lumps of purest glass. The water was absolutely still. Sunshine
lay upon it, and the great glacier-cliff, along which we rowed, was
reflected from the watery mirror. Every few minutes the glacier
“calved,” and the resulting waves rattled the ice about us, whilst the
booming thunder came echoing back from remote hollows of the hills.
Nielsen was reminded of days spent by him as a sailor in fogs on the
Newfoundland banks, when, as he said, they used to smell the icebergs
long before they loomed into view. Kings Bay, of course, presents no
bergs comparable in size to those that drift southward down the coast
of Greenland, though the floating masses we were soon to approach were
much larger than those ordinarily met with in Spitsbergen waters. As
our distance from the south shore of the bay increased, the mountains
behind it were better seen, and proved to be a fine ridge with many
peaks, the watershed between Kings and English bays. A series of
glaciers descend in their hollows, but none reach the sea, for there
is a broad belt of flat land all along the southern shore. The view
up Kings Glacier now became of entrancing beauty as the fog cleared
away, and all our peaks from Mount Nielsen round to the Diadem were
disclosed. How different was this view to our eyes, which recognised
every feature and knew what was behind every impediment, from our
first outlook there last year, in a brief interval between two storms!
The culmination of the charm came when the small, partly ice-covered
island rose into our foreground, and the surging waves of splintered
glacier thrown up behind it contrasted with the smooth wide-spreading
snowfields far beyond. The ice-cliff north of the island was more
shattered than any we had yet beheld. Here the greatest floating bergs
enter the sea. They do not fall into it, but simply float away, being
already quite detached from one another by the deep clefts of the ice.
From an examination of a great many sea-fronting glacier-sections we
learnt that crevasses, however long and wide, seldom penetrate very
far down into the mass of ice. I do not remember ever to have seen
any crevasse (except at this point) which cut a glacier-cliff down
to sea-level. Higher up in the _névé_ region crevasses may be more
profound, but towards a glacier’s snout I am sure that their depth is
often greatly overestimated. The ice in the foundation of a glacier
exists under great pressure and behaves very differently from the
surface ice, which is free to break up under lateral strain. A careful
study of arctic ice-cliffs would, I think, give rise to several
unexpected revelations. The opening up of Spitsbergen to ordinary
summer travellers would enable such simple but illuminating researches
to be undertaken by holiday-making men of science.
The archipelago, which I have named Lovén’s Islands, after the explorer
who first recorded a visit to them, was now close at hand. We made
for a convenient cove and landed. Countless screaming terns saluted
us with a chorus of unmistakable imprecations. No bird that ever I
saw can swear like a tern. Till it opens its mouth you would think it
the very incarnation of gentleness and grace, such the purity of its
white plumage, the slenderness of its form, and the elegance of all
its motions. But it is my matured conviction that in every tern there
resides the spirit of a departed bargee. On these islands Lovén found
countless nesting birds of many sorts, besides the spoor of reindeer
and foxes. We found only eider-ducks, terns, and a very few geese; of
reindeer not a trace. There are no reindeer left on the west coast of
Spitsbergen. We never saw a footprint on the shores of Klaas Billen
Bay, Kings Bay, or Horn Sound this year, though in all three bays are
square miles of country admirably suited to feed and maintain them
and once supporting large herds. The ruthless Norwegian hunter has
exterminated them utterly.
I need not expatiate on the gorgeousness of the view from these
islands. It was especially fine to the north where white icebergs
of all fantastic forms floated in the dark purple reflections of
the hills. The only sound heard, besides the screaming of the terns
and the boom of the glacier-cliff, was the innumerable ploppings of
water against the myriad floating blocks of ice. We landed on another
island to cook a meal and survey. The little plants were putting on
their autumnal colourings, most of the birds-nests were abandoned, the
young broods--alas! sadly few in numbers--disporting themselves in the
neighbouring waters. All the islands are smoothed by ice, for the
Kings Glacier was once at least 500 feet thicker and very much longer
than now. Probably, there are other mounds of rock, continuing under
the glacier the line of these islands, and rumpling up the ice into a
crevassed condition otherwise difficult to account for.
Turning away from the islands, we rowed toward the east end of the
rounded hill standing out into the fjord, to which we gave the
name Blomstrand’s Mound. From the published account of the Swedish
Expedition of 1861, we were led to expect that Scoresby’s Grotto
would be found in this direction. It was only afterwards, when we
procured a copy in the original Swedish, to which are appended maps,
not reproduced in the German translation, that we discovered the
whereabouts of this grotto in Blomstrand’s Harbour.[9] We now had
to wind about amongst large floating towers and castles of ice,
entrancingly beautiful. The number of the great floating bergs seemed
countless. We passed by devious ways along channels, between them,
often being so entirely surrounded as to seem on a lake built all about
with ice-castles. Some were hollowed out into caverns with walls thin
enough to let the light of the low hanging midnight sun shine through.
We manœuvred to get one of these directly between us and the sun, so as
to enjoy the resplendence of its opalescent shimmer, contrasted with
the blueness of the shadowed side of the ice. Deep in the substance
of the crystalline wall shone out a host of sparkling points like
many-faceted diamonds enclosed in cloudy crystal. The evening was
perfect: calm, bright, mellow, clear to the remotest distance, save
just at one point where a sea-mist came pouring over a pass from
English Bay, with a rainbow mantling on its shoulder.
The drowsily creaking oars at length brought us to the mainland,
where camp was quickly pitched on soft ground near a brook. There was
no grotto anywhere in the neighbourhood. The slope of Blomstrand’s
Mound rose temptingly behind. With plane-table and camera we hastened
forth to gain a more commanding panorama. About 500 feet up was a
convenient knoll, whence the upper part of the mound was displayed as
an undulating plateau bending away to the culminating dome of the hill
over a couple of miles of bog land and broken rocks, extraordinarily
disagreeable to walk upon. The whole mound is encircled on three sides
by the bay, whilst on the fourth a large glacier descending from the
north abuts against it, and sends an arm down into the sea on either
side. The view was, of course, most extensive and beheld under rarely
favourable conditions, for the low-striking, golden sunlight mellowed
all the glaciers and the hills. The bay spread abroad below, as in a
map, and the icebergs on its surface were tiny dots of white, whilst
the areas closely covered with smaller, broken ice resembled surfaces
crisped by some gentle breeze.
At 4 A.M. (August 10) we turned in. A few hours later the weather was
still fine, but at noon the Crowns began to put on caps of cloud. Mists
gathered in all directions, wind rose, and soon all was overcast and
rain was falling on the tent. The spell of fine weather was, in fact,
at an end. By 3 o’clock we were rowing away in water no longer calm.
Yet it was charming to watch the graceful rocking of the smaller pieces
of floating ice, and to see them turn over as their equilibrium was
disturbed. The old white surface went under, the new blue side came up.
There was now but one day left before the _Kvik_ ought to call for us.
The weather was too thick for surveying, so we settled to make at once
for Coal Haven, where tertiary fossil plants had been found, though not
the characteristic _Taxodium_.[10] Accordingly we rowed straight across
the bay, though no sign could be seen of any inlet such as the chart
marks. There is, in fact, no inlet at all, but only a low headland that
protects the anchorage from westerly winds. It is completely open to
north and east. On reaching the south coast and finding no trace of
the expected inlet, we rowed along the shore toward Quade Hook for a
couple of miles. It was an open, pebbly beach, on which we might have
hauled up the boat, but whence it could not have been launched in face
of any sea, like that now threatening to rise. Leaving the men to keep
the boat off shore, Garwood and I landed to prospect. Just behind the
narrow beach was a low cliff, the front of a wide area of boggy and
stony ground from which the hills rise, half a mile or so inland.
Westward was no bay whatever, so we concluded that Coal Haven lay to
the east, where, in fact, we presently discovered it, behind a low spit
of shingle a few yards wide, enclosing a lagoon.
While the men pitched camp, Garwood and I walked inland to look for the
coal-bed. Its position is carefully described by Lamont, but we had
only the book on the Swedish expedition of 1861 with us, and, though
the members of that party visited and, I believe, discovered the coal,
they give no accurate account of its position. We dimly remembered that
it was found where a glacier-stream cuts a section into the ground.
There were two glaciers ending about a mile inland from the bay, so
we walked towards them and tracked up every stream flowing from them,
but found no coal. I then went to the west, Garwood to the east, till
every inch of land within Coal Haven had been traversed. It was no
good. A big stone man planted on a mound, and with a slanting stick
built into it, seemed likely to be a guide to the hidden treasure; but
there was no coal in the mound, nor anywhere in the direction to which
the stick pointed. We have since learnt that the cairn marks one of the
points whose position was astronomically fixed by the Swedes,[11] and
that it has nothing to do with the coal, which in fact is not found
within Coal Haven at all, but within the next bay to the east, where of
course we did not look for it.
A low cloud-roof, intermittently dropping rain, hung continuously over
Coal Haven during our visit. Only the bases of hills and the grey
snouts of glaciers emerged beneath it. Sometimes a dense mist came up;
rarely the drizzle held off for half an hour. In this cheerless case
black melancholy invaded Svensen. At a moment of gloomy forgetfulness
he filled the pot with sea-water for brewing soup. The mistake was
fortunately discovered in time, for there was no food to spare. When
Garwood returned with half a dozen guillemots, the last shot-cartridge
had been fired off. Svensen skinned the birds for the pot with the
sadness of a man condemned to death. “We will only eat half of them
to-night,” he said. “Why?” I asked. “Because this is the last proper
food we shall have, and we may as well make it hold out as long as
possible. When did you say the _Kvik_ is coming for us?” “At midnight
to-night,” I answered. “Not a bit of it. _Ikke!_ I heard the sailors on
the boat say the captain would not come for us at all. We shall starve
here.” “Skittles! They’ll come for us to-day or to-morrow.” “_Ikke!_
they’ll not come at all, I believe.” “I tell you they will; the captain
undertook to come.” “_Ikke, ikke!_” We finished all the birds, but the
food almost stuck in Svensen’s throat.
When supper was done (it was the morning of the 11th) a surprising
vigour seized our gloomy companion. He jumped into the boat, pitched
its mast, sail, and some spars on shore, and carried them away to the
point. We watched him build a big stone-heap and plant the mast in it
with the sail suspended as a flag. Then he turned in and was heard
loudly and solemnly prophesying to himself in his fine declamatory
style. We breakfasted late in the afternoon on one of our last soups
and some mouldy biscuits fried in the scrapings of the butter-pot;
then we began to look out for the _Kvik_. The mouth of Kings Bay was
not visible from camp, so we went for walks to various higher points,
besides spending some hours over another hunt for coal; but neither
coal nor _Kvik_ appeared. The drizzling night dragged its slow hours
along. A meagre supper in the morning of the 12th was the occasion of
more loud lamentations from our Norwegian Jeremiah. The others then
turned in, whilst I went off to the ruins of an old Russian hut on the
neighbouring cape to watch for the expected steamer.
Less than a century ago there was a big winter settlement of Russian
trappers in and about Kings Bay. As in the case of other Russian
settlements, there were a central house and a number of outlying huts
widely scattered from one another. The central house of this group
was in Cross Bay, in Ebeltoft’s Haven, I believe. The Coal Haven
hut was only an outlyer, inhabited by a solitary individual, who at
stated intervals visited the central depôt to leave his catch of furs
and renew his meagre stock of provisions. Numbers of these trappers
annually died of scurvy. The rock on which I sat had assuredly been
witness to such unrecorded tragedies. There now remains nothing but
the ground plan of the hut, with a few bits of mouldering wood and
broken brick lying about. There were fragments of both Dutch and
Russian bricks, as is not uncommon on these sites, for the Russians
used the remains of older Dutch whaling “cookeries” in building their
stoves. Against a big rock was a piece of stone wall and a rotting
beam, apparently part of an old store-cupboard. Moss had crept up
over it, and little arctic flowers were growing upon it with unwonted
luxuriance. The bones of foxes and bears were in the ground, which was
pervaded with corrupting wood-fibre and carpeted with a peculiarly
rank moss that only grows thus luxuriantly on the abandoned sites of
human habitation. What a desolate place for a winter dwelling, planted
between a bog and the icy bay! Who lived here? I asked myself. What
did he think about? Were the hills anything to him--the Three Crowns
and those other peaks rising all around? Did the beauty of the long
sunset heralding the arctic night find recognition in his eyes? Or
was life too hard for the growth in him of any sense of beauty? Was
he some poor creature forced as a last resource to come here for the
bare means of subsistence, or some criminal forcibly expatriated to
these inhospitable shores? Such indeed was the custom in Northern
Russia before Siberia came into fashion as a place of exile. Long I
sat, musing on these things in the grey night, and listening to the
far-off rumble of the calving glacier. Every few minutes I scanned
the sea horizon off Mitra Hook, and always thought I could trace the
faint appearance of a remote steamer’s smoke. Imagination is a dreadful
trickster, but time always shows up its character. No steamer came in
sight, though the appointed hour had passed. My watch completed, I
returned to camp and sent up Nielsen to look out. “They haven’t come,”
said Svensen, “and they won’t come. _Ikke, ikke!_ We shall never get
away from here.” This croaking raven of a man began to grate upon our
nerves.
In the afternoon all turned out again. No signs of the _Kvik_. We
assured one another that it was of no consequence. A fire was lit, the
pot set on to boil and all our remaining provisions turned into it.
If this was to be our last meal it should be as big a one as we could
provide. Slowly the water came to the boil, all of us anxiously and
greedily watching. Nielsen wandered forlornly off to the point. “The
_Kvik_, the _Kvik_!” he shouted. “_Ikke, ikke!_” said Svensen, but no
one heeded him; this time there was no mistake. Before our last food
was swallowed she had rounded into the bay and cast anchor close by us.