NARES AND SMITH SOUND
After the return of Sir Edward Belcher’s expedition in 1854 the
British Government was content to rest on its laurels, so far as
Arctic research was concerned, and to leave the field entirely to
Germans, Austrians, Americans, and to such private individuals as
cared to undertake the very heavy cost of equipping an expedition for
the Polar regions. In the year 1874, however, it once again awoke
to a sense of its responsibilities. There was still about the Pole
a tract of some two and a half million square miles which had never
been trodden by the foot of a civilised man, and it was felt by men
of science that no satisfactory data concerning the cause and the
track of storms, together with the thousand and one other things
concerning the sea which commercial nations wish to know, could be
obtained unless the Polar seas became rather less of a sealed book.
No time was lost in setting about the preparations, and in April
of the following year two ships were commissioned for the great
expedition of 1875-76, and the command was entrusted to Captain
George S. Nares. The ships in question were the _Alert_, a steam
sloop of 751 tons and 100 horse-power, and the _Discovery_, a
steamer of 556 tons and 96 horse-power, which, under the name of
the _Bloodhound_ had already seen service as a whaler. They were
fitted with all the most modern appliances, and were provisioned for
three years, while among the officers of the expedition were Albert
H. Markham, commander of the _Alert_, Pelham Aldrich, who served
as a lieutenant on the same ship, and Henry F. Stevenson, who was
appointed captain of the _Discovery_.
Accompanied by the store ship _Valorous_, from which they were to
take additional supplies at Godhaven, the two ships set sail from
Portsmouth on May 29, 1875. The passage across the Atlantic was long
and boisterous, but they eventually arrived at Godhaven on July 6,
where they parted company with the _Valorous_ after taking on board
everything in the way of provisions that they needed as well as
twenty-four Greenland dogs. At Ritenbenk they shipped more dogs,
together with two drivers, Petersen, the Dane who had served under
Hayes, and Frederick, an Eskimo. At Proven they touched again, to
pick up our old friend Hans Christian, whose family, undeterred by
their previous experiences on the ice-floe, once more insisted on
accompanying him. They reached Port Foulke on July 28, and had the
good fortune to find the entrance to Smith Sound entirely free from
ice. They were net, indeed, delayed until they reached Payer Harbour,
a little south of Cape Sabine, where they were beset in the ice for
several days, during which time Stevenson occupied himself with
exploring Foulke Fiord, while Nares visited Littleton Island and Life
Boat Cove and examined the _cache_ left behind by the _Polaris_.
The journey northward was pursued with very varying fortunes. The
ice was exceedingly bad, and when the ships were not actually beset
in it, they were occupied in charging their way through it. Little by
little, however, they made their way up the channel, caching large
stores of provisions as they went, among the chief being a depot of
3600 rations on the Carey Islands, another depot of the same size at
Cape Hawks, and one of 1000 rations at Cape Lincoln.
But ice was not the only difficulty with which Nares had to contend,
for Hayes’ chart was a source of perpetual annoyance to him, and
a great part of his time was spent in correcting its errors. Cape
Frazer was placed eight miles and Scoresby Bay twenty miles too far
north, and the rest of the western coast was so badly delineated
that Nares pathetically remarked that it was often difficult to know
exactly where he was.
Hugging the western shore and taking advantage of every channel that
opened near the ship, he succeeded in reaching Lady Franklin Bay, on
the other side of which he found a land-locked inlet; this he named
Discovery Harbour, and in it he decided to leave his companion ship
while he himself pushed on in the _Alert_.
As he ascended the strait he observed that the character of the ice
changed rapidly. Off Cape Sabine the biggest floes were only eight or
ten feet thick; off Cape Fraser their thickness increased to twenty
feet, and the ice was obviously older, “but,” he says, “up to the
present time, when the main pack consisted entirely of heavy ice, I
had failed to observe that, instead of approaching a region favoured
with open water and a warm climate, we were gradually nearing a
sea where the ice was of a totally different formation to what we
had ever before experienced, that few Arctic navigators had met,
and only one battled with successfully; that in reality we must be
approaching the same sea which gives birth to the heavy ice met with
off the coast of America by Collinson and M’Clure, and which the
latter in 1851 succeeded in navigating through in a sailing vessel
for upwards of 100 miles, ... which Sir Edward Parry met with in the
same channel in 1820, ... which, passing onwards to the eastward from
Melville Strait down M’Clintock Channel, beset, and never afterwards
released, the _Erebus_ and _Terror_ under Sir John Franklin and
Captain Crozier; and which, intermixed with light Spitzbergen ice,
is constantly streaming to the southward along the eastern shore of
Greenland, and there destroyed the _Hansa_ of the last German Arctic
expedition.” In other words, Nares was in the middle of the ice
formed in the Polar Sea, now known as Palæocrystic, and was the first
man really to understand its character.
With some difficulty, the _Alert_ succeeded in making her way as far
as Floeberg Reach, in lat. 82° 25´ N., long. 62° W., the highest
point yet attained by a ship. Here Nares determined to spend the
winter, for, though the situation seemed at first sight to be rather
exposed, it was well protected by a fringe of heavy floes which were
grounded in eight to twelve fathoms of water. No land was to be seen
to the northward, and Nares was forced to come to the conclusion
that, though he had reached the shores of the Arctic Ocean, it was
the very reverse of that open Polar sea which he had hoped to find.
On September 16 the ship was effectually frozen in for the winter,
and ten days later Captain Markham, Lieutenant Parr, and Lieutenant
May set off on a sledging expedition with the object of establishing
depots of provisions as far north as they could. They accomplished
their work well, but at terrible cost, for seven men and one
officer returned to the ship badly frost-bitten, and in three cases
amputations were necessary. At the same time Pelham Aldrich went
out on an exploring trip in which he succeeded in reaching Parry’s
latitude of 82° 48′ N.
The winter was fairly fine, but bitterly cold—the coldest, in fact,
on record. The _Alert_ experienced a mean temperature for five
days and nine hours of 66.29° below zero, while for two separate
periods of fifteen days each the mercury remained frozen. In the
middle of March Lieutenants Egerton and Rawson attempted to open
up communications with the _Discovery_, but the attempt ended with
disaster, for Petersen, who accompanied them, was taken ill on the
journey, and the whole party had to return. The two officers made
the most heroic exertions to bring him back to health, depriving
themselves of their own warm clothing and suffering severely in
consequence. Their efforts were, however, of no avail, for Petersen
was found to be so badly frost-bitten that both his feet had to be
amputated, and three months later he died of exhaustion. Setting out
again, Rawson and Egerton, accompanied by two sailors, reached the
_Discovery_, and found that her crew had passed a comfortable winter,
though one man was down with scurvy.
As soon as April came round Nares began the serious work of the
spring by sending out two great sledge parties, one of which, under
Commander Markham, was to push as far north as possible, while the
other, under Lieutenant Aldrich, was to explore the northern shores
of Grinnell Land.
Having been accompanied by a supporting party as far as Cape Henry,
Markham set out over the Polar Sea on April 10, 1876. Fearing that
they might chance upon an open sea, the party took with it two boats,
which added greatly to their labours, making it necessary for them to
cover every mile of their journey four times. Their way, moreover,
lay in peculiarly unpleasant places, for the ice-field over which
they had to travel was like a frozen ocean, the depressions between
the waves being filled with snow and broken pack-ice. One of the
boats was soon abandoned, but the men dragged the other as far as
lat. 83° 20´, the highest point attained up to that time.
The homeward journey was even more trying, for scurvy had broken out
among the men, five out of the seventeen had to be placed on the
sledges, and many of the others could barely drag themselves over
the ice. It soon became obvious that they could not reach the ship
without assistance, so Lieutenant Parr gallantly volunteered to set
out by himself, and performed the truly astonishing feat of covering
the thirty miles which lay between his starting-point and the ship
in twenty-four hours. The help that he brought back was only just in
time, for one man died on the way, while eleven of the others had to
be dragged to the ship on sledges.
In many ways Markham’s journey was one of the most extraordinary on
record. Instead of advancing at a steady walk, more than half of
each day was spent by the whole party facing the sledge and dragging
it forward a few feet at a time. The maximum rate of advance was 2¾
miles a day, the mean rate being 1¼, while, though the distance from
the ship to their farthest point was only 73 miles, on the outward
and homeward journeys they actually covered no less than 521 miles.
Aldrich’s expedition also suffered severely from scurvy, but
succeeded, nevertheless, in doing excellent work, by exploring the
northern shores of Grinnell Land for 220 miles, that is to say, as
far as lat. 82° 16′ N., 86° W. Fortunately Nares, becoming anxious
about Aldrich’s safety, sent out Lieutenant May and two sailors to
relieve him. It was as well that he did so, for he found that only
Aldrich and one man were in a fit condition to haul, and the whole
party would probably have perished if it had not been for his timely
aid.
Lieutenant Beaumont’s expedition from the _Discovery_ also very
nearly ended in disaster from the same cause. He was especially
detailed to explore the coast of Greenland to the north, and so
well did he fulfil his mission that he far outdistanced all his
predecessors, and succeeded in reaching lat. 82° 20′ N., 51° W. The
homeward journey was a long and stern fight against disease, which
seemed likely to end in disaster when, on reaching Robeson Channel,
he found the ice too rotten to permit them to cross to the _Alert_.
Fortunately Rawson and Dr Coppinger arrived just in time to save all
of the party but two.
There were now no fewer than thirty-six cases of scurvy on the
_Alert_ alone, and Nares decided to return as soon as he could break
out of winter quarters. He was released at the end of July, and in
October both ships reached England in safety, after a remarkably
successful voyage, in which great tracts of entirely new country had
been opened up.