THE FROZEN SEA
At Cape Intsi we pass from the narrow straits dividing the Lapp
country from the Samoyed country into this northern gulf.
About twice the size of Lake Superior in the United States, this
Frozen Sea has something of the shape of Como; one narrow northern
bay, extending to the town of Kandalax, in Russian Lapland; and two
southern bays, divided from each other by a broad sandy peninsula, the
home of a few villagers employed in snaring cod and hunting seal.
These southern bays are known, from the rivers which fall into them,
as Onega Bay and Dvina Bay. At the mouths of these rivers stand the
two trading ports of Onega and Archangel.
The open part of this inland gulf is deep--from sixty to eighty
fathoms; and in one place, off the entrance into Kandalax Bay, the
line goes down no less than a hundred and sixty fathoms. Yet the shore
is neither steep nor high. The gulf of Onega is rich in rocks and
islets; many of them only banks of sand and mud, washed out into the
sea from the uplands of Kargopol; but in the wide entrance of Onega
Bay, between Orlof Point and the town of Kem, stands out a notable
group of islets--Solovetsk, Anzersk, Moksalma, Zaet and others; islets
which play a singular part in the history of Russia, and connect
themselves with curious legends of the Imperial court.
In Solovetsk, the largest of this group of islets, stands the famous
convent of that name; the house of Saints Savatie and Zosima; the
refuge of St. Philip; the shrine to which emperors and peasants go on
pilgrimage; the haunt of that Convent Spectre which one hears
described in the cod-fisher's boat and in the Kozak's tent; the scene
of many great events, and of one event which Russians have agreed to
sing and paint as the most splendid miracle of these latter days.
Off the Dvina bar stands the new tower and lighthouse, where the
pilots live; a shaft some eighty feet high, not often to be seen above
the hanging drapery of fog. A pilot comes on board; a man of soft and
patient face, with gray-blue eyes, and flow of brownish hair, who
tells us in a bated tone--as though he feared we might be vexed with
him and beat him--that the tide is ebbing on the bar, and we shall
have to wait for the flow. "Wait for the tide!" snaps our Danish jarl;
"stand by, we'll make our course." The sun has just peeped out from
behind his veil; but the clouds droop low and dark, and every one
feels that a gale is coming on. Two barks near the bar--the "Thera"
and the "Olga"--bob and reel like tipsy men; yet our pale Russ pilot,
urged by the stronger will, gives way with a smile; and our speed
being lowered by half, we push on slowly towards the line of red and
black signals floating in our front.
The "Thera" and the "Olga" are soon behind us, shivering in all their
sheets, like men in the clutch of ague--left in our wake to a swift
and terrible doom. In half an hour we pass the line of buoys, and gain
the outer port.
Like all great rivers, the Dvina has thrown up a delta of isles and
islets near her mouth, through which she pours her flood into the sea
by a dozen arms. None of these dozen arms can now be laid down as her
main entrance; for the river is more capricious than the sea; so that
a skipper who leaves her by one outlet in August, may have to enter by
another when he comes back to her in June. The main passage in the old
charts flowed past the Convent of St. Nicolas; then came the turn of
Rose Island; afterwards the course ran past the guns of Fort Dvina:
but the storms which swept the Polar seas two summers since, destroyed
that passage as an outlet for the larger kinds of craft. The port
police looked on in silence. What were they to do? Archangel was cut
off from the sea, until a Danish blacksmith, who had set up forge and
hammer in the new port, proposed that the foreign traders should hire
a steamer and find a deliverance for their ships. "If the water goes
down," he said, "it must have made a way for itself. Let us try to
find it out." A hundred pounds were lodged in the bank, a steamer was
hired, and a channel, called the Maimax arm, was found to be deep
enough for ships to pass. The work was done, the city opened to the
sea; but then came the question of port authorities and their rules.
No bark had ever left the city by this Maimax arm; no rules had been
made for such a course of trade; and the port police could not permit
a ship to sail unless her papers were drawn up in the usual forms. In
vain the merchants told them the case was new, and must be governed by
a rule to match. They might as well have reasoned with a Turkish bey.
Here rode a fleet of vessels, laden with oats and deals for the Elbe,
the Maas, and the Thames; there ran the abundant Maimax waters to the
sea; but the printed rules of the port, unconscious of the freaks of
nature and of the needs of man, forbade this fleet to sail.
Appeal was made to Prince Gagarine, governor of Archangel: but
Gagarine, though he laughed at these port rules and their forms, had
no deals and grain of his own on board the ships. Gospodin Sredine, a
keen-witted master of the customs, tried to open the ports and free
the ships by offering to put officers on the new channel; but the
police were--the police. In vain they heard that the goods might
spoil, that the money they cost was idle, and that every ruble wasted
would be so much loss to their town.
To my question, "How was it arranged at last?" a skipper, who was one
of the prisoners in the port, replies, "I will tell you in a word. We
sent to Petersburg; the minister spoke to the Emperor; and here is
what we have heard they said. 'What's all this row in Archangel
about?' asks the Emperor. 'It is all about a new mouth being found in
the Dvina, sir, and ships that want to sail down it, sir, because the
old channel is now shoaled up, sir.' 'In God's name,' replied the
Emperor, 'let the ships go out by any channel they can find.'"
Whether the thing was done in this sailor-like way, or by the more
likely method of official report and order, the Maimax mouth was
opened to the world in spite of the port police and their printed
rules.
A Hebrew of the olden time would have called this sea a whited
sepulchre. Even men of science, to whom wintry storms may be summed up
in a line of figures--so many ships in the pack, so many corpses on
the beach--can find in the records of this frozen deep some show of an
excuse for that old Lapland superstition of the Golden Hag. The year
before last was a tragic time, and the memory of one dark day of wrack
and death has not yet had time to fade away.
At the end of June, a message, flashed from the English consul at
Archangel--a man to represent his country on these shores--alarmed our
board of trade by such a cry for help as rarely reaches a public
board. A hundred ships were perishing in the ice. These ships were
Swedes, Danes, Dutch, and English; luggers, sloops, corvettes, and
smacks; all built of wood, and many of them English manned. Could any
thing be done to help them? "Help is coming," flashed the wires from
Charing Cross; and on the first day of July, two steamers left the
Thames to assist in rescuing those ships and men from the Polar ice.
On the fifteenth night from home these English boats were off Cape
Gorodetsk on the Lapland coast, and when morning dawned they were
striving to cross the shallow Archangel bar. They could not pass; yet
the work of humanity was swiftly and safely done by the English crews.
That fleet of all nations, English, Swedish, Dutch, and Danish, left
the Dvina ports on news coming up the delta that the pack was breaking
up in the gulf; but on reaching that Corridor through which we have
just now come, they met the ice swaying to and fro, and crashing from
point to point, as the changing wind veered round from north to south.
By careful steering they went on, until they reached the straits
between Kanin Cape and Holy Point. The ice in their front was now
thick and high; no passage through it could be forced; and their
vessels reeled and groaned under the blows which they suffered from
the floating drifts. A brisk north wind arose, and blowing three days
on without a pause, drove blocks and bergs of ice from the Polar Ocean
down into the gut, forcing the squadrons to fall back, and closing up
every means of escape into the open sea. The ships rolled to and fro,
the helmsmen trying to steer them in mid-channel, but the currents
were now too strong to stem, and the helpless craft were driven upon
the Lapland reefs, where the crews soon saw themselves folded and
imprisoned in the pack of ice.
Like shots from a fort, the crews on board the stronger ships could
hear in the grim waste around them hull after hull crashing up, in
that fierce embrace, like fine glass trinkets in a strong man's hand.
When a ship broke up and sank, the crew leaped out upon the ice and
made for the nearest craft, from which in a few hours more they might
have to fly in turn. One man was wrecked five times in a single day;
each of the boats to which he clung for safety parting beneath his
feet and gurgling down into the frozen deep.
When the tale of loss was made up by the relieving steamers, this
account was sent home to the Board of Trade:
The number of ships abandoned by their crews was sixty-four; of this
great fleet of ships, fourteen were saved and fifty lost. Of the fifty
ships lost in those midsummer days, eighteen were English built and
manned; and the master mentions with a noble pride, that only one ship
flying the English flag was in a state to be recovered from the ice
after being abandoned by her crew.
It would be well for our fame if the natives had no other tales to
tell of an English squadron in the Frozen Sea.