THE OPEN POLAR SEA.--WIDTH OF THE POLAR BASIN.--BOUNDARIES
OF THE POLAR BASIN.--POLAR CURRENTS.--POLAR ICE.--THE
ICE-BELT.--ARCTIC NAVIGATION AND DISCOVERY.--THE RUSSIAN
SLEDGE EXPLORATIONS.--WRANGEL'S OPEN SEA.--PARRY'S BOAT
EXPEDITION.--DR. KANE'S DISCOVERIES.--EXPANSION OF SMITH
SOUND.--GENERAL CONCLUSIONS DRAWN FROM MY OWN DISCOVERIES AND
THOSE OF MY PREDECESSORS.
Let us pause here a few moments, in order that we may take a brief
survey of the Polar Basin and arrive at a correct understanding of what
is meant by the term, "Open Polar Sea," so often used.
[Sidenote: BOUNDARIES OF THE POLAR BASIN.]
By referring to the circumpolar map, the reader will be able to
form a more accurate judgment than he could from the most elaborate
description. He will observe that about the North Pole of the earth
there is an extensive sea, or, more properly, ocean, with an average
diameter of more than two thousand miles. He will observe that this
sea is almost completely surrounded by land, and that its shores
are, for the most part, well defined,--the north coasts of Greenland
and Grinnell Land, which project farthest into it, being alone
undetermined. He will note that these shores occupy, to a certain
extent, a uniform distance from the Pole, and are everywhere within the
region of perpetual frost. He will remember that they are inhabited
everywhere by people of the same race, to whom the soil yields no
subsistence, who live exclusively by hunting and fishing, and confine
their dwelling-places either to the coast or to the banks of the
rivers which flow northward. He will observe that the long line of
coast which gives lodgment to these Arctic nomads is interrupted in
three principal places; and that through these the waters of the Polar
Sea mingle with the waters of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans,--these
breaks being Baffin Bay, Behring Strait, and the broader opening
between Greenland and Nova Zembla; and if he traces the currents on
the map and follows the Gulf Stream as it flows northward, pouring
the warm waters of the Tropic Zone through the broad gateway east of
Spitzbergen and forcing out a return current of cold waters to the
west of Spitzbergen and through Davis Strait, he will very readily
comprehend why in this incessant displacement of the waters of the Pole
by the waters of the Equator the great body of the former is never
chilled to within several degrees of the freezing-point; and since it
is probably as deep, as it is almost as broad, as the Atlantic between
Europe and America, he will be prepared to understand that this vast
body of water tempers the whole region with a warmth above that which
is otherwise natural to it; and that the Almighty hand, in the all-wise
dispensation of His power, has thus placed a bar to its congelation;
and he will read in this another symbol of Nature's great law of
circulation, which, giving water to the parched earth and moisture to
the air, moderates as well the temperature of the zones--cooling the
Tropic with a current of water from the Frigid, and warming the Frigid
with a current from the Tropic.[11]
[Footnote 11: The temperature of the air at the North Pole has
furnished a fruitful theme of speculation, both in connection with
the influence of the sea and of the sun. I have before me a highly
instructive paper on the climate of the North Pole, read before the
Royal Geographical Society of London, April 10th, 1865, by W. E.
Hickson, Esq., from which I extract the following:--
"It had always been supposed that the immediate areas of the Poles
must be the coldest regions of the globe, because the farthest points
from the equator. Hence the argument that the higher the latitude the
greater must be the difficulties and dangers of navigation. Quite an
opposite opinion, however, had begun to prevail among meteorologists
on the publication, in 1817, of the Isothermal system of Alexander Von
Humboldt, which showed that distance from the equator is no rule for
cold, as the equator is not a parallel of maximum heat. The line of
maximum heat crosses the Greenwich meridian, in Africa, fifteen degrees
north of the equator, and rises, to the eastward, five degrees higher,
running along the southern edge of the Desert of Sahara. In 1821, Sir
David Brewster pointed out, in a paper on the mean temperature of the
globe, the probability of the thermometer being found to range ten
degrees higher at the Pole than in some other parts of the Arctic
Circle. No new facts have since been discovered to invalidate this
conclusion--many, on the contrary, have come to light tending to
confirm it."]
[Sidenote: POLAR CURRENTS]
Bearing these facts in mind, the reader will perceive that it is the
surface-water only which ever reaches so low a temperature that it is
changed to ice; and he will also perceive that when the wind moves the
surface-water, the particles which have become chilled by contact with
the air mingle in the rolling waves with the warm waters beneath, and
hence that ice can only form in sheltered places or where the water of
some bay is so shoal and the current so slack that it becomes chilled
to the very bottom, or where the air over the sea is uniformly calm.
He will remember, however, that the winds blow as fiercely over the
Polar Sea as in any other quarter of the world; and he will, therefore,
have no difficulty in comprehending that the Polar ice covers but a
small part of the Polar water; and that it exists only where it is
nursed and protected by the land. It clings to the coasts of Siberia,
and springing thence across Behring Strait to America, it hugs the
American shore, fills the narrow channels which drain the Polar
waters into Baffin Bay through the Parry Archipelago, crosses thence
to Greenland, from Greenland to Spitzbergen, and from Spitzbergen to
Nova Zembla,--thus investing the Pole in an uninterrupted land-clinging
belt of ice, more or less broken as well in winter as in summer, and
the fragments ever moving to and fro, though never widely separating,
forming a barrier against which all the arts and energies of man have
not hitherto prevailed.
[Sidenote: THE ICE-BELT.]
If the reader would further pursue the inquiry, let him place one leg
of a pair of dividers on the map near the North Pole (say in latitude
86°, longitude 160° W.), and inscribe a circle two thousand miles in
diameter, and he will have touched the margin of the land and the mean
line of the ice-belt throughout its wide circuit, and have covered an
area of more than three millions of square miles.
Although this ice-belt has not been broken through, it has been
penetrated in many places, and its southern margin has been followed,
partly along the waters formed near the land by the discharging rivers
of the Arctic water-sheds of Asia and America, and partly by working
through the ice which is always more or less loosened by the summer. It
was in this manner that various navigators have attempted the northwest
passage; and it was after following the coast line from Behring Strait
to Banks Land, and then pushing through the broken ice that Sir
Robert McClure finally succeeded in effecting this long-sought-for
passage--not, however, by carrying his ship completely through, but
by traveling over the winter ice three hundred miles to Wellington
Channel, whence he returned home through Baffin Bay in a ship that had
come from the eastward. And it was in this same manner that Captain
Collinson, passing from west to east, reached almost to the spot where
perished Franklin, who had entered the ice from the opposite direction.
And it is thus, also, that the Russians have explored the coasts of
Siberia, meeting but two insurmountable obstacles to the navigation
from the Atlantic to the Pacific side, namely, Cape Jakan, against
which the ice is always jammed, and which Behring tried in vain to
pass, and Cape Ceverro Vostochnoi, which the gallant young Lieutenant
Prondtschikoff made such heroic efforts to surmount. And it was by the
same method of navigation that the Amsterdam pilot, earnest old William
Barentz, strove, in 1598, to find by the northeast a passage to Cathay.
[Sidenote: ICE NAVIGATION.]
The efforts to break through the belt, with the expectation of finding
clear water about the Pole, have been very numerous, and they have
been made through every opening from the southern waters to the Polar
Sea. To follow the history of those various attempts would not fall
within my present purpose. It is but a long record of defeat, so far as
concerned the single object of getting to the Pole. Cook, and all who
have come after him, have failed to find the ice sufficiently open to
admit of navigation northward from Behring Strait, as Hudson and his
followers have through the Spitzbergen Sea; and all the efforts through
Baffin Bay have been equally futile. The most persevering attempts to
break through the ice-belt have been made to the west of Spitzbergen,
and in this quarter ships have approached nearer to the Pole than in
any other. The highest well-authenticated position achieved by any
navigator was that of Scorsby, who reached latitude 81° 30′, although
it is claimed that Hudson had gone still further; and if the stories
which Daines Barrington picked up from the fishermen of Amsterdam and
Hull are to be relied on, then the old Dutch and English voyagers
have gone even beyond this, seeking new fishing-grounds and finding
everywhere an open sea. There is, however, as before observed, no
well-authenticated record of any ship having attained a higher latitude
than that of Scorsby.
[Sidenote: WRANGEL'S OPEN SEA.]
Failing to get through the ice, explorers have next tried to cross it
with sledges. In this the Russians have done most. Many enterprising
officers of the Russian service, using the dog-sledges of the native
tribes inhabiting the Siberian coast, have, in the early spring,
boldly struck out upon the Polar Sea. Most conspicuous among them
was Admiral Wrangel, then a young lieutenant of the Russian Navy,
whose explorations, continued through several years, showed that, at
all seasons of the year, the same condition of the sea existed to
the northward. The travelers were invariably arrested by open water;
and the existence of a _Polynia_ or open sea above the New Siberian
Islands, became a fact as well established as that the rivers flow
downward to the sea.
Sir Edward Parry tried the same method above Spitzbergen, using,
however, men instead of dogs for draft, and carrying boats for safety
in the event of the ice breaking up. Parry traveled northward until
the ice, becoming loosened by the advancing season, carried him south
faster than he was traveling north; and after a while it broke up under
him, and set him adrift in the open sea.
[Sidenote: KANE'S OPEN SEA.]
Next came Captain Inglefield's attempt to get into this circumpolar
water through Smith Sound; and then Dr. Kane's. The latter's vessel
could not be forced further into the ice than Van Rensselaer Harbor;
and, like the Russians, he continued the work with sledges. After
many embarrassments and failures in his attempts to surmount the
difficulties presented by hummocked ice of the Sound, one of his
parties succeeded finally in reaching the predicted open water; and, to
quote Dr. Kane's words, "from an elevation of five hundred and eighty
feet, this water was still without a limit, moved by a heavy swell,
free of ice, and dashing in surf against a rock-bound shore." This
shore was the shore of the land which he named Washington Land.
Next, after Dr. Kane's, came my own undertaking; and the last chapter
leaves me with my sledge upon the shores of that same sea which Dr.
Kane describes, about one hundred miles to the north and west of the
point from which one of his parties looked out upon the iceless waters.
My own opinion of what I saw and of the condition of this sea, which
Wrangel found open on the opposite side from where I stood, and which
Kane's party had found open to my right, and which Parry's journey
showed to be open above Spitzbergen, may be inferred from what I have
already briefly stated, and may be more briefly concluded.
[Sidenote: EXPANSION OF SMITH SOUND.]
The boundaries of the Polar Basin are sufficiently well defined to
enable us to form a rational estimate of the unknown coast-lines of
Greenland and Grinnell Land,--the only parts of the extensive circuit
remaining unexplored. The trend of the northern coast-line of Greenland
is approximately defined by the reasonable analogies of physical
geography; and the same process of reasoning forbids the conclusion
that Grinnell Land extends beyond the limit of my explorations. I
hold, as Inglefield did before me, that Smith Sound expands into the
Polar Basin. Beyond the narrow passage between Cape Alexander and
Cape Isabella, the water widens steadily up to Cape Frazer, where it
expands abruptly. On the Greenland side the coast trends regularly
to the eastward, until it reaches Cape Agassiz, where it dips under
the glacier and is lost to observation. That cape is composed of
primitive rock, and is the end of a mountain spur. This same rock is
visible at many places along the coast, but is mostly covered with the
deposit of sandstone and greenstone, which forms the tall cliffs of
the coast-line, until it crops out about thirty miles in the interior
into a mountain chain, which, (in company with Mr. Wilson), I crossed,
in 1853, to find the _mer de glace_ hemmed in behind it. Further to
the north the _mer de glace_ has poured down into the Polar Sea, and
pushing its way onward through the water, it has at length reached
Washington Land, and swelled southward into Smith Sound. That the face
of Humboldt Glacier trends more to the eastward than is exhibited on
Dr. Kane's chart, I have shown; and that Washington Land will be found
to lie much farther in the same direction, I have sufficient grounds
for believing. According to the report of Morton, it is to be inferred
that this island is but a continuation of the same granitic ridge which
breaks off abruptly at Cape Agassiz, and appears again above the sea
at Cape Forbes, in a line conformable with the Greenland range. It is
probable then that at some remote period this Washington Land stood
in the expansion of Smith Sound, washed by water on every side,--that
lying to the eastward being now supplanted by the great glacier of
Humboldt; that lying to the westward now bearing the name of Kennedy
Channel.
[Sidenote: THE OPEN POLAR SEA.]
With the warm flood of the Gulf Stream pouring northward, and keeping
the waters of the Polar Sea at a temperature above the freezing
point, while the winds, blowing as constantly under the Arctic as
under the Tropic sky, and the ceaseless currents of the sea and the
tide-flow of the surface, keep the waters ever in movement, it is
not possible, as I have before observed, that even any considerable
portion of this extensive sea can be frozen over. At no point within
the Arctic Circle has there been found an ice-belt extending, either
in winter or in summer, more than from fifty to a hundred miles from
land. And even in the narrow channels separating the islands of the
Parry Archipelago, in Baffin Bay, in the North Water, and the mouth
of Smith Sound,--everywhere, indeed, within the broad area of the
Frigid Zone, the waters will not freeze except when sheltered by the
land, or when an ice-pack, accumulated by a long continuance of winds
from one quarter, affords the same protection. That the sea does not
close except when at rest, I had abundant reason to know during the
late winter; for at all times, as this narrative frequently records,
even when the temperature of the air was below the freezing point of
mercury, I could hear from the deck of the schooner the roar of the
beating waves.
[Sidenote: THE OPEN WATER.]
It would be needless for me to detain the reader with the conclusions
to be drawn from the condition of the sea as observed by me at the
point from which the last chapter left us returning, as the facts speak
for themselves. It will not, however, be out of place to observe that
no one whose eye has ever rested upon the Arctic ice or witnessed the
changes of the Arctic seasons, could fail to realize that in a very
short time, as the summer advanced, the open water would steadily eat
its way southward, through Kennedy Channel, into Smith Sound.
[Illustration]