OUR MARCH OVER LAND AND SEA.
We had our boats to prepare now for a long and adventurous navigation.
They were so small and heavily laden as hardly to justify much confidence
in their buoyancy; but, besides this, they were split with frost and
warped by sunshine, and fairly open at the seams. They were to be calked,
and swelled, and launched, and stowed, before we could venture to embark
in them. A rainy south-wester too, which had met us on our arrival, was
now spreading with its black nimbus over the bay, and it looked as if we
were to be storm stayed on the precarious ice beach. It was a time of
anxiety, but to me personally of comparative rest. I resumed my journal:--
"_July 18._--The Esquimaux are camped by our side,--the whole settlement
of Etah congregated around the 'big caldron' of Cape Alexander, to bid
us good-bye. There are Metek and Nualik his wife, our old acquaintance
Mrs Eider-duck, and their five children, commencing with Myouk, my
body-guard, and ending with the ventricose little Accomodah. There is
Nessark and Anak his wife; and Tellerk the 'Right Arm,' and Amaunalik his
wife; and Sip-su, and Marsumah and Aningnah--and who not? I can name them
every one, and they know us as well. We have found brothers in a strange
land.
"Each one has a knife, or a file, or a saw, or some such treasured
keepsake; and the children have a lump of soap, the greatest of all great
medicines. The merry little urchins break in upon me even now as I am
writing--'Kuyanake, kuyanake, Nalegak-soak!' 'Thank you, thank you, big
chief!' while Myouk is crowding fresh presents of raw birds on me as if I
could eat for ever, and poor Aningnah is crying beside the tent-curtain,
wiping her eyes on a bird skin!
"My heart warms to these poor, dirty, miserable, yet happy beings, so
long our neighbours, and of late so staunchly our friends. Theirs is no
affectation of regret. There are twenty-two of them around me, all busy
in good offices to the Docto Kayens; and there are only two women and the
old blind patriarch Kresuk, 'Drift-wood,' left behind at the settlement.
"But see! more of them are coming up--boys ten years old pushing forward
babies on their sledges. The whole nation is gipsying with us upon the
icy meadows.
"We cook for them in our big camp-kettle; they sleep in the _Red Eric_:
a berg close at hand supplies them with water; and thus, rich in all that
they value,--sleep, and food, and drink, and companionship,--with their
treasured short-lived summer sun above them, the _beau ideal_ and sum of
Esquimaux blessings, they seem supremely happy.
[Sidenote: Parting With the Esquimaux]
"Whatever may have been the faults of these Esquimaux heretofore,
stealing was the only grave one. Treachery they may have conceived; and
I have reason to believe that, under superstitious fears of an evil
influence from our presence, they would at one time have been glad to
destroy us. But the day of all this has passed away. When trouble came to
us and to them, and we bent ourselves to their habits,--when we looked
to them to procure us fresh meat, and they found at our poor Oomiak-soak
shelter and protection during their wild bear-hunts,--then we were so
blended in our interests as well as modes of life, that every trace of
enmity wore away. God knows that since they professed friendship--albeit
the imaginary powers of the angekok-soak and the marvellous six-shooter
which attested them may have had their influence--never have friends
been more true. Although, since Ohlsen's death, numberless articles of
inestimable value to them have been scattered upon the ice unwatched,
they have not stolen a nail. It was only yesterday that Metek, upon my
alluding to the manner in which property of all sorts was exposed without
pilfering, explained through Petersen, in these two short sentences, the
argument of their morality:--
"'You have done us good. We are not hungry; we will not take
(steal).----You have done us good; we want to help you; we are friends.'"
I made my last visit to Etah while we were waiting the issue of the
storm. I saw old Kresuk (Drift-wood) the blind man, and listened to his
long good-bye talk. I had passed with the Esquimaux as an angekok,
in virtue of some simple exploits of natural magic; and it was one of
the regular old-times entertainments of our visitors at the brig, to
see my hand terrible with blazing ether, while it lifted nails with
the magnet. I tried now to communicate a portion of my wonder-working
talent. I made a lens of ice before them, and "drew down the sun," so
as to light the moss under their kolupsut. I did not quite understand
old Kresuk, and I was not quite sure he understood himself. But I
trusted to the others to explain to him what I had done, and burned the
back of his hand for a testimony in the most friendly manner. After all
which, with a reputation for wisdom which I dare say will live in their
short annals, I wended my way to the brig again.
We renewed our queries about Hans, but could get no further news of
him. The last story is, that the poor boy and his better-half were seen
leaving Peteravik, "the halting-place," in company with Shang-hu and one
of his big sons. Lover as he was, and nalegak by the all-hail hereafter,
joy go with him, for he was a right good fellow.
We had quite a scene distributing our last presents. My amputating
knives, the great gift of all, went to Metek and Nessark; but every
one had something as his special prize. Our dogs went to the community
at large, as tenants in common, except Toodlamick and Whitey, our
representative dogs through very many trials; I could not part with them,
the leaders of my team.
[Sidenote: Farewell!]
And now it only remained for us to make our farewell to these desolate
and confiding people. I gathered them round me on the ice-beach, and
talked to them as brothers for whose kindness I had still a return
to make. I told them what I knew of the tribes from which they were
separated by the glacier and the sea, of the resources that abounded in
those less ungenial regions not very far off to the south, the greater
duration of daylight, the less intensity of the cold, the facilities
of the hunt, the frequent drift-wood, the kayack, and the fishing-net.
I tried to explain to them how, under bold and cautious guidance, they
might reach there in a few seasons of patient march. I gave them drawings
of the coast, with its headlands and hunting-grounds, as far as Cape
Shackleton, and its best camping-stations from Red Head to the Danish
settlements.
They listened with breathless interest, closing their circle round me;
and, as Petersen described the big ussuk, the white whale, the bear, and
the long open water hunts with the kayack and the rifle, they looked
at each other with a significance not to be misunderstood. They would
anxiously have had me promise that I would some day return and carry a
load of them down to the settlements; and I shall not wonder if--guided
perhaps by Hans--they hereafter attempt the journey without other aid.
It was in the soft subdued light of a Sunday evening, June 17, that,
after hauling our boats with much hard labour through the hummocks, we
stood beside the open sea-way. Before midnight we had launched the _Red
Eric_, and given three cheers for Henry Grinnell and "homeward bound,"
unfurling all our flags.
But we were not yet to embark; for the gale which had been long brooding
now began to dash a heavy _wind-lipper_ against the floe, and obliged us
to retreat before it, hauling our boats back with each fresh breakage of
the ice. It rose more fiercely, and we were obliged to give way before
it still more. Our goods, which had been stacked upon the ice, had to
be carried further inward. We worked our way back thus, step by step,
before the breaking ice, for about two hundred yards. At last it became
apparent that the men must sleep and rest, or sink; and, giving up for
the present all thoughts of embarking, I hauled the boats at once nearly
a mile from the water's edge, where a large iceberg was frozen tight in
the floes.
But here we were still pursued. All the next night it blew fearfully,
and at last our berg crashed away through the broken ice, and our asylum
was destroyed. Again we fell to hauling back the boats; until, fearing
that the continuance of the gale might induce a ground-swell, which
would have been fatal to us, I came to a halt near the slope of a low
iceberg, on which I felt confident that we could haul up, in case of the
entire disruption of the floes. The entire area was already intersected
with long cracks, and the surface began to show a perceptible undulation
beneath our feet.
It was well for us I had not gratified the men by taking the outside
track; we should certainly have been rafted off into the storm, and
without an apparent possibility of escape.
I climbed to the summit of the berg; but it was impossible to penetrate
the obscurity of mist, and spray, and cloud further than a thousand
yards. The sea tore the ice up almost to the very base of the berg, and
all around it looked like one vast tumultuous caldron, the ice-tables
crashing together in every possible position with deafening clamour.
The gale died away to a calm, and the water became as tranquil as if the
gale had never been. All hands were called to prepare for embarking.
The boats were stowed, and the cargo divided between them equally; the
sledges unlashed and slung outside the gunwales; and on Tuesday the 19th,
at 4 P.M., with the bay as smooth as a garden-lake, I put off
in the _Faith_. She was followed by the _Red Eric_ on our quarter, and
the _Hope_ astern. In the _Faith_ I had with me Mr M'Gary, and Petersen,
Hickey, Stephenson, and Whipple. Mr Brooks was in the _Hope_, with Hayes,
Sontag, Morton, Goodfellow, and Blake. Bonsall, Riley, and Godfrey made
the crew of the _Eric_.
[Sidenote: Boat Disasters]
The wind freshened as we doubled the westernmost point of Cape Alexander,
and, as we looked out on the expanse of the sound, we saw the kitty-wakes
and the ivory-gulls and jagers dipping their wings in the curling waves.
They seemed the very same birds we had left two years before screaming
and catching fish in the beautiful water. We tried to make our first rest
at Sutherland Island; but we found it so barricaded by the precipitous
ice-belt that it was impossible to land. I clambered myself from the
boat's mast upon the platform and filled our kettles with snow, and then,
after cooking our supper in the boats, we stood away for Hakluyt. It
was an ugly crossing: we had a short chopping sea from the south-east;
and, after a while, the _Red Eric_ swamped. Riley and Godfrey managed to
struggle to the _Faith_, and Bonsall to the _Hope_: but it was impossible
to remove the cargo of our little comrade; it was as much as we could do
to keep her afloat and let her tow behind us. Just at this time, too, the
_Hope_ made a signal of distress; and Brooks hailed us to say that she
was making water faster than he could free her.
The wind was hauling round to the westward, and we could not take the
sea abeam. But, as I made a rapid survey of the area around me, studded
already with floating shreds of floe-ice, I saw ahead the low, grey blink
of the pack. I remembered well the experience of our Beechy Island trip,
and knew that the margin of these large fields is almost always broken by
inlets of open water, which gave much the same sort of protection as the
creeks and rivers of an adverse coast. We were fortunate in finding one
of these, and fastening ourselves to an old floe, alongside of which our
weary men turned in to sleep without hauling up the boats.
When Petersen and myself returned from an unsuccessful hunt upon the ice,
we found them still asleep, in spite of a cold and drizzling rain that
might have stimulated wakefulness. I did not disturb them till eight
o'clock. We then retreated from our breakwater of refuge, generally
pulling along by the boat-hooks, but sometimes dragging our boats over
the ice; and at last, bending to our oars as the water opened, reached
the shore of Hakluyt Island.
In the morning of the 22d we pushed forward for Northumberland Island,
and succeeded in reaching it a little to the eastward of my former
landing-place.
We crossed Murchison Channel on the 23d, and encamped for the night on
the land-floe at the base of Cape Parry; a hard day's travel, partly by
tracking over ice, partly through tortuous and zigzag leads. The next day
gave us admirable progress. The ice opened in leads before us, somewhat
tortuous, but, on the whole, favouring, and for sixteen hours I never
left the helm. We were all of us exhausted when the day's work came to a
close.
The next day's progress was of course slow and wearisome, pushing through
alternate ice and water for the land-belt. We fastened at last to the
great floe near the shore, making our harbour in a crack which opened
with the changes of tide.
The imperfect diet of the party was showing itself more and more in
the decline of their muscular power. They seemed scarcely aware of it
themselves, and referred the difficulty they found in dragging and
pushing to something uncommon about the ice or sludge, rather than to
their own weakness. But, as we endeavoured to renew our labours through
the morning fog, belted in on all sides by ice-fields so distorted and
rugged as to defy our efforts to cross them, the truth seemed to burst
upon every one. We had lost the feeling of hunger, and were almost
satisfied with our pasty broth and the large draughts of tea which
accompanied it. I was anxious to send our small boat, the _Eric_, across
to the lumme-hill of Appah, where I knew from the Esquimaux we should
find plenty of birds; but the strength of the party was insufficient to
drag her.
We were sorely disheartened, and could only wait for the fog to rise,
in the hope of some smoother platform than that which was about us,
or some lead that might save us the painful labour of tracking. I had
climbed an iceberg, and there was nothing in view except Dalrymple Rock,
with its red brassy face towering in the unknown distance. But I hardly
got back to my boat, before a gale struck us from the north-west, and
a floe, taking upon a tongue of ice about a mile to the north of us,
began to swing upon it like a pivot, and close slowly in upon our narrow
resting-place.
[Sidenote: An Ice Nip]
At first our own floe also was driven before the wind; but in a little
while it encountered the stationary ice at the foot of the very rock
itself. On the instant the wildest imaginable ruin rose around us. The
men sprang mechanically each one to his station, bearing back the boats
and stores; but I gave up for the moment all hope of our escape. It
was not a nip, such as is familiar to Arctic navigators; but the whole
platform where we stood, and for hundreds of yards on every side of us,
crumbled, and crushed, and piled, and tossed itself madly under the
pressure. I do not believe that of our little body of men, all of them
disciplined in trials, able to measure danger while combating it,--I
do not believe there is one who this day can explain how or why--hardly
when, in fact--we found ourselves afloat. We only know that in the midst
of a clamour utterly indescribable, through which the braying of a
thousand trumpets could no more have been heard than the voice of a man,
we were shaken, and raised, and whirled, and let down again in a swelling
waste of broken hummocks, and, as the men grasped their boat-hooks in the
stillness that followed, the boats eddied away in a tumultuous skreed of
ice, and snow, and water.
We were borne along in this manner as long as the unbroken remnant of
the in-shore floe continued revolving,--utterly powerless, and catching
a glimpse every now and then of the brazen headland that looked down on
us through the snowy sky. At last the floe brought up against the rocks,
the looser fragments that hung round it began to separate, and we were
able by oars and boat-hooks to force our battered little flotilla clear
of them. To our joyful surprise, we soon found ourselves in a stretch of
the land-water wide enough to give us rowing-room, and with the assured
promise of land close ahead.
At three o'clock the tide was high enough for us to scale the ice-cliff.
One by one we pulled up the boats upon a narrow shelf, the whole sixteen
of us uniting at each pull. We were too much worn down to unload; but a
deep and narrow gorge opened in the cliffs almost at the spot where we
clambered up; and, as we pushed the boats into it on an even keel, the
rocks seemed to close above our heads, until an abrupt turn in the course
of the ravine placed a protecting cliff between us and the gale. We were
completely encaved.
Just as we had brought in the last boat, the _Red Eric_, and were shoring
her up with blocks of ice, a long-unused, but familiar and unmistakable
sound startled and gladdened every ear, and a flock of eiders darkening
the sky for a moment passed swiftly in front of us. We knew that we must
be at their breeding-grounds; and as we turned in wet and hungry to our
long-coveted sleep, it was only to dream of eggs and abundance.
We remained almost three days in our crystal retreat, gathering eggs
at the rate of twelve hundred a day. Outside, the storm raged without
intermission, and our egg-hunters found it difficult to keep their feet;
but a merrier set of gourmands than were gathered within never surfeited
on genial diet.
[Sidenote: "Weary Man's Rest"]
On the 3d of July the wind began to moderate, though the snow still
fell heavily; and the next morning, after a patriotic egg-nog, the
liquor borrowed grudgingly from our alcohol-flask, and diluted till
it was worthy of temperance praise, we lowered our boats, and bade a
grateful farewell to "Weary Man's Rest." We rowed to the south-east end
of Wostenholme Island; but the tide left us there, and we moved to the
ice-foot.
In the meantime, the birds, which had been so abundant when we left
Dalrymple's Island, and which we had counted on for a continuous store,
seemed to have been driven out by the storm. We were again reduced to
short daily rations of bread-dust, and I was aware that the change of
diet could not fail to tell upon the strength and energies of the party.
I determined to keep in-shore, in spite of the barricades of ice, in the
hope of renewing, to some extent at least, our supplies of game. We were
fifty-two hours in forcing this rugged passage: a most painful labour,
which, but for the disciplined endurance of the men, might well have been
deemed impracticable.
Once through the barrier, the leads began to open again, and on the 11th
we found ourselves approaching Cape Dudley Digges, with a light breeze
from the north-west. It looked for some hours as if our troubles were
over, when a glacier came in sight not laid down on the charts, whose
tongue of floe extended still further out to sea than the one we had just
passed with so much labour. Our first resolve was to double it at all
hazards, for our crews were too much weakened to justify another tracking
through the hummocks, and the soft snow which covered the land-floes was
an obstacle quite insuperable. Nevertheless, we forced our way into a
lead of sludge, mingled with the comminuted ice of the glacier; but the
only result was a lesson of gratitude for our escape from it. Our frail
and weather-worn boats were quite unequal to the duty.
I again climbed the nearest berg,--for these ice-mountains were to us
like the look-out hills of men at home,--and surveyed the ice to the
south far on toward Cape York. My eyes never looked on a spectacle more
painful. We were in advance of the season: the floes had not broken
up. There was no "western water." Here, in a _cul-de-sac_, between two
barriers, both impassable to men in our condition, with stores miserably
inadequate and strength broken down, we were to wait till the tardy
summer should open to us a way.
I headed for the cliffs. Desolate and frowning as they were, it was
better to reach them and halt upon the inhospitable shore than await the
fruitless ventures of the sea. A narrow lead, a mere fissure at the edge
of the land-ice, ended opposite a low platform; we had traced its whole
extent, and it landed us close under the shadow of the precipitous shore.
Providence Retreat, as I called this spot, abounded in life. We found the
lumme, nearly as large as canvas-backs, and, as we thought, altogether
sweeter and more juicy; their eggs, well known as delicacies on the
Labrador coast; the cochlearia, growing superbly on the guano-coated
surface;--all of them in endless abundance: imagine such a combination of
charms for scurvy-broken, hungry-stricken men.
I could not allow the fuel for a fire, our slush and tallow being reduced
to very little more than a hundred pounds. The more curious in the
art of cooking made experiments upon the organic matters within their
reach,--the dried nests of the kitty-wake, the sods of poa, the heavy
mosses, and the fatty skins of the birds around us. But they would none
of them burn; and the most fastidious consoled himself at last with the
doubt whether heat, though concentrating flavour, might not impair some
other excellence. We limited ourselves to an average of a bird a-piece
per meal,--of choice, not of necessity,--and renewed the zest of the
table with the best salad in the world--raw eggs and cochlearia.
[Sidenote: Providence Halt]
It was one glorious holiday, our week at Providence Halt; so full of
refreshment and all-happy thoughts, that I never allowed myself to
detract from it by acknowledging that it was other than premeditated.
There were only two of the party who had looked out with me on the bleak
ice-field ahead, and them I had pledged to silence.
On the 18th of July the aspects of the ice about us gave me the hope of
progress. We had prepared ourselves for the new encounter with the sea
and its trials by laying in a store of lumme; two hundred and fifty of
which had been duly skinned, spread open, and dried on the rocks, as the
entremets of our bread-dust and tallow.
My journal tells of disaster in its record of our setting-out. In
launching the _Hope_ from the frail and perishing ice-wharf on which
we found our first refuge from the gale, she was precipitated into the
sludge below, carrying away rail and bulwark, losing overboard our
best shot-gun, Bonsall's favourite, and, worst of all, that universal
favourite, our kettle,--soup-kettle, paste-kettle, tea-kettle,
water-kettle, in one. I may mention, before I pass, that the kettle found
its substitute and successor in the remains of a tin-can which a good
aunt of mine had filled with ginger-nuts two years before, and which had
long survived the condiments that once gave it dignity. "Such are the
uses of adversity."
Our descent to the coast followed the margin of the fast ice. After
passing the Crimson Cliffs of Sir John Ross, it wore almost the dress of
a holiday excursion,--a rude one perhaps, yet truly one in feeling. Our
course, except where a protruding glacier interfered with it, was nearly
parallel to the shore. The birds along it were rejoicing in the young
summer, and when we halted it was upon some green-clothed cape near a
stream of water from the ice-fields above. Our sportsmen would clamber
up the cliffs and come back laden with little auks; great generous fires
of turf, that cost nothing but the toil of gathering, blazed merrily;
and our happy oarsmen, after a long day's work, made easy by the promise
ahead, would stretch themselves in the sunshine and dream happily away
till called to the morning wash and prayers. We enjoyed it the more, for
we all of us knew that it could not last.
We reached Cape York on the 21st, after a tortuous but romantic travel
through a misty atmosphere. Here the land-leads ceased, with the
exception of some small and scarcely-practicable openings near the shore,
which were evidently owing to the wind that prevailed for the time.
Everything bore proof of the late development of the season. The red
snow was a fortnight behind its time. A fast floe extended with numerous
tongues far out to the south and east. The only question was between a
new rest for the shore-ices to open, or a desertion of the coast, and a
trial of the open water to the west.
We sent off a detachment to see whether the Esquimaux might not be
passing the summer at Episok, behind the glacier of Cape Imalik, and
began an inventory of our stock on hand.
On their return they gave us no reason to hesitate. The Esquimaux had not
been there for several years. There were no birds in the neighbourhood.
I called my officers together, explained to them the motives which
governed me, and prepared to re-embark. The boats were hauled up,
examined carefully, and, as far as our means permitted, repaired. The
_Red Eric_ was stripped of her outfit and cargo, to be broken up for
fuel when the occasion should come. A large beacon-cairn was built on an
eminence, open to view from the south and west; and a red flannel shirt,
spared with some reluctance, was hoisted as a pennant to draw attention
to the spot. Here I deposited a succinct record of our condition and
purposes, and then directed our course south by west into the ice-fields.
[Sidenote: The Way Lost]
I was awakened one evening from a weary sleep in my fox-skins, to
discover that we had fairly lost our way. The officer at the helm of
the leading boat, misled by the irregular shape of a large iceberg that
crossed his track, had lost the main lead some time before, and was
steering shore-ward far out of the true course. The little canal in
which he had locked us was hardly two boats'-lengths across, and lost
itself not far off in a feeble zigzag both behind and before us: it was
evidently closing, and we could not retreat.
Without apprising the men of our misadventure, I ordered the boats to be
hauled up, and, under pretence of drying the clothing and stores, made
a camp on the ice. A few hours after, the weather cleared enough for
the first time to allow a view of the distance, and M'Gary and myself
climbed a berg some three hundred feet high for the purpose. It was truly
fearful: we were deep in the recesses of the bay, surrounded on all sides
by stupendous icebergs and tangled floe-pieces. My sturdy second officer,
not naturally impressible, and long accustomed to the vicissitudes of
whaling life, shed tears at the prospect.
There was but one thing to be done: cost what it might, we must harness
our sledges again and retrace our way to the westward. One sledge had
been already used for firewood; the _Red Eric_, to which it had belonged,
was now cut up, and her light cedar planking laid upon the floor of the
other boats; and we went to work with the rue-raddies as in the olden
time. It was not till the third toilsome day was well spent that we
reached the berg which had bewildered our helmsman. We hauled over its
tongue, and joyously embarked again upon a free lead, with a fine breeze
from the north.
Our little squadron was now reduced to two boats. The land to the
northward was no longer visible; and whenever I left the margin of the
"fast" to avoid its deep sinuosities, I was obliged to trust entirely to
the compass. We had at least eight days' allowance of fuel on board; but
our provisions were running very low, and we met few birds, and failed to
secure any larger game. We saw several large seals upon the ice, but they
were too watchful for us; and on two occasions we came upon the walrus
sleeping,--once within actual lance-thrust; but the animal charged in the
teeth of his assailant and made good his retreat.
Although the low diet and exposure to wet had again reduced our party,
there was no apparent relaxation of energy; and it was not until some
days later that I found their strength seriously giving way.
[Sidenote: The Boats in Danger]
I well remember our look of blank amazement as, one day, the order
being given to haul the _Hope_ over a tongue of ice, we found that she
would not budge. At first I thought it was owing to the wetness of the
snow-covered surface in which her runners were; but, as there was a heavy
gale blowing outside, and I was extremely anxious to get her on to a
larger floe to prevent being drifted off, I lightened her cargo and set
both crews upon her. In the land of promise off Crimson Cliffs, such a
force would have trundled her like a wheelbarrow: we could almost have
borne her upon our backs. Now, with incessant labour and standing hauls,
she moved at a snail's pace.
The _Faith_ was left behind, and barely escaped destruction. The outside
pressure cleft the floe asunder, and we saw our best boat, with all our
stores, drifting rapidly away from us. The sight produced an almost
hysterical impression upon our party. Two days' want of bread, I am sure,
would have destroyed us; and we had now left us but eight pounds of shot
in all. To launch the _Hope_ again, and rescue her comrade or share her
fortunes, would have been the instinct of other circumstances; but it
was out of the question now. Happily, before we had time to ponder our
loss, a flat cake of ice eddied round near the floe we were upon, M'Gary
and myself sprang to it at the moment, and succeeded in floating it
across the chasm in time to secure her. The rest of the crew rejoined
her by only scrambling over the crushed ice as we brought her in at the
hummock-lines.
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