KANE’S EXPEDITION (_concluded_).
A Sad Entry—Farewell to the Brig—Departure for the South—Death of
Ohlsen—Difficult Travelling—The Open Water—The Esquimaux of Etah—A
Terrible Gale—Among the broken Floes—A Greenland Oasis—The Ice
Cliff—Eggs by the Hundred—An Anxious Moment—A Savage Feast—The
First Sign of Civilisation—Return to the Settlements—Home once
more.
Kane had now been two years in the arctic regions, and the day of release,
so far at least as their little brig was concerned, seemed as far off as
ever. Nearly all the men were invalids, and it took all the doctor’s
unremitting attention to keep them from utter despondency; others, again,
wanted only strength to become mutinous. Kane writes at the beginning of
March that his journal “is little else than a chronicle of sufferings.”
Brooks, his first officer, “as stalwart a man-o’-war’s-man as ever faced
an enemy,” burst into tears when he first saw himself in the glass. On the
4th their last remnant of fresh meat had been doled out, and the region
about their harbour ceased to yield any game.
May arrived, and with returning spring, and some supplies obtained from
the natives, the crew were so far restored to health that all but three or
four could take some part in the preparations for an immediate start to
the southward. It had become only too evident that their vessel, now
almost dismantled to the water’s edge—the woodwork having been needed for
fuel—_must_ be abandoned. But one month’s provisions remained, and they
were thirteen hundred miles from the nearest Danish settlement.
The last farewell to the brig was made with some degree of solemnity. It
was Sunday. After prayers and a chapter of the Bible had been read, Kane
addressed his men, not affecting to disguise from them the difficulties
still to be overcome, but reminding them how often an unseen Power had
already rescued them from peril. He was met in a right spirit, and a
memorial was shortly afterwards brought to him, signed by the whole
company, which stated that they entirely concurred in his attempt to reach
the south by means of boats, and that they were convinced of the necessity
of abandoning the brig. All then went on deck. The flags were hoisted and
hauled down again, and the men walked once or twice around the brig,
looking at her timbers, and exchanging comments upon the scars, which
reminded them of every stage of her dismantling. The figure-head—the fair
Augusta, the little blue girl with pink cheeks, who had lost her breast by
an iceberg and her nose by a nip off Bedevilled Reach—was taken from the
bows. “She is at any rate wood,” said the men, when Kane hesitated about
giving them the extra burden, “and if we cannot carry her far we can burn
her.”
Their boats were three in number, all of them well battered by exposure to
ice and storm, almost as destructive of their seaworthiness as the hot sun
of other regions. Two of them were cypress whale-boats, twenty-six feet
long, with seven feet beam, and three feet deep. These were strengthened
with oak bottom-pieces and a long string-piece bolted to the keel. A
washboard of light cedar, about six inches high, served to strengthen the
gunwale and give increased depth. A neat housing of light canvas was
stretched upon a ridge-line sustained fore and aft by stanchions. The
third boat was the little _Red Eric_. They mounted her on the old sledge,
the _Faith_, hardly relying on her for any purposes of navigation, but
with the intention of cutting her up for firewood in case their guns
should fail to give them a supply of blubber. Indeed, in spite of all the
ingenuity of the carpenter, Mr. Ohlsen, well seconded by the persevering
labours of M’Garey and Bonsall, not one of the boats was positively
seaworthy. The _Hope_ would not pass even charitable inspection, and they
expected to burn her on reaching water. The planking of all of them was so
dried up that it could hardly be made tight by caulking. The three boats
were mounted on the sledges, the provisions stowed snugly under the
thwarts; the chronometers, carefully boxed and padded, placed in the
stern-sheets of the _Hope_, in charge of Mr. Sontag. With them were such
of the instruments as they could venture to transport. Their powder and
shot, upon which their lives depended, were carefully distributed in bags
and tin canisters.
“There was,” says Kane, “no sign or affectation of spirit or enthusiasm
upon the memorable day when we first adjusted the boats to their cradles
on the sledges, and moved them off to the ice-foot. But the ice
immediately around the vessel was smooth, and as the boats had not
received their lading, the first labour was an easy one. As the runners
moved, the gloom of several countenances was perceptibly lightened. The
croakers had protested that we could not stir an inch. These cheering
remarks always reach a commander’s ears, and I took good care, of course,
to make the onset contradict them. By the time we reached the end of our
little level the tone had improved wonderfully, and we were prepared for
the effort of crossing the successive lines of the belt-ice, and forcing a
way through the smashed material which interposed between us and the
ice-foot.
“This was a work of great difficulty, and sorrowfully exhausting to the
poor fellows not yet accustomed to heave together. But in the end I had
the satisfaction, before twenty-four hours were over, of seeing our little
arks of safety hauled up on the higher plane of the ice-foot, in full time
for ornamental exhibition from the brig; their neat canvas housing rigged
tent-fashion over the entire length of each; a jaunty little flag, made
out of one of the commander’s obsolete linen shirts, decorated in stripes
from a disused article of stationery—the red-ink bottle—and with a very
little of the blue-bag in the star-spangled corner. All hands after this
returned on board. I had ready for them the best supper our supplies
afforded, and they turned in with minds prepared for their departure next
day.
“They were nearly all of them invalids, unused to open air and exercise.
It was necessary to train them very gradually. We made but two miles the
first day, and with a single boat; and, indeed, for some time after this I
took care that they should not be disheartened by overwork. They came back
early to a hearty supper and warm beds, and I had the satisfaction of
marching them back each recurring morning refreshed and cheerful. The
weather, happily, was superb.”
Repeated sledge journeys back to the brig, and afterwards from station to
station, were made, as they could not transport all their goods at one
time in their enfeebled state. No one worked harder than did the commander
himself. On one of his last visits to the brig, he, with the aid of Morton
and an Esquimaux, baked 150 lbs. of bread, and performed other culinary
operations for the benefit of the whole party.
Their journey was one of peril and difficulty, and constantly interrupted
by gales. The reflection would now and again force itself upon their minds
that a single storm might convert the precarious platform on which they
travelled into a tumultuous ice-pack. While crossing a weak part of the
ice one of their sledge-runners broke through, and but for the presence of
mind of Ohlsen, the load, boat and all, would have gone under. He saw the
ice give way, and by a violent exercise of strength, passed a capstan-bar
under the sledge, and thus bore the load till it was hauled on to safer
ice. He was a very powerful man, and might have done this without injuring
himself; but it would seem his footing gave way under him, forcing him to
make a still more desperate effort to extricate himself. It cost him his
life: he died three days afterwards, from the strain on his system.
But there were times when travelling was not so difficult, and when they
could hoist their sails, and run rapidly before the wind over solid ice.
It was a new sensation to the men. Levels which, under the slow labour of
the drag-rope, would have delayed them for hours, were glided over without
a halt, and the speed of the sledges made rotten ice nearly as available
as sound. They made more progress in one day in this manner than they had
previously in five. The spirits of the men rose; “the sick mounted the
thwarts; the well clung to the gunwale; and, for the first time for nearly
a year, broke out the sailors’ chorus, ‘Storm along, my hearty boys!’”
“Though the condition of the ice assured us,” says Kane, writing several
days later, “that we were drawing near the end of our sledge-journeys, it
by no means diminished their difficulty or hazards. The part of the field
near the open water is always abraded by the currents, while it remains
apparently firm on the surface. In some places it was so transparent that
we could even see the gurgling eddies below it; while in others it was
worn into open holes that were already the resort of wild fowl. But in
general it looked hard and plausible, though not more than a foot or even
six inches in thickness.
“This continued to be its character as long as we pursued the Lyttelton
Island channel, and we were compelled, the whole way through, to sound
ahead with the boat-hook or narwal-horn. We learned this precaution from
the Esquimaux, who always move in advance of their sledges when the ice is
treacherous, and test its strength before bringing on their teams. Our
first warning impressed us with the policy of observing. We were making
wide circuits with the whale-boats to avoid the tide-holes, when signals
of distress from men scrambling on the ice announced to us that the _Red
Eric_ had disappeared. This unfortunate little craft contained all the
dearly-earned documents of the expedition. There was not a man who did not
feel that the reputation of the party rested in a great degree upon their
preservation. It had cost us many a pang to give up our collections of
natural history, to which every one had contributed his quota of labour
and interest; but the destruction of the vouchers of the cruise—the
log-books, the meteorological registers, the surveys, and the
journals—seemed to strike them all as an irreparable disaster.
“When I reached the boat everything was in confusion. Blake, with a line
passed round his waist, was standing up to his knees in sludge, groping
for the document-box, and Mr. Bonsall, dripping wet, was endeavouring to
haul the provision-bags to a place of safety. Happily the boat was our
lightest one, and everything was saved. She was gradually lightened until
she could bear a man, and her cargo was then passed out by a line and
hauled upon the ice. In spite of the wet and the cold and our thoughts of
poor Ohlsen, we greeted its safety with three cheers.
“It was by great good fortune that no lives were lost. Stephenson was
caught as he sank by one of the sledge-runners, and Morton while in the
very act of drifting under the ice was seized by the hair of the head by
Mr. Bonsall, and saved!”
On June 16th their boats were at the open water. “We see,” says Kane, “its
deep indigo horizon, and hear its roar against the icy beach. Its scent is
in our nostrils and our hearts.” They had their 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 caulked, and swelled, and launched, and stowed,
before they could venture to embark in them. A rainy south-wester too,
which had met them on arrival, was now spreading with its black nimbus
over the sky as if they were to be storm-stayed on the precarious
ice-beach. It was a time of anxiety.
[Illustration: CAPE ALEXANDER, GREENLAND.]
Kane writes on July 18th, “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 Meteh and Mealik his wife, our old
acquaintance Mrs. Eiderduck, and their five children, commencing with
Myouk my body-guard, and ending with the ventricose little Accomadah.
There is Nessark and Anak his wife; and Tellerk, ‘the right-arm,’ and
Amannalik his wife; and Sip-see, and Marsumah, and Aniugnah—and who not? I
can name them every one, but they know us as well. We have found brothers
in a strange land.”
For many days after leaving their Esquimaux friends they were more or less
beset with broken floating ice, and the weather was often extremely bad.
Kane describes a gale, during which the boats were nearly swamped. At
length they reached a cleft or cave in the cliff, and were shoring up
their boat with blocks of ice, when they saw the welcome sight of a flock
of eider ducks, and they knew that they were at their breeding grounds.
[Illustration: THE HOME OF THE EIDER DUCK.]
“We remained almost three days in our crystal retreat, gathering eggs at
the rate of 1,200 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 in genial diet.” It
was the 18th of July before the ice allowed them to depart. In launching
the _Hope_ she was precipitated into the sludge below, carrying away rail
and bulwark, tumbling their best shot-gun into the sea, and, worst of all,
their kettle—soup-kettle, paste-kettle, tea-kettle, water-kettle, all in
one—was lost overboard. For some days after they made fair progress.
A little later and matters had not improved. The ice was again before them
in an almost unbroken mass. “Things grew worse and worse with us,” says
Kane; “the old difficulty of breathing came back again, and our feet
swelled to such an extent that we were obliged to cut open our canvas
boots. But the symptom which gave me most uneasiness was our inability to
sleep. A form of low fever which hung by us when at work had been kept
down by the thoroughness of our daily rest. All my hopes of escape were in
the refreshing influences of the halt.
“It must be remembered that we were now in the open bay, in the full line
of the great ice-drift to the Atlantic, and in boats so frail and
unseaworthy as to require constant baling to keep them afloat.
“It was at this crisis of our fortunes that we saw a large seal
floating—as is the custom of these animals—on a small patch of ice, and
seemingly asleep. It was an ussuk, and so large that I at first mistook it
for a walrus. Signal was made for the _Hope_ to follow astern, and,
trembling with anxiety, we prepared to crawl down upon him.
“Petersen, with the large English rifle, was stationed in the bow, and
stockings were drawn over the oars as mufflers. As we neared the animal
our excitement became so intense that the men could hardly keep stroke. I
had a set of signals for such occasions, which spared us the noise of the
voice; and when about three hundred yards off the oars were taken in, and
we moved on in deep silence with a single scull astern.
“He was not asleep, for he reared his head when we were almost within
rifle-shot; and to this day I can remember the hard, careworn, almost
despairing expression of the men’s thin faces as they saw him move: their
lives depended on his capture.
“I depressed my hand nervously, as a signal for Petersen to fire. M’Gary
hung upon his oar, and the boat, slowly but noiselessly sagging ahead,
seemed to me within certain range. Looking at Petersen, I saw that the
poor fellow was paralysed by his anxiety, trying vainly to obtain a rest
for his gun against the cut-water of the boat. The seal rose on his
fore-flippers, gazed at us for a moment with frightened curiosity, and
coiled himself for a plunge. At that instant, simultaneously with the
crack of our rifle, he relaxed his long length on the ice, and, at the
very brink of the water, his head fell helpless to one side.
“I would have ordered another shot, but no discipline could have
controlled the men. With a wild yell, each vociferating according to his
own impulse, they urged both boats upon the floes. A crowd of hands seized
the seal, and bore him up to safer ice. The men seemed half crazy: I had
not realised how much we were reduced by absolute famine. They ran over
the floe, crying and laughing, and brandishing their knives. It was not
five minutes before each man was sucking his bloody fingers, or mouthing
long strips of raw blubber.
“Not an ounce of this seal was lost. The intestines found their way into
the soup-kettles without any observance of the preliminary home processes.
The cartilaginous parts of the fore-flippers were cut off in the _mêlée_
and passed round to be chewed upon; and even the liver, warm and raw as it
was, bade fair to be eaten before it had seen the pot. That night, on the
large halting-floe, to which, in contempt of the dangers of drifting, we
happy men had hauled our boats, two entire planks of the _Red Eric_ were
devoted to a grand cooking-fire, and we enjoyed a rare and savage
feast....
“Two days after this a mist had settled down upon the islands which
embayed us, and when it lifted we found ourselves rowing in lazy time,
under the shadow of Karkamoot. Just then a familiar sound came to us over
the water. We had often listened to the screeching of the gulls or the
bark of the fox, and mistaken it for the ‘Huk’ of the Esquimaux; but this
had about it an inflection not to be mistaken, for it died away in the
familiar cadence of a ‘halloo.’
“‘Listen, Petersen! oars, men!’ ‘What is it?’—and he listened quietly at
first, and then, trembling, said, in a half whisper, ‘Dannemarkers!’
“I remember this the first tone of Christian voice which had greeted our
return to the world. How we all stood up and peered into the distant nook;
and how the cry came to us again, just as, having seen nothing, we were
doubting whether the whole was not a dream; and then how, with long
sweeps, the white ash cracking under the spring of the rowers, we stood
for the cape that the sound proceeded from, and how nervously we scanned
the green spots, which our experience, grown now into instinct, told us
would be the likely camping-ground of wayfarers!
“By-and-by—for we must have been pulling for a good half-hour—the single
mast of a small shallop showed itself; and Petersen, who had been very
quiet and grave, burst out into an incoherent fit of crying, only relieved
by broken exclamations of mingled Danish and English. ‘’Tis the Upernavik
oil-boat, the _Fraulein Flaischer_! Carlie Mossyn, the assistant cooper,
must be on his road to Kingatok for blubber. The _Mariane_ (the one annual
ship) has come, and Carlie Mossyn’—and here he did it all over again,
gulping down his words and wringing his hands.
“It was Carlie Mossyn, sure enough. The quiet routine of a Danish
settlement is the same year after year, and Petersen had hit upon the
exact state of things. The _Mariane_ was at Proven, and Carlie Mossyn had
come up in the _Fraulein Flaischer_ to get the year’s supply of blubber
from Kingatok.
“Here we first got our cloudy vague idea of what had passed in the world
during our absence. The friction of its fierce rotation has not much
disturbed this little outpost of civilisation, and we thought it a sort of
blunder as he told us that France and England were leagued with the
Mussulman against the Greek Church. He was a good Lutheran, this assistant
cooper, and all news with him had a theological complexion.
“‘What of America? eh, Petersen?’—and we all looked, waiting for him to
interpret the answer.
“‘America?’ said Carlie; ‘we don’t know much of that country here, for
they have no whalers on the coast; but a steamer and a barque passed up a
fortnight ago, and have gone out into the ice to seek your party.’
“How gently all the lore of this man oozed out of him! he seemed an
oracle, as, with hot tingling fingers pressed against the gunwale of the
boat, we listened to his words. ‘Sebastopol aint taken.’ Where and what
was Sebastopol?
“But ‘Sir John Franklin?’ There we were at home again—our own delusive
little speciality rose uppermost. Franklin’s party, or traces of the dead
which represented it, had been found nearly a thousand miles to the south
of where we had been searching for them. He knew it; for the priest
(Pastor Kraag) had a German newspaper which told all about it. And so we
‘out oars’ again, and rowed into the fogs.
“Another sleeping halt was passed, and we have all washed clean at the
fresh-water basins, and furbished up our ragged furs and woollens.
Kasarsoak, the snow top of Sanderson’s _Hope_, shows itself above the
mists, and we hear the yelling of the dogs. Petersen had been foreman of
the settlement, and he calls my attention, with a sort of pride, to the
tolling of the workmen’s bell. It is six o’clock. We are nearing the end
of our trials. Can it be a dream?
“We hugged the land by the big harbour, turned the corner by the
brewhouse, and, in the midst of a crowd of children, hauled our boats for
the last time upon the rocks.
“For eighty-four days we had lived in the open air. Our habits were hard
and weatherworn. We could not remain within the four walls of a house
without a distressing sense of suffocation. But we drank coffee that night
before many a hospitable threshold, and listened again and again to the
hymn of welcome, which, sung by many voices, greeted our deliverance.”
They had been eighty-four days on the trip.
Kane and his party received all manner of kindness from the Danes of
Upernavik. After stopping there nearly a month, and recruiting their
health, they left for Godhavn on a Danish vessel, the captain of which had
engaged to drop them at the Shetland Islands, should no other or better
opportunity occur. Just as they were leaving Godhavn, however, the
look-out man at the hill-top announced a steamer in the distance. It drew
near, with a barque in tow, and they soon recognised the stars and stripes
of their own country. All the boats of the settlement put out to her.
“Presently,” says the interesting narrative we have followed, “we were
alongside. An officer whom I shall ever remember as a cherished friend,
Captain Hartstene, hailed a little man in a ragged flannel shirt, ‘Is that
Dr. Kane?’ and with the ‘Yes!’ that followed the rigging was manned by our
countrymen, and cheers welcomed us back to the social world of love which
they represented.” This U.S. man-of-war which had been sent especially to
search for them, had been several weeks among the northward ice before
they returned, so fortunately, to Godhavn. A few weeks later Kane was
being honoured as only Americans honour those whom they highly esteem.
Later, in many ways, he received the fullest recognition in our own
country. It is sad to know that he, who had laboured so hard for the
welfare of his men, and not merely for science or personal ambition, was
the first to pass away. His slight frame could not stand the many drafts
which had been put on its endurance, and scarcely fourteen months elapsed
from the period of his return till the sad news of his death shocked not
merely the world of science but a world of friends, many of whom had never
known him in the flesh, but who, from his writings and good report, had
learned to love him.
[Illustration: GODHAVN, A DANISH SETTLEMENT IN DISCO ISLAND, GREENLAND.]