SPITSBERGEN
(_continued_)
The summer town of Smeerenberg—Himkoff winters in North East
Land—Phipps reaches 80° 48´—Scoresby the elder reaches 81°
30´—Scoresby the younger—Voyage of the _Dorothea_ and _Trent_
under Buchan and Franklin—Parry reaches 82° 45´—Torell and
Nordenskiöld—Carlsen sails round Spitsbergen—Swedish North Polar
expedition under Nordenskiöld—Lamont—The Diana coal mine—Leigh
Smith—Conway.
This wintering of the _Salutation_ men occurred when the Spitsbergen
fisheries were most flourishing, the prosperity continuing for seven
more years. So lucrative was the trade that on Amsterdam Island under
Hakluyt Headland, within fifteen miles of 80° north latitude, about as
far from the North Pole as St. Malo is from John o' Groat's, there
sprang up as a summer resort the Dutch village of Smeerenberg. Such was
the bustle produced by the yearly visit of two or three hundred
double-manned vessels, containing from twelve thousand to eighteen
thousand men, that this village of the farthest north was as busy as a
manufacturing town. The incitement of prices proportionate to the
latitude attracted hundreds of annual settlers, who throve on the sale
of brandy, wine, tobacco, and sundries to the whale-fishers in shops of
all varieties, including bakehouses, where the blowing of a horn let the
sailors know that the bread had just been drawn hot from the oven. In
fact, hot rolls and every delicacy could be had in Smeerenberg, which
the Dutch averred was as flourishing as Batavia, founded by them a few
years before. And when winter was just about due every man—and
woman—went back to Holland. But the life of Smeerenberg was a short and
a merry one, for in 1640 the shore fisheries were failing, and a year or
so afterwards the lingerers of its last season left it for good,
clearing out from its houses of brick and wood, demolishing its
furnaces, removing its copper cauldrons and coolers and casks and
everything that could be taken away, and leaving it in desolation to be
occupied in the next and subsequent summers by polar bears.
Like all seaside resorts it had its rival. Close by is the
Cookery-of-Haarlem, abandoned at the same time, but rather more
hurriedly. When Martens went there on the 15th of July, 1671, he found
four houses still standing, in one of which were "several barrels or
kardels that were quite decayed, the ice standing in the same shape the
vessels had been made of: an anvil, smith's tongs, and other tools
belonging to the cookery, were frozen up in the ice; the kettle was
still standing as it was set, and the wooden troughs stood by it."
Behind these houses "are high mountains," he continues, "if one climbeth
upon these, as we do on others, and doth not mark every step with chalk,
one doth not know how to get down again: when you go up you think it to
be very easy to be down; but when you descend it is very difficult and
dangerous, so that many have fallen and lost their lives." Absurd as
this chalking of the steps may seem, there have been many who have taken
the hint from the careful Martens when climbing in Spitsbergen, and many
who have regretted not having done so.
In ordinary summers the west side of Spitsbergen is clear of ice, not so
the eastern side, the difference being due to the Gulf Stream, which,
though evidently failing, is traceable along the coast round Hakluyt
Headland and up to the ice barrier. In addition to this there is the
general cause, whatever it may be, which makes the western coasts of all
Arctic lands, isolated or not, warmer than the eastern. Greenland, for
instance, is more approachable in summer from Davis Strait than from the
Greenland Sea, Novaya Zemlya from Barents Sea than from Kara Sea, and so
on with all the islands and peninsulas of Asia and America. Hence all
this whaling was confined practically to the western harbours of West
Spitsbergen, the largest of the group of islands. The next largest,
North East Land, was never much visited except from Hinlopen Strait,
though the Russians from time to time took some interest in the north
and east harbours, and would have taken more, for it abounded in
reindeer, if the ice had not made the landing an enterprise of some
difficulty.
On the east coast of North East Land, in 1743, a Russian whaler was
caught in the pack, and the mate, Alexis Himkoff, remembering that a
house had been built there some years before, went on shore with his
godson, Ivan Himkoff, and two sailors, Scharapoff and Weregin, in search
of it, in case the ship should have to be abandoned. They found the
house, but, on returning to the shore next morning, could see nothing of
the ship, which had apparently been carried away and crushed in the ice.
They had brought with them a musket, a powder-horn with twelve charges
of powder, twelve bullets, an axe, a small kettle, a bag with about
twenty pounds of flour, a knife, a tinder-box and tinder, a bladder of
tobacco, and every man had his pipe. That was their outfit.
The house was thirty-six feet in length, and eighteen in height and
breadth. It contained a small antechamber about twelve feet broad, which
had two doors, one to close it from the outer air, the other admitting
to the inner room in which was a Russian stove, a kind of oven without a
chimney, serving at will for heating, for baking, or for sleeping on.
Realising that they had a long stay before them, they began by shooting
twelve reindeer, one for each bullet. They then repaired the house,
stopping up all the crevices with moss; and they then laid in a store of
fuel from the driftwood, there being no trees on the island. On the
beach they found some boards with nails in them, and a long iron hook
and a few other pieces of old iron. And also there was a root of a fir
tree in shape not unlike a bow. Those were the materials they had to
make the best of.
A large stone served for an anvil, a pair of deer horns did duty for
tongs, and with these and the fire, the iron hook was made into a
hammer; and then two of the nails were shaped into spear-heads, which
were tied to sticks from the driftwood with strips of deerskin. With
these weapons they began by killing a bear, whose flesh they ate, whose
skin they kept, and whose tendons they made into thread and a string for
the bow formed out of the root of the fir tree. More nails were forged
into arrow-heads, tied with sinew on to light sticks cut with the knife,
the shafts being feathered from the feathers of seafowl. With these
weapons they shot, before they had finished, two hundred and fifty
reindeer, and they kept the skins, as they did also those of a large
number of blue and white foxes, as we shall see in the sequel. In their
own protection they killed nine bears, the only one they deliberately
attacked being the first.
To be sure of keeping their fire alight they modelled a lamp out of
clay, which they filled with deer-fat, with twisted linen for a wick;
but the clay was too porous, the fat ran through it; so they made
another lamp of the same stuff, dried it in the air, heated it red hot,
and cooled it in a sort of thin starch made of flour and water,
strengthening the pottery by pasting linen rags over it. The result was
so successful that they made a second lamp as a reserve. Some wreckage
gave them a little cordage and a quantity of oakum, which came in for
lamp-wicks. The lamp, like the sacred fire, was never allowed to go out.
To make themselves clothes, they soaked skins in fresh water till the
hair could be pulled off easily, and rubbed them well, and then rubbed
deer fat into them until they were pliant and supple. Some of the skins
they prepared as furs. Out of nails they, after many failures, made awls
and needles, getting the eyes by piercing the heads with the point of
the knife, and smoothing and pointing them by rounding and whetting them
on a stone.
For six years they lived in this desert place. Then one of them,
Weregin, died of scurvy, and their gloomy forebodings as to which was to
be taken next were broken in upon by their sighting a ship, to which
they signalled with a flag made of deerskin. The signal was seen and
they were rescued; and they took back to Archangel two thousand pounds
weight of reindeer fat, their bales of skins and furs, their bow and
arrows and spears, and in short everything they possessed. And they
arrived there on the 28th of September, 1749, comfortably off from the
value of the goods they brought with them—the heroes of one of the very
best of true desert island stories.
Like most Russians they do not seem to have suffered much from the cold
or to have been inconvenienced by the summer heat, which is also
considerable. In 1773, on the 13th of June, when Phipps and Lutwidge
anchored in Fair Haven, round by Amsterdam Island, they found the
thermometer reach 58½° at noon and descend no lower than 51° at
midnight, and on the 16th it rose in the sun to 89½° till a light breeze
made it fall almost suddenly ten degrees. This was the expedition sent
out to the North Pole, mainly at the instigation of Daines Barrington,
Gilbert White's friend. The ships were the _Racehorse_ and _Carcass_;
and, as every one knows, or ought to know, as midshipman with Captain
Lutwidge went Horatio Nelson, then a boy of fourteen, who was to figure
largely in the world, though on this occasion he did nothing remarkable
beyond attacking a polar bear, whose skin he thought would make a nice
present for his father, and bringing his boat to the rescue when one of
the _Racehorse_ boats was attacked by walruses. For another thing the
expedition is memorable, that being that the useful apparatus for the
distillation of fresh water from sea water, known to every seafarer, was
first used on this voyage, Dr. Irving, its inventor, being the surgeon
of the _Racehorse_. Another item to be noted is that Phipps had with him
a Cavendish thermometer, which he tried the day after he crossed the
Arctic Circle, and found that at a depth of 780 fathoms the temperature
was 26°, while at the surface it was 48°.
Phipps did all he could to go north, and, in longitude 14° 59´ east,
reached 80° 48', the nearest to the Pole up to then, but he was foiled
by the ice barrier, which he tried to penetrate again and again. He got
his ships caught in the ice and took to his boats, thinking he would
have to abandon them, when fortunately the pack drifted south, and the
vessels, clearing themselves under sail, caught the boats up and took
them on board. Then he went along the edge of the ice westward, and,
finding no opening, gave the venture up and sailed for home.
The next to do good work within this area was William Scoresby the
elder, whose only equal as a whale-fisher was his son. To him we owe the
invention of the crow's nest, that cylindrical frame covered with
canvas, entrance to which is given by a trap-hatch in the base, reached
by a Jacob's ladder from the topmast crosstrees, the conning-tower, so
to speak, carried since by every ship on Arctic service. He was also the
inventor of the ice-drill and many another implement and device used in
Polar navigation; and he it was who sloped off his fore and main courses
to come inboard to a boom fitted to the foot, used by every whaler, by
which, in fact, you may know them. He also, long before the _America_,
discovered the advantage of flat sails, and, in order to get his weights
well down, he filled his casks with water as ballast and packed them
with shingle, so that, instead of going out light, he was in the best of
trim, with a power of beating to windward that took him to the fishing
ground in double quick time and further into the ice, when he chose,
than any of his competitors.
[Illustration: WHALERS AMONG ICEBERGS]
Out in the _Resolution_ in 1806 he saw from his crow's nest, in which he
often spent a dozen hours at a stretch, that below the ice-blink—the
white line in the sky which betokens the presence of ice—there was a
blue-grey streak denoting open water, and that the motion of the sea
around the ship must be due to a swell, which could only come from open
water to the northward. On the 13th of May he started for this. By
sawing the ice, hammering at it, dropping his boats on to it from the
bow, sallying the ship—that is, rolling her by running the crew
backwards and forwards across her deck—and, in fact, using every means
he could think of, he passed the barrier in the eightieth parallel, and,
on the 24th of June, attained 81° 30´, the farthest north ever reached
by a sailing vessel in these seas. On that day there was not a ship
within three hundred and fifty miles of the _Resolution_. The bold
venture proved a thorough success; in thirty-two days he filled up with
twenty-four whales, two seals, two walruses, and a narwhal—one of the
most profitable of his thirty voyages.
In this voyage the chief officer was his son, William Scoresby the
younger, whose _Arctic Regions_ is the best book ever written on the
northern seas. Sent by his father to Edinburgh University where he
studied almost every branch of natural and physical science, he was
thoroughly equipped for his task, and his practical experience as a
whaling captain and trained observer stood him in such stead that his
book is still the basis of all scientific Polar research. His
description of the Spitsbergen coast as seen from a ship is as faithful
to-day as when he wrote it. "Spitsbergen and its islands, with some
other countries within the Arctic Circle, exhibit a kind of scenery
which is altogether novel. The principal objects which strike the eye
are innumerable mountainous peaks, ridges, precipices, or needles,
rising immediately out of the sea to an elevation of 3000 or 4000 feet,
the colour of which, at a moderate distance, appears to be blackish
shades of brown, green, grey and purple; snow or ice, in striæ or
patches, occupying the various clefts and hollows in the sides of the
hills, capping some of the mountain summits, and filling with extended
beds the most considerable valleys; and ice of the glacier form,
occurring at intervals all along the coast, in particular situations as
already described, in prodigious accumulations. The glistening or
vitreous appearance of the icy precipices; the purity, whiteness, and
beauty of the sloping expanse formed by their snowy surfaces; the gloomy
shade presented by the adjoining or intermixed mountains and rocks,
perpetually covered with a mourning veil of black lichens, with the
sudden transitions into a robe of purest white, where patches or beds of
snow occur, present a variety and extent of contrast altogether
peculiar; which, when enlightened by the occasional ethereal brilliancy
of the Polar sky, and harmonised in its serenity with the calmness of
the ocean, constitute a picture both novel and magnificent. There is,
indeed, a kind of majesty, not to be conveyed in words, in these
extraordinary accumulations of snow and ice in the valleys, and in the
rocks above rocks and peaks above peaks, in the mountain groups, seen
rising above the ordinary elevation of the clouds, and terminating
occasionally in crests of snow, especially when you approach the shore
under the shelter of the impenetrable density of a summer fog; in which
case the fog sometimes disperses like the drawing of a curtain, when the
strong contrast of light and shade, heightened by a cloudless atmosphere
and powerful sun, bursts on the senses in a brilliant exhibition
resembling the production of magic."
In 1818 there went out the first British expedition prepared to winter
in the north. The vessels were two whalers bought into the navy, the
_Dorothea_ and _Trent_, the first under the command of David Buchan, the
other under that of John Franklin. Neither officer had been in the
Arctic region before, but Buchan had done excellent service in surveying
Newfoundland, and Franklin had been marked for special duty owing to his
work in Australian seas under his cousin, Matthew Flinders, and for the
manner in which on his way home he had acted as signal officer to
Nathaniel Dance in that ever-memorable victory off the Straits of
Malacca, when the Indiamen defeated and pursued a French fleet under
Admiral Linois. Dance's report gave Franklin a further chance of
distinction, for it led to his appointment to the _Bellerophon_, whose
signal officer he was during the battle of Trafalgar.
They were instructed to proceed to the North Pole, thence to continue on
to Bering Strait direct, or by the best route they could find, to make
their way to the Sandwich Islands or New Albion, and thence to come back
through Bering Strait eastward, keeping in sight and approaching the
coast of America whenever the position of the ice permitted them so to
do. A nice little programme. But they started too early in a bad season;
they did not get so far north as Phipps; they made accurate surveys and
other observations; in exploration they did little; and they had many
adventures.
As they ranged along the western side of Spitsbergen the weather was
severe. The snow fell in heavy showers, and several tons' weight of ice
accumulated about the sides of the _Trent_, and formed a complete casing
to the planks, which received an additional layer at each plunge of the
vessel. So great, indeed, was the accumulation about the bows, that they
were obliged to cut it away repeatedly with axes to relieve the bowsprit
from the enormous weight that was attached to it: and the ropes were so
thickly covered with ice that it was necessary to beat them with large
sticks to keep them in a state of readiness. In the gale the ships
parted company, but they met again at the rendezvous in Magdalena Bay.
[Illustration: SIR JOHN FRANKLIN]
Later on, off Cloven Cliff, there was a walrus fight begun by the seamen
and continued by the walruses when they found themselves more at home in
the water than on the ice. They rose in numbers about the boats, rushing
at them, snorting with rage, endeavouring to upset them or stave them in
by hooking their tusks on the gunwales, or butting at them with their
heads. "It was the opinion of our people," says Beechey, "that in this
assault the walruses were led on by one animal in particular, a much
larger and more formidable beast than any of the others; and they
directed their efforts more particularly towards him, but he withstood
all the blows of their tomahawks without flinching, and his tough hide
resisted the entry of the whale lances, which were, unfortunately, not
very sharp, and soon bent double. The herd was so numerous, and their
attacks so incessant, that there was not time to load a musket, which,
indeed, was the only effectual mode of seriously injuring them. The
purser, fortunately, had his gun loaded, and the whole now being nearly
exhausted with chopping and sticking at their assailants, he snatched it
up, and, thrusting the muzzle down the throat of the leader, fired into
him. The wound proved mortal, and the animal fell back amongst his
companions, who immediately desisted from their attack, assembled round
him, and in a moment quitted the boat, swimming away as hard as they
could with their leader, whom they actually bore up with their tusks and
assiduously preserved from sinking."
On one occasion Franklin and Beechey, when out in a boat together,
witnessed the launch of an iceberg. They had approached the end of a
glacier and were trying to search into the recess of a deep cavern at
its foot when they heard a report as if of a cannon, and, turning to the
quarter whence it proceeded, perceived an immense piece of the front of
the cliff of ice gliding down from a height of two hundred feet at least
into the sea, and dispersing the water in every direction, accompanied
by a loud grinding noise, and followed by a quantity of water, which,
lodged in the fissures, made its escape in numberless small cataracts
over the front of the glacier. They kept the boat's head in the
direction of the sea and thus escaped disaster, for the disturbance
occasioned by the plunge of this enormous fragment caused a succession
of rollers, which swept over the surface of the bay, making its shores
resound as it travelled along it, and at a distance of four miles was so
considerable that it became necessary to right the _Dorothea_, which was
then careening, by instantly releasing the tackles which confined her.
The piece that had been disengaged wholly disappeared under water, and
nothing was seen but a violent boiling of the sea and a shooting up of
clouds of spray like that which occurs at the foot of a great cataract.
After a short time it reappeared, raising its head full a hundred feet
above the surface, with water pouring down from all parts of it; and
then, labouring as if doubtful which way it should fall, it rolled over,
and, after rocking about for some minutes, became settled. It was nearly
a quarter of a mile round and floated sixty feet out of the water, and
making a fair allowance for its inequalities, was computed to weigh
421,600 tons.
[Illustration: TRACK OF H.M.S. "DOROTHEA" AND "TRENT"]
There were frequent landings, often with difficulties in the return, due
generally to attempts at making a short cut to the shore or across the
ice. Of these short cuts the very shortest was that made by one of the
sailors named Spinks, who was out with a party in pursuit of reindeer.
The ardour of the chase had led them beyond the prescribed limits, and
when the signal was made for their return to the boat some of them were
upon the top of a hill. Spinks, an active and zealous fellow, anxious to
be first at his post, thought he would outstrip his comrades by
descending the snow, which was banked against the mountain at an angle
of about 40° with the horizon, and rested against a small glacier on the
left. The height was about two thousand feet, and in the event of his
foot slipping there was nothing to impede his progress until he reached
the beach, either by the slope or the more terrific descent of the face
of the glacier. He began his career by digging his heels into the snow,
the surface of which was rather hard. At first he got on very well, but
presently his foot slipped, or the snow was too hard for his heel to
make an impression, and he increased in speed, keeping his balance,
however, by means of his hands. In a very short time his descent was
fearfully quick; the fine snow flew about him like dust, and there
seemed but little chance of his reaching the bottom in safety,
especially as his course was taking him in the direction of the glacier.
For a moment he was lost sight of behind a crag of the mountain, and it
was thought he had gone over the glacier, but with great presence of
mind and dexterity, "by holding water first with one hand and then the
other," to use his own expression, he contrived to escape the danger,
and, like a skilful pilot, steered into a place of refuge amid a bed of
soft snow recently drifted against the hill. When he extricated himself
from the depths into which he had been plunged he had to hold together
his tattered clothes, for he had worn away two pairs of trousers and
something more. That was all his damage, and we shall meet with him
again in the west out with Franklin and Captain Back.
In the morning of the 30th of July the ships found themselves caught in
a gale with the ice close to leeward. The only way of escaping
destruction seemed to be by taking refuge in the pack. It was a
desperate expedient rarely resorted to by whalers and only in extreme
cases. In the _Trent_ a cable was cut up into thirty-foot lengths, and
these, with plates of iron four feet square, supplied as fenders, and
some walrus hides, were hung around her, mainly about her bows; the
masts were secured with extra ropes, and the hatches were battened and
nailed down. When a few fathoms from the ice those on board searched
with anxiety for an opening in the pack, but saw nothing but an unbroken
line of furious breakers with huge masses heaving and plunging with the
waves and dashing together with a violence that nothing but a solid body
seemed likely to withstand; and the noise was so great that the orders
to the crew could with difficulty be heard. At one moment the sea was
bursting upon the ice blocks and burying them deep beneath its wave, and
the next, as the buoyancy brought them up again, the water was pouring
in foaming cataracts over their edges, the masses rocking and labouring
in their bed, grinding and striving with each other until one was either
split with the shock or lifted on to the top of its neighbour. Far as
the eye could reach the turmoil stretched, and overhead was the
clearness of a calm and silvery atmosphere bounded by a dark line of
storm cloud lowering over the masts as if to mark the confines within
which no effort would avail.
"At this instant," says Beechey, "when we were about to put the strength
of our little vessel in competition with that of the great icy
continent, and when it seemed almost presumption to reckon on the
possibility of her surviving the unequal conflict, it was gratifying in
the extreme to observe in all our crew the greatest calmness and
resolution. If ever the fortitude of seamen was fairly tried it was
assuredly not less so than on this occasion; and I will not conceal the
pride I felt in witnessing the bold and decisive tone in which the
orders were issued by the commander of our little vessel, and the
promptitude and steadiness with which they were executed by the crew."
The brig was steered bow on to the ice. Every man instinctively gripped
his hold, and with his eyes fixed on the masts awaited the moment of
concussion. In an instant they all lost their footing, the masts bent
with the shock, and the timbers cracked below; the vessel staggered and
seemed to recoil, when the next wave, curling up under her counter,
drove her about her own length within the edge of the ice, where she
gave a roll and was thrown broadside to the wind by the succeeding wave
which beat furiously against her stern, bringing her lee in touch with
the main mass and leaving her weather side exposed to a floe about twice
her size. Battered on all sides, tossed from fragment to fragment,
nothing could be done but await the issue, for the men could hardly keep
their feet, the motion being so great that the ship's bell, which in the
heaviest gale had never struck of itself, now tolled so continuously
that it had to be muffled.
After a time an effort was made to put the vessel before the wind and
drive her further into the pack. Some of the men gained the
fore-topsail-yard and let a reef out of the sail, and the jib was
dragged half up the stay by the windlass. The brig swung into position,
and, aided by a mass under her stern, split the block, fourteen feet
thick, which had barred her way, and made a passage for herself into
comparative safety; and after some four hours the gale moderated.
Strained and leaking the _Trent_ had suffered much, but the _Dorothea_
had been damaged more; and both returned to Fair Haven, where it was
found hopeless to continue the voyage, and thence, when the ships had
been temporarily repaired, they sailed for England. The expedition had
not done much, but it had given their Arctic schooling to Franklin,
Beechey, and Back.
In May, 1827, Parry, in the _Hecla_, was forced to run into the ice, but
not quite in the same way as Buchan did. He was beset for three weeks,
and then, getting clear, proceeded to the Seven Islands to the north of
Spitsbergen, on one of which, Walden, he placed a reserve of provisions;
the ship, after reaching 81° 5´, going to Treurenberg Bay, in Hinlopen
Strait, to await his return.
[Illustration: PARRY CAMPED ON THE ICE]
From here he made his dash for the Pole. He had with him two boats of
his own design, seven feet in beam, twenty in length. On each side of
the keel was a strong runner, shod with steel, upon which the boat stood
upright on the ice. They were so built that they would have floated as
bags had they been stove in. On ash and hickory timbers, an inch by an
inch and a half thick, placed a foot apart, with a half-timber of
smaller size between each, was stretched a casing of waterproof canvas
tarred on the outer side and protected by a skin of fir three-sixteenths
of an inch thick, over this came a sheet of stout felt, and over all a
skin of oak of the same thickness as the fir, each boat weighing about
fourteen hundredweight—that is the hull, as launched. One of these boats
was named the _Enterprise_, the other the _Endeavour_. They were
intended to be hauled by reindeer, but the state of the ice rendered
this impracticable and the men did the work themselves. Parry took
command of the _Enterprise_, the other being in charge of Lieutenant
James Clark Ross; and, altogether, officers and men numbered
twenty-eight.
From Little Table Island, where they left a reserve as they had done at
Walden, they started for the north—two heavy boats laden with food for
seventy days and clothing for twenty-eight men, with a compact equipment
including light sledges, travelling in a sea crowded or covered with ice
in every form, large and small, over which they were dragged up and down
hummocks, round and among crags and ridges, along surfaces of every kind
of ruggedness, of every slope and irregularity, the few flat stretches
broken with patches of sharp crystals or waist-deep snow; through lanes
and pools of water with frequent ferryings and transhipments, in
sunshine and fog, and, strange to say, frequently in pouring rain. They
travelled by night and rested by day, though, of course, there was
daylight all the time. "The advantages of this plan," says Parry, "which
was occasionally deranged by circumstances, consisted, first in our
avoiding the intense and oppressive glare from the snow during the time
of the sun's greatest altitude, so as to prevent in some degree the
painful inflammation in the eyes called snow-blindness which is common
in all snowy countries. We also thus enjoyed greater warmth during the
hours of rest and had a better chance of drying our clothes; besides
which no small advantage was derived from the snow being harder at night
for travelling. When we rose in the evening we commenced our day by
prayers, after which we took off our sleeping dresses and put on those
for travelling, the former being made of camlet lined with racoon skin,
and the latter of strong blue, box cloth. We made a point of always
putting on the same stockings and boots for travelling in, whether they
had dried during the day or not, and I believe it was only in five or
six instances that they were not either still wet or hard frozen." When
halted for rest the boats were placed alongside each other, with their
sterns to the wind, the snow or wet cleared out of them, and the sails,
held up by the bamboo masts and three paddles, were placed over them as
awnings with the entrance at the bow.
Progress was not great, sometimes fifty yards an hour, occasionally
twelve miles a day, that is on the ice, for soon it was apparent that
the distance gained by reckoning was greater than that given by
observation, and Parry realised to his dismay that the pack was drifting
south while he was going north. But he kept on till on the 21st of July
he reached 82° 45´, which remained the farthest north for forty-nine
years.
[Illustration: PARRY'S BOATS AMONG THE HUMMOCKS]
During the last few days he had been drifting south in the day almost as
far as he had advanced north in the night, and, having used up half his
provisions, he reluctantly abandoned the struggle as hopeless. "As we
travelled," he says, "by far the greater part of our distance on the
ice, three, and not infrequently, five times over, we may safely
multiply the road by 2½; so that our whole distance, on a very moderate
calculation, amounted to five hundred and eighty geographical miles, or
six hundred and sixty-eight statute miles; being nearly sufficient to
have reached the Pole in a direct line."
In 1858 a Swedish expedition under Otto Torell started from Hammerfest
for Spitsbergen. He was accompanied by A. Quennerstedt and Adolf Erik
Nordenskiöld. They explored Horn Sound, Bell Sound, and Green Harbour.
In Bell Sound they dredged with great success for mollusca; they made a
botanical collection, chiefly of mosses and lichens, found tertiary
plant fossils, and, in the North Harbour, carboniferous limestone beds
with the tertiary plant-bearing strata above them—in short, Nordenskiöld
entered upon his long and fruitful study of Spitsbergen geology. Three
years afterwards Torell took out another expedition, Nordenskiöld going
with him, which was to explore the northern coast and then make for the
far north; but the ice conditions kept them in Treurenberg Bay, where
they visited Hecla Cove and found Parry's flagstaff. In the course of
their journeys they noticed in Cross Bay the first known Spitsbergen
fern, _Cystopteris fragilis_; by the side of a freshwater lake in Wijde
Bay an Alpine char was picked up; and, at Shoal Point, Torell discovered
in a mass of driftwood a specimen of the unmistakable Entada bean, two
and a quarter inches across, brought there from the West Indies by the
Gulf Stream, as other specimens have been drifted to European shores.
In 1864, the year that Elling Carlsen found the navigation so open that
he passed the Northern Gate and sailed round Spitsbergen, Nordenskiöld,
at the head of a small expedition, was at work in Ice Fjord, and, unable
to go north on account of the ice, rounded South Cape, entered Stor
Fjord, visited Edge's Land and Barents Land, and from the summit of
White Mountain, near Unicorn Bay, rediscovered the west coast of the
island reported by Edge two hundred and fifty years before. In 1868, as
leader of the Swedish North Polar Expedition in the _Sofia_, he reached
81° 42´, in 17° 30´ east, the highest latitude then reached by a steam
vessel, and his farthest north; his next Polar venture, four years
afterwards, in the _Polhem_, ending in his having to winter in Mossel
Bay, where his generous endeavour to feed one hundred and one extra men,
who were ice-bound, on provisions intended for his own twenty-four,
would have ended in disaster had he not been relieved by Leigh Smith in
the _Diana_.
The _Diana_ was the steam yacht built for James Lamont, in which, like
Leigh Smith, he cruised for several seasons in the Arctic seas,
combining sport with exploration in a truly admirable way. To these two
yachtsmen we owe much of our knowledge of Spitsbergen, Novaya Zemlya,
and Franz Josef Land, but we can only give them passing mention here. We
must, however, find room for Lamont's useful find of the coal mine in
Advent Bay, from which he filled up the _Diana's_ bunkers. "When I paid
a visit to the coal mine," he says, "I found it quite a busy scene for a
quiet Arctic shore. The engineer and fireman directed the blasting, my
English hands quarried, while the Norwegians carried the sacks down the
hill. The old mate, the many-sidedness of whose character I have so much
valued on my various voyages, was digging away with the rest, though I
am sorry that in the sketch his weather-beaten face is turned away. All
the rest are portraits, and the reader will notice that Arctic work is
not done in the attractive uniforms known to Cowes and Ryde. The
coal-bed was about three feet thick, and lay very horizontally between
two layers of soft, mud-coloured limestone. It was harder to obtain than
I anticipated, because saturated, through all the cracks and
interstices, with water which had frozen into ice more difficult to
break through than the coal itself, thereby rendering these fissures
worse than useless in quarrying. This is tertiary coal, and is of fair
quality, but contains a good deal of sulphur. When we began to burn it,
so much water and ice was unavoidably mixed with it that the engineers
had to let it drain on deck in the hot sun and then mix it with an equal
bulk of Scotch coal. Consumed in this way the ten tons obtained in three
days was a useful addition to the fast-dwindling stock on board."
While Nordenskiöld was at Mossel Bay he attempted a journey to the
north, but was stopped by the ice at Seven Islands, and returned round
North East Land. It took him five days to pass across the twenty-three
miles between Phipps Island and Cape Platen over pyramids of angular ice
up to thirty feet high. On the coast, which he found extending, as Leigh
Smith had reported, much further to the east than was shown on the
charts, he met with the inland ice ending in precipices from two
thousand to three thousand feet high. Ascending this ice they had
scarcely gone a quarter of a mile before one of the men disappeared at a
place where the surface was level, and so instantaneously that he could
not even give a cry for help. When they looked into the hole they found
him hanging on to the drag-line, to which he was fastened with reindeer
harness, over a deep abyss. Had his arms slipped out of the harness, a
single belt, he would have been lost. Along the level surface every puff
of wind drove a stream of fine snow-dust, which, from the ease with
which it penetrated everywhere, was as the fine sand of the desert to
the travellers in the Sahara. By means of this fine snow-dust, steadily
driven forward by the wind, the upper part of the glacier—which did not
consist of ice, but of hard packed blinding white snow—was glazed and
polished so that it seemed to be a faultless, spotless floor of white
marble, or rather a white satin carpet. Examination showed that the
snow, at a depth of four to six feet, passed into ice, being changed
first into a stratum of ice crystals, partly large and perfect, then to
a crystalline mass of ice, and finally to hard glacier ice, in which
could still be observed numerous air cavities compressed by the
overlying weight; and, when, as the surface thaws, the pressure of the
enclosed air exceeds that of the superincumbent weight, these cavities
break up with the peculiar cracking sound heard in summer from the
glacier ice that floats about in the fjords. Occasionally broad channels
were crossed, of which the only way to ascertain the depth was to lower
a man into them, and frequently he had to be hoisted up again without
having reached the bottom; such danger areas causing so circuitous a
route that much progress was impossible.
Prior to the explorations of Sir Martin Conway in 1896, it was supposed
that this inland ice extended over all the islands of the group, an area
exceeding twenty thousand square miles. He, however, proved that so far
as West Spitsbergen was concerned, this was not the case. Crossing it he
found much of the interior a complex of mountains and valleys, amongst
which were many glaciers, as in Central Europe, but with no continuous
covering of ice, each glacier being a separate unit with its own
drainage system and catchment area, the valleys boggy and relatively
fertile, the hillsides bare of snow in summer up to more than a thousand
feet above sea-level. In the rise of the country from the sea it seems
to have come up as a plain which did not reach the level of perpetual
snow, so that as it rose it was cut down into valleys in the usual way
by the agency of water pouring off from the plateau over its edge down a
frost-split rock-face, the valleys gently sloped, the head necessarily
steep owing to the face of the cliff being stripped off as the
waterfalls cut their way back.
Since Nordenskiöld's first expedition we have learnt much of the geology
and physical features of Spitsbergen; and we hear no more of the poverty
of its flora and fauna. Now it has become a summer tourist resort we are
yearly increasing our knowledge of this land of no thunderstorms, for
centuries the largest uninhabited area on the globe, the only
considerable stretch on which there is no trace of human occupation
before its discovery by the moderns in 1596, when it was found by
Barents and his companions.