CAPE CHELYUSKIN
Chelyuskin reaches the cape—The Laptefs—Deschnef's voyage through
Bering Strait—Nordenskiöld's voyages to the Yenesei—The Siberian
tundra—The voyage of the _Vega_—Nordenskiöld rounds Cape
Chelyuskin—Endeavour to reach the Siberian Islands—Liakhoff's
discovery—The _Vega_ passes the Cape North of Captain Cook—Frozen
in within six miles of Cape Serdze Kamen—Completes the North-east
Passage—Nansen's voyage—The _Fram_—Her drift in the ice—Nansen and
Johansen start for the Pole—They reach 86° 13´ 6˝—Their journey to
Frederick Jackson Island—The meeting with Jackson—Sverdrup's
voyage to Spitsbergen.
The tundras and shores of Siberia abound with obstacles to exploration,
and yet a third of the threshold of the Polar regions has been surveyed
along their line. No spot remains unvisited on the northern margin of
the Asiatic mainland, the northernmost point of which is Cape Chelyuskin
in 77° 36·8´, so that the Arctic Circle sweeps inland for 770 miles to
the south of it—in other words the cape is practically half-way between
the Circle and the Pole.
[Illustration: CAPE CHELYUSKIN]
It was chiefly from the land that the northern coast-line was surveyed
by the Russians, whose Arctic work has been immense and thorough, though
not marked by any striking discoveries. Cape Chelyuskin was first
reached, in May, 1742, by the explorer whose name it bears, after a
sledge journey from the Chatanga, he being at the time second in command
to Khariton Laptef, whose first expedition in 1739 ended in the loss of
his ship three hundred miles from his winter quarters, to which he had
to travel on foot, losing twelve men by cold and exhaustion on the way.
Within the preceding four years the survey of the coast west of it had
been completed in four stages—from Archangel to Yalmal (that is Land's
End); from Yalmal to the Obi; from the Obi to the Yenesei; from the
Yenesei to Cape Sterlegof. In 1735 Pronchistschef, from the Lena, failed
to round Cape Chelyuskin from the east, and returned to the Olenek to
die but two days before his young wife, who was his companion on his
perilous voyage. Two years afterwards Dmitri Laptef began his
explorations east of the Lena which took him to Cape Baranoff, thus
joining up to the discoveries of the sable-hunters made a century
before, including those of Deschnef, who, in 1648, sailed from the
Kolyma to Kamchatka and went through Bering Strait more than thirty
years before Bering was born. Thus the route of the North-east Passage
was known, although no man had travelled the whole way either by land or
sea, before the task was undertaken by Nordenskiöld.
To begin with, Nordenskiöld made two voyages to the Yenesei. In the
first voyage he left Tromsoe in the _Proeven_ on the 14th of June, 1875,
and reached what he named Dickson Harbour at the mouth of the Yenesei on
the 15th of August. Sending back the _Proeven_, which returned through
Matyushin Shar, he, with Lundstrom the botanist and Stuxberg the
zoologist, and three walrus-hunters, embarked in a boat they had brought
out with them and proceeded up the estuary into the river; and during
the first six hundred miles they landed only twice. On the last day of
the month they caught up a steamer on which they became passengers.
"We were yet," says Nordenskiöld, "far to the north of the Arctic
Circle, and as many perhaps imagine that the little-known region we were
now travelling through, the Siberian tundra, is a desert wilderness
covered either by ice and snow, or by an exceedingly scanty moss
vegetation, it perhaps may not be out of place to say that this is by no
means the case. On the contrary, we saw snow during our journey up the
Yenesei only at one place, in a deep valley cleft some fathoms in
breadth, and the vegetation, especially on the islands which are
overflowed during the spring floods, is distinguished by a luxuriance to
which I have seldom seen anything comparable. Already had the fertility
of the soil and the immeasurable extent and richness in grass of the
pastures drawn forth from one of our walrus-hunters, a middle-aged man
who is owner of a little patch of ground among the fells of Northern
Norway, a cry of envy at the splendid land our Lord had given the
Russian, and of astonishment that no creature pastured, no scythe mowed,
the grass. Daily and hourly we heard the same cry repeated, and even in
louder tones, when some weeks after we came to the grand old forests
between Yeneseisk and Turuchansk, or to the nearly uninhabited plains on
the other side of Krasnojarsk covered with deep black earth, equal
without doubt in fertility to the best parts of Scania, and in extent
surpassing the whole Scandinavian peninsula. This judgment formed on the
spot by a genuine though illiterate agriculturist is not without
interest in forming an idea of the future importance of Siberia."
In fact, Siberia is particularly rich in mineral and agricultural
wealth, and this voyage, which opened up the route to and from Europe by
the natural outlets to the north, was of such commercial promise that
the explorer received for it the special thanks of the Russian
Government. As, however, there were people who looked upon it as an
exceptional voyage in an exceptional year, Nordenskiöld next season took
another voyage to the river, this time in the _Ymer_, carrying the first
instalment of merchandise so as to begin the trade; and he was followed
in a few weeks by Captain Joseph Wiggins, in the _Thames_, whose
subsequent voyages made the northern route well known.
Assured by the experience gained in these voyages that the North-east
Passage was possible to a steam vessel of moderate size, Nordenskiöld,
in 1878, was enabled to fit out the _Vega_, and sailed from Tromsoe on
the 31st of July. Three other vessels accompanied her, two bound for the
Yenesei, one for the Lena, the rendezvous being Khabarova. All went
well. On the 9th of August the _Fraser_ and _Express_ proceeded up the
Yenesei to discharge their cargoes and return to Europe in safety; next
day the _Vega_ and _Lena_ left for the eastward, and, after some risky
navigation among islands and through fog, lay for four days in Actinia
Haven, between Taimyr Island and the mainland, vainly waiting for clear
weather. Pushing on through fitful fog they sighted a promontory in the
north-east gleaming in the sunshine, and rounding its western horn
anchored in a bay open to the north and free from ice at the extremity
of Cape Chelyuskin. With the rounding of the most northerly point of the
Old World the first object of the expedition had been attained. The
salute fired in honour of the event having frightened away the only
polar bear who had stood watching the ship from the western horn, some
of the party landed, the botanists to discover that all the plants of
the peninsula had apparently been stopped on the outermost promontory
when trying to migrate further north. The flora was not extensive—a few
luxuriant lichens and twenty-three flowering plants, eight of them
saxifrages, most of them with a tendency to form semi-globular tufts;
the fauna consisted of the bear, a few seals, a walrus, two shoals of
white whales, some ducks and geese, and a number of sandpipers. Not so
long a list as was obtained at other landings, but by no means a bad one
for the half-way house to the Pole.
After passing the cape the course was laid for the New Siberian Islands,
but ice prevented progress in their direction beyond 77° 45´, the
highest north of the voyage, and the ship had to work her way out by the
route she went in, thus losing a day, which had serious consequences,
though it proved the correctness of Nordenskiöld's theory that the water
delivered by the Siberian rivers is, for a few months, of sufficiently
high temperature to give a clear passage to vessels content to keep near
the coast. On reaching the mouth of the Lena the ships parted company,
Captain Johannsen taking the smaller steamer up the river as intended
and bringing the news of the rounding of Cape Chelyuskin and the promise
of the North-east Passage being accomplished in one season, which was
not destined to be fulfilled.
Another attempt was then made by the _Vega_ to reach the islands to the
north, but after sighting the two most westerly of the group the shallow
sea was too crowded with rotten ice, and an idea of landing on Liakhoff
Island having to be given up for the same reason, the course was altered
so as to take the ship round Svjatoi Nos (the Holy Cape), where in
April, 1770, Liakhoff had noticed the mighty crowd of reindeer going
south. Justly considering they must have come over the ice from some
northern land, he went back on their tracks in a dog-sledge, discovering
two of the most southerly islands, and obtaining from Catherine the
Second as a reward the monopoly of hunting the foxes and collecting the
ivory there from the fossil mammoths he found in abundance.
Forced to keep to the channel along the coast, which daily became
narrower, the _Vega_ reached Cape Chelagskoi, and when off this
promontory Nordenskiöld saw the first natives during his voyage. Two
boats built of skin almost exactly similar to the oomiaks, or women's
boats, used by the Eskimos, came out to the ship, the men, women, and
children in them intimating by shouts and gestures that they wished to
come on board. The _Vega_ was brought-to that they might do so, but as
none of the Chukches could speak Russian and none of the Swedes knew
Chukche, the interview was not so satisfactory as expected, though the
universal language of pantomime with presents ensured a favourable
termination.
On the 12th of September the _Vega_ passed Irkaipii, the Cape North of
Captain Cook, and by rounding it Nordenskiöld joined up with the
westernmost limit of the Arctic discoveries of the great navigator. Cook
tried to weather it in August, 1778, but was turned back by fog and
snow, and thinking it was "not consistent with prudence to make any
further attempts to find a passage into the Atlantic this year in any
direction, so little was the prospect of succeeding," he sailed for
Hawaii, where his intention of making the attempt the ensuing summer
came to nought owing to his death.
On the 28th of September the _Vega's_ progress for the year was arrested
by her being frozen in for the winter on the eastern side of Kolyuchin
Bay in the northernmost part of Bering Strait, only six miles of ice
barring the way round Cape Serdze Kamen into the open sea. During her
detention of two hundred and sixty-four days the scientific
investigations of many kinds that were undertaken were of lasting
importance, as they had been throughout, and when she was released on
the 18th of July, 1879, to come home by way of Yokohama, the collections
and records she brought with her were simply enormous. No better work
with greater results was done by any Arctic expedition than during this
successful voyage, which was too well managed to have much adventure.
For it Nordenskiöld very justly claimed the reward of twenty-five
thousand guilders offered in 1596 by the States-General of Holland, the
endeavour to win which sent out Van Heemskerck, Barents, and Rijp.
[Illustration: ADOLF ERIK NORDENSKIÖLD]
We have seen how the Dutchmen built their house at Ice Haven mainly of
the driftwood from the Siberian rivers. Similar wood from probably the
same source is found on the shores of Greenland and of almost all the
northerly islands of the Arctic Ocean. Further, the Greenland flora
includes a series of Siberian plants apparently from seeds drifted there
by some current. Not only do trees and seeds travel by water from Asia
westward to America; at Godthaab, for instance, on the western coast of
Greenland, there was found a throwing-stick of a shape and ornamentation
used only by the Alaskan Eskimos; and three years after the foundering
of the _Jeannette_ to the north of the New Siberian Islands there were
found on the south-west coast of Greenland a number of articles in the
drift-ice that must have come from the sunken vessel. For these and
other reasons it seemed clear to Fridtjof Nansen that a current flowed
at some point between the Pole and Franz Josef Land from the Siberian
Arctic Sea to the Greenland coast, and so he set to work to organise his
daring expedition to strike this current well to the eastward, trusting
to its mercies to take him to or near the Pole.
In 1893, when the _Fram_ rounded Cape Chelyuskin, Nansen had found the
Kara Sea almost as open as Nordenskiöld had done, but had met with more
difficulties among the islands off the Taimyr Peninsula. A famous
vessel, the _Fram_, the first of her kind, built specially for the ice
to take her where it listed in the hope that she would drift to
discovery like the _Tegetthoff_, and not to disaster like the
_Jeannette_. The general idea was Nansen's, the carrying out of the idea
was Colin Archer's. As Nansen says: "We must gratefully recognise that
the success of the expedition was in no small degree due to this man."
Plan after plan did he make of the projected ship, model after model did
he prepare and abandon before he was satisfied: and never was a ship
more honestly built. With her double-ended deck plan, with a side of
such curve and slope that under ice pressure she would be lifted instead
of crushed between the floes, and with bow, stern, and keel so rounded
off that she would slip like an eel from the embrace of the ice, she was
of such solidity as to withstand any pressure from any direction. Her
stem of three stout oak beams, one inside the other, was four feet in
thickness, protected with iron; her rudder-post and propeller-post, two
feet across, had on either side a stout oak counter-timber following the
curvature upwards and forming a double stern-post, with the planking
cased with heavy iron plates; and between these timbers was a well for
the screw and another for the rudder, so that each could be hoisted on
deck, the rudder with the help of the capstan coming up in a few
minutes. Her frames, ten inches thick and twenty-one wide, stood close
together, carrying three layers of planking, giving altogether a side of
two feet or more of solid wood, so shored and stayed for strength that
the hold looked like a thicket of balks, joists, and stanchions. With a
length of 128 feet over all, a breadth of thirty-six, a depth of
seventeen, and a displacement of 800 tons, she was quite a
multum-in-parvo engined with a 220 horse-power triple expansion, so
contrived that in case of accident or for any other cause the cylinders
could be used singly or two together. Rigged as a three-masted
fore-and-aft schooner, with the mainmast much higher than the others—it
being unusually high, for the crow's-nest on the main-topmast was 102
feet above the water—she proved equal to the demands on her, though in
her case strength and warmth had to be thought of before weatherliness
and speed. But her speed was not so poor, for when steaming and sailing
after leaving Cape Chelyuskin on the 10th of September she was doing her
nine knots.
The day after she had entered the Nordenskiöld Sea came a walrus-hunt,
so graphically described by Nansen that we must find room for an
extract. "It was," he says, "a lovely morning—fine, still weather; the
walruses' guffaw sounded over to us along the clear ice surface. They
were lying crowded together on a floe a little to landward of us, blue
mountains glittering behind them in the sun. At last the harpoons were
sharpened, guns and cartridges ready, and Henriksen, Juell, and I set
off. There seemed to be a slight breeze from the south, so we rowed to
the north side of the floe, to get to leeward of the animals. From time
to time their sentry raised his head, but apparently did not see us. We
advanced slowly, and soon were so near that we had to row very
cautiously. Juell kept us going, while Henriksen was ready in the bow
with a harpoon, and I behind him with a gun. The moment the sentry
raised his head the oars stopped, and we stood motionless; when he sank
it again, a few more strokes brought us nearer. Body to body they lay,
close-packed on a small floe, old and young ones mixed. Enormous masses
of flesh they were. Now and again one of the ladies fanned herself by
moving one of her flippers backwards and forwards over her body; then
she lay quiet again on her back or side. More and more cautiously we
drew near. Whilst I sat ready with the gun, Henriksen took a good grip
of the harpoon shaft, and as the boat touched the floe he rose, and off
flew the harpoon. But it struck too high, glanced off the tough hide,
and skipped over the backs of the animals. Now there was a pretty to do!
Ten or twelve great weird faces glared upon us at once; the colossal
creatures twisted themselves round with incredible celerity, and came
waddling with lifted heads and hollow bellowings to the edge of the ice
where we lay. It was undeniably an imposing sight; but I laid my gun to
my shoulder and fired at one of the biggest heads. The animal staggered
and then fell head foremost into the water. Now a ball into another
head; this creature fell, too, but was able to fling itself into the
sea. And now the whole flock dashed in, and we, as well as they, were
hidden in the spray. It had all happened in a few seconds. But up they
came again immediately round the boat, the one head bigger and uglier
than the other—their young ones close beside them. They stood up in the
water, bellowed and roared till the air trembled, threw themselves
forward towards us, then rose up again, and new bellowings filled the
air. Then they rolled over and disappeared with a splash, then bobbed up
again. The water foamed and boiled for yards around—the ice-world that
had been so still before seemed in a moment to have been transformed
into a raging Bedlam. Any moment we might expect to have a walrus tusk
or two through the boat or to be heaved up or capsized. Something of
this kind was the very least that could happen after such a terrible
commotion. But the hurly-burly went on and nothing came of it."
The _Fram_ had to follow the coast owing to the thick pack barring the
way across the sea. The mouth of the Chatanga was passed, then that of
the Olenek, and then the influence of the warm water of the Lena being
apparent by the clearance of the floes, the course was laid straight for
the Pole in open water until 77° 44´ was reached, when, checked by the
long compact edge of ice shining through the fog, the route became
north-westerly until they stopped for fear they should get near land,
which was the very thing they wished to avoid; and on the 25th of
September in about 78½° north latitude—north-west of Sannikof Land—they
were frozen in.
Preparations for wintering began. The rudder was hauled up, the engine
was taken to pieces, each separate part oiled and laid away with the
greatest care—for Amundsen looked after it as if it were his own child—a
carpenter's shop was started in the hold, a smithy arranged first on
deck and then on the ice. But it all had to be replaced, even the engine
put together again, for the pack cleared away for a brief period, to
return, when again the shiftings were made; and when the windmill was
put up to drive the dynamo, the winter installation was in all senses
complete.
Slowly the _Fram_ drifted in her ice-berth, so slowly that at the end of
twelve months she had moved from point to point only 189 miles, having
returned no further west than the longitude of the Olenek; her highest
north, attained on the 18th of June, being 81° 46´. In the main the
drift was north-westerly, but three times it had boxed the compass in
irregular loops, the only constant thing about it being that, in no
matter what direction she was taken, the bow of the _Fram_ always
pointed south. Of grips she had many, some of the pressures were
enormous, once they were severe enough to suggest measures for her
abandonment, but she survived them all unscathed. Early in the drift it
became apparent that the ice was packing twice and slacking twice in
every twenty-four hours, and in this sea, as afterwards in the Atlantic
area, the influence of the tides, particularly the spring tides, was
unmistakable—as it was expected it would be—though in the deep Polar
basin the wind had more effect; and, in truth, the wind was a factor
throughout in the packing of the ice and in the drift's direction. One
thing was clear, that the current was not taking the _Fram_ across the
North Pole, but about half-way between it and Spitsbergen; and if the
Pole was to be reached some of the expedition must attempt to get there
over the ice. This meant leaving the ship, going north, and returning to
the nearest known land, for, owing to the irregularity of the drift, it
was hopeless to think of again reaching the _Fram_. During the second
winter the route of the ship trended more to the north, and, after a
loop all round in January, she reached 84° 4´ on the 14th of March in
the longitude of Cape Chelyuskin. Here Nansen and Lieutenant F. H.
Johansen, who rather than not join the _Fram_ had shipped in her as
stoker, left the ship with three sledges, two kayaks, and twenty-eight
dogs to go as far northward as they could, their expectation being that
they would reach the Pole in fifty days. Had they remained in the ship
until November they would have saved themselves trouble, for, as matters
turned out, the embarrassing drift took the _Fram_ within eight miles of
the farthest north they attained after twenty-three days of strenuous
endeavour.
[Illustration: Yours sincerely Fridtjof Nansen.]
The ice, fairly easy for a few days, soon became terrible in the
difficulties it offered to progress over it, and the continual toil of
hauling and carrying the sledges, and righting them when capsized, soon
told on the two men to such an extent as to tire them out so thoroughly
that sometimes in the evening they fell asleep as they went along. The
cold, too, proved singularly searching and severe. During the course of
the day the damp exhalations of the body little by little became
condensed in their outer garments, which became transformed into suits
of ice-armour, so hard that if they could have been got off they could
have stood by themselves, and they crackled audibly at every movement.
The clothes were so stiff that the sleeve of Nansen's coat rubbed deep
sores in his wrist, one of which got frost-bitten, the wound growing
deeper and deeper and nearly reaching the bone. "How cold we were," says
Nansen, "as we lay there shivering in the bag, waiting for the supper to
be ready! I, who was cook, was obliged to keep myself more or less awake
to see to the culinary operations, and sometimes I succeeded. At last
the supper was ready, was portioned out, and, as always, tasted
delicious. These occasions were the supreme moments of our existence,
moments to which we looked forward all day long. But sometimes we were
so weary that our eyes closed, and we fell asleep with the food on its
way to our mouths. Our hands would fall back inanimate with the spoons
in them and the food fly out on the bag."
The further they went the worse became the conditions. On the 8th of
April, with ridge after ridge and nothing but rubble to travel over, the
work became so disheartening that Nansen went on ahead on his skis and
from the highest hummocks viewed the state of affairs; and as far as the
horizon, lay a chaos of such character that progress across was
impracticable if he and Johansen were to return alive. Here, then, they
stopped, this being their northernmost limit, 128 miles from the _Fram_,
260 miles from the Pole, latitude 86° 13·6´, longitude 95°.
To reach this point they had been travelling north-westwards for six
days, the way due north being impassable; but on turning south they
seemed to enter another country; so much did the going improve after the
first mile that in three days they covered over forty miles. They were
making for Petermann Land, which does not exist, or for the
wide-stretching Franz Josef Land, also placed on the maps by Payer,
which Jackson had been cutting up into fragments while the _Fram_ was in
the ice. Further south difficulties thickened ahead of them till the
road became almost as bad as that to the north. Before they reached land
the hundred days they had allowed themselves had increased to more than
half as many again, their dogs had been killed one by one to yield food
for the rest, until only two remained; Nansen was helpless with
rheumatism for two days; and Johansen was nearly killed by a bear.
Through a chain of disasters caused by storms and fogs and snow and the
state of the ice, they threaded their way, sometimes by sledge,
sometimes by kayak, through mazes of open channels, leaping from floe to
floe and ferrying back to get their baggage over, hundreds of yards on
mere brash, dragging the sledges after them in constant fear of their
capsizing into the water. Then the ice gave out and, taking to their
kayaks, they sailed and paddled to what is now known as Frederick
Jackson Island in the north of the Franz Josef Archipelago.
Here they wintered, quite at a loss at first to know where they were,
owing to their watches having run down during a great effort of
thirty-six hours at a stretch, so that they did not know their
longitude, though they subsequently concluded they must be somewhere on
Franz Josef Land within 140 miles of Eira Harbour. They built a hut and
altogether lived passably well, there being no lack of food, thanks
mainly to the bears, whose visits were embarrassing in their frequency
though the visitors were not unwelcome when they came to stay.
On the 19th of May they set out for the south, down British Channel,
with their sledges and kayaks, and five days afterwards, when off Cape
M'Clintock, while Johansen was busy lashing the sail and mast securely
to the deck of his kayak to prevent their being blown away, Nansen went
on ahead to look for a camping ground and fell through a crack in the
ice which had been hidden by the snow. He tried to get out, but with his
skis firmly fastened could not pull them up through the rubble of ice
which had fallen into the water on the top of them, and, being harnessed
to the sledge, he could not turn round. Fortunately, as he fell, he had
dug his staff into the ice on the opposite side of the crack, and
holding himself up with its aid, and the arm he had got over the edge of
the ice, he waited patiently for Johansen to come and pull him out. When
he thought a long time had passed and felt the staff giving way and the
water creeping further up his body, he called out but received no
answer; and it was not until the water had reached his chest that
Johansen came and pulled him out.
For a few days they were storm-bound. On the 3rd of June they started
again down the channel, their whereabouts still a mystery to them,
nothing in the least like it being on their map. Nine days afterwards,
after rounding Cape Barents on Northbrook Island, the kayaks, which had
been left moored to the edge of the ice, got adrift. Nansen, running
down from the hummock, from which he had been looking round, threw off
some of his clothes and sprang into the water. The wind was off the ice,
and the kayaks with their high rigging were moving away as fast as he
could swim. It seemed more than doubtful if he could reach them. But all
their hope was there, all they had was on board; they had not even a
knife with them, and whether he sank or turned back amounted to much the
same thing. When he tired he turned over and swam on his back, and then
he could see Johansen walking restlessly up and down on the ice, unable
to do anything, and having the worst time he ever lived through. But the
wind lulled, and when Nansen turned over he saw he was nearing the
kayaks, and though his limbs were stiffening and losing all feeling, he
put all the strength he could into his strokes, and eventually was able
to reach them. He tried to pull himself up, but was so stiff with cold
that he could not do so. For a moment he thought he was too late; but
after a little he managed to swing one leg up on to the edge of the
sledge, which lay on the deck, and in this way he scrambled on board.
The kayaks were lashed together so as to form a double boat, and the
only way in which, owing to his stiffness, he could paddle them was to
take one or two strokes on one side and then step into the other kayak
and take a few strokes on the other side. The return was consequently
slow, but it was a return, though the ice was reached a long way from
where the drifting had begun.
Next day but one came another perilous episode. "Towards morning," says
Nansen, "we rowed for some time without seeing any walrus, and now felt
more secure. Just then we saw a solitary rover pop up a little in front
of us. Johansen, who was in front at the time, put in to a sunken ledge
of ice; and although I really thought that this was caution carried to
excess, I was on the point of following his example. I had not gone so
far, however, when suddenly the walrus shot up beside me, threw himself
on to the edge of the kayak, took hold further over the deck with one
flipper, and as it tried to upset me aimed a blow at the kayak with its
tusks. I held on as tightly as possible, so as not to be upset into the
water, and struck at the animal's head with the paddle as hard as I
could. It took hold of the kayak once more and tilted me up so that the
deck was almost under water, then let go and raised itself right up. I
seized my gun, but at the same moment it turned round and disappeared as
quickly as it had come. The whole thing had happened in a moment, and I
was just going to remark to Johansen that we were fortunate in escaping
so easily from that adventure, when I noticed that my legs were wet. I
listened, and now heard the water trickling into the kayak under me. To
turn and run her in on to the sunken ledge of ice was the work of a
moment, but I sank there. The thing was to get out and on to the ice,
the kayak filling all the time. The edge of the ice was high and loose,
but I managed to rise; and Johansen, by tilting the sinking kayak over
to starboard, so that the leak came above the water, managed to bring
her to a place where the ice was low enough to admit of our drawing her
up. All I possessed was floating about inside, soaked through. So here
we lie, with all our worldly goods spread out to dry and a kayak that
must be mended before we can face the walrus again. It is a good big
rent that he has made, at least six inches long; but it is fortunate
that it was no worse."
The kayak was mended, and, after a long rest, it was past noon on the
17th of June when Nansen turned out to prepare breakfast. After doing so
he went up on a hummock to look around. Flocks of little auks were
flying overhead, and, amid the confused noise of their calls, he heard a
couple of barks from a dog. Thinking he was mistaken he waited for a
time, and then the barking was unmistakable, bark after bark, one of a
deeper tone than the other. He shouted to Johansen, who started up from
the sleeping-bag incredulous. The sound ceased, and, breakfast over,
Nansen went forth to investigate. Soon he came on the footprints of a
dog or wolf, and then, still doubting, he heard a distant yelping that
certainly came not from a wolf. Making his way among the hummocks, he
heard a shout from a human voice, a strange voice—the first for three
years. Running up on to a hummock he shouted with all his might. Back
came a shout in reply; and among the hummocks he caught sight of a dog,
and further off a man walked into view. The man spoke to the dog in
English. Thinking he recognised Jackson, Nansen raised his hat as he met
him, and they shook hands heartily.
The contrast could not have been greater. One the well-groomed,
civilised European in a check suit and rubber water-boots, the other in
dirty rags black with oil and soot, with long matted hair and shaggy
beard, and a face in which the complexion was undiscernible through the
accumulations which a winter's endeavours, including scrapings with a
knife, had failed to remove. As they talked they had turned to go
inland. Suddenly Jackson stopped, and, looking the new arrival straight
in the face, said—
"Aren't you Nansen?"
"Yes, I am."
"By Jove! I'm damned glad to see you."
And seizing his hand he shook it again, his whole face beaming with a
smile of welcome and delight at the unexpected meeting; and needless to
say, both Nansen and Johansen received the warmest of welcomes from all
at Elmwood. The _Windward_ was then on her way, and when she arrived the
two Norsemen from the farthest north went in her to Vardoe, where they
landed on the 13th of August.
Meanwhile the _Fram_ had continued her leisurely drift, north-west,
south-west, north-west, west, then all round the compass, still with her
head pointing south, until on the 15th of November she reached 85° 55·5´
in longitude 66° 31´, thus giving Captain Otto Sverdrup the honour of
attaining the highest north in a ship. Another winter was passed in her
ice-berth, during which she moved westerly. In February came another
complete triangle in her course, after which she went south-west, and on
the 16th of May turned due south. Then, in the later days of the month
with the southerly drift continuing and open water on ahead, Sverdrup
resolved to set her free by mines, and on the 3rd of June, as a result
of the blastings, she gave a lurch, settled a little deeper at the stern
and moved away from the edge of the ice until the hawsers tautened. But,
though she was afloat, the ice around still kept her captive, and in the
pool she drifted straight towards Spitsbergen.
Again and again was steam got up and endeavour made to break a way out,
but day after day elapsed, and it was not until the 13th of August that
she passed through the last floes into open water, and her thirty-five
months of imprisonment came to an end. Making for Danes Island in
Spitsbergen, she was there boarded by Andrée, who was then preparing for
his disappearance in the balloon voyage to the Pole. Going on direct to
Skjervoe in Norway, Sverdrup landed at two o'clock in the morning to
wake up the telegraphist, who told him that Nansen had reached Vardoe a
week before and was then at Hammerfest and probably leaving for Tromsoe.
For Tromsoe Sverdrup started, after telegraphing to Nansen. And there,
at four o'clock in the afternoon of the 25th of August, 1896, Sir George
Baden-Powell's yacht _Otaria_, with Nansen and Johansen on board, glided
alongside the _Fram_, the good little ship looking much weather-beaten
though none the worse for such a task of strength and endurance as had
been set no other in the story of the sea.