SMITH SOUND
Captain Inglefield—Dr. Kane—The open Polar Sea—Hans Hendrik the
Greenlander—Kalutunah the Eskimo—An Eskimo bear-hunt—A lesson in
catching auks—Dr. Hayes—His journey over the glacier—Tyndall
Glacier—Captain C. F. Hall—Joe and Hannah—Voyage of the
_Polaris_—Drift of the _Polaris_—The voyage on the ice-floe—The
British Government Expedition of 1875—The _Alert_ and
_Discovery_—The cairn on Washington Irving Island—Discovery
Harbour—How the _Alert_ got into safety at Floeberg Beach—Low
temperatures—Nares on sledging—Description of the sledges and
their burden—Markham starts for the Pole—Reaches 83° 20´
26˝—Outbreak of scurvy—Parr's walk—Aldrich's journey
west—Beaumont's journey east—The perilous homeward voyage.
Lady Franklin, who incidentally did so much for Arctic discovery, sent
out the _Isabel_ in 1852 under Commander, afterwards Sir, Edward
Augustus Inglefield to search for her husband to the north of Baffin
Bay. Unlike John Ross, the names of whose ships, _Isabella_ and
_Alexander_, are home by the capes at its entrance, he found Smith Sound
to be the highway to the north. Steaming up the open water "stretching
through seven points of the compass," noting the coasts as he went, he
was turned back by the ice in 78° 28´, at the entrance to the Kane Sea,
with Cairn Point and the way in to Rensselaer Harbour on his right, and
Cape Sabine and Ellesmere Land, which he named, on his left; the
farthest north he sighted being Cape Louis Napoleon, the farthest east
Cape Frederick VII, now known as Cape Russell. Needless to say he found
no Franklin traces, although he really looked for them.
Twelve months afterwards Dr. Elisha Kent Kane in the United States brig
_Advance_ followed in his track and wintered in Rensselaer Harbour, nine
miles further north. Ostensibly Kane was on a Franklin search, but his
real object was the Pole. He explored the sea named after him, naming
many landmarks, not always placing them in their true positions, and
underwent many hardships. For one mistake he was famous for a time, and
his reputation now suffers. One of his expedition, William Morton,
almost reached Cape Constitution, in about 80½°, which he placed some
sixty miles too far north, and described as the corner of the north
coast of Greenland; and from the southern horn of the bay of which it is
the northern boundary he looked out over the south of Kennedy Channel,
which is open every summer, and mistook it for the Polar Sea. And he
returned with a report of an even more wonderful discovery than the
Polar Sea, for, according to the illustration, he beheld the midnight
sun dipping in its waters on Midsummer Day.
In May, 1854, the month before Morton's discoveries, Dr. Hayes and
William Godfrey crossed the Kane Sea to connect the northern coast with
Inglefield's survey, "but it disclosed no channel or any form of exit
from the bay," being, in fact, Ellesmere Land continued, and yet on
reaching the shore for the first time at Hayes Point, three miles north
of Cape Louis Napoleon, and following it for two miles to Cape Frazer,
they quite unnecessarily named the country Grinnell Land. On the other
side of this sea the chief discovery was Kane's Humboldt glacier, some
fifty miles north-east of their winter quarters, which was described as
"the mighty crystal bridge which connects the two continents of America
and Greenland," when, of course, it does nothing of the sort.
[Illustration: KALUTUNAH]
What with sickness, accident, and other disaster, it became evident that
the _Advance_ would never leave her wintering place, and in July Kane
set off on a wild endeavour to reach Beechey Island and obtain relief
from the Franklin search vessels, but he had to return. Next month Hayes
was sent to Upernivik, but he also came back. Finally in May, 1855, the
brig was abandoned and the survivors began their journey to the south.
Fortunately on the outward voyage Kane, at Fiskernaes, had engaged Hans
Hendrik the Greenlander, then a boy of nineteen, who became quite a
prominent figure in this and subsequent voyages, and without him and
Kalutunah, chief of the Etah Eskimos, the whole party would have
perished miserably.
Hans first appears when spearing a bird on the wing; Kalutunah's first
appearance was equally encouraging. "The leader of the party," says
Kane, "was a noble savage, greatly superior in everything to the others
of his race. He greeted me with respectful courtesy, yet as one who
might rightfully expect an equal measure of it in return, and, after a
short interchange of salutations, seated himself in the post of honour
at my side. I waited, of course, till the company had fed and slept, for
among savages especially haste is indecorous, and then, after
distributing a few presents, opened to them my project of a northern
exploration. Kalutunah received his knife and needles with a 'Kuyanaka,'
'I thank you'; the first thanks I have heard from a native of this upper
region. He called me his friend—'Asakaoteet,' 'I love you well'—and
would be happy, he said, to join the nalegak-soak in a hunt."
And the journey ended in a hunt, for the dogs caught sight of a large
male bear in the act of devouring a seal. The impulse was irresistible;
Kane lost all control over both dogs and drivers, who seemed dead to
everything but the passion of pursuit. Off they sped with incredible
speed; the Eskimos clinging to their sledges and cheering their dogs
with loud cries. A mad, wild chase, wilder than German legend—"the dogs,
wolves; the drivers, devils." After a furious run, the animal was
brought to bay, and the lance and rifle did their work. There were more
bears and more hunts, and when Kane objected that this could hardly be
called northern exploration, he was told by Kalutunah, significantly,
that the bear-meat was absolutely necessary for the support of their
families, and that the nalegak-soak had no right to prevent him from
providing for his household. "It was a strong argument," says Kane, "and
withal the argument of the strong."
[Illustration: THE EAST COAST OF SMITH SOUND]
Bear-hunting hereabouts has its dangers, for the Eskimos of the north
are not armed with bows and arrows as are those of the mainland. When
the bear is found the dogs are set upon the trail, and the hunter runs
by their side in silence. As he turns the angle ahead his game is in
view before him, stalking probably along with quiet march, sometimes
sniffing the air suspiciously, but making, nevertheless, for a clump of
hummocks. The dogs spring forward, opening in a wild wolfish yell, the
driver shrieking "Nannook! nannook!" and all straining every nerve in
pursuit. The bear rises on his haunches, views his pursuers, and starts
off at full speed. The hunter, as he runs, leaning over his sledge,
seizes the traces of a couple of his dogs and liberates them from their
burden. It is the work of a minute; for the speed is not checked and the
remaining dogs rush on with apparent ease. Pressed more severely, the
bear stands at bay while his two foremost pursuers halt at a short
distance and quietly await the arrival of the hunter. At this moment the
whole pack are liberated; the hunter grasps his lance, and, stumbling
through the snow and ice, prepares for the encounter. Grasping the lance
firmly in his hands he provokes the animal to pursue him by moving
rapidly across its path, and then running as if to escape. But hardly is
its long body extended for the tempting chase, before, with a quick
jump, the hunter doubles on his track, and, as the bear turns after him
again, the lance is plunged into the left side below the shoulder; and
that so dexterously, that, if it be an inch or so wide of the proper
spot, the spear has to be left in the bear and the man has to run for
his life.
At this hazardous work Kalutunah was an adept, and he was equally
skilful at a much less dangerous game, as Dr. Hayes was to discover when
wintering in the schooner _United States_ in Foulke Harbour, further
south, in 1860-61. Hayes wished to learn how to catch auks, and the
Eskimo gave him a lesson. Kalutunah carried a small net, made of light
strings of sealskin knitted together, the staff by which it was held
being about ten feet in length. Arriving about half-way up the cliffs he
crouched behind a rock and invited the doctor to follow his example. The
slope on which the birds were congregated was about a mile long, and in
vast flocks they were sweeping over it a few feet above the stones down
the whole length of the hill, returning higher in the air, and so round
and round in a complete circuit. Occasionally a few hundreds or
thousands would drop down as if following some leader, and in an instant
the rocks, for some distance, would swarm with them as they speckled the
hill with their black backs and white breasts. The doctor was told to
lie lower, as the birds noticed him and were flying too far overhead.
Having placed himself as Kalutunah approved, the birds began to sweep
lower and lower in their flight until their track came well within
reach. Then, as a dense portion of the crowd approached, up went the
net, and half a dozen birds flew into it, and, stunned by the blow,
could not recover before the Eskimo had slipped the staff through his
hands and seized the net. With his left hand he pressed down the birds,
while with the right he drew them out one by one, and, for want of a
third hand, used his teeth to crush their heads. The wings were then
locked across each other; and with an air of triumph the old chief
looked around, spat the blood and feathers from his mouth, and went on
with the sport, tossing up his net and hauling it in with much rapidity
until he had caught about a hundred, and wanted no more.
[Illustration: I. I. Hayes]
Hayes did his best to disparage both Kalutunah and Hans, to whom he was
not quite so much indebted as Kane, owing to his having given himself a
better chance of retreat by not taking the schooner out of Smith Sound,
his quarters in Hartstene Bay being only some twelve miles north of Cape
Alexander. He had come to verify the existence of the open sea and sail
to the Pole across it if he could; and he verified it to his own
satisfaction. But he did not get so far north as Morton, although he
claimed to have done so, for he climbed a cliff eight hundred feet high
and looked out over the open water—in Kennedy Channel—and did not see
the Greenland cliffs trending away northwards within thirty miles of
him, and visible all the way up for two degrees north of Cape
Constitution. Thus he left the map as Kane left it, with Greenland cut
off short south of the eighty-first parallel, and his farthest seems to
have been the south point of Rawlings Bay, where the _Alert_ was forced
on shore in August, 1876, in 80° 15´.
"I climbed," he says, "the steep hillside to the top of a ragged cliff,
which I supposed to be about eight hundred feet above the level of the
sea. The view which I had from this elevation furnished a solution of
the cause of my progress being arrested on the previous day. The ice was
everywhere in the same condition as in the mouth of the bay across which
I had endeavoured to pass. A broad crack, starting from the middle of
the bay, stretched over the sea, and uniting with other cracks as it
meandered to the eastward, it expanded as the delta of some mighty river
discharging into the ocean, and under a water-sky, which hung upon the
northern horizon, it was lost in the open sea. The sea beneath me was a
mottled sheet of white and dark patches, these latter being either soft
decaying ice or places where the ice had wholly disappeared. These spots
were heightened in intensity of shade and multiplied in size as they
receded, until the belt of the water-sky blended them all together into
one uniform colour of dark blue. The old and solid floes (some a quarter
of a mile, and others miles across) and the massive ridges and wastes of
hummocked ice which lay piled between them and around their margins,
were the only parts of the sea which retained the whiteness and solidity
of winter."
Unfortunately for Hayes, the astronomer of the expedition, August
Sonntag, who had assisted Kane in the same capacity, was frozen to death
on a sledge journey, and the doctor was left to do the work for himself,
with disappointing results, as with errors of many miles in either
latitude or longitude his journeys can only be noticed in a very general
way. In October, 1860, he proceeded for some distance over the glacier
to the east of his wintering place. The first attempt to scale the
glacier was attended by what might have been a serious accident. The
foremost member of the party missed his footing as he was clambering up
the rude steps, and, sliding down the steep side, scattered those who
were below him to the right and left and sent them rolling into the
valley beneath. The next effort was more successful, and, the end of a
rope being carried over the side of the glacier, the sledge was drawn up
the inclined plane and a fair start obtained. A little further on Hayes
was only saved from disappearing down a crevasse by clutching a pole he
was carrying on his shoulder. Next day, the surface being smoother, more
progress was made, and they reached a plain of compact snow covered with
a crust through which the feet broke at every step. The day afterwards
the cold grew more intense and a gale came on. At night the men
complained bitterly and could not sleep, and as the storm increased in
strength they were forced to leave the tent and by active exercise
prevent themselves from freezing.
[Illustration: THE SHORES OF KENNEDY CHANNEL]
To face the wind was impossible, and shelter was nowhere to be found
upon the unbroken plain, there being but one direction in which they
could move, that being with their backs to the gale. It was not without
difficulty that the tent was taken down and bundled upon the sledge, the
wind blowing so fiercely that they could scarcely roll it up with their
stiffened hands. The men were in pain and could only hold on for a few
moments to the hardened canvas, their fingers, freezing continually,
requiring vigorous pounding to keep them on the flickering verge of
life. "In the midst of a vast frozen Sahara, with neither hill,
mountain, nor gorge anywhere in view," says Hayes, "fitful clouds swept
over the face of the full-orbed moon, which, descending toward the
horizon, glimmered through the drifting snow that whirled out of the
illimitable distance, and scudded over the icy plain, to the eye in
undulating lines of downy softness, to the flesh in showers of piercing
darts. Our only safety was in flight; and like a ship driven before a
tempest which she cannot withstand, and which has threatened her ruin,
we turned our backs to the gale; and, hastening down the slope, we ran
to save our lives. We travelled upwards of forty miles, and had
descended about three thousand feet before we ventured to halt."
Next year he visited the large glacier in Whale Sound which he named
after Professor John Tyndall, pulling first along its front in a boat
and then mounting its surface. As he rowed along within a few fathoms of
this two miles of ice, he found the face "worn and wasted away until it
seemed like the front of some vast incongruous temple, here a groined
roof of some huge cathedral, and there a pointed window or a Norman
doorway deeply moulded; while on all sides were pillars round and fluted
and pendants dripping crystal drops of the purest water, and all bathed
in a soft blue atmosphere. Above these wondrous archways and galleries
there was still preserved the same Gothic character; tall spires and
pinnacles rose along the entire front and multiplied behind them, and
new forms met the eye continually. Strange, there was nothing cold or
forbidding anywhere. The ice seemed to take the warmth which suffused
the air, and I longed to pull my boat far within the opening and paddle
beneath the Gothic archways."
Charles Francis Hall, of Cincinnati, was a man of a very different
stamp. He was a genius and a genuine worker, an accurate observer and
painstaking explorer who believed above all things in thoroughness.
Realising that the best way to study the Polar regions was to understand
the Eskimos, who know most about them, and utilise their local
knowledge, he settled amongst them, lived with them, adopted their
customs, and became as one of them in their huts and tents, taking part
in their sports and hardships. Two friends he made amongst them,
Ebierbing and his wife Tookoolito, better known as Joe and Hannah, who
accompanied him till he died.
[Illustration: TYNDALL GLACIER]
After clearing up the Frobisher problem and throwing some light on the
Franklin mystery, he started in 1871 to go as far north as he could
across the reported Polar Sea. To him Henry Grinnell, who did so much
for northern discovery, entrusted the American flag which had been to
the Antarctic with Wilkes in 1838, to the Arctic with De Haven, with
Kane and with Hayes, and was a sort of oriflamme of Polar discovery. His
ship was the _Polaris_, of 387 tons, once the _Periwinkle_, a name which
seemed to be a little too unassuming. Buddington, his sailing-master,
was an experienced whaling captain; his assistant, Tyson, destined for
the independent command of an ice-floe, was another whale-fisher. The
naturalist was Emil Bessels. On board were also Joe and Hannah—of
course—and William Morton, to show where the sea was, and, picked up at
Upernivik, the indispensable Hans Hendrik with his wife and three
children.
The voyage was fortunate so long as Hall lived. The _Polaris_ found the
Polar gates open before her. She steamed right up Smith Sound, through
Kane Sea, up Kennedy Channel, into Robeson Channel—named after the
Secretary to the American Navy—until she reached the ice, in 82° 16´, on
the 30th of August, 1871, the highest latitude then attained by a ship.
Hall would have pressed on into the ice, but Buddington wisely refused,
and hardly had the _Polaris_ been headed round when she was beset and
carried southwards, to escape in a few days and take refuge for the
winter in a harbour on the east of what is now known as Hall Basin,
protected at its entrance by a grounded floeberg. The latitude is 81°
38´, the harbour Hall called Thank God Bay. There in November he died;
and close by is Hall's Rest, where he is buried.
His death was the end of the enterprise. Buddington wished to return as
soon as the ship was released, and eventually had his way, after a
journey or two of little importance. But he stayed too long. The ship
was clear in June, and he did not start until the 1st of August, and he
started by driving her into the pack, anchored her to a floe, and
drifted helplessly into Baffin Bay, as De Haven had done through
Lancaster Sound in 1850. For eleven weeks the drift continued until she
was off Northumberland Island on the 15th of October. Here in the middle
of the night a violent gale arose, and the crippled ship, nipped between
two masses of ice, was lifted bodily and thrown on her side, her timbers
cracking loudly and her sides apparently breaking in. Two boats, all she
had, were hurriedly got on to the ice, and provisions, stores, and
clothing were being passed out, when with a roar the floe broke asunder,
and the _Polaris_ disappeared like a phantom in the gale. As the ice
cracked and the sides lurched apart, a bundle of fur lay across the
fissure. A grab was made at it, and the bundle was saved. It contained
the baby of Joe the Eskimo, whose wife had been confined the year before
in latitude 82°, perhaps the most northerly birthplace of any of this
world's inhabitants.
[Illustration: A SEAL IN DANGER]
On the ice were Tyson, with Sergeant Meyer, the steward, the cook, six
sailors, and nine Eskimos, men, women, and children, including Hans and
Joe. They built a house, from the materials thrown out from the ship, as
a shelter; and they built snow houses as the time went on and the floe
diminished. Provisions they had but few, but Hans and Joe were
indefatigable. They speared seals, caught fish, trapped birds, and,
sometimes, a bear would scramble up on to the ice for them to shoot—and
they never missed. In short, without them the party would have starved
to death.
The floe on which the castaways passed the winter was about a hundred
yards long and seventy-five broad. On this they voyaged down the whole
length of Baffin Bay and through Davis Strait, the ice melting away and
getting smaller and smaller as they drifted south, until on the 1st of
April, when it was only twenty yards round, they had to take to the
remaining boat, the other having been used for fuel. Once they nearly
touched the shore, but the wind rose and off they were driven in the
snow. When they were picked up by the sealer _Tigress_ in 53° 35´, near
the coast of Labrador, on the 30th of April, they had drifted fifteen
hundred miles in the hundred and ninety-six days that had elapsed since
they left the ship.
The _Polaris_, blown to the northward, reached land at Lifeboat Cove in
the entrance to Smith Sound, a little north of Foulke Harbour, and here
with the aid of the Etah Eskimos the crew passed the winter; and, in the
spring, some of them went on an expedition in the Hayes country and lost
the famous flag. As the ship could not be made seaworthy, two
flat-bottomed boats were built of her materials, and on the 21st of June
these were found hauled up on a floe in Melville Bay, and their people
rescued by the whaler _Ravenscraig_, which shifted them into the
_Arctic_, another Dundee whaler, on board of which was Commander
Markham, who, with Hans Hendrik, four years afterwards, was to follow up
Hall's track to the north.
The results of this expedition were of considerable importance. In five
days Captain Hall had run five hundred miles through what on most
occasions has been found to be an ice-choked sea. He completed the
exploration of Kennedy Channel, discovered Hall Basin and Robeson
Channel, and was the first to reach the Polar ocean by this route.
Greenland and Grinnell Land he extended northward for nearly a hundred
and forty miles; and, north of Petermann Fiord, where he showed that the
inland ice terminated, he had found a large area free from ice, with its
wild flowers and herbage and musk oxen.
Hall's remarkable success in taking a ship to so high a latitude led to
the Government expedition of 1875, the first British attempt to reach
the Pole since Parry's failure in 1827. Three ships were employed: the
_Alert_, a seventeen-gun sloop; the _Discovery_, once the _Bloodhound_,
a Dundee whaler; and the _Valorous_. The _Alert_ and _Discovery_ were
specially prepared for the voyage at Portsmouth by Sir Leopold
M'Clintock who was then Admiral Superintendent of the dockyard; the
_Valorous_, an old paddle sloop, required little alteration, as her duty
was merely to carry the stores that could not safely be taken by the
exploring vessels in crossing the Atlantic and hand them over at Disco.
[Illustration: SIR GEORGE NARES]
The leader, Captain George Strong Nares, when one of the Franklin search
officers under Kellett at Melville Island, had distinguished himself by
a sledge journey in which he had travelled nine hundred and eighty miles
in sixty-nine days and reached 119½° west longitude. He was known as one
of the best navigators in the Navy, and when called upon to go to the
north was in command of H.M.S. _Challenger_, then on her famous voyage
of scientific exploration in very different seas. With him in the
_Alert_ was Commander Albert Hastings Markham, whose experience, varied
and considerable, gained by his spending much of his spare time within
the Arctic Circle, rendered him especially well fitted for the position.
In command of the _Discovery_ was Captain Henry Frederick Stephenson;
and the officers of both ships were, like the crews, all specially
selected. There was no difficulty in the manning. One commanding officer
called at the office at Portsmouth where the men were being entered and
asked for advice. "An order," he said, "has come on board my ship,
directing me to send volunteers for Arctic service to this office. What
am I to do? The whole ship's company, nearly eight hundred men, have
given in their names."
The three ships left Spithead on the 29th of May, 1875, and were all at
Godhavn on the 6th of July. Nine days afterwards they left for Ritenbenk
of the curious name, which is an anagram of that of Berkentin who was in
charge of the Greenland department when it was founded. Here the
_Valorous_ parted company to return home after filling up with fuel at
the coal quarries on the north side of Disco Island, while the two ships
went to Proven to pick up Hans Hendrik, who this time left his wife and
children behind him.
Through Smith Sound, almost choked with ice, progress was slow and
difficult; but the passage was safely accomplished, and so across Kane
Sea and up Kennedy Channel. On Washington Irving Island an ancient cairn
was found, evidently the work of white men's hands and of great age, as
shown by the state of the lichens on it—yet another of the many
indications in the Polar regions that there was always a somebody before
the first on record. Crossing the mouth of Archer Fiord, a snug harbour
was found in 81° 44´, where the _Discovery_ was left to spend the
winter, the _Alert_ going on, hampered much by the floes, though helped
at last by a south-westerly wind, until she had to stop in 82° 27´ on
the shore of the Polar Ocean, at what was named Floeberg Beach, off an
open coast and with no more protection during the winter than was
afforded by masses of ice ranging up to sixty feet in height aground in
from eight to twelve fathoms of water.
"The protected space," says Nares, "available for shelter was so
contracted and shallow, the entrance to it so small, and the united
force of the wind and flood-tide so powerful, that it was with much
labour and no trifling expense in broken hawsers that the ship was
hauled in stem foremost. It was a close race whether the ice or the ship
would be in first, and my anxiety was much relieved when I saw the
ship's bow swing clear into safety just as the advancing edge of the
heavy pack closed in against the outside of our friendly barrier of ice.
From our position of comparative security the danger we had so narrowly
escaped was strikingly apparent as we gazed with wonder and awe at the
power exerted by the ice driven past us to the eastward with
irresistible force by the wind and flood-tide at the rate of about a
mile an hour. The projecting points of each passing floe which grounded
near the shore in about ten fathoms of water would be at once wrenched
off from its still moving parent mass; the pressure continuing, the
several pieces, frequently thirty thousand tons in weight, would be
forced up the inclined shore, rising slowly and majestically ten or
twelve feet above their old line of flotation. Such pieces quickly
accumulated until a rampart-like barrier of solid ice-blocks, measuring
about two hundred yards in breadth and rising fifty feet high, lined the
shore, locking us in, but effectually protecting us from the
overwhelming power of the pack." The land had already assumed a wintry
aspect, and the ship soon put on a garb of snow and ice, each spar and
rope being double its ordinary thickness from the accumulation of rime.
Around her everything was white and solemn; no voice of bird or beast
was heard; all was still and silent save the gathering floes; and in two
days the men were able to walk on shore over the new ice.
For eleven months she stayed here, secured by cables to anchors frozen
on to the shore to protect her from gales on the landward side. With the
ship housed in awnings of tilt-cloth, with snow a foot thick laid on the
upper deck and banked up on each side as high as the main-chains, with
skylights and hatchways carefully covered up, except two hatchways for
ingress and egress constructed with porches and double doors so as to
prevent the entrance of the bitter air, the crew here passed the long
Polar night. On the 11th of October the sun disappeared, and then began
those entertainments, lectures, lessons, games, not forgetting the Royal
Arctic Theatre which opened on the 18th of November, with which the
winter was pleasantly whiled away. "Can you sing or dance? or what can
you do for the amusement of others?" every man had been asked before he
was chosen, and the result was a singularly happy time kept up until
sunrise.
The cold was intense and long-continued. Even the tobacco pipes froze,
the stem becoming solidly clogged with ice as the smoking went on unless
it was made so short as to bring the bowl unpleasantly close to the
mouth. On the 1st of April the temperature was down to minus 64°, and
three days afterwards it was a hundred and five below freezing, the cold
weather preventing the departure of the dog-sledge for Discovery Bay.
During the autumn, sledging parties had laid out reserves of stores for
the spring journeys, and a certain amount of practice had been given to
the men in what was intended to be the chief work of the expedition. The
field, however, was not promising. On one occasion Nares went out to
look at it. He obtained a fine view of the pack for a distance of six
miles from the land. The southern side of each purely white snow-covered
hummock was brilliantly lighted by the orange-tinted twilight. The
stranded floebergs lining the shore extended from half to three-quarters
of a mile off the land. Outside were old floes with undulating upper
surfaces separated from each other by Sherard Osborn's "hedgerows of
Arctic landscape," otherwise ridges of pressed-up ice of every size. "It
will be as difficult," was his verdict, "to drag a sledge over such ice
as to transport a carriage directly across country in England." He gave
a lecture on sledging at one of the winter entertainments. It was
interesting but not encouraging. He told his hearers that if they could
imagine the hardest work they had ever been called upon to perform in
their lives intensified to the utmost degree, it would only be as
child's play in comparison with the work they would have to perform
whilst sledging. "These prophetic words," says Markham, "were fully
realised, and were often recalled and commented on by the men."
They had four different kinds of sledges. From the illustrations it will
appear how the eight-feet sledges differed from those used by
M'Clintock, the Nares sledge being higher and more slender in the
uprights. The eight-men sledge, such as the Marco Polo—which was bound
for the Pole—had six uprights eighteen inches apart. It was eleven feet
long, thirty-eight inches wide, eleven inches high, and weighed one
hundred and thirty pounds. The tent, made of light, unbleached duck, was
nine feet four inches long at the bottom, eight feet at the top, seven
feet wide and high, and weighed forty-four pounds. The tent poles, five
in number, weighed five pounds apiece. The coverlet weighed thirty-one
pounds and a half, and the extra coverlet twenty pounds. The lower robe
weighed twenty-three pounds, the waterproof floor-cloth fifteen. The
eight sleeping-bags weighed eight pounds apiece, and the eight
knapsacks, when packed, twelve pounds apiece. The shovel and two
pickaxes accounted for twenty-one pounds, the store-bag for twenty-five,
the cooking gear for twenty-nine, the gun and ammunition for
twenty-five, the medical stores for twelve, the instruments for fifteen,
and the tent for nine and a quarter. To this must be added a thousand
and eighty pounds for forty-five days' provisions for the eight men, and
we have the total of sixteen hundred and sixty-four pounds odd, which
with seven men at the ropes gives each man a drag of about two hundred
and thirty-eight pounds. In the spring the weight decreases as the
provisions are consumed, but the rate of decrease is not the same in the
autumn, for then the steadily falling temperature increases the weight
of the outfit by the moisture it adds to the tent and clothing. In
Markham's autumn journey the tent of thirty-two pounds came back as
fifty-five, the coverlet as forty-eight, the lower robe as forty, the
floor-cloth as forty, and everything else was heavier than at the start.
The sledges mustered for their journeys on the 3rd of April. Seven in
number, they were drawn up in single line according to the seniority of
the leaders, all fully equipped and provisioned, and manned by
fifty-three officers and men. On each was its commander's banner—a
swallow-tailed flag charged with a St. George's cross and displaying the
armorial bearings. As a precaution against snow-blindness, the men had
been ordered to decorate the backs of their snow-jumpers with any device
they thought fit, the result being a display of comic blazonry that
often formed a topic of conversation when others failed. For the same
reason the two boats carried on the north-going sledges were gaily
decorated with the royal arms, and the rose, shamrock, and thistle; the
artist, as on other occasions, being Doctor Moss, whose great difficulty
in the matter was that in spite of the quantity of turpentine used in
mixing the paint it would persist in freezing so that the brush became
as stiff as a stick every few seconds.
[Illustration]
SECTION SLEDGES USED BY (1) SIR LEOPOLD M'CLINTOCK AND SECTION
M'CLINTOCK (2) SIR GEORGE NARES NARES
(In the collection of Ed. Whymper)
Lieutenant Aldrich, supported for three weeks by Lieutenant Giffard, was
to explore the shores of Grant Land, towards the north and west, along
the coast-line he had discovered in the previous autumn. Commander
Markham, seconded by Lieutenant Parr, was to accompany Aldrich to Cape
Joseph Henry and then strike off to the northward over the ice. The
other three sledges were to accompany these as far as their own
provisions would allow, after completing the four's deficiencies and
giving them a fresh start from an advance post.
When Markham was only eleven days out, one of his crew complained of
pain in his ankles and knees, and was of no help for the rest of the
journey. This was the first appearance of the scurvy which was to ruin
so many hopes, for man after man was taken ill and became a passenger.
To make matters worse no rougher road was ever traversed by sledge. Over
a labyrinth of piled-up blocks of ice ranging to forty feet and more in
height, through which the road had to be cut with pickaxe and shovel,
and amid gale and fog and falling snow, the painful progress went on.
With many a "One; two; three; haul!" the heavy mass would be dragged
where the men could hardly drag themselves; one of the sledges taken a
few yards by the combined crews, who would then return for the other. On
the 19th of April one of the boats was abandoned and this made matters
easier, but only for a time, as the disease spread. At last it was
decided to stop; and on the 12th of May a party of ten went ahead to
reach the farthest north.
"The walking," says Markham, "was undoubtedly severe, at one moment
struggling through deep snowdrifts, in which we floundered up to our
waists, and at another tumbling about amongst the hummocks. Some idea
may be formed of the difficulties of the road, when, after more than two
hours' hard walking, with little or nothing to carry, we had barely
accomplished one mile. Shortly before noon a halt was called, the
artificial horizon set up, and the flags and sledge standards displayed.
Fortunately the sun was favourable to us, and we were able to obtain a
good altitude as it passed the meridian, although almost immediately
afterwards dark clouds rolled up, snow began to fall, and the sun was
lost in obscurity. We found the latitude to be 83° 20´ 26˝ N., or three
hundred and ninety-nine miles and a half from the North Pole."
On the 8th of June Lieutenant Parr appeared on the quarter-deck of the
_Alert_ greeting in silence the one or two who chanced to meet him. That
some calamity had happened was evident from his looks. He had walked on
alone for forty miles to bring the news that Markham's party were in
sore distress. Measures of rescue were instantly taken; Lieutenant May
and Doctor Moss, on snow-shoes, pushing ahead with the dog-sledge laden
with medical stores, while Nares with a strong party followed. On their
arrival one man had died, and of the others no less than eleven were
brought back to the ship on the relief sledges.
Ten days afterwards, fearing a similar fate had overtaken Aldrich's
party, Lieutenant May was despatched to find him. As with Markham,
scurvy had begun on the outward journey, and it had become so bad on the
return that one of the men was being sent off to the ship when May
arrived with help. It had nevertheless been a successful journey, the
road being easier than that by the northern route. Aldrich had traced
the continuous border of the heavy pack for two hundred miles from
Floeberg Beach, rounded Cape Columbia, in 83° 7´ N., the northernmost
point of Grant Land, and, along the coast trending steadily south-west,
had reached longitude 85° 33´ and sighted Cape Alfred Ernest in
longitude 86½°.
With his arrival there were over forty scurvy patients on board the
_Alert_; and Nares was to learn that the sledge parties from the
_Discovery_ had been similarly affected. Lieutenant Beaumont had gone
along the North Greenland coast, reaching, on the 21st of May, 51° W.,
in 82° 20´ N., and sighting Cape May, Mount Hooker, and Cape Britannia.
On the 10th of May, while on his outward journey, he had sent back
Lieutenant Rawson to bring a relief party to meet him, and Rawson with
Hans and eight dogs, accompanied by Doctor Coppinger, reached him on the
25th of June when he was on his last possible day's journey, he and two
of his men dragging the sledge with four helpless comrades lashed on the
top of it.
The _Discovery_ had also sent out Lieutenant Archer to survey the fiord
named after him, which opens out into Lady Franklin Bay; and Lieutenant
Fulford had crossed the channel and explored Petermann Fiord. In fact,
the expedition's geographical work was of great extent, as was the other
scientific work, the most important, as usual, being that done from the
ships. Among the odds and ends easily rememberable was the haul of the
seine in Sheridan Lake, near the wintering station of the _Alert_, which
yielded forty-three char (_Salmo arcturus_), the most northerly
freshwater fish; the finding of the nest of the sanderling (_Calidris
arenarius_), now in the Natural History Museum, in 82° 33´, and the
discovery of the nesting of the grey phalarope and the knot in the same
neighbourhood; the thirty-feet seam of Miocene coal worked in Discovery
Harbour; and the Eskimo relics at Cape Beechey, near the eighty-second
parallel, which, in connection with the encampments on the opposite
coast, suggested that there, at the narrowest part of Robeson Channel,
had been a crossing place from shore to shore.
On the 31st of July, 1876, the _Alert_ was again under steam after her
long rest, and one of the most dangerous voyages on record began. The
ships, of from five hundred to six hundred tons, were handled as if they
were small tugs; blocked, beset, pressed on shore, Nares with consummate
skill, constant watchfulness, and never-failing patience, brought them
through. But they did not get out of Smith Sound until the 9th of
September, and then it was against head winds in stormy weather amid
icebergs innumerable that they were slowly worked southwards and
homewards.
[Illustration: BISHOP PAUL EGEDE]