Classic Ground—A Ramble over the “Doige Mountains”—Foulke
Fiord—The Mer de Glace—Pack Ice—The First Check—Hayes’ Sound—Twin
Glacier Valley—Charged by a Berg—Varying Fortunes—Walrus.
Records of our advance were to be deposited at Lyttelton Island, for
the information of a relief ship which would so far follow us if the
Expedition should remain northward for two winters. Accordingly, on
the morning of 28th July, our ships anchored off Reindeer Point,
Port Foulke. Here we were on ground that must always possess a deep
interest for every Arctic traveller. The southern side of our little
bay shut in the winter quarters from which Dr. Hayes had brought his
ship safely home; out to seaward Lyttelton Island was strewn with
remains of the “Polaris;” and Rensselaer Harbour, famed as the winter
quarters of Dr. Kane, was but thirty miles to the northward. A path,
still plainly discernible, led across a gap in the Doige range to the
deserted Eskimo settlement of Etah; and if any further inducement was
required to make the shore attractive, it was supplied by a little
note on our chart, “reindeer plentiful.”
Our time for exploration was limited, for the ships would weigh anchor
on the return of the main party from Lyttelton Island. Leaving the
ship as soon as possible after breakfast, we landed amongst fragments
of shore ice which still lined the little bay, and travelled inland up
a valley completely bare of snow, and green with saxifrage, willow,
and grasses. A rivulet trickled through some marshy ground in its
centre, amongst treacherous islands of rich-coloured velvety moss,
and occasional broad ripple-marked slabs of red sandstone. The whole
ground was covered with footprints of reindeer, but a gentle wind blew
up the valley, and left little hope of sighting them. Climbing the
hills to the northward to obtain a better view, a broad undulating
table-land lay spread out before us, ridges of plutonic rock, like
low walls, traversed the country from east to west, and here and
there marshy pools, some of them almost deserving the name of lakes,
lay in the hollows, and sent little streams winding towards gaps in
the coast cliffs. Beyond and below the cliffs lay Smith’s Sound, an
unbroken expanse of blue, limited westward by snow-clad Ellesmere
Land between Capes Isabella and distant Sabine. The strait was, so
far, quite open and unencumbered by ice, but away to the northward,
where Hayes’ Sound interrupted the outline of the coast, a long thin
line of pack, the first indication of coming troubles, streaked the
horizon. This was bad news to have to report on our return to the
ship, but there was no help for it. We turned our backs on it, and
struck out inland across the muddy flats in the direction of Foulke
Fiord. The Doige Range looked near enough, but an hour’s hard walking
did not bring it much nearer. Two steep ravines had to be crossed,
as well as a stream, which fortunately was in one place bridged by
a deep snowdrift that afforded firm footing across. At length the
precipitous cliffs of Foulke Fiord were reached at a point close above
the deserted settlement of Etah. Looking down into the fiord, large
flocks of little auks were seen perched in black and white lines along
the ledges.
A small ravine intersects the cliff-edge a little eastward from
the “Aukrey,” and on the brow over it we came upon two structures,
evidently the work of man, puzzling enough at the time, but which
we have since learnt to recognise as Eskimo meat _caches_ or safes.
Each consisted of a pile of stones covering in a long rectangular
chamber, left open at one end, but easily closed by a flat stone which
lay close by. Both stood in a conspicuous position on the top of a
little rise, and were surrounded by lemming and fox marks. A mile
further eastward, the cliffs promised a good commanding position for
a view, but the rough and undulating hill-tops took us a good while
to get over. At length the ascent of the last ridge was commenced,
when suddenly a snow-white object appeared over the brow. It was an
Arctic hare, the first we had seen. He was evidently astonished at
the reappearance of his old enemy, man, and it was not till after
he had made a careful examination of us, standing straight up, full
length, on his hind feet, that he concluded we were to be avoided.
Then off he went, running ten or fifteen paces erect, then a bound or
two on all-fours, then erect again, and finally, when he had run some
eighty or one hundred yards, he stopped for another look, sitting on
his haunches like a dog begging. This time we were ready for him; he
presented a steady mark, and his curiosity was fatal to him. On going
to pick him up, we came on a low wall of stones roughly piled, nowhere
more than two feet high, leading from the cliff-edge on the right, for
about eighty yards inland, to a small shallow tarn; it was apparently
some Eskimo hunting contrivance, possibly to assist in driving small
game to a suitable spot over the cliffs. Amongst the rounded boulders
in the margins of the tarn lay a great number of shed antlers of
reindeer, some of them broken and moss-grown, half-buried in the mud;
others bleached white, but evidently of no great age. The tips of
almost all showed marks of having been gnawed by foxes. Some scattered
antlers were found on other parts of the hills, but were always
numerous round the tarns; every one we met with had horns of various
sizes and ages lying about it.
On reaching the summit we were amply rewarded for our expenditure of
energy. The prospect was truly magnificent. A thousand feet below,
the blue waters of Foulke Fiord lay, rippled with a breeze, under the
richly-coloured cliffs of the opposite shore; further on, the flat
expanse at the head of the inlet, with Alida Lake, and Brother John’s
Glacier of Kane, shaped like a great paw, closed in the valley. Beyond
and above all, a broad white plain, the vast inland ice of Greenland,
lay spread before us. Even at first sight, this sea of ice could not
be mistaken for a frozen sea, for its distant horizon was sensibly
above our level.
The coast of Greenland, like other western shores, is so subdivided by
inlets and fiords, that there are but few places where it is possible
to get a good view over any extent of the _mar de glace_. Three or
four miles off, as we saw it, its surface seems smooth enough, but it
is really so uneven and fissured, that the most persevering attempts
to travel inland over it have penetrated but a short distance,
after three days’ incessant toil. When not checked by labyrinths of
crevasses, the travellers have encountered impassable rivers, flowing
in icy beds, till they plunged in a cloud of mist into fathomless
pits. Enough, however, has been learned to justify the belief, that a
continuous mass of ice, many thousand feet deep, loads the whole of
Greenland, from the land’s end near Cape Farewell, to far north beyond
Petermann’s fiord, where our Expedition traced its outline behind the
coast hills on the shores of the Polar Sea.
The place where we stood afforded an excellent site for a sketch; some
bold rocks over the cliffs and a mellow-tinted herbage—principally
red-tipped three-cleft saxifrage—supplied a good foreground. Our
artistic proceedings were, however, interrupted by the appearance of
a little grey fox, attracted doubtless by the dead hare. He seemed
perfectly aware of the danger he ran, and never exposed more
than his forehead, ears, and eyes over the rocks behind which he had
taken up his position. His skin would have made an acceptable addition
to our collection; and after waiting some time in hope that he would
make a further advance, he was fired at, but missed, and he gave us no
opportunity for a second shot.
[Illustration: PLATE II.—FOULKE FIORD AND THE INLAND ICE OF GREENLAND,
JULY 28, 1875.—p. 16.
Foulke Fiord is a narrow ice-scooped inlet in the coast of Greenland,
at the entrance of Smith’s Sound. Hayes made it his winter quarters;
and Rensselaer Bay, where Kane spent his three winters, is close to
the northward. On the shore of the fiord, and under the red granite
cliff in foreground of the picture, a few ruined huts mark the site of
the once populous Eskimo village of Etah—the capital of the “Arctic
Highlanders.” At the head of the fiord an expanse of lake and valley
leads to Brother John’s Glacier of Kane, stretching down in the shape
of a huge paw from the inland ice beyond. This continental ice lies
thousands of feet thick over what little is known of the interior of
Greenland, and looks like a vast frozen sea, but that its level is
sensibly above the horizon.]
It was now high time to get back to the ships, so, shouldering a
specimen pair of reindeer horns and our hare, we took a direct course
across the Doige Range, but found it by no means an easy one, for a
steep ravine had to be crossed, and a rapid knee-deep stream waded,
before the hills of Reindeer Point were reached. On getting to the
ship, we learned that a party of officers from the “Discovery” had
been more successful than we were. Landing at the head of the inlet,
they had searched the valley below Brother John’s Glacier, and climbed
the cliffs on its southern side. There they found three reindeer,
which led them a severe chase across the glacier. They finally secured
one of them, and carried the best parts of the meat to their boat, but
not until one of the most active of the party was so much exhausted,
that it required the united exertions of the others to keep him awake.
The ice seen northwards from the hills over our anchorage at Port
Foulke was met with off Cape Sabine the day after we left, and found
to be altogether impenetrable. It was disheartening to see the ships
come to a complete standstill under steam and sail in the very first
pack-ice we encountered in Smith’s Sound. We were compelled again and
again to return and shelter in a little harbour inside some islands
three miles south of Cape Sabine. Our prospects seemed sufficiently
discouraging. We had only reached the latitude of Dr. Kane’s winter
quarters, and here was an impassable barrier of ice stretching north
and east, as far as we could see from the rocky hills over our harbour
of refuge. Our chances of progress were often discussed sitting round
the table after dinner, and when one of us, hoping to gain support
from opposition, suggested that perhaps we might have to winter here,
it was at first treated as a joke, but after half-a-dozen failures
to advance, the subject was dropped as altogether too serious for
discussion. Four days were spent in fruitless efforts to push through
the tongue of pack stretching into Hayes’ Sound, and we thus got
early experience of the necessity of a continuous coast-line for ice
navigation. At length a fine lead of water opened round Cape Sabine
into Hayes’ Sound. If we could not go north, we might at least go
west, and hold ourselves ready to seize any opportunities for advance
that the unknown waters of Hayes’ Sound might offer.
After three or four hours’ rapid steam and sail, in the line of water
between the floes and shore, the sound was found to subdivide into a
number of narrow inlets. The only available lane of water led into the
first of these. As we passed into it, a strange landmark on the top of
a long hill on its south side attracted our attention. If we had been
in an inhabited latitude, no one would have hesitated to call it a
house. We could only suppose it to be a gigantic and singularly square
specimen of the boulders which here strew the surface of the country.
The inlet did not run far, and we soon found ourselves “brought up”
off a broad valley closed in landwards by the union of two large
glaciers. The ships were secured inside some rocks to wait for the
opening of the ice, which would probably occur next tide. The shores
here were virgin ground, and parties were soon organised to explore
the valley. It was two miles wide at its sea face, and not far from
three in length; precipitous hills rose on either side; along the
centre, a stream from the ice above had cut a water-course, in some
places as much as eighty feet deep, through the soft yellow sandstone.
At the head of the valley, a wall of ice, formed by the junction of
two glaciers, stood across it from side to side. The glacier on the
right terminated in a perpendicular cliff seventy feet high, excavated
along the ground, and with small streams spouting from blue fissures
in its wall; that on the left was parallel with the former, but
rounded off gradually to a sort of glacis covered with a thin layer
of black mud, smelling strongly of decaying vegetable matter. Bunches
of dead heather-like Cassiopea cropped up amongst the stones within
three feet of the sloping face of ice. The stream came down from an
amphitheatre between the glaciers, which, half-a-mile further on, met
in a ridge, caused by the right hand glacier being forced up over the
left.
We were greatly disappointed at finding no game in the valley; there
was not even a ptarmigan or a hare to be seen, though tracks of both
were numerous. Every gap in the banks of the water-course was pitted
with the footprints of reindeer or musk oxen. A number of boulders
strewed the valley, and every one that was large enough had been used
as scratching-posts by musk oxen, as the white wool and brown hair on
and around them testified.
[Illustration: TWIN GLACIER VALLEY.]
A splendid erratic block of red granite, twelve or fifteen feet high,
lay in the south side of the valley, and round it a complete trench
was worn deep into the ground by the foot prints of musk oxen as they
rubbed themselves against it or stood under it for shelter. This glen
was even more fertile than Port Foulke, and would make a delightful
winter quarters for an amateur Arctic Expedition. There was plenty of
willow, with large well-grown leaves, and in many places the ground
was covered with a perfect garden of dwarf flowers; even in the dry
parts of the river bed, patches of purple Epilobium covered the sand.
We could only account for the absence of game by supposing that the
neighbouring valleys were equally rich. An old reindeer antler was
picked up, together with the skull of a bear, and at the upper end of
the valley some remains of Eskimo “igloos” were discovered, with door
posts made of whale ribs.
Our furthest point in Hayes’ Sound was reached two days afterwards,
and, so far as we could see, the peninsula on our right was not an
island. We subsequently saw that it, and the very similar headland
next north of it, were parts of the same land, only separated by a
curve in the coast with a low hill in the centre. We accordingly
ceased to speak of our headlands as Henry and Bache Islands, and
returned to their original titles, Capes Albert and Victoria.
At length the long check at Hayes’ Sound came to an end. Some
southward motion in the ice opened a lead round Cape Albert. It was
at once taken advantage of, and when it closed in again the ships
were well to the north of the Cape, but, unfortunately, completely
imprisoned in close pack drifting steadily southwards, and taking them
with it. There was no fixed point to lay hold on. The long wall of
horizontally banded cliffs was more than a mile off, and, even if we
could have reached it, there did not appear to be any little curve or
hollow where we could have held our own. What little we had won seemed
slipping from us. There was nothing to be done but wait patiently
for the chances of the next tide. “Tea” had been cleared away in the
wardroom, and logs were being written up and journals posted, when we
were startled by sudden orders on deck. “Full speed ahead!” “Clear
away jib!” “Set fore-top sail, top-gallant sail, and foresail!” We
rushed on deck, expecting that a fine lead had opened northwards, but,
lo! the ships were still fast in the pack, and drifting right down
upon an iceberg two hundred yards long and forty feet above water
that crushed through the floes towards us. The “Alert” was directly
in its path. Men out on the ice ahead and astern tried to make way,
and hauled with ice anchors and tackle; full steam and sail failed to
move her. The pack tightened every moment with increasing pressure.
The roar of the crushing ice came nearer and nearer. And as the orders
“Up screw and up rudders” were given, those of us who were useless on
deck went below to see that our messmates’ haversacks were ready to
be flung out on the ice alongside, if our ship’s strong beams should
prove unequal to the crush. In solitary possession of the wardroom,
and quite undisturbed by the excitement on deck, our white cat “Pops”
dozed peacefully in her favourite posture on a chair in front of the
stove. When we went on deck again the critical moment had come. The
stern was clear of the berg, but the bow was in its direct path. The
ice pack, buckling and shovelling in front, caught the fore part of
the ship, and pushed her forcibly sternwards, swinging her half round
into a stream of ice and water sweeping past the berg. The danger was
over, but our jibboom was not four feet from the wall of ice. Such
an opportunity of arresting our southward drift was not to be lost.
Grappling appliances were all ready, and in a moment both ships were
being towed comfortably along in the wake of their old enemy.
[Illustration: OUR WHITE CAT “POPS.”++]
The events of next day well illustrate the uncertainties of ice
navigation. At 2 a.m. the ships had slowly struggled northwards until
they were abeam of Cape Victoria, but there the ice closed in and
“nipped” the ships close inshore under the cliffs. Rudder and screw
were again raised to save them from the dangerous pressure, which
increased till the floes, sliding one under the other, were forced
landwards completely under the ship. At that moment nothing could be
more unpromising than the prospects of the expedition, and yet, twenty
minutes afterwards we were steaming cheerily along through a good lead
towards Franklin and Pierce Bay. By breakfast time we had crossed to
the north-eastern shore of the bay, and found further progress checked
for the time by floes close packed against the rugged headlands to
the north. As the ships were secured to the edge of a broad flat
floe lying between an island and the high conglomerate cliffs of the
mainland, several walrus were seen lying on a fragment of floe about a
mile off. Their flesh would make a most valuable store of food for our
dogs, who had been living almost exclusively on preserved Australian
meat, for they disliked dog biscuit. Accordingly, a whale-boat with
a harpoon gun in her bows was lowered and manned. It was necessary
to make a long detour. New ice forming in the shadow of the cliffs
impeded our progress and rendered a noiseless attack impossible. Our
game, however, paid no attention to the noise we made scraping the ice
with the oars and breaking a road with a paddle. We soon got close
enough to see that there were three of them lying close together.
Occasionally one or other would rear himself slowly up, displaying his
double-lobed head and long gleaming tusks, scratch his side lazily
with his huge flipper, and fling himself down again with a satisfied
grunt beside his slumbering companions. They lay on the edge of a
floe. We steered for the largest of the three, and at length the broad
arrow-head of the harpoon, projecting from the muzzle of the gun, was
within five yards of the beast. Then, with the flash, the steel buries
itself deep in his side, a stream of blood spurts on the snow, and all
three walrus start up and heave themselves upright before plunging
into the water, looking as formidable game as any post-diluvian
sportsman could desire, but evidently too much frightened to attack.
A well-aimed bullet struck our victim’s throat and shortened his
death-struggle. Ere long the drag on the harpoon line slackened, and
the huge carcase was drawn to the surface and towed slowly to the
ship. It measured twelve and a-half feet from nose to tail, eleven
and a-half in girth. The tusks, eighteen inches from gum to point,
gave the creature a savage appearance, but their use was to dig up
the molluscs on which he fed, or to hook himself up on to the ice
floes. The dogs were not alone in their appreciation of fresh meat. We
ourselves found some steaks by no means unpalatable though desperately
tough, and for some days walrus liver figured upon our breakfast-table.
[Illustration: WALRUS.++]