A Haul of the Dredge—Norman Lockyer Island—Traces of an Eskimo
Exodus—Midnight on 12th August—Mysterious Cairns—Forcing the
Tidal Barrier—“Kane’s Open Polar Sea”—Hannah Island—Grant Land
Reached—Musk Oxen—“Discovery’s” Winter Quarters.
An anxious watch was always kept for any favourable movement of the
ice. But, meanwhile, the broad smooth floe alongside afforded a
tempting exercising ground, whereon, after working hours, some played
football and others took their first lessons in dog-driving. The
ships happened to be secured in a sort of basin fifteen fathoms deep,
but with shallower water all round, so that the bottom was protected
from the scrapings of icebergs. It was evidently a favourable spot
for a haul of the dredge. Our expectations were more than realised.
The net came up full of strange creatures. Here a fish with a sucker
under his chin; there a brittle feather star with long branched arms.
He has to be extracted most carefully from the bag, and supplied
with some cotton to grasp before being consigned to our naturalist’s
ever-ready bottle. Next comes a _Terebratula_, or lamp shell,
anchored by a strange chance to a fossil _Terebratula_ drifted from
some neighbouring rock. Here are pale vermilion-coloured antlers of
_Escharella_, and delicate lacework of _Retepore Polyzoa_, and here,
perhaps greatest prize of all, a little calcareous sponge with a
double frill glistening like spun glass. The dredging operations were
continued far into the nominal night, and, after a little necessary
rest, we started to explore the island. A steep wall of ice-foot
encircling the land disputed our inroad. Clambering up over it, we
were at once struck with the terraced condition of the shores. On the
north side of the island especially, the ridges rose one over the
other in long horizontal waves to the number of twenty or more. Even
on the highest, sea shells were to be picked up. Each ridge was tipped
here and there with little mounds of yellow clay, sometimes in lines
at right angles to the ridges. The shore was very barren; a few little
grey tufts of grass, or Draba, found root in the mounds of yellow
clay, all the rest was small stones weathered into sharp points like
cinders.
When we reached the northern shores of the island, a number of
conspicuous white objects strewn along the lower terraces excited
our curiosity. They were bones of walrus and seal, much broken
evidently by the hand of man, but fragile and moss-grown with age.
Some long-vanished tribe had doubtless found this lonely island a rich
hunting-ground. The western point of the island was covered with the
foundations of a complete town. In some places mere rings of stones
had served to keep down the edges of summer tents of skins; in others,
rectangular enclosures three yards broad, with excavated floor and
with traces of porch opening seawards, gave unmistakable evidence of
more permanent habitation. Deep carpets of velvety moss found rich
soil in the floors of the huts, which had doubtless been no cleaner
than that of modern Eskimo. A little further inland we came upon a
bird-shelter, such as the natives of Danish Greenland still use to
encourage geese and duck to settle on their shores. It consisted of
four stones piled together like a miniature “Druid’s altar,” so as to
form a chamber large enough to shelter a nest. Generations of eider
duck had been hatched in it in security since the last wild hunter
left the shore. When we found it, it held a deep nest of eider down
with three eggs, fresh, but cold, probably belonging to a duck we had
killed before landing. The traces of former human habitation found on
this island, as well as at other places further northwards, seemed to
be about equally ancient. All told—not of fixed habitation in these
inhospitable lands, but of the exodus of some migrating tribe whose
hunters must have travelled far with their dog sledges if the walrus
and seal were as scarce then as now. No doubt the Arctic Highlanders
who told Kane that an island rich in musk oxen lay far to the north,
had occasionally despatched hunters in that direction; but no mere
hunters would require such a town of huts, nor would they take the
trouble to build on a new site at each visit without disturbing the
circles of stone close beside them. Similar ancient remains have been
found far westward through the Parry group, and have been attributed
to that host which, in the fourteenth century, swept downwards from
the unknown north and annihilated the Norsemen; but in our case the
broken walrus and seal bones, though lichen-grown and evidently very
old, could hardly have lasted five centuries even in an Arctic climate.
[Illustration: ESKIMO TENT-CIRCLES.]
After three days’ detention in Franklin and Pierce Bay, the ships
succeeded in creeping up inshore past Cape Prescott and a broad
glacier-headed bay, which has since been called after Professor
Allman. Every one was on deck as we rounded Cape Hawkes into Dobbin
Bay at midnight on the 12th August, for the scene that was opening
beyond the tall shadow of the cape was one of unusual splendour,
altogether different from such ideas of far Northern scenery as we
had gleaned from books. It has somehow or other become conventional
to represent Arctic skies as dark and lowering, and Arctic day as
little better than uncertain twilight. Nothing could be wider from
the mark, at least during the months that travel by ship and sledge
is possible. Washington Irving Island threw a long shadow towards us
across the lilac-tinted floes and gleaming water-spaces, which broke
into ripples as our iron prow pushed towards them. As we rounded in
close to the island, every telescope was fixed on a strange point on
the top of the bluff standing out clear and sharp against the northern
sunlight. It was either a very odd pinnacle of rock or a cairn, and
that, too, remarkably well placed. We could soon decide, for the back
of the bluff afforded a steep but practicable ascent. The conglomerate
rock of the summit was smoothed off like a mosaic by the action of
some ancient glacier, but near the edges it broke into a succession
of rocky ledges, and on the topmost of these stood the object of our
curiosity—a conical pile of well-packed stones. A second similar one
stood a little lower down to the southwards, both plainly the work of
a painstaking builder. But who was that builder? Not Eskimo. Structure
and site forbade that suggestion. Civilised man had but once visited
this shore, and that was when Dr. Hayes, in the spring of 1861, halted
his tired dogs on the floes beside the island. He did not climb the
bluff, and, besides, such an active sledge traveller would not have
loitered to build a pair of cairns except at some crisis of his
journey, and then he would have referred to them in his Journal. But
the cairns themselves bore witness that they were not the work of any
modern builder. Lichens grow but slowly in these regions. Dr. Scott
found Sir Edward Parry’s cairn untouched by them after thirty-two
years, and the wheel tracks of his cart were fresh as yesterday’s
when, after the same interval, Sir Leopold M’Clintock crossed his
track. These stones, on the other hand, were cemented together by deep
patches of orange lichen—the growth of many generations. We found no
record or scratched stone to tell us the names or fortunes of the men
who had left the cairns as witnesses to us, their successors. Perhaps
some baffled wanderer, whose fate is unknown to fame, had thus marked
his furthest north. There is plenty of room for conjecture. Many have
sailed for the northern Eldorado since Karlsefne, Celtic Norseman,
left his Greenland home and launched his three ships on the first
Arctic Expedition, eight hundred and seventy years ago.
[Illustration: CAPE HAWKES.]
For a week after leaving the island our progress northward was a
constant struggle with the pack. Here, in the broad basin opposite
Humboldt glacier, the Atlantic tidal wave through Baffin’s Sea
terminates, and leaves an icy barrier to mark its limits. Had not
that barrier consisted of much broken floes lying off a continuous
coast-line, it would have been impossible to force any ship through
it; but, aided as we were by the shore, twenty-eight miles were made
good in a week. Never did the prospects of the Expedition seem less
cheering, but we comforted ourselves with the knowledge that the
“Polaris,” a fortnight later in the season, had made her magnificent
run into Robeson Channel without much difficulty. With constant
watchfulness and unremitting labour the way northward was won mile by
mile. Every hour opened up some fresh possibility of advance, or some
new danger to be combated. The tired watch-keepers found little rest
during their short spell below. Almost every one “turned in” without
undressing. The tearing and splintering of the ice along the ship’s
sides, and the creaking and crushing as she charged the floes, made
sleep difficult. “All hands up screw and rudder,” became a familiar
order. And twice during the week it became necessary to cut docks in
the floes to shelter the ships from pressure. On the first occasion,
the heavy ice-saws, swung on tripods and worked by every hand on
board, did their work readily; but on the second day they were found
too short to reach through the thick ice, and nothing but rapid
blasting with gunpowder saved the ships from an overwhelming crush. At
length we found the rising tide flowing—not from the south as it had
done, but from the unknown north. It was the 19th August. The barrier
was past. Pools and lanes of water became more frequent, and on the
21st we steamed through a sea which Morton, leader of Kane’s northern
party, might well call open, for the ice fragments floating in its
intensely green water were not numerous enough to prevent a slight
swell, which gave our wardroom lamps the old familiar swing.
[Illustration: CAIRNS ON WASHINGTON IRVING ISLAND.]
As we pass Cape Constitution, Kane’s furthest, the air, 6° below
freezing, warns us that this year’s navigable season is already far
gone, but the dazzling sunlight ahead shows but little ice save the
film already forming on the sea. Twenty hours’ steam at this rate
would take us beyond where ship had ever sailed. But, alas! “open
seas” inside the Polar ice are disappointingly limited. Fragments of
pack increase in masses, and at length stretch across the channel in
a long white line from shore to shore. But a degree and a-half of
latitude has been gained, and the 81° parallel lies five miles behind
us as the ships are secured between Hannah Island and the grey cliffs
of Bessels Bay. The island is merely a number of gravel mounds forming
a convex breakwater in the entrance of the narrow fiord. Looking
northward from it, Hall’s Basin lay before us, bounded on the right by
Cape Morton and Joe Island, and far away beyond the mouth of Petermann
Fiord the valley of Hall’s Rest and the distant headlands of “Polaris”
Promontory; while to the left, at the other side of the strait, the
snowy cliffs of Grant Land formed the western lintel of Robeson
Channel. There was little time to explore the island. A sketch which
supplies the accompanying engraving was just complete when the signal
for recall flew from the foremast of H.M.S. “Alert.” A lead had opened
to the north-westward; the whole of the ice was in motion, and that
night both ships reached the northern shores of Lady Franklin Straits
before the closing pack barred further progress.
[Illustration: PLATE III.—MUSK OX HUNT, DISCOVERY HARBOUR, MIDNIGHT,
AUGUST 25, 1875—p. 25.
Our first musk ox hunt led us to an isolated hill-top overlooking
the bay in which H.M.S. “Discovery” afterwards wintered. This sketch
was made on the following evening, from the spot where seven of the
herd had fallen. Looking southward across the bay, and beyond Bellot
Island, Lady Franklin Sound extends away to the south-west; and at
the other side of the sound Grinnell Land rises in a line of straight
cliffs, and spreads away towards Cape Leiber on the left, and to the
distant peaks of the Victoria and Albert range on the right.]
[Illustration: VIEW FROM THE TOP OF HANNAH ISLAND.]
It was then midnight and very calm. A well-sheltered bay shut in by
Bellot Island offered a secure harbour, and both ships entered it,
steaming in towards a snow-covered valley at its head. Half-a-mile
inland in the valley lay a cluster of dark objects; through our
telescopes they looked like boulders; but as we watched them,
wondering at their uniform size, they appeared to move. In a moment
there could be no mistake. They were musk oxen, eleven of them in all,
and within easy reach. A hunting party of six was soon organised, and
in a few minutes a boat landed us on this yet untrodden shore. We
separated in three directions, meaning to cut off the retreat of the
animals landwards, but, unfortunately, our left wing engaged the enemy
sooner than we expected, and they made off at a rolling gallop up a
steep glen; two of them, evidently wounded, turned downwards towards
a ravine to the left, but the main body vanished over the brow of a
hill. So many pounds of good fresh meat could not be allowed to escape
without an effort, and accordingly two of us started off up hill on
the track of the game. They had made almost a complete circle, and we
sighted them standing together on a steep isolated bluff nearly over
where we had first seen them. Hidden by a projecting edge of the hill
crest, we scrambled to the top up a slope of stones and snow, and
surprised the beasts not ten yards off. They galloped right and left,
heads down, and sweeping the snow with their long shaggy fur, but fell
fast under the quick fire of our Winchester repeating rifles—murderous
weapons for this sort of work. In less than a minute all seven were
stretched on the snow.
It was now necessary to skin and cut up our victims, but before we
commenced this very disagreeable duty, the reports of rifles in the
valley below induced us to look over the brow. Our comrades had been
reinforced by others from the ships, and a circle of assailants had
closed round the wounded leader of the herd—a splendid bull. He was
making his last stand close to the brink of a deep ravine, gallantly
facing round at the flash of each rifle. He could no longer charge,
but the angry toss of his head showed how dangerous it would be to
close with him. He received no less than twenty-eight heavy Snider
bullets before he fell.
Musk ox hunting is not, as a rule, exciting sport. The skinning and
cleaning of the game, often in a cutting wind and low temperature,
and the carrying of the meat on board the ship, involved a good deal
of labour. Upon a subsequent occasion one of our hunters conceived
the happy idea of making a wounded ox carry his own beef towards the
ship, but the beast resented direction, refused even to be led by the
horns, and finally overthrew his captor, and had to be despatched
incontinently. They rarely attack, and can generally be approached
within rifle range with little trouble. Sometimes, however, they are
unaccountably timid. Animals that have never seen men are said to be
devoid of fear; but our experience does not bear out the statement.
Every beast we met, from the musk ox to the lemming, was afraid of
us. They seemed to take some time to realise that we did not belong
to their world. But having once made up their minds, they showed even
more terror than wild animals usually do.
Each musk ox gave us about two hundred pounds of meat, often most
excellent, but occasionally tainted with the flavour that gives them
their name. We failed to ascertain the source of this characteristic.
It occurs in both sexes and at all ages; and, moreover, it is not
peculiar to the musk ox, for a haunch of reindeer presented to us by
the Governor of Egedesminde possessed the very same flavour. A long
course of preserved food makes most fresh meat acceptable; walrus
and seal became delicacies; owls, foxes, and even skuas are not to
be despised; but genuinely musky musk ox is fit for nothing more
civilised than Eskimo dogs.
[Illustration: HEAD OF MUSK OX.]
According to the programme drawn up for our Expedition before we left
England, the second ship was not to be carried beyond the 82° parallel
of north latitude. The sheltered harbour in which the ships now lay
was 81° 41´, and was in every way suited for the winter quarters of
our consort. Here, accordingly, the first stage of the Expedition
terminated. So far everything we had hoped for had been accomplished.
Depôts to cover retreat in case of disaster had been duly deposited
at the Carey Islands and at Cape Hawkes, and a suitable harbour for
H.M.S. “Discovery” had been found beyond Lady Franklin Strait, in a
higher northern latitude than any human being had yet wintered in.
Much of the navigable season still remained, and though we had all
long ago realised the absurdity of expecting open water in the Far
North, we could not but look hopefully forward to the long stretch of
coast line shown on the charts extending to within 6° of the Pole,
interrupted only by “Army Fiord” and “Navy Opening.”