The Ships Part Company—Robeson Channel—Strange
Ice—Lincoln Bay—A Gale—A Rush North—The “Alert” reaches
a Latitude never before attained by Ship, and enters a
Polar Sea—Precarious Position—Disappointment—No Land
to the North—Perennial Ice—Altered Prospects—Autumn
Sledging—Pioneering—Dog-sledging—Romance and Reality.
On the 26th August the ships parted company, but the beginning of
the voyage was ominous. A quarter of an hour after the “Alert” had
received the last well-wishes of her consort, she grounded on a
sunken rock, and got off again only to be checked within sight of
her starting-point by a close-packed barrier of heavy floes. Two
days afterwards she pushed successfully past Cape Murchison, but
soon afterwards became entangled in a chaos of broken floes of most
formidable proportions, and was forced to take refuge in a shallow bay
with, fortunately, no worse injury than a broken rudder. While the
rudder was being replaced, three more musk oxen were obtained, and,
with our larder thus replenished, we entered Robeson Channel. Heavy
floes completely filled the strait, moving rapidly north and south
with each tide. Sometimes the whole pack would check for a moment
against a projecting point of coast, and then rush on again, leaving
a lane of eddying water filled with broken fragments between it and
the wall-like cliffs. Through this lane, with a precipice of rock and
ice-foot on the left, and square-sided floes gliding irresistibly
past on the right, the path northward lay. It changed continually,
one moment opening out invitingly, and the next closing like the jaws
of a vice. It required the most unwearying watchfulness to advance
through such a lead, especially as the numerous little bays which
had so often enabled us to hold our own further south had now given
place to an almost unindented coast. Late on the afternoon of the
27th we passed a broad inlet, which was identified as Lincoln Bay of
the “Polaris.” Twice we were forced back into its shelter. The second
occasion was after an attempt had been made to force a passage through
the pack away from shore. After an hour’s charging and crushing
amongst heavy blocks, the little patches of water became smaller
and smaller, and the ship became beset amongst broken floes of most
unusual proportions. The level surface of many of them was as high as
the ship’s sides out of water, and their whole thickness little if at
all under eighty feet. The gentlest touch between such floes would be
instant destruction; but, fortunately for us, there was much broken
ice between them, and the ship was able to struggle away from the
larger pieces till some change in the tide allowed her to escape back
to the protecting land.
The first of September was an eventful day for the Expedition. A gale
blew from the south-west, and after it had continued with undiminished
violence for some hours, we could see through the drifting snow, blown
in clouds from the land, that the ice was separating from the shore,
and leaving a lane of water between it and the “ice-foot.” Such a
chance would not come twice, and there was no time to be lost. Under
full steam, and with reefed topsails and foresail, our ship was soon
flying northwards, trusting to chance for security when the floes
would close again. Flying mists of snow left little to be seen but
the black band of water ahead, and the bases of dark, steep cliffs on
the left. We were passing Cape Union, but which of the numerous bold
bluffs had received that name we could not tell. After a few hours, it
was plain that it lay behind us, for the land began to trend to the
westward. At noon the ship still advanced, but at right angles to her
former course. The cliffs of Robeson Channel were past, and what could
be seen of the shore was a low undulating beach fringed by a barrier
reef of grounded icebergs. Our lane of water extended about two miles
along this shore, and then ended at a low point of land, from which
the pack had never moved in spite of the violence of the gale. The
wind was now lessening rapidly, and the floes were closing steadily
and resistlessly inwards. To be caught between them and the wall of
grounded ice would be instant and hopeless destruction.
A mile behind us we had noticed a gap in the barrier of ice. There was
just time to run back and push the ship through it, into the shallow
water between the grounded ice-blocks and the shore, and to make her
fast under the shelter of one of the blocks, when the pack closed in
with a grinding crush that made some of us at least expect to see
ice-barrier, ship, and all pushed high and dry on the beach.
In a few hours it again came on to blow, and this time furiously. The
ice-pack was again driven off shore, carrying part of our barrier with
it, the hawsers holding the ship to hillocks of grounded ice tightened
like bars, and finally, in a fierce gust, snapt, and the ship drifted
outside her shelter, but was again brought up by her anchor. Then the
wind suddenly veered, and drove the ice in on us with alarming speed.
There was no time to turn the ship; struggling sideways and sternwards
through the tide of slush and tumbling ice that raced along the
outside of the barrier, she reached the friendly gap just in time to
be helped in by the closing pack. The roar of crushing ice had already
commenced on the point of land north-west of the ship. It approached
and increased every moment, till the whole beach was in full chorus,
creaking, screaming, and crashing. Under such an enormous pressure the
strongest ship that ever floated would have been reduced to matches in
one minute.
For months afterwards the same harsh sound was to be heard outside
our barrier, till it became familiar and commonplace. It can be very
closely imitated by rubbing dinner plates together. As soon as the
position of the ship ceased to claim immediate attention, many an
anxious look was cast over the chaos of ice beyond in search of the
coast-line to the northwards. The truth broke on us very slowly.
President’s Land was not there. The shore off which we lay curved to
the left in a broad bay, and thirty or forty miles north-west of the
ship the land ended in an abrupt cape. Behind us, and beyond Robeson
Channel, Greenland spread away to the eastward, dwindling off in a
perspective of rounded snow-covered hills, while to the north between
these two lands’ ends there was nothing but an icy horizon.
[Illustration: PLATE IV.—FLOEBERG BEACH AND THE POLAR SEA, LOOKING
NORTH FROM THE CREST OF CAPE RAWSON, JULY, 1876.—p. 29.
Where Robeson Channel opens out into the Polar Sea, the cliffs of
Grant Land give place to a more shelving shore. This sketch, made
late in July, 1876, and looking due north across the winter quarters
of H.M.S. “Alert” at Floeberg Beach, shows the poleward prospect from
the last of the cliffs. The coast-line curves away to the west into
Black Cliff Bay, then turns north, and ends in the peaked mountains of
Cape Joseph Henry, the point from which the northern sledge-parties
started. Patches of melting snow, under Cairn Hill on the left, and
under the slaty crest in the foreground (where some pink saxifrage
is still in flower), send rivulets across the mud-flats to the South
Ravine, and help to flood the green one-season ice between the
grounded edge of the perennial pack and the shore. The floes are
mapped out by hedges of hummocks, and look deceptively smooth from
this height.]
The whole sea was covered with floes varying from a few yards to miles
in diameter. Their surfaces were undulating, and assumed peculiar blue
and metallic greens in low sunlight. Small angular spaces between them
were choked with fragments broken from the parent masses, and long
irregular hedges made of similar _débris_ surrounded each ice-field.
These hedges rarely reflected the same tint as the floes; when one
was purple, the other was green, and _vice versa_. It was months
before we realised the full import of this ice. At first it seemed
impossible that the great masses grounded along the shore could be
mere fragments of sea ice we saw spread before us. We mistook them
for icebergs. Like them, they were stratified. They grew in the same
way, only the land is the parent of one, and the sea of the other. The
Polar floes are in fact a floating glacier, and we accordingly called
the fragments floebergs. In this the sea before us differed from
ordinary frozen seas. Baffin’s Bay, for example, renews its ice year
by year. Every summer great part of it is, as we saw it, free from
ice; in autumn, its surface freezes first into a pasty mass, then
into floes nearly as flat as a frozen pond. During the winter, frost
and snow thicken them, and wind piles them into hummocks. Sometimes
part of the ice lasts for more than one year—thus whalers talk of
ice of one or more seasons old. But the floes of the Polar Sea are
perennial. They bear the plainest evidences of great age. They grow
from above, and are stratified by seasonal deposits of snow slowly
converted into ice. Excepting in insignificant spots along shore, the
surface of the Polar Sea never freezes into new floe; it is never
long enough exposed. The only ice of a single season possible here is
a frozen together conglomerate of boulder blocks between the thick
old floes. With this distinction in view, the term “Paleocrystic”
was applied to this “sea of ancient ice.” “Archäiocrystic” would
more exactly represent what we meant, but sounds, if possible, more
pedantic. The age of the floes is a subject for speculation; whether
there is any limit to their thickness is also unknown. It does not in
any way depend on crushing or piling together. They should be thinnest
near land, where they are most frequently broken, and yet there were
several on our beach—Floeberg Beach, as we called it—over eighty feet
in thickness. We met with others floating so high out of water that
they could not be less than two hundred feet deep. When strong winds
and tides occur together during autumn, pools and fissures, crevasses
rather, sometimes form in the edges of this polar-ice cap, but only
those who have seen it can fully appreciate the utter impossibility
of “boring” any ship through this polar pack; a nut-shell would have
as much chance under a steam-hammer as a ship between the closing
walls of such a crevasse. This was the open polar sea we had heard
so much of, but which in truth no one in the Expedition had ever
expected to sail in. What we had not calculated on was the absence of
land northward; and that the coasts shown in the maps were absent was
soon beyond all doubt. Day by day our disappointing position became
plainer. The continuous coast-line upon which every hope depended
was at least not in sight. One chance still remained. Possibly the
land beyond Cape Joseph Henry turned to the northward, and though the
ship had reached the utmost limit of navigation, sledges could travel
along the frozen shore. Depôts pushed far northwards on a continuous
coast-line would yet enable us to reach a high latitude, if that
northward-running coast-line could be found at any reasonable distance
from the ship. Meanwhile, it was plainly necessary to accommodate
our aspirations to the stern negatives before us. The infinite
possibilities of the unknown were no longer at our disposal. We
could no longer cherish little unspoken hopes of rapid success, more
navigable seas, richer hunting-grounds, or milder climate, polewards.
Our ship lay about a hundred yards from the beach, her bows pointed
to the north, her right side against the grounded ice which protected
her, and on her left a space of shallow water stretching to the shore.
Even this space was by no means “open water;” it was, on the contrary,
filled with floating lumps of ice of every size, from that of a
hailstone to that of a house, moving about with every change of tide.
Some of the large ones were troublesome neighbours, and had to be
secured with hawsers to prevent them getting into damaging positions.
One of them, more erratic and less manageable than the rest, was
commonly known as the Wandering Jew. The poet, by-the-bye, who placed
that hero on a piece of polar pack, must have had a prophetic glimpse
of these perennial floes ever drifting slowly round and round the
pole. A few days after the gale the whole space between the ship
and the shore froze hard, and it was possible to walk to land. The
shelving beach was of rough shale, but, like the rest of the land,
was almost entirely covered with snow. Much of the latter was soft
and white, and had fallen recently; but here and there, in sheltered
hollows, hard brown patches had evidently remained through the summer.
Half-a-mile inshore low undulating hills rose to about four hundred
feet. None of them had anything characteristic about them; they were
simply rounded-off banks of brown slate and grey shale, with long
straight slopes of hard snow on their northward faces—splendid places
for headlong “toboggoning,” as we found later on. Nothing could be
more dismal than our new territory. But we still hoped that the
next spring tides might allow the ship to advance a little way into
some more favoured spot before she was finally frozen in for the
winter. Two short excursions had already been made in search of safer
quarters, but the reports they brought back were not encouraging.
There were several bays not far north of the ship, but most of them
were blocked with ice, which had evidently remained unmoved for many
seasons. Under any circumstances, it was perfectly plain that the
ship would be obliged to winter within a few miles of where she lay,
and preliminary exploration of the coast westward, in preparation for
the autumn sledging, could no longer be delayed. Accordingly, three
dog-sledges were got ready to pioneer the road towards Cape Joseph
Henry, to push forward a small depôt, and to search likely-looking
spots for game.
Dog-sledges are to an Arctic Expedition what cavalry is to an army.
They act as the feelers of the advancing force, do the scout work,
carry despatches, keep up communications, and are in fact the Uhlans
of a sledging campaign. Speed is their strong point, but in the long
run dogs are unable to carry their provisions as far as men. They
have, nevertheless, accomplished long journeys in latitudes where the
pick and shovel had not to travel before the sledge, and where an
occasional seal or bear helped out their provender. Looked at from a
distance, there is a deal of romance about dog-sledging. Imagination
immediately pictures the lively galloping team flying along over the
crisp snow, and the comfortably muffled driver, covered with furs,
reclining on the sledge, without a trace of baggage or provisions
to inconvenience him. Alas! one half-hour’s experience of the real
thing is enough to take the whole gloss off the subject. The sledge
is heavily laden with tent and sleeping-bags, provisions, and fuel—an
item not considered by many people, without which even a drink of
water is an impossibility. The driver toils along behind the sledge,
guiding it by its handles as he would a plough, or flogging the dogs
with all his might. Striding along in the deep snow gives him a
peculiar waddling gait universal amongst the Eskimo. His companions
run in front or behind, and keep up as best they can, painfully
panting in the icy air, which sometimes brings blood from the lungs.
When the sledge sticks in the snow, or falls into a crack, or jams
between two lumps of ice, the dogs make one violent effort, and then
stop doggedly till the sledge is lifted out for them. Then the driver
hisses out “Kis, kis, kis,” and the whip encourages any dogs that wont
understand good Eskimo or forcible English, and off they go again. The
Eskimo dog is, as a rule, utterly destitute of the ordinary virtues of
his species. He is simply a wolf that has found slavery convenient.
After the autumn sledging season, we tried hard to rear pups.
Sometimes we got them large enough to toddle about the decks, and the
fat little morsels would begin to answer to their names; but if we
took our eyes off them for an instant, little “Samuel” or “William
Henry” would suddenly disappear, and some near relative would look a
little less hungry than before. When travelling, there is generally
some unpopular individual in the team, and he is snapped at by all
the rest. The dogs pull in the shape of a fan, constantly changing
places, and thus tangling their tails in the traces. One elderly dog,
appropriately called Bruin, had lost his tail in that way; some former
Eskimo master had found it simpler to amputate than to unravel. More
than once dogs were so severely bitten by their fellow-labourers that
they had to be tied up in bread-bags, and carried on the sledge till
they recovered a little. The meat biscuit provided for their diet was
the only thing they would not eat. Hide sledge-lashings or whip-thongs
were luxuries to them. One brute, called Michael, invariably ate his
canvas harness, and upon one occasion ran off with the cook’s metal
ladle, and bit a large piece out of it. With all their faults, our
dogs worked wonderfully hard. Their value to the Expedition can not
be overrated. They could pull at a pinch nearly one hundred pounds
each for a long day’s march. Then when camping-time came, the driver
whistled the signal to halt. A meal of preserved meat was served out
to them, and they coiled themselves down in the snow, and slept with
their bushy tails wrapped round their heads.
[Illustration: DRAGGED AT THE HEELS OF A DOG-TEAM.++]
Most of our dog-sledging parties found it necessary to secure their
teams during the hours called “night.” This was done by detaching the
united traces from the sledge, and fastening them to a spare tent-pole
pushed deep into the snow. Securing the dogs was not always a simple
matter. Upon one occasion, the officer in charge had loosed the traces
from the sledge for this purpose, when the dogs overpowered him, and
started off at full speed across the floes, dragging him at their
heels. He held on manfully, banging about like the tail of a kite;
if he let go, good-bye to the team. Fortunately, the dogs divided on
either side of an abrupt lump of ice, which checked them effectually,
and put an end to his Mazeppa-like career.
[Illustration: A RAVINE IN THE STRATIFIED ICE.]