Arctic Summer—Flowers and Butterflies—Feathered Visitors—A
Strange Shot—Deceptive Game Tracks—The Land Ransacked—No Vestige
of Man—Nature’s Records—The Raised Beaches—The Break-up—Farewell
to Floeberg Beach—Running the Gauntlet—Robeson Channel
Ice-drift—A “Nip”—Walled in by Floebergs—Escape—Reunion with the
“Discovery.”
Summer at Floeberg Beach was an affair of weeks, almost of days. The
turning-point came silently and quickly—not in quite the demonstrative
fashion some of us expected, with an abrupt bursting forth of ravines
and a general rush of torrents to the sea, but still suddenly.
Three-fourths of the snow disappeared as if by magic, and the dark
patches of bare land grew broader and broader every day. In some
places the earth passed at once from frozen rock to dust; in others
marshy spots formed, and there the whole ground was cut up into
the hexagonal bosses that form a very striking feature in Arctic
foregrounds. A view of Floeberg Beach from Cape Rawson (Plate No. 4),
sketched on 18th July, gives an idea of how the land looked in summer.
Even near the shores it is never altogether free from snow. Permanent
drifts lie in the hollows, and from the crests of the cliffs at Cape
Rawson a great bank several hundred feet in height sloped downward
to the “mud flats” below. Trickling streams cut their way vertically
down through the snow or flow in tunnels under it, then wind across
the marshy flats, and end in some of the ravines that intersect
the land like Lancashire “cloughs.” For great part of the year the
ravines are merely more or less deep grooves in the monotonous
undulating whiteness, but in summer they hold brown foaming torrents
rushing between steep undermined banks of snow, quite unfordable if
deeper than the knee. These are the rivers of the country, but they
cannot run out to sea, like ordinary streams; the grounded pack-edge
prevents them; so they expend much of their energy in destroying the
green one-season’s ice, filling the lagoon between barrier bergs and
beach. The snow was no sooner off the land than the flowers were in
bloom—not very gorgeous specimens certainly, but still flowers, and
with more than their share of tender sentiment, as might be seen
by many bright little nosegays gathered for our invalids by the
rough hands of messmates. First came close clumps of magenta-tinted
saxifrage, with scarcely a trace of a leaf, and fading as fast as it
bloomed; then tiny yellow _Drabas_, and white coltsfoot, and woolly
willow catkins; and later, when the sorrel leaves, each as large
as a sixpence, began to get red and tasteless, the yellow poppies
appeared, and with them the delicately-tinted strawberry-like flowers
of _Dryas octopetala_. Plants were of course few and far between—for
example, four men searching all day could just gather one plateful
of the valuable sorrel. All, too, were on the most Liliputian scale,
seldom more than an inch above ground, but with immensely long roots.
Sometimes, as we sat sketching or picking sorrel, a mosquito or two
would present themselves, but they did not bite like their brethren
of the Greenland settlements. A small sort of dragon-fly was not
uncommon near pools, and now and then a small brown butterfly, an
_Argynnus_, or, more rarely, a yellow _Colias_, would flit by, looking
somewhat incongruous amongst the rocks and snow. Birds soon became
comparatively plenty; graceful grey tern fluttered about over cracks
in the floes, and dipped into the pools for the little shrimps that
came to the surface; flocks of knots, exceedingly wild and quick of
wing, were commonly seen wading about in marshy places. A pair of
snowy owls reared a brood on the cliffs of the north ravine. The
parents supplied an excellent dish, and the young ones were made pets
of. One of them, called “Mordecai” on account of his Asian profile,
became a great favourite in consequence of his quaintly gluttonous
habits. A few king-duck and Brent geese chose Grant Land as a safe
nursery for their coming broods. Stringent game laws were enacted, in
order that they might not be frightened away before they had made up
their minds on the subject. We altogether underrated the sagacity of
these creatures. Birds accustomed to winter perhaps on our own shores
would of course be familiar with man, but we hoped they might take us
for Eskimo armed with bows and arrows, and we were not at all prepared
for their accurate knowledge of the range of Eley wire cartridge in
our Guy and Moncrieff “central fires.” All were not so well informed,
however. One day, an officer wandering about the “mud flats” was
brought to a standstill by the extreme stickiness of the ground, and
was endeavouring to extract his boot from a muddy place, where it
had stuck fast, when a pair of geese, impelled by most convenient
curiosity, flew round him once or twice, and lit within a hundred
yards, then, stretching out their necks straight in front, walked
deliberately up till there was less risk of missing than of blowing
them to fragments. These birds no doubt come north in search of safety
for themselves and their broods during the nursing season, for the
moulting of both parents, just before the young are able to fly,
leaves them peculiarly defenceless. Later on, when the Expedition was
on its way southward, two of our sportsmen encountered a large flock
thus deprived of their pinions, and secured no less than seventy birds
in fourteen shots.
_A propos_ of shooting, the following curiously improbable personal
incident is perhaps worth narrating:—One evening, shortly before the
ship broke out of winter quarters, I took my rifle and went shoreward
to try and find a hare, but, after a long search, was returning
unsuccessful, when I happened to discover a king-duck swimming about
in a small lake; there was little chance of hitting her, but she would
at any rate give an excuse for a shot. After trying for twenty minutes
to get within moderate range, it was plain that there was nothing for
it but to walk straight up through the crunching snow; but the bird’s
patience was exhausted, and she rose on the wing a good hundred yards
off. In sheer annoyance and chagrin I fired, when, most unexpectedly,
out flew the feathers and down fell the duck. On going to pick her up,
marvelling greatly at the Munchausen-like luck of the shot, and hoping
that the hole was not through the best part of the bird, what was
my amazement to discover that she was not only alive, but perfectly
unhurt. Turn her over how I would, there was not a speck of blood on
the feathers, or a scratch on any part of the body. At last the secret
was discovered; the bullet had clipped the pinions off one wing, and
the fall had stunned the bird. She afterwards lived some time in
captivity in a hen-coop, and laid two eggs.
We had not spent many days roaming over our newly uncovered lands,
before we began to suspect that tracks of game were, in our part
of the Arctic regions at any rate, extremely misleading. On the
way northward, whenever the ship came to a standstill amongst the
floes, men and officers often made hurried visits to the shore, and
invariably came off with the stereotyped report that “traces of game
were numerous and recent.” We found so many traces and so little
game that the phrase acquired an inverted meaning, and passed into a
proverb, but the discrepancy remained unaccounted for. At Floeberg
Beach tracks of game were certainly numerous enough. The hard frozen
mud at the margins of every pool showed footprints of birds, often
so sharp and distinct that “rubbings” with pencil and paper were
easily made of them, and sometimes in relief where dust had filled
the impression and ice evaporation afterwards lowered the mould. In
some places tracks of musk oxen were abundant, and of every size,
from the little round footprints of calves to the broad hoof-marks of
full-grown animals; but there was absolutely no way of telling when
or in what numbers the game had been there. Once frozen, a footprint
may last indefinitely, especially if protected by snow; and, for aught
we could prove to the contrary, some of the tracks may have been as
old as the celebrated mammoth frozen up in the Siberian mud. On 5th
July, however, those who contended that the tracks were practically
fossil were confounded by the appearance of three musk oxen on a
hill-top beyond the north ravine. Their discoverer instantly sent off
news to the ship, and, very judiciously, waited patiently till the
arrival of assistance rendered their escape impossible. A few mornings
afterwards, a fine bull walked innocently down to the beach near the
ship, and was forthwith slaughtered. Being a good specimen, and close
at hand, he was transferred to the naturalist, and he now represents
his species in the British Museum.
All through the earlier weeks of July the pack gave warnings of
approaching disruption. Decided motion first occurred on 16th, and
on 21st the old familiar sound of “breaking plates” came from the
offing, and with a loud crack the ship suddenly righted herself from
the heel towards shore, which had slowly increased during the winter.
Nevertheless, as long as it remained calm no important movement was
likely to occur, except at high tide. We were, therefore, still able
to extend our hunting expeditions to several days from the ship. It
was not the search for game only, exciting as it was, that made these
late trips interesting. Our hunters enjoyed a privilege that has
rarely fallen to the lot of any discoverers in either past or recent
times—they traversed a shore never before trodden by the foot of man.
Everywhere south of the steep cliffs of Robeson Channel some vestiges
of humanity were discoverable; a broken sledge-runner, a chipped
flint, or a musk ox bone broken to extract the marrow, told us that
wandering Eskimo had been before us; but from the cliffs northward
all traces ceased—no savage hunter had ever disturbed the ice-borne
boulders of Floeberg Beach to fasten down his tent of skins, or form a
rough hearth for his travelling camp, and no sledges but our own were
ever launched towards the icy horizon beyond—
“We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea.”
Yet though there was no trace of man or his doings, Nature had left
deeply significant records of her own to tell the history of the
land. The neighbourhood of the ship was rich in such evidences. No
one could walk over the broad “mud flats” half-a-mile inland from the
ship without being convinced that the land had risen from the sea at,
geologically speaking, no very distant period. Shells similar to those
still living in the sea two hundred feet below lay strewn in abundance
on the fine sand. Here a pair of valves, enormously thickened to bear
the crush of ice, there a whole bed of slighter shells, still covered
with their brown filmy skins, and connected by their gristly hinges.
The mud itself was so salty, that where it dried in the sun a white
briny coat formed on its surface. Stems and roots of laver sea-weeds
were sometimes picked up, but the most interesting and eloquent
witnesses of the past were the splinters and logs of drift-wood that
lay imbedded in the mud, or scattered along the crests of these raised
beaches. The wood was easily recognised by the microscope as the wood
of pine trees, and though probably very many centuries old, was often
so apparently fresh as to smell woody when cut. It was not for us to
conjecture when or where that wood had grown, or how it had drifted to
its present elevated site; but we could not help thinking that it told
of a time when the shores, though perhaps far more deeply laden with
glaciers, were washed by a less ice-bound sea.
At one o’clock in the morning of 23rd July, the pack broke from the
shore under the influence of a strong wind, and left pools of water
outside our barrier bergs, but the ice still crushed close on Cape
Rawson, and when the wind lessened, all closed in. Again, on the
evening of 26th a space of water formed outside the bergs, and in
order to be ready when an opportunity for a rush southward should
offer, we set about breaking a channel through the floes between the
ship and the nearest gap in the wall of grounded bergs. The ice was
far too thick for even our longest and heaviest ice-saws, but with
the aid of three hundred pounds of gunpowder, judiciously disposed
in torpedoes made of tin cans and lime-juice jars, it was shattered,
piece by piece, and as each mass broke off and floated free, it was
pushed out to seaward by the united efforts of the whole crew wielding
levers and ice-poles.
While we lay waiting for a path southward to open, we could not but
look forward to the ordeal before us with a good deal of anxiety. Once
round Cape Rawson, there would be no turning back. Thirty miles of
shelterless cliff must be passed before we reached Lincoln Bay, and
for the whole of that distance the ship would have to run the gauntlet
through a mere fissure between a perpendicular wall of ice-foot, and a
moving, irresistible mass of floe eighty feet and more in thickness.
If fortune did not favour us, the destruction of the ship was certain,
and every preparation was made to meet such an eventuality. Provisions
and sledges were piled on deck ready to launch on the floes, and
notes and sketches and carefully-selected specimens were packed into
the smallest possible bundles, so that they could be pushed hastily
into a pocket if it should be necessary to desert the ship. Early
on the morning of 31st, an unusual sound awoke us; a strong breeze
whistled and sung in the rigging overhead, and a low vibration, like
the bass notes of an organ, filled the ship. It came from our heating
boilers—steam was being got up. On deck one glance round told us that
the time had come. A long black canal of water skirted the coast as
far as we could see towards Cape Rawson, and the rush through it must
be made now or never. Screw and rudder were already down in their
places, and the sails “bent,” ready to be loosed. A few strong charges
of gunpowder shook the ship from her icy bed. The order “full speed
ahead” was given. The screw flung a stream of foaming water over the
ice, and the ship moved slowly forward into the channel blasted for
her. Then, as she swung round under steam and sail through the narrow
portal in the wall of bergs, we caught our last glimpse of Floeberg
Beach. Shadows of clouds chased each other down over the brown slopes.
The headstone of Petersen’s grave stood out like a solitary human
figure, and a piece of canvas fluttered on a pole over “the doctor’s
garden,” where mustard and cress were just beginning to appear above
ground. Our tall cairn on top of the hill remained in sight for a few
minutes longer, then the bend of the coast shut it from view. At full
speed we flew past the well-known headlands so often painfully rounded
with tired crew and heavy sledge, past the ice-rounded rocks of Cape
Rawson, the tower-like buttresses of Half-way Cliffs, and the dark
precipices of Black Cape; but before we got to Cape Union our career
was cut short—the angle of a floe lay right across our narrow path,
and we had to wait in anxious inactivity till the next tide moved it
off and let us slip past. All that night and next morning, the floes,
closing in behind us, literally hunted us along the coast from one
little hollow of the ice-foot to another. Over and over again the ship
had to be pushed and wriggled through desperately narrow gaps to avoid
the closing floes behind her. Several times there was so little space
to pass that our boats, hoisted high up at the davits, scraped along
the perpendicular wall of ice-foot. The accompanying etching is from a
sketch made near midnight on 2nd August, looking back along our track,
but no sketch can convey an idea of the chief feature of the scene—the
majestic and irresistible motion of the ice-fields.
[Illustration: RUNNING THE GAUNTLET.]
Two days later, when we lay walled in by bergs in “Shift Rudder Bay,”
we could look back past Cape Beechey into the strait from which we had
escaped, and watch the tight pack of ice islands streaming south from
Robeson Channel into Hall’s Sea, without the distracting influence
of immediate danger, and we one and all came to the conclusion that,
as an impressive example of magnificent and imposing force, no other
natural phenomena could equal it. Our little vessel went very near
leaving her bones on the shores of this same bay. When we reached it,
the ice was closing in. A line of grounded bergs lay along the beach,
with a gap in it just large enough to admit the ship. Into this we
thrust her, feeling thankful for so good and opportune a shelter, but
unfortunately the gateway of our castle had no portcullis to close
behind us, the ice followed us in, and, foot by foot, forced the ship
up on the ice-foot, heeling her over and damaging her rudder. At four
in the morning the pressure suddenly relaxed, and the ship fell two
feet, but remained imprisoned. For days not a patch of water was to be
seen, though the whole pack moved south with one tide and halted with
the next. On 8th August it blew a gale, and the ice swept past with
increased speed. One large, dome-shaped fragment of polar floe crushed
through our gateway, and though it grounded long before getting near
the ship, the pressure behind was so enormous that it continued to
advance, shovelling round lumps of ice as big as a house on either
side of it, and rising out of the water as it did so, till it came
against the side of the ship. Now we were nipped in earnest. First
a rattle on deck, exactly like a hail-storm overhead, as the pitch
cracked and flew out of the seams; then a crunch as the ship yielded,
then an interval, and then another horrible vibrating crunch—for
downright unpleasantness, not even the tear of a shot through a ship’s
timbers can compare with such a sound—but the decks did not buckle
up under our feet, and the sides did not collapse. The “Alert” was
evidently not fated to be destroyed in that way. Nevertheless, when
the crush ceased, her position was far from comfortable; she was
raised four feet by the stern and completely imprisoned in a citadel
of bergs, apparently as hopelessly walled in as she well could be.
There might be oceans of water outside, but how was she to get out?
One chance only remained. It might be possible to make our jailor
berg float by digging off the whole top of it; so all hands set to
work, and for three days all that gunpowder, pick, and shovel could do
was done. Time was everything, for the tide fell lower every day. At
last our enemy gave up the fight, floated up, turned partly over, and
sailed out through the gate, considerably smaller than when he came
in. Victory came just in time; the ice opened before us across the bay
and down the coast. Ice navigation is never very rapid work, every
mile has to be fought for. We were only twenty-five miles from the
“Discovery,” but it took two days of sleepless activity to accomplish
that distance, and it was late on the evening of the 11th when we
rounded Distant Cape and caught sight of our sister ship.
[Illustration: ESKIMO BIRD-SHELTER.]