THE AUTUMN OF 1873.—THE STRANGE LAND VISITED.
1. The autumn was unusually mild, though stormy and gloomy. The
thermometer up to the 20th of September fell daily some degrees below
zero (C.), and occasionally we had rain. At the end of the month the
minimum temperature ranged from 14° to 5° F., and the mean temperature of
the month was as low as 24·5° F. The mildness of the season was, perhaps,
connected with the unusual recession of the ice-barrier in the south;
though it might have been a consequence of the open water which had been
formed under the land during the drifting of the floes. The land itself
was but seldom visible, and heavy masses of dark-blue clouds, which are
peculiar to southern latitudes, generally hung over it. Frequent falls of
snow again covered everything around us. Parhelia were sometimes visible,
and these were generally the precursors of driving snow, which reared
deep drifts round the ship. The numerous little lakes on the ice-floes
were frozen over in the night even in the earlier part of August, and
at the end of the month these bore us during the day. The clear mirror
of their surface cracked whenever the temperature fell suddenly some
degrees, while the effect of contraction in the ship was followed by the
noises which we called “Schüsse.” The “ice-holes” were overspread with
a viscous ropy ice, which was strong enough to bear us at their edges.
The ship now stood out from the ice; her hull was about fourteen feet
above the surrounding surface of snow. To facilitate egress and ingress,
we constructed steps of ice on each side of the vessel. After the 7th of
September our efforts to free the ship were given up. The little basin
at the fore-part of the ship—the result of the toil of many months—was
completely frozen over, and afforded us the recreation of skating as a
reward for our labours.
2. The experience of the past greatly strengthened all the grounds and
motives which so readily presented themselves to abandon our helpless
vessel in the following summer and attempt the return to Europe by
means of sledges and boats. If there had been no other reason for this
resolution, regard for our health would have dictated the step. Our
supply of lemon-juice was so reduced, as to leave scarcely a doubt as
to the necessity of attempting to return. But amid these prudential
considerations, we were filled with fear lest we should be unable to
explore the mysterious land we had discovered.
3. The daylight now began to fail. On the 9th of September the sun set at
8.30 and the stars were visible at night. About the middle of the month
lamps were kept burning all the night through in our quarters below, and
our environment, never very animated, again wore the aspect of the dark
realm of ice. The visits of birds became rarer, although they did not
quite leave us as long as there was any open water near. The divers and
auks had already disappeared. They flew in long lines southward, and as
they whizzed past us through the rigging of the ship, we acknowledged
the superiority of these little creatures to us and to our ship, which
was never to hoist its sails again. The ice-birds, and the robber-gulls
still remained with us. We once shot a rose-coloured gull (Ross’s gull),
said to belong only to North America and Iceland. On the 28th we saw the
last snow-bunting. The first aurora was seen on the 22nd, and during the
winter its light fell not merely on the Frozen Ocean but on the distant
Franz-Josef’s Land, showing us that we were not drifting away from it. By
the end of the month we had drifted to the eightieth degree of latitude,
nearly; and every cliff of the land, even the most insignificant,
emerging at a distance from the ice, had charms enough to call us all on
deck.
4. In the second half of October, winds from the north and north-east
had driven us towards the south and south-west, and as we neared the
land we saw that the ice-fields were broken up by their contact with its
immovable barrier. Our own floe had been greatly diminished from the
general pressure of the ice. On the 1st of October we were driven so
near the land that we found ourselves in the midst of the destruction
going on in the ice. Our ice-floe was shattered and broken, and so
rapidly had it diminished in size, that the distance of the ship from
the edge of the floe, which was 1,300 paces on the 1st, amounted to only
875 two days afterwards. On the 6th it had diminished to 200 paces, so
that it was reduced to a mere fragment of its former size. The shocks
it now received caused the ship to quiver and shake, and we heard the
cracking and straining in its timbers, which kept us on the tenter-hook
of expectation lest the ice should suddenly break up. It seemed as if we
were doomed to a repetition of the trials and dangers of the preceding
winter. The bags of necessaries to be taken with us if we should be
forced to leave the ship, were kept in readiness for immediate use. As
we watched the advancing wall of ice, and heard the too well known howl
it sent forth, and saw how fissures were formed at the edge of the floe,
the days of the ice-pressures were painfully recalled, and the thought
constantly returned—what will be the end of all this? The Land we had so
longed to visit lay indeed before us, but the very sight of it had become
a torment; it seemed to be as unattainable as before; and, if our ship
should reach it, it appeared too likely that it would be as a wreck on
its inhospitable shore. Many were the plans we formed and debated, but
all were alike impracticable, and all owed their existence to the wish
to escape from the destruction that stared us in the face. Such were our
out-looks when on the 31st of October we were driven close to a headland
of no great height, about three miles distant from the ship, and found
ourselves in the midst of icebergs, several of which were of considerable
magnitude. Towards this, the bergs, or we ourselves, or both, were
rapidly drifting, as the soundings showed. If the icebergs drifted they
would of course crush all the ice-fields which stood in their way. We
were now in 79° 51′ N. Lat. and 58° 56′E. Long. Here exactly in the
longitude of Admiralty peninsula of Novaya Zemlya, and with the ship
lying north and south, we were to pass the winter—but harbourless.
5. On the forenoon of the 1st of November, the land lay to the north-west
of us in the twilight. The lines of rocks were so clearly and distinctly
seen, that we were convinced that it could be reached without endangering
our return to the ship. There was no room for hesitation; full of energy
and wild excitement, we clambered over the ice-walls lying to the
northward, which consisted of barriers, fifty feet high, of huge pieces
of ice recently forced up amid the pressure. These passed, we came on a
broad surface of young ice, which showed that there had been open water
there a short time before. Over the surface of this young ice we now ran
towards the land. We crossed the ice-foot and actually stepped on it.
Snow and rocks and broken ice surrounded us on every side; a land more
desolate could not be found on earth than the island we walked on; all
this we saw not. To us it was a paradise; and this paradise we called
Wilczek Island.
6. So great was our joy at having reached the Land at last, that we
bestowed on all we saw an attention which, in itself it in no way
merited. We looked into every rent in the rocks, we touched every block,
we were ravished with the varied forms and outlines which each crevice
presented. We talked in grand style of the frozen slopes of its hollows
as glaciers! Nothing was of greater moment in these first hours than the
question of its geological character, and great was our surprise to find
here the same rocks, with which we had become acquainted at the Pendulum
Islands during the second German North Polar Expedition. The columnar
conformation of these Dolerite rocks singularly resembled those of Griper
Roads and Shannon Island. The vegetation was indescribably meagre and
miserable, consisting merely of a few lichens. The drift-wood we expected
to find was no where to be seen. We looked for traces of the reindeer and
the fox, but our search was utterly fruitless. The land appeared to be
without a single living creature. We then ascended a rocky height on the
southern margin of the island, whence we had a view of the frozen ocean
extending some miles beyond the ship. There was something sublime to the
imagination in the utter loneliness of a land never before visited; felt
all the more from the extraordinary character of our position. We had
become exceedingly sensitive to new impressions, and a golden mist which
rose on the southern horizon of an invisible ice-hole, and which spread
itself, like an undulating curtain, before the glow of the noontide
heavens, had to us the charm of a landscape in Ceylon.
7. How vexatious was it to feel, that if we had reached this Land some
weeks earlier, we might have explored it without the risk of being cut
off from the ship. For some days the sun had sunk below the horizon, and
the twilight of noon admitted of only a few short excursions from the
ship, quite insufficient to satisfy our earnest desire to learn more of
its structure and configuration; and we much feared lest the constant
north winds should cause us to drift out of sight of it. Southwards
stretched a flat surface of bluish-grey ice, and beyond the distant ship,
a large “ice-hole” from whose yellow mirror there arose undulating mists.
Beyond this again stretched dark lines of floes running parallel to the
horizon, over which, in the south, hung the sky in deep carmine. We
scrambled over a rugged slope covered with ice as smooth as glass, which
ran into the interior of the little island, in order to get a clear view
northward; but we were compelled to return without achieving our purpose,
for we feared to absent ourselves longer from the ship. We accordingly
went back, but returned next day to explore. But these barren days and
small events made a profound impression on our minds, and even Carlsen,
the old and tried navigator of the frozen deep, wore on his breast,
beneath his fur coat, the star of the order of St. Olaf, to do due honour
to the dignity of discovery. We built a pyramid of stones six feet high
on the island, and fixed in it one of our flags attached to a pole.
8. On the 3rd of November a party of us started about eight o’clock
in the morning, when it was quite dark, to attempt to reach a glacier
which we had seen, on the north of the island and on the other side of a
frozen inlet of the sea. We took with us a small sledge drawn by three
dogs, and, in constant fear of being cut off from the ship, we pressed
on over a level surface of snow towards some objects suffused with a dim
rosy light, which seemed to float over them. As we neared them we found
them to be icebergs, which sparkled like jewels, and which we took to
be the terminal precipice of the glacier we were in search of. It was
only, however, after some hours that we came actually in sight of it; the
ship having meanwhile disappeared from our view. Suddenly there emerged
before us, in the east, a white band, which proved to be the terminal
front of the glacier, which, as we approached it, we were surprised to
find had an inclination of only two or three degrees. Its highest point,
therefore, must have been at a very great distance. On its left side
there was a moraine of great depth. When we began our return to the ship,
the rosy evening light had disappeared from the higher clouds, while it
became clearer behind the gigantic mass of the glacier, so that its dark
outline stood out strongly marked on the heavens. It was quite dark when
we again drew near the ship, but the brave Carlsen, armed with rifle and
walrus-lance for any emergency, came out to meet us.
[Illustration: APPROACHING THE LAND BY MOONLIGHT.]
9. In an excursion on the 6th of November we reached a point on the
north-west of Wilczek Island—passing for the first time during this
expedition beyond the eightieth degree of north latitude—whence we could
see the mainland of the new country stretching before us under the
silver light of the moon. An indescribable loneliness lay on its snowy
mountains, faintly illuminated by the span of twilight in the south and
by the light of the moon. If the ice on the shore, as it was moved by the
ebb and flow of the tide, had not sent forth shrill notes, and had not
the wind sighed as it passed over the edges of the rocks, the stillness
of death would have lain on the pale and spectral landscape. We hear of
the solemn silence of the forest or of the desert, or of a city buried
in sleep during the night; but what is this silence to the silence of a
land with its cold glacier mountains losing themselves in snows and mists
which can never be explored, and the very existence of which had remained
unknown from creation till this moment?
10. On the 7th another short expedition towards the south-west of Wilczek
Island was carried out; but notwithstanding all our exertions we were
unable to determine its configuration, even of the parts immediately
contiguous to us. Until the spring of the following year, the whole
island, except perhaps a portion of its southern side, remained a mystery
to us.