Transcriber's Note:

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

ROUND ABOUT

THE NORTH POLE

"DONE UP"

Frontispiece

ROUND ABOUT
THE NORTH POLE

BY W. J. GORDON

WITH WOODCUTS AND OTHER ILLUSTRATIONS

BY EDWARD WHYMPER

NEW YORK

E. P. DUTTON AND COMPANY

31 West Twenty-third Street

1907

Printed in Great Britain

PREFACE

Among the many books about the Polar regions there is none quite like this, dealing with the gradual progress of exploration towards the north along the different areas of advance within the Arctic Circle.

The subject is always interesting, for few regions have been the scene of more persistent effort and exciting adventure and unexpected gains from the unknown, particularly in the earlier days when the endeavour to find the northern passages to the east and west led to the beginning of our foreign trade.

It is often asked, "What is the use of further Arctic discovery?" No one knows. Nor did any one know the use of most discoveries before they were made.

When Eric landed in Greenland he was not in search of cryolite for aluminium. When Cabral sailed to Porto Seguro he knew nothing of the incandescent gas-mantle. When Oersted looped the live wire round the magnetic needle he was not bent on founding electrical engineering. And when Linnæus noticed the sleep of plants he had no intention of providing a substitute for a clock in high latitudes where, though the sunshine is continuous during the summer, the plants within the Circle sleep as in the night time, their sleeping leaves telling the traveller that midnight is at hand.

Men have made up their minds to reach the Pole, and thither they will go. What they will find when they get there may not promise to be much, but what they have found round about it has been enough to influence considerably the history of the world.

W. J. G.

July, 1907.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

SECTIONAL MAPS

ROUND ABOUT

THE NORTH POLE

CHAPTER I
SPITSBERGEN

Iceland—Greenland—America—Sebastian Cabot—Robert Thorne—The North-east Passage—Willoughby—Chancellor—Borough—The North Cape rounded—The White Sea reached—The First Arctic Search Expedition—Pet and Jackman—Brunel—Cornelis Nai—Barents reaches 77° 20´—Second voyage of Nai—The Samoyeds—Rijp, Jacob Van Heemskerck and Barents—Bear Island discovered—Spitsbergen discovered—The Dutch reach 79° 49´—Stephen Bennet—Welden—Jonas Poole—Henry Hudson reaches 80° 23´—Poole starts the British whaling trade—Baffin's voyages to Spitsbergen—Pellham winters at Green Harbour.

The story of the lands within the Arctic Circle is a record of the brave deeds of healthy men. This would seem to be true were we to take the story, if we could, back to the days when man followed the retreat of the glaciers, as he may in turn have to retreat before them, such a condition of things being not beyond the range of probability though it may be remote. For the boundaries of the frozen north are not dependent on a line of latitude, and have never been the same from period to period, or even from year to year. In some cases they have changed considerably within the Christian era, and it is evident that the ice is not eternal. The fossils declare that the climate round the North Pole has varied greatly, and must in comparatively recent ages have been comfortably warm, so genial indeed that some people would have us believe that men came from there in their last distribution. Not, however, with such migrants from the far north do we concern ourselves, but with those who have endeavoured to get there in historical times by different lines of approach, as we follow the circle round from east to west and note the record of each section by itself.

Who was the first to sail to the northern seas we know not. Suffice it for us that in 875 Ingolf the jarl, from Norway, refusing to live under the sway of Harold Haarfager, sighted Mount Oraefa. As he neared the coast, overboard went the carved wood; and where the wood drifted ashore he founded Reikjavik. But he was not the first in Iceland, for the Irish monastery had been there for years when he arrived, though the monks retired to their old country when they found the Norsemen had come to stay.

Then the Icelander Gunnbiörn, driven westward in a gale, sighted the strange land he called White Shirt from its snowfields, which Eric the Red, following a long time afterwards, more happily renamed. "What shall we call the land?" he was asked. "Call it Green Land," replied Eric. "But it is not always green!" "It matters not: give it a good name and people will come to it!"

THE SUMMIT OF ORAEFA

From a photo

Then the Norsemen worked further south. In 986 Bjarni sighted what we now call America, and in 1000 came the voyage of Leif Ericson, who, on his way down the mainland, landing again and again, gave the names to Helluland, Markland, Vinland—in short, the Viking discovery of the New World.

Greenland, like the eastern coast of the continent, was duly colonised, its two chief settlements being one just round Cape Farewell, the other further north on the same coast. In those days the island, or chain of islands beneath an ice-cap, as many think it is, would appear to have had a milder climate than it has now. The colonies throve, their population becoming numerous enough to require a series of seventeen bishops, the last one dying about 1540, to superintend their spiritual welfare. But the Eskimos, in their migration from Asia across the Arctic islands, arrived in the country before the middle of the fourteenth century and gradually drove the Norsemen downwards, the northern colony coming to an end in 1342 owing to the enemy attacking during a visitation of the Black Death.

Meanwhile Iceland, which touches the Arctic Circle in its northernmost point, and extends but half as far south of it as Greenland, increased in prosperity as a sort of aristocratic republic, and produced more vernacular literature than any country in Europe, in which, as might be expected, the story of Greenland and the American colonies was kept so well to the fore that it became as familiar among the people as a nursery tale. Thither, from Bristol, in February, 1477, went Columbus; and thence it was he returned to seek a patron for his western voyage across the Atlantic.

The first voyage of Columbus in 1492 gave a great stimulus to maritime discovery, and many were the projects for searching the seas for a new route to the east. Of these the most important was that submitted to Henry VII by John Cabot, of Bristol. Much has been written, on slender and confusing evidence, as to the share in its success due to him and to his son, the more famous Sebastian; and, to be brief, we cannot do better than follow Anderson, who, in his Origin of Commerce, ingeniously evades the difficulty by speaking, commercially, of "Cabot and Sons." The Bristol firm, then, in 1497 despatched their ship Matthew to the westward and discovered and took possession of Labrador and the islands and peninsulas in the mouth of the St. Lawrence, the district being at first known as the New Found Land, a name afterwards restricted to the largest island. And they had their reward, as shown in the Privy Purse accounts of Henry VII, where an entry of the 10th August, 1497, appears—"To hym that found the new isle, £10." Surely not an excessive honorarium for the finding of a continent.

In 1498 another voyage of the same ship by way of Iceland, in which some attempt seems to have been made to colonise the newly discovered territories, resulted in the discovery of Hudson Strait and a visit to Labrador, judging by the finding of the deer in herds, the white bears, and the Eskimos who are not known to have ever crossed into the island of Newfoundland. This was not the only English vessel to appear in these parts at that time, for in the same year the Privy Purse accounts record a gift of £30 to Thomas Bradley and Launcelot Thirkill for going to the New Isle, adding that Launcelot had already received £20 "as preste" for his ship going there.

COLUMBUS

It is evident that the fisheries were found to be worth working, for no less than fifty Spanish, French, and Portuguese ships were engaged in them in 1517, the year of Sebastian Cabot's disputed voyage to Hudson Bay. Ten years afterwards Robert Thorne, of Bristol, wrote to the King, mentioning this voyage and suggesting three sea routes to Cathay—by the north-west, as Sebastian had attempted, by the north over the Pole, and by the north-east—and, in 1547, when Sebastian returned to England for good, after his long service with Spain, he again, as the first Governor of the Company of Merchant Adventurers, took up this Cathay question, which had frequently been raised, and fitted out, as a commencement, an expedition to the north-east.

The ships were built at Bristol specially for the purpose, and they were sheathed with lead, the first so treated in this country. This sheathing of ships was not the only innovation we owe to the most scientific seaman of his time, for in his famous ordinances for the voyage many excellent new things are enjoined, including the keeping of a log and journal, which date from this expedition. There were three vessels, the Bona Esperanza, of one hundred and twenty tons, Captain Sir Hugh Willoughby; the Edward Bonaventure, one hundred and sixty tons, Captain Richard Chancellor; and the Bona Confidentia, ninety tons, Captain Durfourth. In Chancellor's ship, as master, was the best navigator of the fleet, whose monumental brass in Chatham Church is noteworthy for its epitaph: "Here lieth buried the bodie of Steven Borough, who departed this life ye xij day of July in ye yere of our Lord 1584, and was borne at Northam in Devonshire ye xxv^th of Septemb. 1525. He in his life time discouered Moscouia, by the Northerne sea passage to St. Nicholas, in the yere 1553. At his setting foorth of England he was accompanied with two other shippes, Sir Hugh Willobie being Admirell of the fleete, who, with all the company of ye said two shippes, were frozen to death in Lappia ye same winter. After his discouerie of Roosia, and ye Coastes thereto adioyninge—to wit, Lappia, Nova Zemla, and the Countrie of Samoyeda, etc.: he frequented ye trade to St. Nicholas yearlie, as chief pilot for ye voyage, until he was chosen of one of ye foure principall Masters in ordinarie of ye Queen's Mat^ties royall Nauy, where in he continued in charge of sundrie sea services till time of his death."

The ships left in May, but did not remain long together. On the 2nd of August Willoughby and Durfourth separated from Chancellor in a storm off the Lofodens, and after devious courses, that might have led anywhere, were frozen in on the coast of Lapland, where they wintered and died, as did all the men with them. Chancellor, having waited at the rendezvous in vain, crossed the Arctic Circle, rounded the North Cape—so named by Borough—and found his way into the White Sea. While his ship was in winter quarters near where Archangel now is, he made a sledge journey to the Czar at Moscow, which led to the formation of the Muscovy Company and the beginning of England's Russian trade; and through his meeting there with the Persian Ambassador came about the mission of Anthony Jenkinson to the Shah, which opened up for us the Persian trade. Never was a voyage more successful. With it began the foreign commerce of this country, and from it dates the rise of our mercantile marine.

In 1556 Borough, in the Searchthrift, persevered further east, and, passing between Novaya Zemlya and Waigatz Island, through the strait that bears his name spelt differently, entered the Kara Sea. Next year in the same ship he was given the command of the first Arctic Search Expedition, its object being to discover what had become of Willoughby. Of one ship, the Confidentia, he obtained news in an interview with a man who had bought her sails, but the full story of the disastrous end of the voyage remained a mystery until the Russians found the ships and bodies and Willoughby's journal, and took the ships round to the Dwina. Then for the first time did people realise what it meant to battle with an Arctic winter without preparation, and many were those who withdrew their interest in the frozen north, preferring tropical dangers to the possibility of such accumulating miseries as the journal records in due order in its matter-of-fact way, its last entry being the terribly suggestive—"Unknowen and most wonderful wild beasts assembling in fearful numbers about the ships."

With Stephen Borough in the Chancellor voyage was Arthur Pet—or Pett, a name not unknown in the navy—who, after two centuries, has become notable again through a strange discovery. In search of the much-desired passage by the north-east he sailed from Harwich on the 31st of May, 1580, in the George, of forty tons, accompanied by Charles Jackman, in the William, of twenty tons. His orders were to avoid the open sea and keep the coast in sight all the way out on the starboard side, and William Borough—Stephen's brother, afterwards Comptroller of the Navy—gave him certain instructions and notes.

Arranging with Jackman, whose little vessel sailed badly, to wait for him at Waigatz, Pet went ahead and endeavoured to pass through Burrough Strait, but meeting with trouble from the ice, missed the passage, and working round Waigatz to the south, entered the Kara Sea through Yugor Strait, or as it used to be called after him, Pet Strait. Coasting eastward with the mainland in sight, he was, as might be expected, much hampered by the heavy pack. On being joined by the little William he made for the northward, seeking a way to the east, but the "more and thicker was the ice so that they could go no further," and, after talking the matter over on the 28th of July, Pet and Jackman reluctantly decided to return to Waigatz and there decide on what should be done.

Their way back was difficult. They became shut in so that "they could not stir, labouring only to defend the ice as it came upon them." For one day they were clear of it, but next day, the 16th of August, they were encumbered again, though they got out of the trouble by sailing between the ice and the shore, which was a new experience. In this way they just scraped through Pet Strait, and bore away in the open sea to Kolguiev, both vessels grounding for a time on the sands to the south of that island. On the 22nd of August, two days afterwards, the William parted from the George in a dense fog, while Pet brought his ship home and dropped anchor at Ratcliff on Boxing Day.

The Dutch had for some time been trying to outstrip the English on this route to the far east. In 1565 they had settled at Kola, and about thirteen years afterwards had established the factory at the mouth of the Dwina on the site of Nova Kholmogory, generally known as Archangel. In 1584 Olivier Brunel, their energetic emissary in Russia, sailed on the first Dutch Arctic discovery expedition. He tried in vain to pass through Pet Strait, and the ship, with a valuable cargo of furs and mica, was wrecked on its homeward voyage at the mouth of the Petchora.

Ten years elapsed, and then there sailed from the Texel the expedition of Cornelis Nai, in which the Mercury, of Amsterdam, was commanded by Willem Barents. Barents—really Barentszoon, the son of Bernard—sighted Novaya Zemlya, with which his name was to be thenceforth associated, on the 4th of July, and coasting along its mighty cliffs, peopled with their myriad seabirds, passed Cape Nassau ten days later. Thence reaching 77° 20´, and thus improving on John Davis's record for the highest north, he struggled through the ice to the Orange Islands and back, some twenty-five miles, during which he tacked eighty-one times and thereby sailed some seventeen hundred geographical miles. Failing to proceed further, he came south, and off Pet Strait—named by the Dutchmen Nassau Strait—fell in with the other two ships returning from their unsuccessful attempt to cross the Kara Sea.

Next year a fleet of seven vessels under Nai left the Mars Diep on another endeavour to get through to China. One of the two chief commissioners on board was the famous Van Linschoten, who had been on the previous voyage, and the chief pilot was Barents, who was in the Winthont (Greyhound) with Jacob van Heemskerck as supercargo. Arriving at Pet Strait they found it so blocked with ice that no passage was possible, and Barents, in search of information, went ashore on the mainland south of the strait and made friends—in a way—with the Samoyeds, whose appearance, as described by Gerrit de Veer, was "like that of wild men," dressed as they were in deerskins from head to foot, those of importance wearing caps of coloured cloth lined with fur; for the most part short of stature, with broad flat faces, small eyes, and bow legs; their hair worn long, plaited, and hanging down their backs.

They were evidently suspicious of the Dutchmen, who did their best to be friendly. The chief had placed sentinels all round to see what the new-comers were about and note everything that was bought and sold. One of the sentinels was offered a biscuit, which "he with great thanks took and ate, and while he ate it he still looked diligently about him on all sides, watching what was done." Their reindeer sledges were kept ready—"that run so swiftly with one or two men in them that our horses were not able to follow them." They were unacquainted with firearms, and, when a musket was fired to impress them, "ran and leapt like madmen," but calmed down as soon as they saw there was no malicious intention, to wonder much more, however, when the man with the gun aimed at a flat stone he placed as a mark, and, fortunately, hit and broke it. The meeting ended satisfactorily; "after that we took our leaves one of the other with great friendship on both sides, and when we were in our pinnace we all put off our hats and bowed to them, sounding our trumpet; they in their manner saluting us also, and then went to their sledges again."

SAMOYEDS AND THEIR DWELLINGS

Barents was by no means convinced that the strait was impassable, and held out against the opinion of the others for some days, but with the firm ice stretching round in all directions he had to give in, and on the 15th of September the fleet began the voyage home. Much had been expected, and the result was so conspicuous a failure that the States General abandoned any further attempt at a north-east passage on their own account, but decided to offer a reward to any private expedition that proved successful. Whereupon the authorities and merchants of Amsterdam fitted out two vessels for a third voyage, giving the command of one to Jan Corneliszoon Rijp, and that of the other to Jacob van Heemskerck, with Barents as chief pilot.

The ships left the Dutch coast on the 18th of May. Four days afterwards they were off the Shetlands, going north-east. On the 9th of June they discovered an island, on which they landed. Here they saw a prodigious white bear, which they went after in a boat, intending to slip a noose over her neck, but when they were near her she looked so strong that their courage failed, and they returned to the ships to fetch more men, and what seems to have been quite an armoury of "muskets, harquebusses, halberds and hatchets." Accompanied by another boat they attacked this formidable beast for over two hours, one of them getting an axe into her back, with which she swam away until she was caught and had her head split open by another blow from an axe. From this remarkable bear, whose skin, we are told, was twelve feet long, the island was named Bear Island.

Continuing northwards they sighted, on the 19th of June, Spitsbergen, which they supposed to be Greenland—an error that led to much confusion—and on the 21st of June they landed and had another trying time with a bear, whose skin proved to be thirteen feet long. On one island of the cluster they found the eggs of the barnacle goose, Bernicla leucopsis, whose nesting ground was up to then unknown, and on others they saw reindeer, for in this land "there groweth leaves and grass." Returning to Bear Island after attaining 79° 49´, some hundred and seventy miles higher north than in 1594, Rijp departed for the north again, and, failing to get beyond Bird Cape, went home to Holland by way of Kola; and to Kola he came back the year afterwards.

In 1603, following the Dutch, came Stephen Bennet to call Bear Island Cherie Island, after his patron, and find the walruses in thousands and the birds in millions. A rocky tableland of mountain limestone and carboniferous sandstone, with the usual fossils in unusual numbers and a few coal seams in between; the ravines faced and floored with fragments of every dimension and shape, split off by the frost and weathered by wind and rain: a grey, grassless, monotonous country, except along the coast, where the guano from the vast numbers of seabirds has coated the crannies and ledges of the cliffs, that tower up perhaps four hundred feet from the water, with a thin layer of soil in which the scurvy-grass and a few other plants thrive amazingly, though the island's complete flora contains but forty species—such is Bear Island, the stepping-stone to Spitsbergen, of which Jonas Poole took possession in 1609 for the Muscovy Company.

SPITSBERGEN

Lying east of the influence of the Gulf Stream, the range of temperature is of the widest. Often the island is unapproachable owing to the ice, sometimes it is even now as hot as Welden found it in 1608, when, in June, "the pitch did run down the ship's sides, and that side of the masts that was to the sun-ward was so hot that the tar did fry out of it as though it had boiled." That was a great year for Welden, for he killed a thousand walruses in less than seven hours and took a young one home with him, "where the king and many honourable personages beheld it with admiration, the like whereof had never before been seen alive in England."

Poole did much useful work in these seas, but is now little heard of, most of the surviving interest in such matters being concentrated on Henry Hudson, who was in the same service at the same time. Hudson was, perhaps, a grandson of Alderman Henry Hudson, one of the founders of the Muscovy Company, but nothing is really known of him beyond his being a captain in the Muscovy Company, who, on the 19th of April, 1607, took the sacrament at St. Ethelburga's, in Bishopsgate Street, with his son and crew "and the rest of the parishioners." That he was a parishioner may be true, but that all the ten members of the crew were so is unlikely. Anyhow, they were outward bound for Japan and China by way of the North Pole, and sailed from Gravesend on the 1st of May.

Where he went is not clear in detail, as his latitudes are seldom correct and his longitudes are not recorded. He sighted Greenland north of Iceland, and, shouldered off by the ice barrier, left it somewhere about Franz Josef Fjord, working easterly by the edge of the ice to Spitsbergen. Here he sailed round Prince Charles's Foreland and went north, passing Hakluyt Headland, which he named, reaching on the 13th of July, 80° 23´, "by observation." He saw many whales, but found his way blocked by ice; and after many attempts, assuring himself that there was no passage hereabouts to the north, sailed southwards for Bear Island. On leaving this he seems to have gone west, possibly to the coast of Greenland again, for on his way home he lighted upon Hudson's Touches, now known as Jan Mayen Island, the principal cape of which bears the name of Hudson's Point—which may be either Hudson's or Rudston's (after the Rudston mentioned in Baffin's fourth voyage)—while another is known as Young's Foreland, perhaps after the James Young who was the first in the ship to sight the coast of Greenland on the outward journey. He dropped anchor in the Thames on the 15th of September all well. He had not crossed the Pole, nor did he find Spitsbergen stretching up to 82°, as he said, its most northerly point being miles further south; but he had gone beyond Van Heemskerck's furthest north and found a fishing ground for whales and walruses which proved of great commercial value.

FRANZ JOSEF FIORD

In 1610, Poole, finding that he could not land on Bear Island owing to the ice, stood away to the north-west, reached Spitsbergen, and worked along the western side to Hakluyt Headland, where the ice barred further advance. On his way up and down the coast he gave many of the capes and bays the names they still bear, and generally did so well that on his return he was put in the place of Hudson, who had left the service two years before, and made a sort of special commissioner by the Muscovy Company "for certain years upon a stipend certain" to make further discoveries round Spitsbergen and to ascertain whether there was an open sea further northward than had already been found. In addition to searching for the open polar sea, he was to convoy the Mary Margaret, in which were six Biscayners "expert in the killing of the whale," to Bear Island, and thence to Whale Bay in Spitsbergen. In short, Poole was to start the British whaling trade, the Mary Margaret being the first British vessel to be employed in that lucrative but hazardous occupation; and she was under the command of Thomas Edge, whose name is borne by Edge's Island.

The beginning was so promising that in 1613, two years afterwards, a fleet of seven vessels went out to take part in the fishery and clear away the foreigners who had come to share in the good fortune; the company claiming the islands on the ground of their purely imaginary discovery by Willoughby, the Dutch resting their claim on the real discovery by Van Heemskerck. In this fleet as chief pilot was William Baffin—his second recorded voyage. By him, who as usual kept his eyes open, we have the first description of the Spitsbergen glaciers. He was at the time—the 29th of July—in Green Harbour in Ice Fjord. "One thing more I observed," he says, "in this harbour which I have thought good also to set down. Purposing on a time to walk towards the mountains, I, and two more of my company, ascended up a long plain hill, as we supposed it to be; but having gone a while upon it, we perceived it to be ice. Notwithstanding we proceeded higher up, about the length of half a mile, and as we went saw many deep rifts or gutters on the land of ice, which were cracked down through to the ground, or, at the least, an exceeding great depth; as we might well perceive by hearing the snow water run below, as it does oftentimes in a brook whose current is somewhat opposed with little stones. But for better satisfaction I brake down some pieces of ice with a staff I had in my hand, which in their falling made a noise on each side much like to a piece of glass thrown down the well within Dover Castle, whereby we did estimate the thickness or height of this ice to be thirty fathoms. This huge ice, in my opinion, is nothing but snow, which from time to time has for the most part been driven off the mountains; and so continuing and increasing all the time of winter (which may be counted three-quarters of the year) cannot possibly be consumed with the thaw of so short a summer, but is only a little dissolved to moisture, whereby it becomes more compact, and with the quick succeeding frost is congealed to a firm ice."

Next year he was out again in the Thomasine, one of a fleet of thirteen vessels, and in endeavouring to pass to the north-east, reached Wijde Bay, where at the point of the beach at the entrance he "set up a cross and nailed a sixpence thereon with the king's arms," probably the neatest property mark in history. Thence he went on to the entrance to Hinlopen Strait, completing the journey along the north of the main island. It was on this voyage that he endeavoured to find his longitudes by observing the moon, for Baffin was the first who attempted to take a lunar at sea.

Year by year the fishery increased, and the whale fishers multiplied as if the sea were a goldfield, the monopoly being respected until 1618, when the Dutch, who had all along prospered more than the rest, proved too strong for the English, and a compromise was arrived at by which the different harbours were allotted to the different nations for the processes necessary in the preparation of the whale products for shipment. But it was purely a summer industry. There was no colony, and it did not seem as though there would be one, for no man willing to winter in the place could be found. Vainly were rewards offered to those who would venture. In the north was the ever-present barrier of ice, more distant some years than others, but always there to come south and hold the islands in its grip when the fishery was over, and those who came early and those who stayed late saw enough of the wintry landscape to make them doubt if life were possible under such conditions.

Then the idea, not new to Englishmen, that colonies should be started by criminals, was acted upon, and the Muscovy Company procured the reprieve of a batch of prisoners under sentence of death and landed them in Spitsbergen under promise of a free pardon, a handsome reward, and full provisions and suitable clothes if they would remain there for a continuous twelve months. But, as the ship that brought them was preparing to return to London, "they conceived such a horror and inward fear in their hearts" that they besought the captain to take them back that they might be hanged rather than perish amid such desolation; and the captain "being a pitiful and a merciful gentleman, would not by force constrain them to stay," and brought them home again, when the company—who could do no less—procured them a pardon. One captain—of a different disposition—had left nine men behind him, all of whom perished miserably; and another, in 1630, left eight others, apparently through causes beyond his control, whose adventure was to form one of the most interesting episodes in Arctic story.

It was on the 15th of August in that year that the Salutation sent Edward Pellham and his seven companions ashore to kill reindeer for the ship's provisions on her voyage home. Taking with them two dogs, a snap-hance, two lances, and a tinder-box, they landed near Black Point, between Green Harbour and Bell Sound, and, "laying fourteen tall and nimble deer along," camped for the night. During the night the weather changed and brought in the ice between the shore and the ship, and in the morning the ship had gone. The boat's crew made for Green Harbour, thinking she would put in there to pick them up, but she failed to appear, being due to leave the country in three days, and after a fruitless attempt to catch her at Bell Sound, they eventually took up their quarters there on the 3rd of September.

Here was one of the so-called tents of the whale-fishers. "This," says Pellham, "which we call the tent, was a kind of house built of timber and boards very substantially, and covered with Flemish tiles, by the men of which nation it had in the time of their trading thither been built. Four-score foot long it is and in breadth fifty. The use of it was for the coopers, employed for the service of the company, to work, lodge, and live in, all the while they make casks for the putting up of the train oil." As this was too large for their comfort, they very sensibly built another within it. "Taking down another lesser tent therefore (built for the landmen hard by the other, wherein they lay whilst they made their oil), from thence we fetched our materials. That tent furnished us with one hundred and fifty deal boards, besides posts or stanchions and rafters. From three chimneys of the furnaces wherein they used to boil their oil, we brought a thousand bricks: there also found we three hogsheads of very fine lime, of which stuff we also fetched another hogshead from Bottle Cove, on the other side of the sound, some three leagues distant. Mingling this lime with the sand of the sea-shore, we made very excellent good morter for the laying of our bricks: falling to work thereon, the weather was so extreme cold as that we were fain to make two fires to keep our morter from freezing. William Fakely and myself, undertaking the masonry, began to raise a wall of one brick thickness against the inner planks of the side of the tent. Whilst we were laying of these bricks, the rest of our company were otherwise employed every one of them: some in taking them down, others in making of them clean and in bringing them in baskets into the tent. Some in making morter, and hewing of boards to build the other side withal, and two others all the while in flaying of our venison. And thus, having built the two outermost sides of the tent with bricks and morter, and our bricks now almost spent, we were enforced to build the two other sides with boards; and that in this manner. First we nailed our deal boards on one side of the post or stanchion to the thickness of one foot: and on the other side in like manner: and so filling up the hollow place with sand, it became so tight and warm as not the least breath of air could possibly annoy us. Our chimney's vent was into the greater tent, being the breadth of one deal board and four foot long. The length of this our tent was twenty foot and the breadth sixteen; the height ten; our ceiling being deal boards five or six times double, the middle of one joining so close to the shut of the other that no wind could possibly get between. As for our door, besides our making it so close as possibly it could shut; we lined it moreover with a bed that we found lying there, which came over both the opening and the shutting of it. As for windows, we made none at all, so that our light we brought in through the greater tent, by removing two or three tiles in the eaves, which light came to us through the vent of our chimney. Our next work was to set up four cabins, billeting ourselves two and two in a cabin. Our beds were the deer skins dried, which we found to be extraordinary warm, and a very comfortable kind of lodging to us in our distress."

For fuel they knocked to pieces seven old boats left ashore by the ships, storing the wood over the beams of the tent so as to make a sort of floor protecting the interior from snow driven in under the tiles, and, in addition, they broke up a number of empty casks. To make the wood last as long as possible they hit upon a device for keeping the fire in—"when we raked up our fire at night, with a good quantity of ashes and of embers, we put into the midst of it a piece of elm wood, where, after it had lain sixteen hours, we at our opening of it found great store of fire upon it, whereupon we made a common practice of it ever after: it never went out in eight months together, or thereabouts."

Upon the 12th of September a small quantity of drift ice came into the sound, on a piece of which they found two walruses asleep, when "William Fakely being ready with his harping iron, heaved it so strongly into the old one that he quite disturbed her of her rest: after which, she, receiving five or six thrusts with our lances, fell into a sounder sleep of death." The young one, refusing to leave her mother, was also killed; and a week afterwards another walrus fell a victim; but even with these the store of provisions was inadequate. To make the food last, they put themselves on an allowance of one good meal a day, except on Wednesdays and Fridays which were fasting days devoted to whale sundries—"a very loathsome meat," says Pellham, in brackets—later on, for four days in the week they fed upon "the unsavoury and mouldy fritters, and the other three we feasted it with bear and venison." "But," continues the narrative, "as if it were not enough for us to want meat, we now began to want light also; all our meals proved suppers now, for little light could we see; even the glorious sun (as if unwilling to behold our miseries) masking his lovely face from us, under the sable veil of coal-black night."But they were equal to the emergency. "At the beginning of this darksome, irksome time, we sought some means of preserving light amongst us; finding therefore a piece of sheet lead over a seam of one of the coolers, that we ripped off and made three lamps of it, which, maintaining with oil that we found in the coopers' tent, and rope-yarn serving us instead of candle-wicks, we kept them continually burning."

Cheerful and resourceful as they were, their fits of depression were not infrequent. "Our extremities being so many, made us sometimes in impatient speeches to break forth against the causers of our miseries; but then again, our consciences telling us of our own evil deservings, we took it either for a punishment upon us for our former wicked lives; or else for an example of God's mercy in our wonderful deliverance: humbling ourselves therefore, under the mighty hand of God, we cast down ourselves before him in prayer, two or three times a day, which course we constantly held all the time of our misery."

Their prospects got worse, but they never lost a little hope. "The new year now began: as the days began to lengthen, so the cold began to strengthen; which cold came at last to that extremity, as that it would raise blisters on our flesh, as if we had been burnt with fire, and if we touched iron at any time it would stick to our fingers like bird-lime: sometimes if we went but out of doors to fetch in a little water, the cold would nip us in such a sort that it made us as sore as if we had been beaten in some cruel manner."

Provisions were running low; the men began to talk of famine, and the outlook became daily gloomier until the 3rd of February. "This proved a marvellous cold day; yet a fair and clear one; about the middle whereof, all clouds now quite dispersed and night's sable curtain drawn, Aurora with her golden face smiled once again upon us, at her rising out of her bed; for now the glorious sun with his glittering beams began to gild the highest tops of the lofty mountains. The brightness of the sun and the whiteness of the snow, both together, were such as that it was able to revive even a dying spirit. But to make a new addition to our new joy, we might perceive two bears (a she one with her cub) now coming towards our tent; whereupon we, straight arming ourselves with our lances, issued out of the tent to await her coming. She soon cast her greedy eyes upon us, and with full hopes of devouring us she made the more haste unto us; but with our hearty lances we gave her such a welcome as that she fell down and biting the very snow for anger."

Then more bears came to be eaten; then the birds began to arrive, and the foxes to come out of their winter earths to be trapped to the number of fifty; then the reindeer returned; and then, on the 25th May, two ships of Hull came into the sound from which a boat's crew landing unperceived came close up to the tent and shouted "Hey!" And Ayers, the only man at the moment in the outer tent, shouted "Ho!"—and Pellham and his shipmates had proved it to be possible to live through a winter in Spitsbergen.

CHAPTER II
SPITSBERGEN

(continued)

The summer town of Smeerenberg—Himkoff winters in North East Land—Phipps reaches 80° 48´—Scoresby the elder reaches 81° 30´—Scoresby the younger—Voyage of the Dorothea and Trent under Buchan and Franklin—Parry reaches 82° 45´—Torell and Nordenskiöld—Carlsen sails round Spitsbergen—Swedish North Polar expedition under Nordenskiöld—Lamont—The Diana coal mine—Leigh Smith—Conway.

This wintering of the Salutation men occurred when the Spitsbergen fisheries were most flourishing, the prosperity continuing for seven more years. So lucrative was the trade that on Amsterdam Island under Hakluyt Headland, within fifteen miles of 80° north latitude, about as far from the North Pole as St. Malo is from John o' Groat's, there sprang up as a summer resort the Dutch village of Smeerenberg. Such was the bustle produced by the yearly visit of two or three hundred double-manned vessels, containing from twelve thousand to eighteen thousand men, that this village of the farthest north was as busy as a manufacturing town. The incitement of prices proportionate to the latitude attracted hundreds of annual settlers, who throve on the sale of brandy, wine, tobacco, and sundries to the whale-fishers in shops of all varieties, including bakehouses, where the blowing of a horn let the sailors know that the bread had just been drawn hot from the oven. In fact, hot rolls and every delicacy could be had in Smeerenberg, which the Dutch averred was as flourishing as Batavia, founded by them a few years before. And when winter was just about due every man—and woman—went back to Holland. But the life of Smeerenberg was a short and a merry one, for in 1640 the shore fisheries were failing, and a year or so afterwards the lingerers of its last season left it for good, clearing out from its houses of brick and wood, demolishing its furnaces, removing its copper cauldrons and coolers and casks and everything that could be taken away, and leaving it in desolation to be occupied in the next and subsequent summers by polar bears.

Like all seaside resorts it had its rival. Close by is the Cookery-of-Haarlem, abandoned at the same time, but rather more hurriedly. When Martens went there on the 15th of July, 1671, he found four houses still standing, in one of which were "several barrels or kardels that were quite decayed, the ice standing in the same shape the vessels had been made of: an anvil, smith's tongs, and other tools belonging to the cookery, were frozen up in the ice; the kettle was still standing as it was set, and the wooden troughs stood by it." Behind these houses "are high mountains," he continues, "if one climbeth upon these, as we do on others, and doth not mark every step with chalk, one doth not know how to get down again: when you go up you think it to be very easy to be down; but when you descend it is very difficult and dangerous, so that many have fallen and lost their lives." Absurd as this chalking of the steps may seem, there have been many who have taken the hint from the careful Martens when climbing in Spitsbergen, and many who have regretted not having done so.

In ordinary summers the west side of Spitsbergen is clear of ice, not so the eastern side, the difference being due to the Gulf Stream, which, though evidently failing, is traceable along the coast round Hakluyt Headland and up to the ice barrier. In addition to this there is the general cause, whatever it may be, which makes the western coasts of all Arctic lands, isolated or not, warmer than the eastern. Greenland, for instance, is more approachable in summer from Davis Strait than from the Greenland Sea, Novaya Zemlya from Barents Sea than from Kara Sea, and so on with all the islands and peninsulas of Asia and America. Hence all this whaling was confined practically to the western harbours of West Spitsbergen, the largest of the group of islands. The next largest, North East Land, was never much visited except from Hinlopen Strait, though the Russians from time to time took some interest in the north and east harbours, and would have taken more, for it abounded in reindeer, if the ice had not made the landing an enterprise of some difficulty.

On the east coast of North East Land, in 1743, a Russian whaler was caught in the pack, and the mate, Alexis Himkoff, remembering that a house had been built there some years before, went on shore with his godson, Ivan Himkoff, and two sailors, Scharapoff and Weregin, in search of it, in case the ship should have to be abandoned. They found the house, but, on returning to the shore next morning, could see nothing of the ship, which had apparently been carried away and crushed in the ice. They had brought with them a musket, a powder-horn with twelve charges of powder, twelve bullets, an axe, a small kettle, a bag with about twenty pounds of flour, a knife, a tinder-box and tinder, a bladder of tobacco, and every man had his pipe. That was their outfit.

The house was thirty-six feet in length, and eighteen in height and breadth. It contained a small antechamber about twelve feet broad, which had two doors, one to close it from the outer air, the other admitting to the inner room in which was a Russian stove, a kind of oven without a chimney, serving at will for heating, for baking, or for sleeping on. Realising that they had a long stay before them, they began by shooting twelve reindeer, one for each bullet. They then repaired the house, stopping up all the crevices with moss; and they then laid in a store of fuel from the driftwood, there being no trees on the island. On the beach they found some boards with nails in them, and a long iron hook and a few other pieces of old iron. And also there was a root of a fir tree in shape not unlike a bow. Those were the materials they had to make the best of.

A large stone served for an anvil, a pair of deer horns did duty for tongs, and with these and the fire, the iron hook was made into a hammer; and then two of the nails were shaped into spear-heads, which were tied to sticks from the driftwood with strips of deerskin. With these weapons they began by killing a bear, whose flesh they ate, whose skin they kept, and whose tendons they made into thread and a string for the bow formed out of the root of the fir tree. More nails were forged into arrow-heads, tied with sinew on to light sticks cut with the knife, the shafts being feathered from the feathers of seafowl. With these weapons they shot, before they had finished, two hundred and fifty reindeer, and they kept the skins, as they did also those of a large number of blue and white foxes, as we shall see in the sequel. In their own protection they killed nine bears, the only one they deliberately attacked being the first.

To be sure of keeping their fire alight they modelled a lamp out of clay, which they filled with deer-fat, with twisted linen for a wick; but the clay was too porous, the fat ran through it; so they made another lamp of the same stuff, dried it in the air, heated it red hot, and cooled it in a sort of thin starch made of flour and water, strengthening the pottery by pasting linen rags over it. The result was so successful that they made a second lamp as a reserve. Some wreckage gave them a little cordage and a quantity of oakum, which came in for lamp-wicks. The lamp, like the sacred fire, was never allowed to go out. To make themselves clothes, they soaked skins in fresh water till the hair could be pulled off easily, and rubbed them well, and then rubbed deer fat into them until they were pliant and supple. Some of the skins they prepared as furs. Out of nails they, after many failures, made awls and needles, getting the eyes by piercing the heads with the point of the knife, and smoothing and pointing them by rounding and whetting them on a stone.

For six years they lived in this desert place. Then one of them, Weregin, died of scurvy, and their gloomy forebodings as to which was to be taken next were broken in upon by their sighting a ship, to which they signalled with a flag made of deerskin. The signal was seen and they were rescued; and they took back to Archangel two thousand pounds weight of reindeer fat, their bales of skins and furs, their bow and arrows and spears, and in short everything they possessed. And they arrived there on the 28th of September, 1749, comfortably off from the value of the goods they brought with them—the heroes of one of the very best of true desert island stories.

Like most Russians they do not seem to have suffered much from the cold or to have been inconvenienced by the summer heat, which is also considerable. In 1773, on the 13th of June, when Phipps and Lutwidge anchored in Fair Haven, round by Amsterdam Island, they found the thermometer reach 58½° at noon and descend no lower than 51° at midnight, and on the 16th it rose in the sun to 89½° till a light breeze made it fall almost suddenly ten degrees. This was the expedition sent out to the North Pole, mainly at the instigation of Daines Barrington, Gilbert White's friend. The ships were the Racehorse and Carcass; and, as every one knows, or ought to know, as midshipman with Captain Lutwidge went Horatio Nelson, then a boy of fourteen, who was to figure largely in the world, though on this occasion he did nothing remarkable beyond attacking a polar bear, whose skin he thought would make a nice present for his father, and bringing his boat to the rescue when one of the Racehorse boats was attacked by walruses. For another thing the expedition is memorable, that being that the useful apparatus for the distillation of fresh water from sea water, known to every seafarer, was first used on this voyage, Dr. Irving, its inventor, being the surgeon of the Racehorse. Another item to be noted is that Phipps had with him a Cavendish thermometer, which he tried the day after he crossed the Arctic Circle, and found that at a depth of 780 fathoms the temperature was 26°, while at the surface it was 48°.

Phipps did all he could to go north, and, in longitude 14° 59´ east, reached 80° 48', the nearest to the Pole up to then, but he was foiled by the ice barrier, which he tried to penetrate again and again. He got his ships caught in the ice and took to his boats, thinking he would have to abandon them, when fortunately the pack drifted south, and the vessels, clearing themselves under sail, caught the boats up and took them on board. Then he went along the edge of the ice westward, and, finding no opening, gave the venture up and sailed for home.

The next to do good work within this area was William Scoresby the elder, whose only equal as a whale-fisher was his son. To him we owe the invention of the crow's nest, that cylindrical frame covered with canvas, entrance to which is given by a trap-hatch in the base, reached by a Jacob's ladder from the topmast crosstrees, the conning-tower, so to speak, carried since by every ship on Arctic service. He was also the inventor of the ice-drill and many another implement and device used in Polar navigation; and he it was who sloped off his fore and main courses to come inboard to a boom fitted to the foot, used by every whaler, by which, in fact, you may know them. He also, long before the America, discovered the advantage of flat sails, and, in order to get his weights well down, he filled his casks with water as ballast and packed them with shingle, so that, instead of going out light, he was in the best of trim, with a power of beating to windward that took him to the fishing ground in double quick time and further into the ice, when he chose, than any of his competitors.

WHALERS AMONG ICEBERGS

Out in the Resolution in 1806 he saw from his crow's nest, in which he often spent a dozen hours at a stretch, that below the ice-blink—the white line in the sky which betokens the presence of ice—there was a blue-grey streak denoting open water, and that the motion of the sea around the ship must be due to a swell, which could only come from open water to the northward. On the 13th of May he started for this. By sawing the ice, hammering at it, dropping his boats on to it from the bow, sallying the ship—that is, rolling her by running the crew backwards and forwards across her deck—and, in fact, using every means he could think of, he passed the barrier in the eightieth parallel, and, on the 24th of June, attained 81° 30´, the farthest north ever reached by a sailing vessel in these seas. On that day there was not a ship within three hundred and fifty miles of the Resolution. The bold venture proved a thorough success; in thirty-two days he filled up with twenty-four whales, two seals, two walruses, and a narwhal—one of the most profitable of his thirty voyages.

In this voyage the chief officer was his son, William Scoresby the younger, whose Arctic Regions is the best book ever written on the northern seas. Sent by his father to Edinburgh University where he studied almost every branch of natural and physical science, he was thoroughly equipped for his task, and his practical experience as a whaling captain and trained observer stood him in such stead that his book is still the basis of all scientific Polar research. His description of the Spitsbergen coast as seen from a ship is as faithful to-day as when he wrote it. "Spitsbergen and its islands, with some other countries within the Arctic Circle, exhibit a kind of scenery which is altogether novel. The principal objects which strike the eye are innumerable mountainous peaks, ridges, precipices, or needles, rising immediately out of the sea to an elevation of 3000 or 4000 feet, the colour of which, at a moderate distance, appears to be blackish shades of brown, green, grey and purple; snow or ice, in striæ or patches, occupying the various clefts and hollows in the sides of the hills, capping some of the mountain summits, and filling with extended beds the most considerable valleys; and ice of the glacier form, occurring at intervals all along the coast, in particular situations as already described, in prodigious accumulations. The glistening or vitreous appearance of the icy precipices; the purity, whiteness, and beauty of the sloping expanse formed by their snowy surfaces; the gloomy shade presented by the adjoining or intermixed mountains and rocks, perpetually covered with a mourning veil of black lichens, with the sudden transitions into a robe of purest white, where patches or beds of snow occur, present a variety and extent of contrast altogether peculiar; which, when enlightened by the occasional ethereal brilliancy of the Polar sky, and harmonised in its serenity with the calmness of the ocean, constitute a picture both novel and magnificent. There is, indeed, a kind of majesty, not to be conveyed in words, in these extraordinary accumulations of snow and ice in the valleys, and in the rocks above rocks and peaks above peaks, in the mountain groups, seen rising above the ordinary elevation of the clouds, and terminating occasionally in crests of snow, especially when you approach the shore under the shelter of the impenetrable density of a summer fog; in which case the fog sometimes disperses like the drawing of a curtain, when the strong contrast of light and shade, heightened by a cloudless atmosphere and powerful sun, bursts on the senses in a brilliant exhibition resembling the production of magic."

In 1818 there went out the first British expedition prepared to winter in the north. The vessels were two whalers bought into the navy, the Dorothea and Trent, the first under the command of David Buchan, the other under that of John Franklin. Neither officer had been in the Arctic region before, but Buchan had done excellent service in surveying Newfoundland, and Franklin had been marked for special duty owing to his work in Australian seas under his cousin, Matthew Flinders, and for the manner in which on his way home he had acted as signal officer to Nathaniel Dance in that ever-memorable victory off the Straits of Malacca, when the Indiamen defeated and pursued a French fleet under Admiral Linois. Dance's report gave Franklin a further chance of distinction, for it led to his appointment to the Bellerophon, whose signal officer he was during the battle of Trafalgar.

They were instructed to proceed to the North Pole, thence to continue on to Bering Strait direct, or by the best route they could find, to make their way to the Sandwich Islands or New Albion, and thence to come back through Bering Strait eastward, keeping in sight and approaching the coast of America whenever the position of the ice permitted them so to do. A nice little programme. But they started too early in a bad season; they did not get so far north as Phipps; they made accurate surveys and other observations; in exploration they did little; and they had many adventures.

As they ranged along the western side of Spitsbergen the weather was severe. The snow fell in heavy showers, and several tons' weight of ice accumulated about the sides of the Trent, and formed a complete casing to the planks, which received an additional layer at each plunge of the vessel. So great, indeed, was the accumulation about the bows, that they were obliged to cut it away repeatedly with axes to relieve the bowsprit from the enormous weight that was attached to it: and the ropes were so thickly covered with ice that it was necessary to beat them with large sticks to keep them in a state of readiness. In the gale the ships parted company, but they met again at the rendezvous in Magdalena Bay.

SIR JOHN FRANKLIN

Later on, off Cloven Cliff, there was a walrus fight begun by the seamen and continued by the walruses when they found themselves more at home in the water than on the ice. They rose in numbers about the boats, rushing at them, snorting with rage, endeavouring to upset them or stave them in by hooking their tusks on the gunwales, or butting at them with their heads. "It was the opinion of our people," says Beechey, "that in this assault the walruses were led on by one animal in particular, a much larger and more formidable beast than any of the others; and they directed their efforts more particularly towards him, but he withstood all the blows of their tomahawks without flinching, and his tough hide resisted the entry of the whale lances, which were, unfortunately, not very sharp, and soon bent double. The herd was so numerous, and their attacks so incessant, that there was not time to load a musket, which, indeed, was the only effectual mode of seriously injuring them. The purser, fortunately, had his gun loaded, and the whole now being nearly exhausted with chopping and sticking at their assailants, he snatched it up, and, thrusting the muzzle down the throat of the leader, fired into him. The wound proved mortal, and the animal fell back amongst his companions, who immediately desisted from their attack, assembled round him, and in a moment quitted the boat, swimming away as hard as they could with their leader, whom they actually bore up with their tusks and assiduously preserved from sinking."

On one occasion Franklin and Beechey, when out in a boat together, witnessed the launch of an iceberg. They had approached the end of a glacier and were trying to search into the recess of a deep cavern at its foot when they heard a report as if of a cannon, and, turning to the quarter whence it proceeded, perceived an immense piece of the front of the cliff of ice gliding down from a height of two hundred feet at least into the sea, and dispersing the water in every direction, accompanied by a loud grinding noise, and followed by a quantity of water, which, lodged in the fissures, made its escape in numberless small cataracts over the front of the glacier. They kept the boat's head in the direction of the sea and thus escaped disaster, for the disturbance occasioned by the plunge of this enormous fragment caused a succession of rollers, which swept over the surface of the bay, making its shores resound as it travelled along it, and at a distance of four miles was so considerable that it became necessary to right the Dorothea, which was then careening, by instantly releasing the tackles which confined her. The piece that had been disengaged wholly disappeared under water, and nothing was seen but a violent boiling of the sea and a shooting up of clouds of spray like that which occurs at the foot of a great cataract. After a short time it reappeared, raising its head full a hundred feet above the surface, with water pouring down from all parts of it; and then, labouring as if doubtful which way it should fall, it rolled over, and, after rocking about for some minutes, became settled. It was nearly a quarter of a mile round and floated sixty feet out of the water, and making a fair allowance for its inequalities, was computed to weigh 421,600 tons.

TRACK OF H.M.S. "DOROTHEA" AND "TRENT"

There were frequent landings, often with difficulties in the return, due generally to attempts at making a short cut to the shore or across the ice. Of these short cuts the very shortest was that made by one of the sailors named Spinks, who was out with a party in pursuit of reindeer. The ardour of the chase had led them beyond the prescribed limits, and when the signal was made for their return to the boat some of them were upon the top of a hill. Spinks, an active and zealous fellow, anxious to be first at his post, thought he would outstrip his comrades by descending the snow, which was banked against the mountain at an angle of about 40° with the horizon, and rested against a small glacier on the left. The height was about two thousand feet, and in the event of his foot slipping there was nothing to impede his progress until he reached the beach, either by the slope or the more terrific descent of the face of the glacier. He began his career by digging his heels into the snow, the surface of which was rather hard. At first he got on very well, but presently his foot slipped, or the snow was too hard for his heel to make an impression, and he increased in speed, keeping his balance, however, by means of his hands. In a very short time his descent was fearfully quick; the fine snow flew about him like dust, and there seemed but little chance of his reaching the bottom in safety, especially as his course was taking him in the direction of the glacier. For a moment he was lost sight of behind a crag of the mountain, and it was thought he had gone over the glacier, but with great presence of mind and dexterity, "by holding water first with one hand and then the other," to use his own expression, he contrived to escape the danger, and, like a skilful pilot, steered into a place of refuge amid a bed of soft snow recently drifted against the hill. When he extricated himself from the depths into which he had been plunged he had to hold together his tattered clothes, for he had worn away two pairs of trousers and something more. That was all his damage, and we shall meet with him again in the west out with Franklin and Captain Back.

In the morning of the 30th of July the ships found themselves caught in a gale with the ice close to leeward. The only way of escaping destruction seemed to be by taking refuge in the pack. It was a desperate expedient rarely resorted to by whalers and only in extreme cases. In the Trent a cable was cut up into thirty-foot lengths, and these, with plates of iron four feet square, supplied as fenders, and some walrus hides, were hung around her, mainly about her bows; the masts were secured with extra ropes, and the hatches were battened and nailed down. When a few fathoms from the ice those on board searched with anxiety for an opening in the pack, but saw nothing but an unbroken line of furious breakers with huge masses heaving and plunging with the waves and dashing together with a violence that nothing but a solid body seemed likely to withstand; and the noise was so great that the orders to the crew could with difficulty be heard. At one moment the sea was bursting upon the ice blocks and burying them deep beneath its wave, and the next, as the buoyancy brought them up again, the water was pouring in foaming cataracts over their edges, the masses rocking and labouring in their bed, grinding and striving with each other until one was either split with the shock or lifted on to the top of its neighbour. Far as the eye could reach the turmoil stretched, and overhead was the clearness of a calm and silvery atmosphere bounded by a dark line of storm cloud lowering over the masts as if to mark the confines within which no effort would avail.

"At this instant," says Beechey, "when we were about to put the strength of our little vessel in competition with that of the great icy continent, and when it seemed almost presumption to reckon on the possibility of her surviving the unequal conflict, it was gratifying in the extreme to observe in all our crew the greatest calmness and resolution. If ever the fortitude of seamen was fairly tried it was assuredly not less so than on this occasion; and I will not conceal the pride I felt in witnessing the bold and decisive tone in which the orders were issued by the commander of our little vessel, and the promptitude and steadiness with which they were executed by the crew."

The brig was steered bow on to the ice. Every man instinctively gripped his hold, and with his eyes fixed on the masts awaited the moment of concussion. In an instant they all lost their footing, the masts bent with the shock, and the timbers cracked below; the vessel staggered and seemed to recoil, when the next wave, curling up under her counter, drove her about her own length within the edge of the ice, where she gave a roll and was thrown broadside to the wind by the succeeding wave which beat furiously against her stern, bringing her lee in touch with the main mass and leaving her weather side exposed to a floe about twice her size. Battered on all sides, tossed from fragment to fragment, nothing could be done but await the issue, for the men could hardly keep their feet, the motion being so great that the ship's bell, which in the heaviest gale had never struck of itself, now tolled so continuously that it had to be muffled.

After a time an effort was made to put the vessel before the wind and drive her further into the pack. Some of the men gained the fore-topsail-yard and let a reef out of the sail, and the jib was dragged half up the stay by the windlass. The brig swung into position, and, aided by a mass under her stern, split the block, fourteen feet thick, which had barred her way, and made a passage for herself into comparative safety; and after some four hours the gale moderated. Strained and leaking the Trent had suffered much, but the Dorothea had been damaged more; and both returned to Fair Haven, where it was found hopeless to continue the voyage, and thence, when the ships had been temporarily repaired, they sailed for England. The expedition had not done much, but it had given their Arctic schooling to Franklin, Beechey, and Back.

In May, 1827, Parry, in the Hecla, was forced to run into the ice, but not quite in the same way as Buchan did. He was beset for three weeks, and then, getting clear, proceeded to the Seven Islands to the north of Spitsbergen, on one of which, Walden, he placed a reserve of provisions; the ship, after reaching 81° 5´, going to Treurenberg Bay, in Hinlopen Strait, to await his return.

PARRY CAMPED ON THE ICE

From here he made his dash for the Pole. He had with him two boats of his own design, seven feet in beam, twenty in length. On each side of the keel was a strong runner, shod with steel, upon which the boat stood upright on the ice. They were so built that they would have floated as bags had they been stove in. On ash and hickory timbers, an inch by an inch and a half thick, placed a foot apart, with a half-timber of smaller size between each, was stretched a casing of waterproof canvas tarred on the outer side and protected by a skin of fir three-sixteenths of an inch thick, over this came a sheet of stout felt, and over all a skin of oak of the same thickness as the fir, each boat weighing about fourteen hundredweight—that is the hull, as launched. One of these boats was named the Enterprise, the other the Endeavour. They were intended to be hauled by reindeer, but the state of the ice rendered this impracticable and the men did the work themselves. Parry took command of the Enterprise, the other being in charge of Lieutenant James Clark Ross; and, altogether, officers and men numbered twenty-eight.

From Little Table Island, where they left a reserve as they had done at Walden, they started for the north—two heavy boats laden with food for seventy days and clothing for twenty-eight men, with a compact equipment including light sledges, travelling in a sea crowded or covered with ice in every form, large and small, over which they were dragged up and down hummocks, round and among crags and ridges, along surfaces of every kind of ruggedness, of every slope and irregularity, the few flat stretches broken with patches of sharp crystals or waist-deep snow; through lanes and pools of water with frequent ferryings and transhipments, in sunshine and fog, and, strange to say, frequently in pouring rain. They travelled by night and rested by day, though, of course, there was daylight all the time. "The advantages of this plan," says Parry, "which was occasionally deranged by circumstances, consisted, first in our avoiding the intense and oppressive glare from the snow during the time of the sun's greatest altitude, so as to prevent in some degree the painful inflammation in the eyes called snow-blindness which is common in all snowy countries. We also thus enjoyed greater warmth during the hours of rest and had a better chance of drying our clothes; besides which no small advantage was derived from the snow being harder at night for travelling. When we rose in the evening we commenced our day by prayers, after which we took off our sleeping dresses and put on those for travelling, the former being made of camlet lined with racoon skin, and the latter of strong blue, box cloth. We made a point of always putting on the same stockings and boots for travelling in, whether they had dried during the day or not, and I believe it was only in five or six instances that they were not either still wet or hard frozen." When halted for rest the boats were placed alongside each other, with their sterns to the wind, the snow or wet cleared out of them, and the sails, held up by the bamboo masts and three paddles, were placed over them as awnings with the entrance at the bow.

Progress was not great, sometimes fifty yards an hour, occasionally twelve miles a day, that is on the ice, for soon it was apparent that the distance gained by reckoning was greater than that given by observation, and Parry realised to his dismay that the pack was drifting south while he was going north. But he kept on till on the 21st of July he reached 82° 45´, which remained the farthest north for forty-nine years.

PARRY'S BOATS AMONG THE HUMMOCKS

During the last few days he had been drifting south in the day almost as far as he had advanced north in the night, and, having used up half his provisions, he reluctantly abandoned the struggle as hopeless. "As we travelled," he says, "by far the greater part of our distance on the ice, three, and not infrequently, five times over, we may safely multiply the road by 2½; so that our whole distance, on a very moderate calculation, amounted to five hundred and eighty geographical miles, or six hundred and sixty-eight statute miles; being nearly sufficient to have reached the Pole in a direct line."

In 1858 a Swedish expedition under Otto Torell started from Hammerfest for Spitsbergen. He was accompanied by A. Quennerstedt and Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld. They explored Horn Sound, Bell Sound, and Green Harbour. In Bell Sound they dredged with great success for mollusca; they made a botanical collection, chiefly of mosses and lichens, found tertiary plant fossils, and, in the North Harbour, carboniferous limestone beds with the tertiary plant-bearing strata above them—in short, Nordenskiöld entered upon his long and fruitful study of Spitsbergen geology. Three years afterwards Torell took out another expedition, Nordenskiöld going with him, which was to explore the northern coast and then make for the far north; but the ice conditions kept them in Treurenberg Bay, where they visited Hecla Cove and found Parry's flagstaff. In the course of their journeys they noticed in Cross Bay the first known Spitsbergen fern, Cystopteris fragilis; by the side of a freshwater lake in Wijde Bay an Alpine char was picked up; and, at Shoal Point, Torell discovered in a mass of driftwood a specimen of the unmistakable Entada bean, two and a quarter inches across, brought there from the West Indies by the Gulf Stream, as other specimens have been drifted to European shores.

In 1864, the year that Elling Carlsen found the navigation so open that he passed the Northern Gate and sailed round Spitsbergen, Nordenskiöld, at the head of a small expedition, was at work in Ice Fjord, and, unable to go north on account of the ice, rounded South Cape, entered Stor Fjord, visited Edge's Land and Barents Land, and from the summit of White Mountain, near Unicorn Bay, rediscovered the west coast of the island reported by Edge two hundred and fifty years before. In 1868, as leader of the Swedish North Polar Expedition in the Sofia, he reached 81° 42´, in 17° 30´ east, the highest latitude then reached by a steam vessel, and his farthest north; his next Polar venture, four years afterwards, in the Polhem, ending in his having to winter in Mossel Bay, where his generous endeavour to feed one hundred and one extra men, who were ice-bound, on provisions intended for his own twenty-four, would have ended in disaster had he not been relieved by Leigh Smith in the Diana.

The Diana was the steam yacht built for James Lamont, in which, like Leigh Smith, he cruised for several seasons in the Arctic seas, combining sport with exploration in a truly admirable way. To these two yachtsmen we owe much of our knowledge of Spitsbergen, Novaya Zemlya, and Franz Josef Land, but we can only give them passing mention here. We must, however, find room for Lamont's useful find of the coal mine in Advent Bay, from which he filled up the Diana's bunkers. "When I paid a visit to the coal mine," he says, "I found it quite a busy scene for a quiet Arctic shore. The engineer and fireman directed the blasting, my English hands quarried, while the Norwegians carried the sacks down the hill. The old mate, the many-sidedness of whose character I have so much valued on my various voyages, was digging away with the rest, though I am sorry that in the sketch his weather-beaten face is turned away. All the rest are portraits, and the reader will notice that Arctic work is not done in the attractive uniforms known to Cowes and Ryde. The coal-bed was about three feet thick, and lay very horizontally between two layers of soft, mud-coloured limestone. It was harder to obtain than I anticipated, because saturated, through all the cracks and interstices, with water which had frozen into ice more difficult to break through than the coal itself, thereby rendering these fissures worse than useless in quarrying. This is tertiary coal, and is of fair quality, but contains a good deal of sulphur. When we began to burn it, so much water and ice was unavoidably mixed with it that the engineers had to let it drain on deck in the hot sun and then mix it with an equal bulk of Scotch coal. Consumed in this way the ten tons obtained in three days was a useful addition to the fast-dwindling stock on board."

While Nordenskiöld was at Mossel Bay he attempted a journey to the north, but was stopped by the ice at Seven Islands, and returned round North East Land. It took him five days to pass across the twenty-three miles between Phipps Island and Cape Platen over pyramids of angular ice up to thirty feet high. On the coast, which he found extending, as Leigh Smith had reported, much further to the east than was shown on the charts, he met with the inland ice ending in precipices from two thousand to three thousand feet high. Ascending this ice they had scarcely gone a quarter of a mile before one of the men disappeared at a place where the surface was level, and so instantaneously that he could not even give a cry for help. When they looked into the hole they found him hanging on to the drag-line, to which he was fastened with reindeer harness, over a deep abyss. Had his arms slipped out of the harness, a single belt, he would have been lost. Along the level surface every puff of wind drove a stream of fine snow-dust, which, from the ease with which it penetrated everywhere, was as the fine sand of the desert to the travellers in the Sahara. By means of this fine snow-dust, steadily driven forward by the wind, the upper part of the glacier—which did not consist of ice, but of hard packed blinding white snow—was glazed and polished so that it seemed to be a faultless, spotless floor of white marble, or rather a white satin carpet. Examination showed that the snow, at a depth of four to six feet, passed into ice, being changed first into a stratum of ice crystals, partly large and perfect, then to a crystalline mass of ice, and finally to hard glacier ice, in which could still be observed numerous air cavities compressed by the overlying weight; and, when, as the surface thaws, the pressure of the enclosed air exceeds that of the superincumbent weight, these cavities break up with the peculiar cracking sound heard in summer from the glacier ice that floats about in the fjords. Occasionally broad channels were crossed, of which the only way to ascertain the depth was to lower a man into them, and frequently he had to be hoisted up again without having reached the bottom; such danger areas causing so circuitous a route that much progress was impossible.

Prior to the explorations of Sir Martin Conway in 1896, it was supposed that this inland ice extended over all the islands of the group, an area exceeding twenty thousand square miles. He, however, proved that so far as West Spitsbergen was concerned, this was not the case. Crossing it he found much of the interior a complex of mountains and valleys, amongst which were many glaciers, as in Central Europe, but with no continuous covering of ice, each glacier being a separate unit with its own drainage system and catchment area, the valleys boggy and relatively fertile, the hillsides bare of snow in summer up to more than a thousand feet above sea-level. In the rise of the country from the sea it seems to have come up as a plain which did not reach the level of perpetual snow, so that as it rose it was cut down into valleys in the usual way by the agency of water pouring off from the plateau over its edge down a frost-split rock-face, the valleys gently sloped, the head necessarily steep owing to the face of the cliff being stripped off as the waterfalls cut their way back.

Since Nordenskiöld's first expedition we have learnt much of the geology and physical features of Spitsbergen; and we hear no more of the poverty of its flora and fauna. Now it has become a summer tourist resort we are yearly increasing our knowledge of this land of no thunderstorms, for centuries the largest uninhabited area on the globe, the only considerable stretch on which there is no trace of human occupation before its discovery by the moderns in 1596, when it was found by Barents and his companions.

CHAPTER III
NOVAYA ZEMLYA

Van Heemskerck and Barents reach Ice Haven—The ship in the ice—The first crew to winter in the Arctic—The house the Dutch built—The bears—The foxes—Intense cold—Twelfth Eve rejoicings—Preparations for departure—Death of Barents—The boat voyage—Meeting with Rijp—Admiral Jacob Van Heemskerck—Carlsen at Ice Haven—Finds the house as described by De Veer—The relics at the Hague—Gardiner finds the powder-flask—Gundersen finds the translation of the voyage of Pet and Jackman—Second voyage of Hudson—His third voyage—De Vlamingh—Russian explorers.

We left Barents parting company with Rijp at Bear Island, Rijp bound northwards. Barents, taking his vessel eastwards, struck Novaya Zemlya at Loms Bay, near Cross Bay, and bearing north-eastwards reached the Orange Islands and rounded Cape Mauritius. Steering south he got down into Ice Haven, where at length, says De Veer, "the ice began to drive with such force that we were enclosed round about therewith, and yet we sought all the means we could to get out, but it was all in vain: and at that time we had like to have lost three men that were upon the ice to make way for the ship, if the ice had held the course it went; but as we drove back again, and the ice also whereon our men stood, they being nimble, as the ship drove by them, one of them caught hold of the beak head, another upon the shrouds, and the third upon the mainbrace that hung out behind, and so by great adventure by the hold they took they got into the ship again, for which they thanked God with all their hearts." The same evening, that of the 26th of August, 1596, they reached the west of Ice Haven—now known as Barents Bay—where they were forced to remain, being the first crew on record to spend a winter in the Arctic regions and survive to tell the story.

To begin with, the ice gathered round the ship and lifted her bow four feet out of the water. Endeavouring to right her by clearing the ice away, Barents was on his knees measuring the height she had to fall when the ice broke with "such a noise and so great a crack that they thought verily they were all cast away." As she lay upright again they tried in vain with crowbars and other tools to break off the piled-up ice, and next day in a heavy snow the pressure became such that the whole ship was borne up and so squeezed that "all that was both about and in it began to crack, so that it seemed to burst in a hundred pieces, which was most fearful both to see and hear, and made all the hair of our heads to rise upright with fear." The grip continuing, the vessel was driven up four or five feet and the rudder squeezed off, which was replaced by a new one, when she sank back into the water a few hours afterwards owing to the ice drifting clear for a while. Thus matters went on for a little time, the ship being alternately lifted and released.

HOW OUR SHIP STUCK FAST IN THE ICE

On the 11th of September, as there was no hope of escape, it was decided to build a house wherein to spend the winter, and in seeking for a suitable position, a mass of driftwood—"trees, roots and all"—was discovered, "driven ashore from Tartaria, Muscovia, or elsewhere," for there were no trees growing on the land, "wherewith," says De Veer, "we were much comforted, being in good hope that God would show us some further favour; for that wood served us not only to build our house, but also to burn and serve us all the winter long; otherwise without all doubt we had died there miserably with extreme cold."

The timber was collected and piled up in heaps that it might not be hidden under the snow, and two sledges were made on which to drag it to the site of the house. This was heavy work in which all took part, four of them in turn remaining by the ship, there being thirteen men to each party, five to each sledge, with three to help and lift the wood behind "to make us draw the better and with more ease," and at the end of the first week of it the carpenter died, so that only sixteen were left. But the wood was brought along day after day, some to build with, some for fuel; and the house was built, the frost so hard at times that "as we put a nail into our mouths, as carpenters do, there would ice hang thereon when we took it out again and made the blood follow"; and when a great fire was made to soften the ground, in order that earth might be dug to shovel round the house, "it was all lost labour for the earth was so hard and frozen so deep that we could not thaw it, and it would have cost us too much wood."

The house was roofed with deals obtained by breaking up the lower deck of the fore part of the ship, and, to make it weather-tight, it was covered with a sail on which afterwards shingle was spread to keep it from being blown off; and the materials of the cabin yielded the wood for the door. Inside, the house was made as comfortable as possible, as shown in the illustration given in De Veer's book in 1598. Low shelves, with partitions between, along the side served for sleeping places; a cask on end with a square hole like a window in the upper half was frequently used as a bath; a striking clock and a time-glass marked the passing of the hours; the large fire in the centre with its frame and trivet and spit and copper pots and other kitchen utensils served for warmth and cooking; and over the fire hung a large lamp beneath the chimney, which terminated outside in a cask giving it the appearance of a crow's nest ashore.

While the house was building, and as long as the sun was above the horizon, there was much trouble with the bears, whose daily visits were always productive of excitement. On the 26th of October, for instance, the day after all the crew first slept in the house, when the men had loaded the last sledge and stood in the track-ropes ready to draw it to the house, Van Heemskerck caught sight of three coming towards them from behind the ship. The men jumped out of the track-ropes, and as fortunately two halberds lay upon the sledge, Van Heemskerck took one and De Veer the other, while the rest ran to the ship, "and as they ran one of them fell into a crevice in the ice, which grieved us much, for we thought the bears would have run unto him to devour him," but they made straight after the others instead. "Meantime we and the man that fell into the cleft of ice took our advantage and got into the ship on the other side; which the bears perceiving, they came fiercely towards us that had no arms to defend us withal but only the two halberds, gave them work to do by throwing billets of firewood and other things at them, and every time we threw they ran after them as a dog does at a stone that has been cast at him. Meantime we sent a man down into the caboose to strike fire and another to fetch pikes; but we could get no fire, and so we had no means to shoot"—their firearms being matchlocks. "At the last as the bears came fiercely upon us we struck one of them with a halberd on the snout, wherewith she gave back when she felt herself hurt and went away, which the other two, that were not so large as she, perceiving, ran away."

When the bears had gone and the long night set in, their place was taken by the white foxes, many of these being caught in traps and furnishing skins for clothes and flesh for meat—"not unlike that of the rabbit"—that was "as grateful as venison." The 19th of November was a great day. A chest of linen was opened and divided among the men for shirts, "for they had need of them." Next day they washed their shirts, having evidently made the new ones in a hurry, and, says De Veer, "it was so cold that when we had washed and wrung them they presently froze so stiff (out of the warm water) that although we laid them by a great fire the side that lay next the fire thawed, but the other side was hard frozen, so that we should sooner have torn them in sunder than have opened them, whereby we were forced to put them into the boiling water again to thaw them, it was so exceeding cold."

On the 3rd of December and the two following days it was so cold that as the men lay in their bunks they could hear the ice cracking in the sea two miles away, and thought that icebergs were breaking on each other; and as they had not so great a fire as usual owing to the smoke "it froze so sore within the house that the walls and the roof thereof were frozen two fingers thick with ice, even in the bunks in which we lay. All those three days while we could not go out by reason of the foul weather we set up the sandglass of twelve hours, and when it was run out we set it up again, still watching it lest we should miss our time. For the cold was so great that our clock was frozen and would not go, although we hung more weight on it than before."

The snow fell until it was so deep round the house that on Christmas Day they heard foxes running over the roof; and the last day of the year was so cold that "the fire almost cast no heat, for as we put our feet to the fire we burnt our hose before we could feel the heat, so that we had work enough to do to patch our hose." On the 4th of January, "to know where the wind blew we thrust a half pike out of the chimney with a little cloth or feather upon it; but we had to look at it immediately the wind caught it, for as soon as we thrust it out it was frozen as hard as a piece of wood and could not go about or stir with the wind, so that we said to one another how fearfully cold it must be out of doors."

Next day, being Twelfth Eve, on which foreigners, according to the old practice, hold the festivities now customary in England on the following day, the men asked Van Heemskerck that they might enjoy themselves, "and so that night we made merry and drank to the three kings. And therewith we had two pounds of meal, which we had taken to make paste for the cartridges wherewith, of which we now made pancakes with oil, and to every man a white biscuit, which we sopped in wine. And so supposing that we were in our own country and amongst our friends it comforted us as well as if we had made a great banquet in our own house. And we also distributed tickets, and our gunner was king of Nova Zembla, which is at least eight hundred miles long and lieth between two seas."

In time the sun reappeared—as also the bears—and the rigours of the winter relaxing, the men, on the 9th of May, applied to Barents asking him to speak to Van Heemskerck with a view to preparing for departure. This, after two other appeals, he did on the 15th of May, Van Heemskerck's answer being that, if the ship were not free by the end of the month, he would get ready to go away in the boats. The two boats, or, to be exact, the boat and the herring skute, were then repaired and made suitable for a long sea voyage, and on the 13th of June were in proper condition with all their stores ready. Then Van Heemskerck, "seeing that it was open water and a good west wind, came back to the house again, and there he spake unto Willem Barents (that had been long sick) and showed him that he thought it good (seeing it was a fit time) to go from thence, and they then resolved jointly with the ship's company to take the boat and the skute down to the water side, and in the name of God to begin our voyage to sail from Nova Zembla. Then Willem Barents wrote a letter, which he put into a powder flask and hanged it up in the chimney, showing how we came out of Holland to sail to the kingdom of China, and what had happened to us." Then Barents was taken down to the shore on a sledge and put into one boat, the other sick man, Andriesz, being placed in the other, and "with a west-north-west wind and an indifferent open water" they set sail on a voyage of over fifteen hundred miles among the ice, over the ice, and through the sea.

Barents, though they little suspected it, had but a few days to live. As they passed the northernmost cape of Novaya Zemlya, "Gerrit," he said to De Veer, "if we are near the Ice Point, just lift me up again. I must see that point once more." They were amongst the ice floes again; soon they had to make fast to one; and then they became shut in and forced to stay there. Next day their only means of safety lay in hauling their boats up on to a floe, taking the sick men out on to the ice and putting the clothes and other things under them; but after mending the boats, which had been much bruised and crushed, they drifted into a little open water and got afloat. On the 20th of June, about eight in the morning it became evident that Andriesz was nearing his end. "Methinks," said Barents, in the other boat, when he heard of it, "with me too it will not last long." But still his companions did not realise how ill he was, and talked on unconcernedly. Then he looked at the little chart which De Veer had made of the voyage. Putting it down, he said, "Gerrit, give me something to drink." And no sooner did he drink than he suddenly died. Thus passed away their chief guide and only pilot, than whom none better ever sailed the northern seas.

HOW WE NEARLY GOT INTO TROUBLE WITH THE SEA-HORSES

Working their way down the west coast of the long island, putting in every now and then in search of birds and eggs, constantly in peril from the floating ice and the bears, they slowly came south. When passing Admiralty Peninsula they had to deal with a danger of their own causing. They sighted about two hundred walruses upon one of the floes. Sailing close to them they drove them off, "which," says De Veer, "had almost cost us dear, for they, being mighty strong sea monsters, swam towards us round about our boats with a great noise as if they would have devoured us; but we escaped from them by reason that we had a good gale of wind, yet it was not wisely done of us to waken sleeping wolves."

Day by day De Veer tells the story of that adventurous voyage, with its long succession of dangers and disappointments, until they reached the mainland and sent the Lapland messenger to Kola, who returned with a letter from Jan Corneliszoon Rijp, who at first they could not believe was the old friend from whom they had parted at Bear Island; and more briefly he continues the story until Amsterdam was reached on the 1st of November, when the survivors, in the same clothes they wore in their winter quarters, fur caps and white fox-skins, walked up to the house of Pieter Hasselaer to report themselves on arrival and received the hearty welcome they deserved.

Though Van Heemskerck had failed to make the passage to the east by way of the north, he was perhaps destined for greater fame on the far less rigorous route. Like Nelson he went on an Arctic expedition that failed, and then secured a place in history by a sea-fight in Spanish waters, for which his countrymen will never forget him. He it was who as Vice-Admiral of Holland fought the Spanish fleet at Gibraltar in the decisive battle of the 25th of April, 1607, in which with his twenty-six vessels he attacked Juan Alvarez Davila's twenty ships and ten galleons. Early in the struggle he had his leg swept off by a cannon shot, but he remained on deck till he died, gaining the complete victory which rendered his countrymen free from hindrance on the road to the Indies round the Cape of Good Hope, of which for so many years they made such profitable use. It is customary to give all the credit of the Arctic voyage to Barents on the ground that his captain was no sailor, but Holland knows no better sailor than Jacob Van Heemskerck of Gibraltar Bay.

On the 9th of September, 1871, Captain Elling Carlsen, sailing in the Barents Sea, which he had entered round Icy Cape, landed in Ice Haven and found the house just as De Veer had described it. There it had stood in cold storage for 274 years, never having been entered by human foot since Van Heemskerck had shut the door. The bunks, the table, the bath, the clock, in short everything, all in order, as the orderly Dutchmen had left it. Never did a voyage book receive such ample verification; never did the description of an island home stand the test better.

Carlsen, to begin with, knew nothing of De Veer or Barents, but he set to work in a conscientious way and recorded the results like a true archæologist. "Thursday, 14th," he wrote in his log, "Calm with clear sky. Four o'clock in the morning we went ashore further to investigate the wintering place. On digging we found again several objects, such as drumsticks, a hilt of a sword, and spears. Altogether it seemed that the people had been equipped in a warlike manner, but nothing was found which could indicate the presence of human remains. On the beach we found pieces of wood which had formerly belonged to some part of a ship, for which reason I believe that a vessel has been wrecked there, the crew of which built the house with the materials of the wreck and afterwards betook themselves to boats."

Bringing away a very large number of articles, he resumed his voyage and landed at Hammerfest, where Mr. E. C. Lister Kay, who happened to be there on a yachting trip, bought them, thinking they would be repurchased from him, at the price he gave, for one of our own museums. In this he was disappointed, and the collection was taken down to his house in Dorsetshire, where Count Bylandt, the Dutch Ambassador, happening to hear of it, called and bought it for his Government, who placed it at the Hague in a room, the exact imitation of that in Novaya Zemlya.

In July, 1876, Mr. Charles Gardiner, another English yachtsman, when on a cruise in the Glow-worm in Barents Sea, made a call at the house and brought away many other relics, which he presented to the Dutch, to be added to those at the Hague; and among them was the powder-flask hung in the chimney, containing the paper mentioned by De Veer. The previous August Captain Gundersen had been there in the Norwegian schooner Regina. In one of the chests he found two charts and what he described as Barents's Journal. The journal proved to be a manuscript Dutch translation of the story of the voyage in 1580 of Arthur Pet and Charles Jackman.

In 1608, eleven years after Barents died, Henry Hudson, in the Muscovy Company's service, was sent to China by the north-east. He sailed on the 22nd of April from St. Katharine's, near the Tower of London, and on the 3rd of June passed the North Cape on his way to Novaya Zemlya, which he reached near Cape Britwin twenty-three days afterwards. For some considerable distance he had skirted the ice pack, vainly endeavouring to get through to the northward and enter the Kara Sea round the Orange Islands.

This being impracticable he ranged southwards looking for a passage through at Kostin Shar, which in the Dutch map he had with him was marked as a strait and proved to be a bay. Had he been able to go a little further north than Cape Britwin he might have found that Matyushin Shar, like a rift in the rocks, divides the long island in half, though at that early season the ice would have probably been blocking it. From Kostin or thereabouts he departed for home, his voyage failing almost at the outset, owing to his being two months too early.

While off the coast he sent his boat ashore several times. "Generally," he says, "all the land of Nova Zembla that we have yet seen is to a man's eye a pleasant land; much main high land with no snow on it, looking in some places green, and deer feeding thereon; and the hills are partly covered with snow and partly bare"—rather a different picture from that given by De Veer of what it was like in the winter. De Veer, too, had committed himself to the statement that there were no deer in the country, but here were Hudson's men frequently coming upon their traces, and on the 2nd of July reporting that they had seen "a herd of white deer, ten in a company," bringing on board with them a white lock of deer's hair in proof thereof.

On his return Hudson left the service of the Muscovy Company. He went to Holland, and, early in April, 1609, was sent out by the Amsterdam Chamber of the Dutch East India Company. On the 5th of May he rounded the North Cape, making for Novaya Zemlya, and a few days afterwards reached the ice. Here, according to Dutch accounts, his men mutinied, but what happened during the trouble is not recorded. Whether it was really owing to a mutiny, or, as is by no means improbable, to secret instructions received at his departure, Hudson, on the 14th, made sail for the North Cape, passed it on the 19th, when he observed a spot on the sun, and then went off westwards to Newfoundland, making direct apparently for the mouth of the river now bearing his name, which was discovered by Verrazano in March, 1524, and surveyed by Gomez in the following year, and was at the time of Hudson's visit British territory.

The reason for this astonishing change of route was, perhaps, that on some of the charts of the period, as on Michael Lock's planisphere, this river, the Rio de Gamas or Rio Grande of the Spaniards, was made to communicate with what seems to be intended for Lake Ontario, and this with the other lakes to the westward was widened out into the waterway to the South Sea. Thus Hudson drops out of our story at his first mutiny, for he did not cross the Arctic Circle on his fourth voyage, when his second mutiny ended his career in the bay that bears his name, which, like the river and the strait, was indicated on the maps years before he went there.

In 1664 Willem de Vlamingh, the Dutch navigator, or—to be cautious—the namesake of the Dutch navigator, who thirty-one years afterwards found Dirk Hartog's plate and named Swan River in West Australia after the black swans, was in these regions and rounded Novaya Zemlya into the Kara Sea, reaching so far north that if his recorded latitude be correct he must have sighted the Franz Josef archipelago, and, contrary to the tendency of Arctic explorers, mistaken land for a bank of mist or a group of icebergs. After him neither Dutch nor English delay us, the opening up of this continuation of the Urals being left to the Russians, who found it first and named it—Novaya Zemlya meaning simply New Land.

For years it was left to the Samoyeds and the walrus hunters, whose persistent reports of deposits of silver in its cliffs led to Loschkin's making his way round it and spending two winters on its east coast. In 1768 Rosmysslof, also on silver bent, wintered in Matyushin Shar, that wonderful waterway, ninety fathoms deep, bounded by high hills and precipitous cliffs, winding so sharply that ships have been into it for a dozen miles or so and seeing no passage ahead have come out again to seek it elsewhere. In 1807 came Pospeloff, with Ludlow the mining engineer, to settle the silver question once for all, and settle it they did by showing that everywhere the so-called silver was either talc or mica, and naming Silver Bay ironically in memory thereof. Fourteen years afterwards Lütke surveyed the west coast, continuing during the next three summers; and in 1832 Pachtussoff arrived to undergo in the course of his really admirable work the hardships and privations of which he died.

CHAPTER IV
FRANZ JOSEF LAND

Austro-Hungarian expedition of 1872—The voyage as planned—The drift of the Tegetthoff—The polyglot crew—Discovery of Franz Josef Land—Payer's description of an aurora—The sledge journeys—Crown Prince Rudolf Land—Cape Fligely reached—Abandonment of the Tegetthoff—The boat voyage to Cape Britwin—Leigh Smith's expeditions—Loss of the Eira—The retreat in the boats—Jackson in Franz Josef Land—His excellent survey work—The Italian expedition under the Duke of the Abruzzi—Cagni attempts to reach the Pole and is stopped at 86° 34´—The return journey.

In 1871 Weyprecht and Payer were out in the cutter Isbjörn, pioneering for their intended voyage to the eastward, which started next year in the Tegetthoff, the famous Austro-Hungarian attempt of 1872 which may be described as an unintentional voyage of unexpected discovery. The amount of credit due to a man who starts to find one thing and lights upon another has always been a contentious matter, and this expedition afforded an extreme case for such speculations. The plan was to go east-north-east, the wintering places being undetermined, though they might be Cape Chelyuskin, the New Siberian Islands, or any land that might be discovered; and a return to Europe through Bering Strait lay among the possibilities of the venture, as an endeavour was to be made to reach the coast of Siberia in boats and penetrate south down one of the large rivers of Northern Asia. What happened was that during the afternoon of the 20th of August, when off the north-west coast of Novaya Zemlya in 76° 22´ north, 63° 3´ east, the ship was run into an ice-hole and made fast to a floe, and during the night the ice, instead of parting asunder, closed in and imprisoned her, so that she never steamed or sailed again. In the ice and on the ice she lay perfectly helpless, drifting with the floe, and still in its grip when she was abandoned by her crew on the 20th of May, two years afterwards.

It was a wonderful drift. North-easterly in the main to begin with, then north-westerly, then easterly to about 73°, then north, then west, in and out and roundabout, till they reached much the same longitude as they started from and then with a general tendency to the northward. Autumn passed away; the Polar night set in; and still they drifted ice-bound—a miscellaneous company representative of the polyglot empire; "on board the Tegetthoff," says Payer, "are heard all the languages of our country, German, Italian, Slavonic, and Hungarian; Italian is, however, the language in which all orders are given," to which we should add the Norwegian of Olaf Carlsen, the ice-master. During the winter there was enough of occupation and amusement, though private theatricals were impossible, as they would have had to be given in four languages to be intelligible to the audience.

The short summer came and went, and August had almost gone when—it was on the 30th, in 79° 43´—there came a surprise. The rays of the sun were fitfully breaking through the gloom when suddenly the gliding mists rolled up like a curtain, revealing in the north-west the outlines of a rocky coast, which in a few minutes grew into a radiant Alpine land. The shore, however, was unattainable, as a rush over the icefield soon showed, but from the edge of the fissure that barred any further progress they could make out its hills and glaciers and imagine the green pastures of its valleys. They called it Kaiser Franz Josef's Land, and along it they drifted during September till its outlines faded as the wind began to drive the floe to the south. But at the end of the month the direction of the floe changed to the north-west, taking the Tegetthoff up to 79° 58´, her highest north, near enough to one of the islands for an effort to be made to land. Six started from the ship over the grinding, groaning, broken walls of ice, and when they were out of sight of the ship a mist settled down which cut them off from the sight of land and then so closely enwrapped them that they could see nothing. Advance they found hopeless, and as they returned they lost their way and were saved by the sagacity of a dog they had with them. All through October the drift continued, and it was not until forenoon of the 1st of November, two months after sighting the country, that they managed to get ashore. This was on Wilczek Island in the same longitude as Admiralty Peninsula in Novaya Zemlya, and in the same latitude as Mossel Bay in Spitsbergen.

The sun had retired for the winter nine days before, and it was by the light of the moon that they first explored the unknown country. Little could be done, and, as it was much too late for attempting to shift from the ship to the shore, the winter had to be spent on board as the other had been. Through this winter, as before, the auroral displays were remarkable, and they are excellently described by Payer. Of one of them, he says: "It is now eight o'clock at night, the hour of the greatest intensity of the northern lights. For a moment some bundles of rays only are to be seen in the sky. In the south a faint, scarcely observable, band lies close to the horizon. All at once it rises rapidly and spreads east and west. The waves of light begin to dart and shoot; some rays mount towards the zenith. For a short time it remains stationary, then suddenly springs to life. The waves of light drive violently from east to west; the edges assume a deep red and green colour and dance up and down. The rays shoot up more rapidly; they become shorter; all rise together and approach nearer and nearer to the magnetic Pole. It looks as if there were a race among the rays, and that each aspired to reach the Pole first. And now the point is reached, and they shoot out on every side, to the north and the south, to the east and the west. Do the rays shoot from above downwards, or from below upwards? Who can distinguish? From the centre issues a sea of flames. Is that sea red, white, or green? Who can say?—it is all three colours at the same moment. The rays reach almost to the horizon; the whole sky is in flames. Nature displays before us such an exhibition of fireworks as transcends the powers of imagination to conceive. Involuntarily we listen; such a spectacle must, we think, be accompanied with sound. But unbroken stillness prevails, not the least sound strikes on the ear. Once more it becomes clear over the ice, and the whole phenomenon has disappeared with the same inconceivable rapidity with which it came, and gloomy night has again stretched her dark veil over everything. This was the aurora of the coming storm—the aurora in its fullest splendour."

Sledging was begun in March, Hall Island being first visited, and, on the 26th, Payer, with six men, started on his main journey up Austria Sound, reaching Hohenlohe Island, where three men were left, and then proceeding further north to Crown Prince Rudolf Land. Off the southern promontory of this were innumerable icebergs, up to two hundred feet in height, cracking and snapping in the sunshine. The Middendorf Glacier, with an enormous sea-wall, ran towards the north-west; layers of snow and rents in the sea-ice, caused by icebergs falling in, filled the intervening space. Into these fissures Payer and his men were continually falling, drenching their canvas boots and clothes with sea-water. One of the men was sent on ahead to find a path by which the glacier might be climbed, and discovering a fairly open road the summit was gained across many crevasses bridged with snow, three of those at the lower part needing but a slight movement to detach the severed portions and form them into bergs.

While resting on the glacier looking down on the semicircular terminal precipice and the gleaming host of bergs which filled the indentations of the coast, one of the men reported that his foot was swollen and ulcerated, and he had to be sent back to Hohenlohe Island. Just as the others were setting off, the snow gave way beneath the sledge, and down fell Zaninovich, the dogs and the sledge, while Payer was dragged backwards by the rope. The fall was arrested at a depth of thirty feet by the sledge sticking fast between the sides of the crevasse. Payer, on his face, the rope attaching him to the sledge tightly strained and cutting into the snow, shouted that he would sever the rope, but Zaninovich implored him not to do so as the sledge would then turn over and he would be killed; hearing, however, from Orel, that the man was lying on a ledge of snow with precipices all around him and that the dogs were still fast to the traces, Payer cut the rope, and the sledge made a short turn and stuck fast again. Then, telling Zaninovich that he must contrive to keep himself from freezing for four hours, Payer and Orel set off to run the six miles back to Hohenlohe Island. Payer, as he went on ahead, threw off his bird-skin clothes, his boots and his gloves, and ran in his stockings through the snow. In an hour he reached the camp, and leaving it unattended they all set off to the rescue with a rope and a pole. Picking up his clothes on the way, Payer and his men reached the crevasse; one of the party was let down by the rope, and finally Zaninovich and the sledge and dogs were brought from their dangerous position four hours and a half after their fall.

The advance was then resumed along the west coast of Crown Prince Rudolf Land round the imposing headland they named Cape Auk—the rocky cliffs being covered with little auks and other seabirds, enormous flocks flying up and filling the air, the whole region seeming to be alive with their incessant whirring—and following the line of Teplitz Bay, Payer mounted one of the bergs detached from a glacier and saw open water with ice bounding it on the horizon. As the sheet over which their course lay became thinner, and threatened to give way beneath them, they had to open up a track among the hummocks by pick and shovel; and when this failed they had to unload the sledge and carry the things separately. At Cape Saulen they camped for the night in the fissure of a glacier into which they had to drag their baggage by a long rope; and next day—the 12th of April, 1874—they went on again and reached Cape Fligely, in 81° 50´ 43˝, their farthest north.

With great difficulty they made their way back to the ship, a long, toilsome journey through snow and sludge, with open water in places where there had been ice, which made them fear the Tegetthoff might have drifted away again. The imminent danger of starvation was ended by their reaching their depot on Schonau Island, whence Payer went on for the remaining twenty-five miles alone with the dog-sledge, the two dogs giving much trouble until they struck the old sledge track almost obliterated by snow, when they raised their heads, stuck their tails in the air, and broke into a run. Halting on an iceberg for a meal, the berg capsized, and in a moment Payer was begirt by fissures, water-pools, and rolling blocks of ice, from which he managed to escape. When he turned into the narrow passage between Salm and Wilczek Islands, Orgel Cape, visible at a great distance, was the only dark spot on the scene. At once the dogs made for it, and about midnight he arrived there. With an anxious heart he began the ascent; a barren stony plateau confronted him; with every advancing step, made with increasing difficulty, the land gradually disappeared and the horizon of the frozen sea expanded before him; no ship was to be seen, no trace of man for thousands of miles except a cairn with the fragments of a flag fluttering in the wind, and a grave half covered with snow. Still he climbed, and suddenly three masts emerged. He had found the ship; there she lay about three miles off, appearing on the frozen ocean no bigger than a fly, the icebergs and drifts around her having hidden her amongst them. He held the heads of the dogs towards her and pointed with his arm to where she lay; and they saw her, and away they went, to find all but the watch asleep.

After another sledge journey north-westwards to Mount Brunn, from which Richthofen Peak was sighted, preparations were made for abandoning the ship and returning home. The three boats left the Tegetthoff on the 20th of May, but so slow was the progress over the difficult route that at the end of every day in the first week it was possible for Payer to go back to her on the dog-sledge to replenish the stores which had been consumed; and at the end of two months of indescribable effort the distance between the boats and the ship was not more than eight statute miles. The heights of Wilczek Land were still distinctly visible and its lines of rocks shone with mocking brilliance in the ever-growing daylight. All things appeared to promise that after a long struggle with the ice there remained for the expedition but a despairing return to the ship and a third winter there with the frozen ocean for their grave.

In the middle of July the fissures which had been opening out around them became wider and longer, progress reaching some four miles a day; then the north wind blew and the icefield commenced to drift to the south, to drift again north-east when the wind changed. Backwards and forwards, amid every variety of weather, including heavy rain, the pack ice moved until it changed to drift ice, and, on the 15th of August, the much-tried company got afloat at last in open water and laid their course for Novaya Zemlya, where they fell in with two Russian schooners off Cape Britwin.

The next to visit Franz Josef Land was Leigh Smith, whom we met with in the Spitsbergen seas. Building the Eira especially for Arctic service, he started in 1880, the year she was launched, on a cruise to Greenland and thence eastwards, which took him to the west and north-west of the ground gone over by the Austrians. He surveyed the whole coast from 42° east to the most westerly point seen by Payer, and sorted it out into several islands, but found no trace of the Tegetthoff, for where she had been left was open water. Encouraged by the success of his visit, in which the observations and collections were unusually good, he returned in the Eira the following year to meet with much more unfavourable ice conditions. Finding it impossible to get westward of Barents Hook the Eira was, on the 15th of August, made fast to the land floe off Cape Flora, and six days afterwards she was nipped and stove by the ice and slowly sank in eleven fathoms of water. As she settled down the steam winch was set to work, and by its means half a dozen casks of flour and about three hundredweight of bread were saved from the main hold; and when nothing more could be got from the lower deck the stores in the after cabin were attacked, and within the two hours from the discovery of the leak to the disappearance of the ship, all these provisions and the boats and clothes were safe on the ice; and the sails were cut away, and with them and some oars a tent was erected in which all the company, twenty-five in number, took shelter.

A move was made next day to the land. On Cape Flora a house was built mainly of earth and stones, covered with sails, in which the winter was passed. Fortunately the district abounds with bears and walruses, and the meat from these, boiled with vegetables, and served out three times a day into twenty-five plates made out of old provision tins, proved the right sort of fare to keep every one in excellent health. Thanks in a great measure to Bob, the retriever, the larder was kept full; but there being a shortness of coal, recourse for fuel had to be made to rope and blubber, so that no one could mistake the time when the cooking was on. In fact, the odour and the smoke were of great interest to the bears, who lingered about intending to pay surprise visits, and the dog had always to be sent in front of those leaving the house. One day when out on his own account, Bob discovered a school of walruses on the ice and reported the matter in his own fashion, whereupon several of these were shot, and after an exciting chase five were secured. In January he found another school, of which three were bagged and stowed alongside the house, although the thermometer stood at forty below zero. On another occasion he managed to tempt a bear up to the front door, where it was promptly tumbled over, to his evident satisfaction.

During the winter the party killed twenty-nine walruses and three dozen bears. Once, when only a fortnight's meat was left, and things began to look serious, no less than eight bears were killed in two weeks. At the end of April the birds returned, and in June the ice was cleared away by a gale and walruses were seen swimming on the water in hundreds. Never did a wintering party meet with better fortune, and never was one better managed.

On the 21st of June they started from Cape Flora in four boats, six men each in three of them, seven in the other, to reach the open sea, leaving in the house six bottles of champagne in case any person might look in, besides a few other things, and blocking up the door to keep out the bears. Before the boats reached the ice they crossed eighty miles of water, and then six weeks' hard labour began, zigzagging through channels, hauling over hummocky floes, sailing through pools, halting for days on a floe with no water in sight, but never doubting that a clearance would come. On leaving the ice they steered for Novaya Zemlya, at first in a gentle breeze, which rapidly increased to a gale in a heavy thunderstorm, so that the boats, with their sails of tablecloth and shirt-tail, had to be carefully handled as they scudded before it at such a pace that within twenty-four hours of leaving the ice they were drawn up all safe on the beach at the entrance of Matyushin Shar. Next morning the Dutch exploring schooner, Willem Barents, was descried coming out of the strait, and before the schooner was reached by the boats there came round the point the Hope, which Sir Allen Young, of the Pandora, had brought out as a rescue ship for them. They had been driven by the gale to the very spot on the very day they could be best relieved.

From the reports of Weyprecht and Payer it appeared that the north-east of Franz Josef Land would make an excellent base for a start for the North Pole, and Leigh Smith was led to the same view by his visit to Alexandra Land, but along the south he had made so many changes in Payer's map that a further examination of the region was evidently desirable. To effect this by a careful survey of the coasts, Frederick G. Jackson landed near Cape Flora on the 7th of September, 1894, and began his residence of a thousand days. Setting to work in a businesslike way, and recording his progress in similar style, he disintegrated the land masses into a group of some fifty size-able islands, through which run two main waterways, his British Channel and Payer's Austria Sound, both opening out northwards into Queen Victoria Sea; Crown Prince Rudolf Land being a large island at the northern entrance of Austria Sound, Wilczek Land at its southern entrance being about twice its size. He defined the coast-lines for over eighty miles of latitude, extending to fifteen degrees of longitude as far west as the most westerly headland, Cape Mary Harmsworth, and so cutting up Franz Josef Land that not even an island now bears the name, which is used only as that of the archipelago. Never in Arctic exploration was work rendered more evident than in the difference between the map as Jackson found it and as he left it.

The Windward, with the expedition on board, sighted the land on the 25th of August, but, stopped by intervening ice, could not reach the coast until a fortnight afterwards, the landing taking place at Cape Flora, close to Leigh Smith's house, which was found with the roof off. Not far away Jackson established his headquarters, quite a little settlement, though the expedition consisted of only eight men. Just as Leigh Smith found no remains of the Tegetthoff, so Jackson found no trace of the Eira. It had been intended that the Windward should return after putting the party ashore, but, shut in by the ice, she had to remain during the first winter, getting away safely next year, to return in 1896 and take away Nansen, who, as we shall see further on, ended his long land journey here. On her 1897 trip she departed with the members of the expedition all well, so that neither ship nor man was lost, the only serious casualties being among the dogs and the Russian ponies which did such excellent service.

Two years afterwards, in July, 1899, the deserted settlement was visited by the Duke of the Abruzzi, in his expedition in the Stella Polare, on his way to the north, a few days before he met with his short imprisonment in the ice in British Channel. His was a successful run all the same, for he was in 82° 4´, to the northward of Crown Prince Rudolf Land, or, as it is now called, Prince Rudolf Island, twenty-seven days out from Archangel. Passing Cape Fligely—the latitude of which was afterwards found to be sixteen miles south of the 82° 5´ Payer had made it—and rounding Cape Auk, the Stella Polare went into winter quarters in Teplitz Bay, whence Captain Umberto Cagni started, on the 11th of March, 1900, for his forty-five days' march towards the North Pole.

It was a great disappointment to the Duke to have to stay with the ship instead of leading this well-equipped and thoroughly organised sledge attempt, but owing to an accident two of his fingers had been so severely frost-bitten that they had to be amputated, and, unless a second winter was to be spent in the ice, a start was imperative before he could recover from the operation. Thus all he could do was to assist at the first encounter of the sledges with the pressure ridges and wish Cagni the longest possible journey and a safe return. There was every appearance of the journey being a difficult one, for on the first day a stoppage had to be made every quarter of a mile or thereabouts for a road to be cut through the ridges with ice-axes, while next day a new hindrance was experienced in the young ice in the channels being too thin at times to support the sledges, one of which began to sink and was only extricated with difficulty, so that only one sledge could be allowed on such ice at a time.

On the 13th of March the auxiliary sledge was sent back, thus reducing the caravan to a dozen sledges and ninety-eight dogs, which in a long line passed over a vast plain covered with great rugged blocks of ice, as though they had been thrown down confusedly by a giant's hand to bar the way. The wind was north-east, the cold intense, fifty below zero, not to be particular to a degree or so, for, as Cagni says, when the temperature is below twenty-two, and it is impossible to use a screen or a magnifying glass, the mere fact of approaching to read the scale on an unmounted thermometer sends it up a couple of degrees, and when the temperature is below fifty-eight an approach makes a difference of three or four degrees. So cold was it that the sleeping bags were as hard as wood, and the men got into them after much effort, not to sleep but to feel their teeth chattering for hours, the only warm parts of the body being the feet clad in long woollen stockings. "There are patches of ice on our knees," says Cagni, "like horses' knee-caps, and we have others, both large and small, sometimes thick enough to be scraped off with a knife, everywhere, but especially on our cheeks and backs and in all places where the perspiration has oozed through."

Amid such surroundings the camp must have seemed somewhat out of place. When a suitable site was chosen the first sledge was stopped, and near it the three other sledges of the third detachment were drawn up at a distance of about ten feet from each other. The sledges of the second detachment as they came up formed a second line, those of the third forming another. The tents were pitched between two sledges, generally those in the centre, the guy ropes being fastened to the sledge runners, those at the ends to an ice-axe stuck in the ice. The sleeping bags were then unpacked, the cooking stoves taken out of the boats, and everything arranged under the tent. The thin steel wire ropes to which the dogs were tethered, when unharnessed, were stretched between the sledges away from the tents. While the men were taking the dogs out of the harness, which always remained attached to the traces on the sledges, and tethering them to the steel ropes, one of the guides took a chosen victim to some distance from the camp, and felled it with a blow from an ice-axe, then opened it, skinned it quickly, divided it up into ten shares and distributed these to the dogs, already destined to undergo the same fate, these being the weakest and most ailing—in short, this was the elimination of the unfit.

On the 22nd of March the first detachment began its return journey; it consisted of Lieutenant Querini and two men, and it was never heard of again. The way northwards continued extremely difficult, with channels and ridges plentiful and the road so rough that the sledges began to break up in the bows and runners, some at last so badly that their fragments had to be used to repair the others with. On the 31st the second detachment was sent back, consisting of the doctor and two men, and it got safely to the ship. The third detachment, consisting of Cagni with two Courmayeur guides—Petigax and Fenoillet—and a sailor, Canepa, all four Italians, made the final effort. That day they were on level ice and covered seventeen miles, but at night a snowstorm came on and there was trouble. After a rest they pressed forward in rapid marches amid bad weather over the drifting fields. On the 12th of April while raising camp a strong pressure piled up within a hundred yards of them a wall from thirty-six to forty-five feet high, the highest ridge they had seen. Enormous blocks rolled down towards them with loud crashes after being thrown up by other blocks, lifted to the brow of the ridge and rolled over in their turn, raising a cloud of ice-dust in their fall, the loud continual creaking of the pressure drowned by the booming of the cascade which shook the ice for yards around. These ridges were constantly forming, most of them remaining, some of them subsiding as the edges drifted apart, and the channels thus caused were even more difficult to deal with, some having to be passed over thin ice, some ferried over on small floes. But they did not cross the track all along, and during the last few days the travelling was easy.

On the 24th of April the long journey reached its end. "At ten minutes past twelve," says Cagni, "we are on our way to the north. The ice is like that of yesterday, level and smooth, and, later on, undulating. At first the dogs are not very willing to pull, but encouraged by our shouts and a few strokes, they advance at a rapid pace, which they keep up during the whole march. At five we meet with a large pressure ridge, which almost surprises us, as it seems to us a century since we have seen any; we lost a quarter of an hour in preparing a passage through and crossing it. Beyond it the aspect of the ice changes; the undulations are more strongly marked, and large blocks and small ridges indicate recent pressure, but luckily they do not stop us or obstruct our way. Soon after six we come upon a large channel running from east to west; we must stop. Beyond the channel is a vast expanse of new ice, much broken up and traversed by many other channels. Even if I were not prevented from doing so, I would now think twice before risking myself in the midst of them. If we did push forward on that ice, even for half a day, we would gain very few miles and besides run the risk of losing a sledge. The dogs are very tired, and we too feel the effects of yesterday's strain. I therefore consider that it is more prudent to stop here, and both the guides are of the same opinion. The sun is unclouded. I bring out the sextant and take altitudes of the sun to calculate the longitude (65° 19´ 45˝ E.) while Fenoillet and Canepa put the sledges in order and pitch the tent in a sort of small amphitheatre of hillocks which shelter us from the north wind. On that farthest to the north, which is almost touched by the water of the channel, we plant the staff from which our flag waves. The air is very clear; between the north-east and the north-west there stand out distinctly, some sharply pointed, others rounded, dark or blue and white, often with strange shapes, the innumerable pinnacles of the great blocks of ice raised up by the pressure. Farther away again on the bright horizon in a chain from east to west is a great azure wall which from afar seems insurmountable." The latitude was 86° 34´.

The outward journey took forty-five days; the homeward took sixty, and proved a perilous adventure owing to the drift of the pack to the westward and its breaking up as the weather became warmer and the southern boundary was approached. At first there was good promise. The dogs knew they were going back, and followed the outward track so fast that the men, failing to keep up with them, for the first time took a seat on the sledges and were drawn along at four miles an hour. Progress was rapid for a few days owing to there being now only four sledges and, in a considerable degree, to the intelligence of the leading dog, Messicano. Ever since leaving Teplitz Bay this small white dog, with the intelligent eyes and bushy legs, had held the first place in the leading sledge because he followed the man at the head of the convoy better than the others, and now when the guide was behind or on the sledge, Messicano took the track at a gallop with his nose on the snow, losing the way now and then, but finding it again, though to the men it was often invisible. The time came, however, when the old track had to be left for a better course to the ship, and then difficulties of every sort had to be overcome, the delays being such that dog after dog had to be killed to keep away starvation, and it was only with seven of them and two sledges that Prince Rudolf Island was reached from the westward on the 23rd of June. "The snow is wet, which is very bad for dragging the sledges, as it sticks to the runners and tires our dogs exceedingly; we have still seven, but only three that really pull (three to each sledge), for Messicano is at the last extremity and can hardly hold up the trace." Toiling on thus through the fog to Cape Brorok a noise was heard in the distance like the creaking caused by pressure among ice floes, and when the fog lifted it was found that the sound was that of the seabirds on the cliffs. Out on the icefield no signs of life had been met with beyond the traces of a bear, a seal that vanished, and a walrus that popped up through thin ice to send Fenoillet scuttling off on his hands and knees.

Meanwhile the ship, which had been seriously damaged, had been made seaworthy. Liberated from her berth by mines of gunpowder and guncotton, she sailed from Teplitz Bay on the 16th of August, and, after further unpleasant experiences in the ice, reached Cape Flora, where a call was made at Jackson's house in the vain hope of news of Querini; and thence, after more ice complications, Captain Evensen took her to Hammerfest. Though, as in all Arctic endeavour, conditions were against them, the employment of a Norwegian crew for the ship and an Italian crew for the sledges had, under excellent management, worked thoroughly well.

CHAPTER V
CAPE CHELYUSKIN

Chelyuskin reaches the cape—The Laptefs—Deschnef's voyage through Bering Strait—Nordenskiöld's voyages to the Yenesei—The Siberian tundra—The voyage of the Vega—Nordenskiöld rounds Cape Chelyuskin—Endeavour to reach the Siberian Islands—Liakhoff's discovery—The Vega passes the Cape North of Captain Cook—Frozen in within six miles of Cape Serdze Kamen—Completes the North-east Passage—Nansen's voyage—The Fram—Her drift in the ice—Nansen and Johansen start for the Pole—They reach 86° 13´ 6˝—Their journey to Frederick Jackson Island—The meeting with Jackson—Sverdrup's voyage to Spitsbergen.

The tundras and shores of Siberia abound with obstacles to exploration, and yet a third of the threshold of the Polar regions has been surveyed along their line. No spot remains unvisited on the northern margin of the Asiatic mainland, the northernmost point of which is Cape Chelyuskin in 77° 36·8´, so that the Arctic Circle sweeps inland for 770 miles to the south of it—in other words the cape is practically half-way between the Circle and the Pole.

CAPE CHELYUSKIN

It was chiefly from the land that the northern coast-line was surveyed by the Russians, whose Arctic work has been immense and thorough, though not marked by any striking discoveries. Cape Chelyuskin was first reached, in May, 1742, by the explorer whose name it bears, after a sledge journey from the Chatanga, he being at the time second in command to Khariton Laptef, whose first expedition in 1739 ended in the loss of his ship three hundred miles from his winter quarters, to which he had to travel on foot, losing twelve men by cold and exhaustion on the way. Within the preceding four years the survey of the coast west of it had been completed in four stages—from Archangel to Yalmal (that is Land's End); from Yalmal to the Obi; from the Obi to the Yenesei; from the Yenesei to Cape Sterlegof. In 1735 Pronchistschef, from the Lena, failed to round Cape Chelyuskin from the east, and returned to the Olenek to die but two days before his young wife, who was his companion on his perilous voyage. Two years afterwards Dmitri Laptef began his explorations east of the Lena which took him to Cape Baranoff, thus joining up to the discoveries of the sable-hunters made a century before, including those of Deschnef, who, in 1648, sailed from the Kolyma to Kamchatka and went through Bering Strait more than thirty years before Bering was born. Thus the route of the North-east Passage was known, although no man had travelled the whole way either by land or sea, before the task was undertaken by Nordenskiöld.

To begin with, Nordenskiöld made two voyages to the Yenesei. In the first voyage he left Tromsoe in the Proeven on the 14th of June, 1875, and reached what he named Dickson Harbour at the mouth of the Yenesei on the 15th of August. Sending back the Proeven, which returned through Matyushin Shar, he, with Lundstrom the botanist and Stuxberg the zoologist, and three walrus-hunters, embarked in a boat they had brought out with them and proceeded up the estuary into the river; and during the first six hundred miles they landed only twice. On the last day of the month they caught up a steamer on which they became passengers.

"We were yet," says Nordenskiöld, "far to the north of the Arctic Circle, and as many perhaps imagine that the little-known region we were now travelling through, the Siberian tundra, is a desert wilderness covered either by ice and snow, or by an exceedingly scanty moss vegetation, it perhaps may not be out of place to say that this is by no means the case. On the contrary, we saw snow during our journey up the Yenesei only at one place, in a deep valley cleft some fathoms in breadth, and the vegetation, especially on the islands which are overflowed during the spring floods, is distinguished by a luxuriance to which I have seldom seen anything comparable. Already had the fertility of the soil and the immeasurable extent and richness in grass of the pastures drawn forth from one of our walrus-hunters, a middle-aged man who is owner of a little patch of ground among the fells of Northern Norway, a cry of envy at the splendid land our Lord had given the Russian, and of astonishment that no creature pastured, no scythe mowed, the grass. Daily and hourly we heard the same cry repeated, and even in louder tones, when some weeks after we came to the grand old forests between Yeneseisk and Turuchansk, or to the nearly uninhabited plains on the other side of Krasnojarsk covered with deep black earth, equal without doubt in fertility to the best parts of Scania, and in extent surpassing the whole Scandinavian peninsula. This judgment formed on the spot by a genuine though illiterate agriculturist is not without interest in forming an idea of the future importance of Siberia."

In fact, Siberia is particularly rich in mineral and agricultural wealth, and this voyage, which opened up the route to and from Europe by the natural outlets to the north, was of such commercial promise that the explorer received for it the special thanks of the Russian Government. As, however, there were people who looked upon it as an exceptional voyage in an exceptional year, Nordenskiöld next season took another voyage to the river, this time in the Ymer, carrying the first instalment of merchandise so as to begin the trade; and he was followed in a few weeks by Captain Joseph Wiggins, in the Thames, whose subsequent voyages made the northern route well known.

Assured by the experience gained in these voyages that the North-east Passage was possible to a steam vessel of moderate size, Nordenskiöld, in 1878, was enabled to fit out the Vega, and sailed from Tromsoe on the 31st of July. Three other vessels accompanied her, two bound for the Yenesei, one for the Lena, the rendezvous being Khabarova. All went well. On the 9th of August the Fraser and Express proceeded up the Yenesei to discharge their cargoes and return to Europe in safety; next day the Vega and Lena left for the eastward, and, after some risky navigation among islands and through fog, lay for four days in Actinia Haven, between Taimyr Island and the mainland, vainly waiting for clear weather. Pushing on through fitful fog they sighted a promontory in the north-east gleaming in the sunshine, and rounding its western horn anchored in a bay open to the north and free from ice at the extremity of Cape Chelyuskin. With the rounding of the most northerly point of the Old World the first object of the expedition had been attained. The salute fired in honour of the event having frightened away the only polar bear who had stood watching the ship from the western horn, some of the party landed, the botanists to discover that all the plants of the peninsula had apparently been stopped on the outermost promontory when trying to migrate further north. The flora was not extensive—a few luxuriant lichens and twenty-three flowering plants, eight of them saxifrages, most of them with a tendency to form semi-globular tufts; the fauna consisted of the bear, a few seals, a walrus, two shoals of white whales, some ducks and geese, and a number of sandpipers. Not so long a list as was obtained at other landings, but by no means a bad one for the half-way house to the Pole.

After passing the cape the course was laid for the New Siberian Islands, but ice prevented progress in their direction beyond 77° 45´, the highest north of the voyage, and the ship had to work her way out by the route she went in, thus losing a day, which had serious consequences, though it proved the correctness of Nordenskiöld's theory that the water delivered by the Siberian rivers is, for a few months, of sufficiently high temperature to give a clear passage to vessels content to keep near the coast. On reaching the mouth of the Lena the ships parted company, Captain Johannsen taking the smaller steamer up the river as intended and bringing the news of the rounding of Cape Chelyuskin and the promise of the North-east Passage being accomplished in one season, which was not destined to be fulfilled.

Another attempt was then made by the Vega to reach the islands to the north, but after sighting the two most westerly of the group the shallow sea was too crowded with rotten ice, and an idea of landing on Liakhoff Island having to be given up for the same reason, the course was altered so as to take the ship round Svjatoi Nos (the Holy Cape), where in April, 1770, Liakhoff had noticed the mighty crowd of reindeer going south. Justly considering they must have come over the ice from some northern land, he went back on their tracks in a dog-sledge, discovering two of the most southerly islands, and obtaining from Catherine the Second as a reward the monopoly of hunting the foxes and collecting the ivory there from the fossil mammoths he found in abundance.

Forced to keep to the channel along the coast, which daily became narrower, the Vega reached Cape Chelagskoi, and when off this promontory Nordenskiöld saw the first natives during his voyage. Two boats built of skin almost exactly similar to the oomiaks, or women's boats, used by the Eskimos, came out to the ship, the men, women, and children in them intimating by shouts and gestures that they wished to come on board. The Vega was brought-to that they might do so, but as none of the Chukches could speak Russian and none of the Swedes knew Chukche, the interview was not so satisfactory as expected, though the universal language of pantomime with presents ensured a favourable termination.

On the 12th of September the Vega passed Irkaipii, the Cape North of Captain Cook, and by rounding it Nordenskiöld joined up with the westernmost limit of the Arctic discoveries of the great navigator. Cook tried to weather it in August, 1778, but was turned back by fog and snow, and thinking it was "not consistent with prudence to make any further attempts to find a passage into the Atlantic this year in any direction, so little was the prospect of succeeding," he sailed for Hawaii, where his intention of making the attempt the ensuing summer came to nought owing to his death.

On the 28th of September the Vega's progress for the year was arrested by her being frozen in for the winter on the eastern side of Kolyuchin Bay in the northernmost part of Bering Strait, only six miles of ice barring the way round Cape Serdze Kamen into the open sea. During her detention of two hundred and sixty-four days the scientific investigations of many kinds that were undertaken were of lasting importance, as they had been throughout, and when she was released on the 18th of July, 1879, to come home by way of Yokohama, the collections and records she brought with her were simply enormous. No better work with greater results was done by any Arctic expedition than during this successful voyage, which was too well managed to have much adventure. For it Nordenskiöld very justly claimed the reward of twenty-five thousand guilders offered in 1596 by the States-General of Holland, the endeavour to win which sent out Van Heemskerck, Barents, and Rijp.

ADOLF ERIK NORDENSKIÖLD

We have seen how the Dutchmen built their house at Ice Haven mainly of the driftwood from the Siberian rivers. Similar wood from probably the same source is found on the shores of Greenland and of almost all the northerly islands of the Arctic Ocean. Further, the Greenland flora includes a series of Siberian plants apparently from seeds drifted there by some current. Not only do trees and seeds travel by water from Asia westward to America; at Godthaab, for instance, on the western coast of Greenland, there was found a throwing-stick of a shape and ornamentation used only by the Alaskan Eskimos; and three years after the foundering of the Jeannette to the north of the New Siberian Islands there were found on the south-west coast of Greenland a number of articles in the drift-ice that must have come from the sunken vessel. For these and other reasons it seemed clear to Fridtjof Nansen that a current flowed at some point between the Pole and Franz Josef Land from the Siberian Arctic Sea to the Greenland coast, and so he set to work to organise his daring expedition to strike this current well to the eastward, trusting to its mercies to take him to or near the Pole.

In 1893, when the Fram rounded Cape Chelyuskin, Nansen had found the Kara Sea almost as open as Nordenskiöld had done, but had met with more difficulties among the islands off the Taimyr Peninsula. A famous vessel, the Fram, the first of her kind, built specially for the ice to take her where it listed in the hope that she would drift to discovery like the Tegetthoff, and not to disaster like the Jeannette. The general idea was Nansen's, the carrying out of the idea was Colin Archer's. As Nansen says: "We must gratefully recognise that the success of the expedition was in no small degree due to this man." Plan after plan did he make of the projected ship, model after model did he prepare and abandon before he was satisfied: and never was a ship more honestly built. With her double-ended deck plan, with a side of such curve and slope that under ice pressure she would be lifted instead of crushed between the floes, and with bow, stern, and keel so rounded off that she would slip like an eel from the embrace of the ice, she was of such solidity as to withstand any pressure from any direction. Her stem of three stout oak beams, one inside the other, was four feet in thickness, protected with iron; her rudder-post and propeller-post, two feet across, had on either side a stout oak counter-timber following the curvature upwards and forming a double stern-post, with the planking cased with heavy iron plates; and between these timbers was a well for the screw and another for the rudder, so that each could be hoisted on deck, the rudder with the help of the capstan coming up in a few minutes. Her frames, ten inches thick and twenty-one wide, stood close together, carrying three layers of planking, giving altogether a side of two feet or more of solid wood, so shored and stayed for strength that the hold looked like a thicket of balks, joists, and stanchions. With a length of 128 feet over all, a breadth of thirty-six, a depth of seventeen, and a displacement of 800 tons, she was quite a multum-in-parvo engined with a 220 horse-power triple expansion, so contrived that in case of accident or for any other cause the cylinders could be used singly or two together. Rigged as a three-masted fore-and-aft schooner, with the mainmast much higher than the others—it being unusually high, for the crow's-nest on the main-topmast was 102 feet above the water—she proved equal to the demands on her, though in her case strength and warmth had to be thought of before weatherliness and speed. But her speed was not so poor, for when steaming and sailing after leaving Cape Chelyuskin on the 10th of September she was doing her nine knots.

The day after she had entered the Nordenskiöld Sea came a walrus-hunt, so graphically described by Nansen that we must find room for an extract. "It was," he says, "a lovely morning—fine, still weather; the walruses' guffaw sounded over to us along the clear ice surface. They were lying crowded together on a floe a little to landward of us, blue mountains glittering behind them in the sun. At last the harpoons were sharpened, guns and cartridges ready, and Henriksen, Juell, and I set off. There seemed to be a slight breeze from the south, so we rowed to the north side of the floe, to get to leeward of the animals. From time to time their sentry raised his head, but apparently did not see us. We advanced slowly, and soon were so near that we had to row very cautiously. Juell kept us going, while Henriksen was ready in the bow with a harpoon, and I behind him with a gun. The moment the sentry raised his head the oars stopped, and we stood motionless; when he sank it again, a few more strokes brought us nearer. Body to body they lay, close-packed on a small floe, old and young ones mixed. Enormous masses of flesh they were. Now and again one of the ladies fanned herself by moving one of her flippers backwards and forwards over her body; then she lay quiet again on her back or side. More and more cautiously we drew near. Whilst I sat ready with the gun, Henriksen took a good grip of the harpoon shaft, and as the boat touched the floe he rose, and off flew the harpoon. But it struck too high, glanced off the tough hide, and skipped over the backs of the animals. Now there was a pretty to do! Ten or twelve great weird faces glared upon us at once; the colossal creatures twisted themselves round with incredible celerity, and came waddling with lifted heads and hollow bellowings to the edge of the ice where we lay. It was undeniably an imposing sight; but I laid my gun to my shoulder and fired at one of the biggest heads. The animal staggered and then fell head foremost into the water. Now a ball into another head; this creature fell, too, but was able to fling itself into the sea. And now the whole flock dashed in, and we, as well as they, were hidden in the spray. It had all happened in a few seconds. But up they came again immediately round the boat, the one head bigger and uglier than the other—their young ones close beside them. They stood up in the water, bellowed and roared till the air trembled, threw themselves forward towards us, then rose up again, and new bellowings filled the air. Then they rolled over and disappeared with a splash, then bobbed up again. The water foamed and boiled for yards around—the ice-world that had been so still before seemed in a moment to have been transformed into a raging Bedlam. Any moment we might expect to have a walrus tusk or two through the boat or to be heaved up or capsized. Something of this kind was the very least that could happen after such a terrible commotion. But the hurly-burly went on and nothing came of it."

The Fram had to follow the coast owing to the thick pack barring the way across the sea. The mouth of the Chatanga was passed, then that of the Olenek, and then the influence of the warm water of the Lena being apparent by the clearance of the floes, the course was laid straight for the Pole in open water until 77° 44´ was reached, when, checked by the long compact edge of ice shining through the fog, the route became north-westerly until they stopped for fear they should get near land, which was the very thing they wished to avoid; and on the 25th of September in about 78½° north latitude—north-west of Sannikof Land—they were frozen in.

Preparations for wintering began. The rudder was hauled up, the engine was taken to pieces, each separate part oiled and laid away with the greatest care—for Amundsen looked after it as if it were his own child—a carpenter's shop was started in the hold, a smithy arranged first on deck and then on the ice. But it all had to be replaced, even the engine put together again, for the pack cleared away for a brief period, to return, when again the shiftings were made; and when the windmill was put up to drive the dynamo, the winter installation was in all senses complete.

Slowly the Fram drifted in her ice-berth, so slowly that at the end of twelve months she had moved from point to point only 189 miles, having returned no further west than the longitude of the Olenek; her highest north, attained on the 18th of June, being 81° 46´. In the main the drift was north-westerly, but three times it had boxed the compass in irregular loops, the only constant thing about it being that, in no matter what direction she was taken, the bow of the Fram always pointed south. Of grips she had many, some of the pressures were enormous, once they were severe enough to suggest measures for her abandonment, but she survived them all unscathed. Early in the drift it became apparent that the ice was packing twice and slacking twice in every twenty-four hours, and in this sea, as afterwards in the Atlantic area, the influence of the tides, particularly the spring tides, was unmistakable—as it was expected it would be—though in the deep Polar basin the wind had more effect; and, in truth, the wind was a factor throughout in the packing of the ice and in the drift's direction. One thing was clear, that the current was not taking the Fram across the North Pole, but about half-way between it and Spitsbergen; and if the Pole was to be reached some of the expedition must attempt to get there over the ice. This meant leaving the ship, going north, and returning to the nearest known land, for, owing to the irregularity of the drift, it was hopeless to think of again reaching the Fram. During the second winter the route of the ship trended more to the north, and, after a loop all round in January, she reached 84° 4´ on the 14th of March in the longitude of Cape Chelyuskin. Here Nansen and Lieutenant F. H. Johansen, who rather than not join the Fram had shipped in her as stoker, left the ship with three sledges, two kayaks, and twenty-eight dogs to go as far northward as they could, their expectation being that they would reach the Pole in fifty days. Had they remained in the ship until November they would have saved themselves trouble, for, as matters turned out, the embarrassing drift took the Fram within eight miles of the farthest north they attained after twenty-three days of strenuous endeavour.

The ice, fairly easy for a few days, soon became terrible in the difficulties it offered to progress over it, and the continual toil of hauling and carrying the sledges, and righting them when capsized, soon told on the two men to such an extent as to tire them out so thoroughly that sometimes in the evening they fell asleep as they went along. The cold, too, proved singularly searching and severe. During the course of the day the damp exhalations of the body little by little became condensed in their outer garments, which became transformed into suits of ice-armour, so hard that if they could have been got off they could have stood by themselves, and they crackled audibly at every movement. The clothes were so stiff that the sleeve of Nansen's coat rubbed deep sores in his wrist, one of which got frost-bitten, the wound growing deeper and deeper and nearly reaching the bone. "How cold we were," says Nansen, "as we lay there shivering in the bag, waiting for the supper to be ready! I, who was cook, was obliged to keep myself more or less awake to see to the culinary operations, and sometimes I succeeded. At last the supper was ready, was portioned out, and, as always, tasted delicious. These occasions were the supreme moments of our existence, moments to which we looked forward all day long. But sometimes we were so weary that our eyes closed, and we fell asleep with the food on its way to our mouths. Our hands would fall back inanimate with the spoons in them and the food fly out on the bag."

The further they went the worse became the conditions. On the 8th of April, with ridge after ridge and nothing but rubble to travel over, the work became so disheartening that Nansen went on ahead on his skis and from the highest hummocks viewed the state of affairs; and as far as the horizon, lay a chaos of such character that progress across was impracticable if he and Johansen were to return alive. Here, then, they stopped, this being their northernmost limit, 128 miles from the Fram, 260 miles from the Pole, latitude 86° 13·6´, longitude 95°.

To reach this point they had been travelling north-westwards for six days, the way due north being impassable; but on turning south they seemed to enter another country; so much did the going improve after the first mile that in three days they covered over forty miles. They were making for Petermann Land, which does not exist, or for the wide-stretching Franz Josef Land, also placed on the maps by Payer, which Jackson had been cutting up into fragments while the Fram was in the ice. Further south difficulties thickened ahead of them till the road became almost as bad as that to the north. Before they reached land the hundred days they had allowed themselves had increased to more than half as many again, their dogs had been killed one by one to yield food for the rest, until only two remained; Nansen was helpless with rheumatism for two days; and Johansen was nearly killed by a bear. Through a chain of disasters caused by storms and fogs and snow and the state of the ice, they threaded their way, sometimes by sledge, sometimes by kayak, through mazes of open channels, leaping from floe to floe and ferrying back to get their baggage over, hundreds of yards on mere brash, dragging the sledges after them in constant fear of their capsizing into the water. Then the ice gave out and, taking to their kayaks, they sailed and paddled to what is now known as Frederick Jackson Island in the north of the Franz Josef Archipelago.

Here they wintered, quite at a loss at first to know where they were, owing to their watches having run down during a great effort of thirty-six hours at a stretch, so that they did not know their longitude, though they subsequently concluded they must be somewhere on Franz Josef Land within 140 miles of Eira Harbour. They built a hut and altogether lived passably well, there being no lack of food, thanks mainly to the bears, whose visits were embarrassing in their frequency though the visitors were not unwelcome when they came to stay.

On the 19th of May they set out for the south, down British Channel, with their sledges and kayaks, and five days afterwards, when off Cape M'Clintock, while Johansen was busy lashing the sail and mast securely to the deck of his kayak to prevent their being blown away, Nansen went on ahead to look for a camping ground and fell through a crack in the ice which had been hidden by the snow. He tried to get out, but with his skis firmly fastened could not pull them up through the rubble of ice which had fallen into the water on the top of them, and, being harnessed to the sledge, he could not turn round. Fortunately, as he fell, he had dug his staff into the ice on the opposite side of the crack, and holding himself up with its aid, and the arm he had got over the edge of the ice, he waited patiently for Johansen to come and pull him out. When he thought a long time had passed and felt the staff giving way and the water creeping further up his body, he called out but received no answer; and it was not until the water had reached his chest that Johansen came and pulled him out.

For a few days they were storm-bound. On the 3rd of June they started again down the channel, their whereabouts still a mystery to them, nothing in the least like it being on their map. Nine days afterwards, after rounding Cape Barents on Northbrook Island, the kayaks, which had been left moored to the edge of the ice, got adrift. Nansen, running down from the hummock, from which he had been looking round, threw off some of his clothes and sprang into the water. The wind was off the ice, and the kayaks with their high rigging were moving away as fast as he could swim. It seemed more than doubtful if he could reach them. But all their hope was there, all they had was on board; they had not even a knife with them, and whether he sank or turned back amounted to much the same thing. When he tired he turned over and swam on his back, and then he could see Johansen walking restlessly up and down on the ice, unable to do anything, and having the worst time he ever lived through. But the wind lulled, and when Nansen turned over he saw he was nearing the kayaks, and though his limbs were stiffening and losing all feeling, he put all the strength he could into his strokes, and eventually was able to reach them. He tried to pull himself up, but was so stiff with cold that he could not do so. For a moment he thought he was too late; but after a little he managed to swing one leg up on to the edge of the sledge, which lay on the deck, and in this way he scrambled on board. The kayaks were lashed together so as to form a double boat, and the only way in which, owing to his stiffness, he could paddle them was to take one or two strokes on one side and then step into the other kayak and take a few strokes on the other side. The return was consequently slow, but it was a return, though the ice was reached a long way from where the drifting had begun.

Next day but one came another perilous episode. "Towards morning," says Nansen, "we rowed for some time without seeing any walrus, and now felt more secure. Just then we saw a solitary rover pop up a little in front of us. Johansen, who was in front at the time, put in to a sunken ledge of ice; and although I really thought that this was caution carried to excess, I was on the point of following his example. I had not gone so far, however, when suddenly the walrus shot up beside me, threw himself on to the edge of the kayak, took hold further over the deck with one flipper, and as it tried to upset me aimed a blow at the kayak with its tusks. I held on as tightly as possible, so as not to be upset into the water, and struck at the animal's head with the paddle as hard as I could. It took hold of the kayak once more and tilted me up so that the deck was almost under water, then let go and raised itself right up. I seized my gun, but at the same moment it turned round and disappeared as quickly as it had come. The whole thing had happened in a moment, and I was just going to remark to Johansen that we were fortunate in escaping so easily from that adventure, when I noticed that my legs were wet. I listened, and now heard the water trickling into the kayak under me. To turn and run her in on to the sunken ledge of ice was the work of a moment, but I sank there. The thing was to get out and on to the ice, the kayak filling all the time. The edge of the ice was high and loose, but I managed to rise; and Johansen, by tilting the sinking kayak over to starboard, so that the leak came above the water, managed to bring her to a place where the ice was low enough to admit of our drawing her up. All I possessed was floating about inside, soaked through. So here we lie, with all our worldly goods spread out to dry and a kayak that must be mended before we can face the walrus again. It is a good big rent that he has made, at least six inches long; but it is fortunate that it was no worse."

The kayak was mended, and, after a long rest, it was past noon on the 17th of June when Nansen turned out to prepare breakfast. After doing so he went up on a hummock to look around. Flocks of little auks were flying overhead, and, amid the confused noise of their calls, he heard a couple of barks from a dog. Thinking he was mistaken he waited for a time, and then the barking was unmistakable, bark after bark, one of a deeper tone than the other. He shouted to Johansen, who started up from the sleeping-bag incredulous. The sound ceased, and, breakfast over, Nansen went forth to investigate. Soon he came on the footprints of a dog or wolf, and then, still doubting, he heard a distant yelping that certainly came not from a wolf. Making his way among the hummocks, he heard a shout from a human voice, a strange voice—the first for three years. Running up on to a hummock he shouted with all his might. Back came a shout in reply; and among the hummocks he caught sight of a dog, and further off a man walked into view. The man spoke to the dog in English. Thinking he recognised Jackson, Nansen raised his hat as he met him, and they shook hands heartily.

The contrast could not have been greater. One the well-groomed, civilised European in a check suit and rubber water-boots, the other in dirty rags black with oil and soot, with long matted hair and shaggy beard, and a face in which the complexion was undiscernible through the accumulations which a winter's endeavours, including scrapings with a knife, had failed to remove. As they talked they had turned to go inland. Suddenly Jackson stopped, and, looking the new arrival straight in the face, said—

"Aren't you Nansen?"

"Yes, I am."

"By Jove! I'm damned glad to see you."

And seizing his hand he shook it again, his whole face beaming with a smile of welcome and delight at the unexpected meeting; and needless to say, both Nansen and Johansen received the warmest of welcomes from all at Elmwood. The Windward was then on her way, and when she arrived the two Norsemen from the farthest north went in her to Vardoe, where they landed on the 13th of August.

Meanwhile the Fram had continued her leisurely drift, north-west, south-west, north-west, west, then all round the compass, still with her head pointing south, until on the 15th of November she reached 85° 55·5´ in longitude 66° 31´, thus giving Captain Otto Sverdrup the honour of attaining the highest north in a ship. Another winter was passed in her ice-berth, during which she moved westerly. In February came another complete triangle in her course, after which she went south-west, and on the 16th of May turned due south. Then, in the later days of the month with the southerly drift continuing and open water on ahead, Sverdrup resolved to set her free by mines, and on the 3rd of June, as a result of the blastings, she gave a lurch, settled a little deeper at the stern and moved away from the edge of the ice until the hawsers tautened. But, though she was afloat, the ice around still kept her captive, and in the pool she drifted straight towards Spitsbergen.

Again and again was steam got up and endeavour made to break a way out, but day after day elapsed, and it was not until the 13th of August that she passed through the last floes into open water, and her thirty-five months of imprisonment came to an end. Making for Danes Island in Spitsbergen, she was there boarded by Andrée, who was then preparing for his disappearance in the balloon voyage to the Pole. Going on direct to Skjervoe in Norway, Sverdrup landed at two o'clock in the morning to wake up the telegraphist, who told him that Nansen had reached Vardoe a week before and was then at Hammerfest and probably leaving for Tromsoe. For Tromsoe Sverdrup started, after telegraphing to Nansen. And there, at four o'clock in the afternoon of the 25th of August, 1896, Sir George Baden-Powell's yacht Otaria, with Nansen and Johansen on board, glided alongside the Fram, the good little ship looking much weather-beaten though none the worse for such a task of strength and endurance as had been set no other in the story of the sea.

CHAPTER VI
THE LENA DELTA

Discovery of the Siberian Islands—Hedenström—Anjou and Wrangell—Migration of reindeer—Animals and plants of the tundra—The northward migration of the native tribes—The voyage of the Jeannette—Her drift in the pack—Jeannette Island—Henrietta Island—The ship crushed and sunk—Landing on Bennett Island—The boat voyage—The boats separate in a storm—De Long lands on the Lena Delta—Nindemann and Noros in search of assistance—Safety of the whale-boat—Fate of De Long and his companions—Baron Toll's discoveries.

The Siberian Islands, lying north of the delta of the Lena, answer to the Parry Islands on the American side, the two groups being separated by that wide stretch of the Arctic Ocean communicating with the Pacific through Bering Strait. At first the Asiatic group was officially named after Liakhoff, then it was called after the unwisely named New Siberia, but, under any designation, it took half a century to find the different islands, and considerably more to land on them.

THE LENA DELTA

When Liakhoff discovered the one named after him by the Empress Catherine, he also went north to Moloi, and he seems to have visited Kotelnoi to the north-west. In 1775 Chvoinof was sent to survey these three, but he devoted most of his attention to Liakhoff Island—fifty miles across—which he found to consist, as reported, of hills of granite rising from a mass of mammoth bones, sand, and ice, some of the ice ancient enough to carry a deep covering of moss. Though he stated that other islands could be made out in the distance, nothing was done to verify his discoveries, real or imaginary, until thirty years had passed, when Thaddeus and Stolbovoi were reached. Next year (1806) New Siberia, to the eastward, was discovered by Sirovatskof, and two years afterwards Bjelkof was added to the southerly portion of the archipelago.

In 1809 Hedenström, assisted by Sannikof, began his series of surveys extending over all these, and cleared up much of the mystery concerning them. From Thaddeus, Sannikof sighted, away to the northward, what is now known as Bennett Island; and, from New Siberia, Hedenström sighted Henrietta and Jeannette Islands, and set out for them, and would have reached them had his sledges not been stopped by open water. Like his predecessors he was astonished at the mammoth remains on Liakhoff Island.

According to his account, "these bones or tusks are less large and heavy the further we advance towards the north, so that it is a rare occurrence on the islands to meet with a tusk of more than 108 lbs. in weight, whereas on the continent they are said often to weigh as much as 432 lbs. In quantity, however, these bones increase wonderfully to the northward, and as Sannikof expresses himself, the whole soil of the first of the Liakhoff Islands appears to consist of them. For about eighty years the fur-hunters have every year brought large cargoes from this island, but as yet there is no sensible diminution of the stock. The tusks on the islands are also much more fresh and white than those on the continent. A sandbank on the western side was most productive of all, and the fur-hunters maintain that when the sea recedes after a long continuance of easterly winds, a fresh supply of mammoth bones is always found to have been washed from this bank, proceeding apparently from some vast store at the bottom of the sea." Besides these multitudinous remains of the mammoth Hedenström found numerous remains of rhinoceros, the horn of which was then thought to be a bird's claw three feet long.

To clear up the wide discrepancies in the maps the Emperor Alexander, in 1820, equipped two expeditions to proceed by land to the northern coast of Siberia and properly survey it, the work to be carried as far east as Cape Chelagskoi, whence a sledge party was to start for the north in search of the inhabited country reported to exist in the Polar Sea in that direction. One of these expeditions, under Lieutenant P. F. Anjou, was to commence its operations from the mouth of the Yana; the other, under Lieutenant Ferdinand Vrangel' (or, as he is generally known amongst us, Wrangell or Von Wrangell), was to start from the mouth of the Kolyma, his chief assistant being Midshipman Matiuschkin. Both parties did good survey work, but neither made any striking discovery. Anjou reached 76° 36´ to the north of Kotelnoi; Wrangell reached 72° 2´ (north-east of the Bear Islands, one hundred and seventy-four miles out on the sea from the great Baranoff rock), beyond which progress was impossible owing to the thinness of the ice, which was covered with salt water.

Wrangell had many perilous experiences. In his fourth journey over the sea the ice broke up around him and he found himself on a floe with a labyrinth of water lanes hemming him in on every side and a storm coming on from the westward. The storm rapidly increased in fury, and the masses of ice around him were soon dashing against each other and breaking in all directions. On the floe, which was tossing to and fro on the waves, he gazed in painful inactivity on the conflict, expecting every moment to be swallowed up. For three long hours he had remained unable to move, the mass of ice beneath him holding together, when it was caught by the storm and hurled against a large field of ice. The crash was terrific, as it was shattered into little pieces. At that dreadful moment, when escape seemed impossible, he was saved by the impulse of self-preservation. Instinctively the party sprang on to the sledges and urged the dogs to full speed, and as hard as they could gallop they skimmed across the yielding fragments to the field on which they had been stranded, and safely reached a stretch of firmer ice, where the dogs ceased running among the hummocks, conscious that the danger was past.

But it is not so much for adventures like this that his account of his work is of continuing interest as for the abundance of its notes and reflections on the country and its life and climate. Once, for instance, when on the Baranicha he was fortunate enough to witness a migration of reindeer. "I had hardly finished the observation," he says, "when my whole attention was called to a highly interesting, and to me a perfectly novel, spectacle. Two large migrating bodies of reindeer passed us at no great distance. They were descending the hills from the north-west and crossing the plain on their way to the forests, where they spend the winter. Both bodies of deer extended further than the eye could reach, and formed a compact mass, narrowing towards the front. They moved slowly and majestically along, their broad antlers resembling a moving wood of leafless trees. Each body was led by a deer of unusual size, which my guides assured me was always a female. One of the herds was stealthily followed by a wolf, who was apparently watching for an opportunity of seizing any one of the younger and weaker deer which might fall behind the rest, but on seeing us he made off in another direction. The other column was followed at some distance by a large black bear, who, however, appeared only intent on digging out a mouse's nest every now and then, so much so that he took no notice of us. We had great difficulty in restraining our two dogs, but happily succeeded in doing so; their barking, or any sound or motion on our part, might have alarmed the deer, and by turning them from their course, have proved a terrible misfortune to the hunters, who were awaiting their passage, on which they are entirely dependent for support. We remained for two hours whilst the herds of deer were passing by, and then resumed our march."

The way in which the deer are dealt with by the hunters was seen by Matiuschkin when despatched by Wrangell to survey the Anyui. "The true harvest, which we arrived just in time to see, is in August or September, when the reindeer are returning from the plains to the forests. They are then healthy and well fed, the venison is excellent, and as they have just acquired their winter coats the fur is thick and warm. The difference of the quality of the skins at the two seasons is such, that whilst an autumn skin is valued at five or six roubles, a spring one will only fetch one or one and a half roubles. In good years the migrating body of reindeer consists of many thousands; and though they are divided into herds of two or three hundred each, yet the herds keep so near together as to form only one immense mass, which is sometimes from thirty to seventy miles in breadth. They always follow the same route, and in crossing the river near Plotbischtsche, they choose a place where a dry valley leads down to the stream on one side, and a flat sandy shore facilitates their landing on the other side. As each separate herd approaches the river, the deer draw more closely together, and the largest and strongest takes the lead. He advances, closely followed by a few of the others, with head erect, and apparently intent on examining the locality. When he has satisfied himself, he enters the river, the rest of the herd crowd after him, and in a few minutes the surface is covered with them. Then the hunters, who have been concealed to leeward, rush in their light canoes from their hiding-places, surround the deer, and delay their passage, whilst two or three chosen men armed with short spears dash into the middle of the herd and despatch large numbers in an incredibly short time; or at least wound them so, that, if they reach the bank, it is only to fall into the hands of the women and children. The office of the spearman is a very dangerous one. It is no easy thing to keep the light boat afloat among the dense crowd of swimming deer, which, moreover, make considerable resistance; the males with their horns, teeth, and hind legs, whilst the females try to overset the boat by getting their fore-feet over the gunwale; if they succeed in this the hunter is lost, for it is hardly possible that he should extricate himself from the throng; but the skill of these people is so great that accidents very rarely occur. A good hunter may kill a hundred or more in less than half an hour. When the herd is large, and gets into disorder, it often happens that their antlers become entangled with each other; they are then unable to defend themselves, and the business is much easier. Meanwhile the rest of the boats pick up the slain and fasten them together with thongs, and every one is allowed to keep what he lays hold of in this manner. It might seem that in this way nothing would be left to requite the spearmen for their skill, and the danger they have encountered; but whilst everything taken in the river is the property of whoever secures it, the wounded animals which reach the bank before they fall, belong to the spearman who wounded them. The skill and experience of these men are such that in the thickest of the conflict, when every energy is taxed to the uttermost, and their life is every moment at stake, they have sufficient presence of mind to contrive to measure the force of their blows so as to kill the smallest animals outright, but only to wound the larger and finer ones, so that they may be just able to reach the bank. Such proceeding is not sanctioned by the general voice, but it seems nevertheless to be almost always practised. The whole scene is of a most singular and curious character, and quite indescribable. The throng of thousands of swimming reindeer, the sound produced by the striking together of their antlers, the swift canoes dashing in amongst them, the terror of the frightened animals, the danger of the hunters, the shouts of warning advice or applause from their friends, the blood-stained water, and all the accompanying circumstances, form a whole which no one can picture to himself without having witnessed the scene."

REINDEER

The tundra has no more characteristic animal than the reindeer. Over the mossy hillocks and the matted tops of the dwarf birches he runs, or through the rivers and lakes he swims, with his broad-hoofed, spade-like feet never at a loss to find a footing. In the long winter he is protected by his thick skin against the influence of the cold, and is seldom at starvation point, as he digs for food in the deepest snow, and is by no means particular what he eats; and in the short summer he is in luxurious ease, for the tundra, as we have seen, is not always as bad as it is painted. In exposed places near the coast it is little else than gravel beds interspersed with patches of peat and clay, with scarcely a rush or a sedge to break the monotony, but by far the greater part of it is a gently undulating plain, broken up by lakes, rivers, swamps, and bogs; the lakes with patches of green water-plants, the rivers flowing between sedges and rushes, the swamps the breeding haunts of ruffs and phalaropes, the bogs dotted with the white fluffy seeds of the cotton-grass. Almost everywhere the birds are in noticeable numbers, among the commonest being the golden plover (who wears the tundra colours), the bluethroat, the fieldfare, the whooper swan, and the ducks and divers—particularly the divers—and, among the birds of prey, the falcons and the rough-legged buzzards, which, with the owls, find such abundant provision in the lemmings that migrate in myriads compared with which the reindeer troops are insignificant.

"The groundwork of all this variegated scenery," says Seebohm, "is more beautiful and varied still—lichens and mosses of almost every conceivable colour, from the cream-coloured reindeer-moss to the scarlet-cupped trumpet-moss, interspersed with a brilliant alpine flora, gentians, anemones, saxifrages, and hundreds of plants, each a picture in itself, the tall aconites, both the blue and yellow species, the beautiful cloudberry, with its gay white blossom and amber fruit, the fragrant Ledum palustre and the delicate pink Andromeda polifolia. In the sheltered valleys and deep water-courses a few stunted birches, and sometimes large patches of willow scrub, survive the long severe winter, and serve as cover for willow-grouse or ptarmigan. The Lapland bunting and red-throated pipit are everywhere to be seen, and certain favoured places are the breeding-grounds of plovers and sandpipers of many species. So far from meriting the name of Barren Ground, the tundra is for the most part a veritable paradise in summer. But it has one almost fatal drawback—it swarms with mosquitoes."

OSTIAK MAN

SAMOYED MAN

The beauty of the tundra is, however, transient and skin deep; it is only such plants as can live in the soil that thaws that survive. Wherever the ground is dug into, ice is sure to be reached; in fact, it may be said that ice is one of the rocks of the subsoil, and in some places these strata of ice that never melts have been found to be three hundred feet thick—ice that has remained in block since the mammoths got into cold storage in it ages ago, for otherwise they would not have lasted intact in skin and flesh as many have done, like the very first discovered in a complete state, that chipped out by Adams in 1807.

In such a climate, whose winter terrors are only too prominent, all along the north of Siberia live the ancient peoples driven towards the sea by those mighty movements from the land of the Turk and Mongol which, north and south, east and west, flooded Europe and Asia with invaders—Ostiaks and Samoyeds west of Chelyuskin; Yakuts, Chukches, and others to the east of it, the descriptions of whose unpleasant manners and customs appear to be written with a view to showing how curiously local are the laws of health. One may well ask, as Wrangell did, why they should remain in so dreary a region and take life so contentedly. And the answer may be that they might go further north and fare worse, as their predecessors in the eastern section would seem to have done. Once, according to the legend, there were more hearths of the Omoki on the shores of the Kolyma than there are stars in the clear sky, and these Omoki, or some other departed race, appear to have left as their traces the remains of the timber forts and the tumuli that are found on the coast, especially near the Indiyirka, and the huts of earth and stones and bones found all along from Chelagskoi to the straits, similar remains of a departed people now existing in the Parry Islands, over a thousand miles away. According to another legend of more recent date, there was an intervening land, the land that Wrangell went to seek and the Jeannette went to winter at, and the supposed site of which she drifted through, in her last and longest imprisonment in the ice.

The Jeannette was the old Pandora, bought from Sir Allen Young by James Gordon Bennett, and accepted by and fitted out, officered, and manned under the orders of the Navy Department of the United States, her commander being Lieutenant George Washington De Long. She left San Francisco on the 8th of July, 1879, and two months afterwards had been run into the pack and was fast in the ice off Herald Island, drifting to her doom. Her route, in the main, was north-westerly, with many complicated loops, at first at the rate of half a mile a day, then at two miles, then at three, showing that the current from Bering Strait had been reinforced by some other current as she went further west, and, from its direction, there seemed to be land to the northward which was never sighted.

Wrangell Land, passed to the south, proved to be not a continent but a small island. No other land was seen for a monotonous twenty months, and then, in May, 1881, the ship drifted, stern first, past that sighted by Hedenström from New Siberia, which was found to consist of two islands, to be henceforth known as Jeannette and Henrietta. On the 12th of June, in latitude 77° 14´ 57˝, the Jeannette was crushed and sank, her fore yardarms breaking upwards as she slipped down through the rift in the pack, and a start was made for the Siberian Islands over the ice; but the drift had taken the party to 77° 36´, before they got on their proper course, and after a most laborious journey, lasting up to the 28th of July, they were safe ashore on the land sighted by Sannikof from Thaddeus, which De Long named Bennett Island.

Bennett Island was left on the 7th of August, the party of thirty-three being in three boats, thirteen under De Long in the first cutter, ten under Lieutenant Chipp in the much smaller second cutter, and ten, under Engineer George W. Melville, whose skill and resourcefulness had been conspicuous throughout, were given the whale-boat, the most suitable of the three. Sail was made for Thaddeus Island, which was reached in safety; after a halt of some days it was left on the 31st of August. Then Kotelnoi Island was reached and rested at; then the boats made for Semonovski, which was left on the 12th of September.

The same day a gale came on in which the first cutter had great difficulty in keeping afloat, the second cutter disappeared never to be heard of again, and the whale-boat, behaving excellently, went off before the wind straight for the continent to reach in safety one of the eastern mouths of the Lena, up which Melville arrived at a Russian village on the 26th of September. De Long's party ran their boat aground in shallow water, on the 17th of September, and rafted and waded ashore to one of the most inhospitable spots on the globe. Heavily laden they made their way down the dreary delta, toiling through the snow, delayed by the tributaries which were not frozen over hard enough to bear, hampered by sickness and disablement, and finally dying one by one of starvation.

On the 9th of October De Long sent two of the seamen, Nindemann and Noros, ahead in search of relief. They had no food but what they could find, and on the second day out their dinner consisted of a little willow tea and a burnt boot sole. Next morning they burnt another sole of a boot, and they spent the day struggling through a morass in drifting snow, crossing streams of all sizes, and halting for the night in so high a wind that they were unable to light a fire and took refuge in a hole in the snow from which they emerged with difficulty in the morning, owing to the wind having piled up the snow against the opening. At the end of the third day they reached a deserted hut in which were some deer bones, which they grilled and tried to eat, and in the morning a gale was blowing and the wild drifting snow was so thick that they had to remain where they were and continue their diet of charred bones and willow tea.

Next day, Thursday, the 13th of October, they began against a strong head wind. In the afternoon they sighted a hut on the west bank of the river. "They had seen one in the morning, but had in vain attempted to cross the ice to it. Now they tried to reach this, but were turned back by the brittle ice. They kept it in sight as they moved southward, and made another attempt to cross the ice, but it broke and they came back. Then they saw that there was no further progress possible to the southward on that side of the water, and they returned to the ice. It broke again, but they kept on. They went in up to their waists, but managed to pull themselves up on the stronger ice." The wind was blowing against them and the ice was like glass, so that they were driven back. They looked about for ice which had been roughened by the ripples beneath, and finding some they succeeded at length in reaching the other side, where were two wooden crosses beneath a bank, which rose fifty feet above them. They pulled themselves up the bank, but when they came to the hut which they had kept in sight they found it a ruin nearly full of snow. "While Noros was trying to make a place in it for shelter, Nindemann saw a black object farther along to the south and went to it. It was a small peaked hut without a door, but large enough to hold two men. There were some fresh wood shavings outside the hut and higher up on the hill two boxes. On going to them Nindemann found them old and decayed, and he began to break one of them open. When he had ripped off the top he discovered that there was another box enclosed; breaking into it he found a dead body, and hastily left it. Doubtless the two crosses below on the river bank were memorials of the two beings left high up above the reach of the floods."

In the small hut they found a sort of floor, the boards of which they pulled up for firewood, and in a hole beneath was a box in which were a couple of fish and two fish heads; and, as these were discovered, a lemming came out of another hole and was promptly caught. On the lemming, roasted on the ramrod, and the fishes, which were so decayed that they dropped apart as they were handled, they made their meal for that day. Next day the snowstorm was so heavy that they were driven back here after striving in vain to make headway. On the Saturday, still without food, they rested for the night in a fissure in the river bank, where as a last resource Nindemann cut a piece off his sealskin trousers and soaked it in water and burnt it to a crust. Their breakfast consisted of the remains of this toasted sealskin. During the day they saw a crow flying across the river and in among the hills, and, as the crow in these regions is rarely found away from the haunts of men, Nindemann decided to cross the river in the hope of meeting with either natives or game on the other side. When darkness came on no shelter was discoverable, and so, after a meal of more sealskin and hot water, they went to rest in a hole in the snow. Next day, during which they recrossed the river, their experiences were similar and the end the same.

On Tuesday the 18th, after a terrible day, they came upon a hut with a pile of wood close by, which proved to be sledges, and these they broke up, as there was no other firing. Next day as they were struggling on they reached a place where there were three huts, in one of which was a half-kayak and in it was some blue mouldy fish; and here, attacked by dysentery, they remained until the Saturday, unable to go any further. About noon there was a noise outside like a flock of geese sweeping by. Nindemann, looking through the crack of the door, saw something moving which he took to be a reindeer, and was going out with his rifle when the door opened and a man entered, who promptly fell on his knees when he caught sight of the gun. Nindemann threw the rifle into a corner and, trying to make friends with the man by signs, offered him some of the fish, which the man by an emphatic gesture pronounced not fit to eat. After some more of the sign language it was clear that the native had no food with him, and holding up three or four fingers to show that he would return in so many hours or days he drove off. About six o'clock in the evening, while they were preparing their fish dinner, the visitor returned with two other men, one of whom brought in a frozen fish which he skinned and sliced, and while the sailors were eating it—the first healthy meal they had had for weeks—the natives invited them to accompany them, and brought in deerskin coats and boots and finally got them into the sledges and drove off to the westward for about fifteen miles. Here there were two tents, and Nindemann was taken into one, Noros into the other, and both were well looked after, the natives doing their very best to get them well.

This was intelligible on both sides, for the language of kindness is universal, but as the sailors knew not the language of their hosts, and the natives knew not the language of their guests, the difficulty of being understood by each other was great, and the delivery of the urgent message in signs was almost impossible. Nindemann did his best; he appealed to the man who seemed to be the head of the party, and drawing in the snow a map of the places where he had been, with every combination of signs he could think of, he tried to explain what he wanted. That he succeeded to a certain extent was clear, though he did not think so at first, for the natives loaded up their sledges, twenty-seven in number, with reindeer meat and skins and fish, and struck their tents, and, with over a hundred head of deer harnessed up, started for the south. At noon, when the deer were resting, the man for whom the map had been drawn in the snow took Nindemann to where he could show him a prominent landmark, and asked by signs if that was where he had left his friends. And on learning by signs that it was further to the north, he shook his head as if sorry, and resumed his journey to the south. During the next day they reached Ku Mark Surka, where there were a number of natives who were much interested in the new-comers, and again the sailors used every effort to deliver their message.

Immediately after breakfast on the morning of the 25th, Nindemann began talking to these people in signs and pantomime. Soon one of them showed that he had an idea of where the sailors came from, for he spoke to one of the boys, who ran off and returned with a model of a Yakutsk boat. Then they gathered round and evidently asked if the ship was anything like it. And in answer, Nindemann took up some sticks and placed three of them in the boat to show that his ship had three masts, and then he fastened smaller sticks across to show that she had yards, which seemed to surprise them greatly. Then he made a funnel out of wood and put it in position, and pointed to the fire and smoke to show that she was a steamer, and then he cut out a propeller with his knife and put it where the rudder was to show that she was a screw. Continuing his work he soon chipped out so many small boats to show how many she had; and then, signing to one of the men to get him two pieces of ice, he showed them how the ship had been crushed. Pointing to the northward he tried to tell them that the ship had been crushed up there; and then he put away the ship and kept only three of the little boats to tell that part of the story, and in the boats he put so many sticks to represent the number of men in each. When he had done this one of the men pointed to a dog that was looking on and asked if the ship had any, whereupon the sailor counted on his fingers to show there were about forty, and by pantomime explained that they had been shot. This being evidently understood, Nindemann drew a chart of the coast-line, and imitating a gale of wind showed that the boat he came from went to the land at a certain point and that he knew nothing of the others. Then he went on to show how they had all left the boat, waded ashore and walked along the river-bank, and he marked the huts where they had stopped, and then he indicated where one of the men had died and been buried in the river. This was understood, for all the audience shook their heads as if to say how sorry they were. But when he tried to tell them that he had left the captain two days afterwards and had been so many days on the way to ask for help, they showed that they either did not or would not understand; and really it was not easy to make such a matter clear.

Next day Nindemann made another attempt to get them to understand the one essential, urgent fact that help was needed, or the men would die; but no, he could not do it. On the Thursday, despairing of the hopelessness of his task and the helplessness of his companions, he broke into tears and groans, and a woman in the hut took pity on him and spoke earnestly to one of the men, who came and said something about a commandant. Then the sailor, who had picked up a few words, asked him to take him to Bulun, to which the man replied by again saying commandant and holding up five or six fingers. Late in the evening there arrived a tall Russian, whom Nindemann supposed to be the commandant and addressed in English, but he was a Russian exile who could not understand him, though he seemed to know something about the matter, for in what he said he clearly mentioned Jeannette and Americansk. Nindemann tried him in German, but at this he shook his head. Then Nindemann showed him the chart given him by De Long, which the Russian evidently did not understand, though he said something that sounded like St. Petersburg and telegrams. While this apparently hopeless conversation was going on Noros was busy steadily writing out a note that the two sailors had drawn up, and the tall Russian—who we shall see was really a most intelligent man—giving over his talk with Nindemann in despair, coolly picked this up and put it in his pocket, and notwithstanding the protest of the Americans, walked off with it. In the morning he came in and gave them to understand that he was going to Bulun, and that they were to follow, and soon afterwards the natives fitted them out with clothing and boots and food and sent them off on a sledge. At Bulun they were taken to the commandant, who, after a little sign language from Nindemann, showed that he understood, and said something about a telegram. The sailors jumped at the idea, and one of them dictated to the other a despatch to the American Minister at St. Petersburg. This the Russian took, explaining that the captain should have it next day. Who the captain was the sailors could not make out; but three days afterwards, that is on the 3rd of November, while Nindemann lay on the bed and Noros was sitting on the table, a man came in dressed in fur.

"My God, Mr. Melville!" said Noros, recognising him as soon as he spoke. "Are you alive? We thought that the whale-boats were all dead!"

The exile had handed the note to Melville, whom he knew as the captain, and his difficulty in understanding the sailors had been in their speaking of one boat while he had only seen the other. The whale-boat crew had reached a village opposite to where he lived, and he had agreed to take them to Bulun, and he was on his way there to arrange for their transport when he heard of the sailors. Like a sensible man he ordered the men to be sent to Bulun, and had hurried there, made his arrangements with the commandant and returned to Melville, who, seeing the urgency of the case as soon as he read the letter, had started at once, leaving his party to follow.

Melville, as soon as possible, went off along the track of the two sailors, who were too weak to go with him, and eventually found the chronometer and the log-books and other records; but the winter was too far advanced for him to do more, and he had to return, after a journey of over six hundred miles, to try again in the spring. Then, accompanied by Nindemann, he went north, and came upon the bodies of the commander and those who had perished with him, and three or four feet behind De Long, as if he had tossed it over his shoulder, lay the journal in which the last page was but a chronicle of death after death.

This chapter must conclude with another tragedy. In 1885 Dr. Bunge and Baron Toll made some important investigations in the neighbourhood of the mouth of the Yana; and next year Bunge among the fossils of Liakhoff Island found not only mammoth and rhinoceros, but horse, musk-ox and deer, and two new species of ox. To these Toll, after discovering that there were flourishing trees on Kotelnoi in the time of the mammoth—nearly two hundred miles north of their present limit—added frozen carcases of musk-ox and rhinoceros, and bones of antelope and tiger.

In 1902 Toll, pushing his geological researches further north, reached Bennett Island, where he collected bones of the mammoth and other recent mammals, while the main mass of the plateau he identified as of Cambrian age. These discoveries he included in the record announcing his intention of leaving for Kotelnoi, which was found in 1904 by the expedition sent to his relief, for he was never seen alive again.

CHAPTER VII
BERING STRAIT

Native stories of the distant continent—The Russians in Kamchatka—Bering's expedition—The difficulties of his task—Builds a vessel and reaches Kamchatka—Builds another vessel and discovers the strait named after him by Captain Cook—His second expedition—Spangberg's voyage to Japan—Bering reaches the American coast—His shipwreck and death—The influence of the sea-otter and the fur-seal on geographical discovery—The Arctic voyage of Captain Cook—Clerke's voyage—Beechey's voyage—Point Barrow reached by the barge of the Blossom—Kellett's voyage in the Herald—Boat expedition to Hudson Bay—Kellett reaches 72° 51´—Landing on Herald Island—Kellett sights Wrangell Island—Berry in the Rodgers explores Wrangell Island—He reaches 73° 44´—Frederick Whymper and W. H. Dall ascend the Yukon.

Rumours of land over against the far corner of Siberia had reached the Russians for years, and many were the legends of those who had seen these lands from the cliffs, or had been on the ice to look at them more closely, or had gone away to them and never come back. There was, for instance, the old legend of Kraechoj, who believed he had found safe shelter at Irkaipii from the Chukche vengeance, but the Chukche made his way into the stronghold and killed Kraechoj's son, whereupon Kraechoj escaped by letting himself down with thongs to the boat and fled to the land whose mountains can be seen in clear sunshine from Cape Yakan; and there he was among his people who had left Asia before him.

And among the official documents was the statement made by the Chukches when they went to Anadyrskoi Ostrog to acknowledge the dominion of the Russians, that "The Noss is full of rocky mountains, and the low grounds consist of land covered with turf. Opposite to it lies an island, within sight of it, of no great extent, and void of wood. It is inhabited by people who have the same aspect as the Chukche, but are quite a different nation, and speak their own language, though they are not numerous. It is half a day's voyage with boats from the Noss to the island. There are no sables on the island, and no other animals but foxes, wolves, and reindeer. Beyond the island is a large continent that can be scarcely discerned from it, and that only on clear days; in calm weather one may row over the sea from the island to the continent, which is inhabited by a people who in every particular resemble the Chukches. There are large forests of fir, pine, larch, and cedar trees; great rivers flow through the country and fall into the sea. The inhabitants have dwellings and fortified places of abode environed with ramparts of earth; they live upon wild reindeer and fish; their clothes are made of sable, fox, and reindeer skins, for sables and foxes are there in great abundance. The number of men in that country may be twice or three times as many as that of the Chukches who are often at war with them." That there was land in sight somewhere seemed clear, but the reports differed in placing it all the way round from the north to the east. Many were the vain attempts to reach it from the northward-flowing rivers, and it was left to be found from the Pacific side.

BERING STRAIT

When Atlassof, in 1697, took the first steps in the conquest of Kamchatka the Russians were already known to the inhabitants. Long before him Fedotof and a few comrades had made their way into the country and intermarried with native women. They had been held in great honour and almost deified as being evidently of a superior race. For some time it was supposed that no human hand could hurt them, but this belief was rudely shattered when two of the demigods quarrelled and fought, and one wounding the other, the blood flowed. That flow of blood was fatal, for the natives, judging that they were but ordinary flesh, took an early opportunity of wiping them out, the name of their leader being still traceable in that of the Fedotcha River on the banks of which they had lived.

The Kamchadales had other tales to tell of visitors from the east and south, and Atlassof himself discovered on the River Itcha a Japanese who had been wrecked on the coast two years before, from whom he learnt of islands innumerable. But there were no ships on the Pacific coast of Siberia, and nothing in the way of discovery could be done until 1714, when there arrived at Ochotsk a detachment of sailors and shipwrights despatched thither overland. According to one of the sailors, Henry Bush, a Dutchman, the carpenters built a good durable vessel some fifty feet long which was ready for sea in 1716 when the first voyage was undertaken. The coast of Kamchatka was made near the River Itcha, and sailing south they reached the Kompakova, where they wintered and found the whale that had in its body the harpoon of European workmanship marked with Roman letters, mentioned by Scoresby. Bush returned to Ochotsk in July, to be sent in the following year to discover the Shantar Islands, and next year, 1718, the Kuriles; thus venturing into the Pacific beyond Cape Lopatka.

The last of these expeditions was due to the direct order of Peter the Great, who, knowing nothing of Deschnef, and finding the sea open to the north, resolved on a voyage in that direction, his holograph instructions to Admiral Apraxin being: "One or two boats with decks to be built at Kamchatka, or at any other convenient place, with which inquiry should be made relative to the northerly coasts, to see whether they are not contiguous with America, since their termination is not yet known." Peter died, and the Empress Catherine, carrying out these instructions in their fullest meaning, began her reign with an order for the expedition.

Veit Bering, Dane by birth and sailor by trade, had voyaged to the Indies, east and west, and, like many other men of enterprise, had entered the Russian service at Peter's invitation. He had served with distinction in the Cronstadt fleet in the war against the Swedes, and, being in good repute for his knowledge of ships and their handling, was appointed to the command of the most remarkable Arctic enterprise on record. Just as Nicholas ruled a line and ordered a railway to be built there, so did Catherine in the same imperial way order an exploring expedition, and it was done. But it meant building the ship from the trees of the forest on the coast of the Pacific and carrying the materials and stores—everything but the timber—right across the Russian empire in the days when for thousands of miles there were not even roads.

THE FACE OF THE FUR SEAL

Bering's lieutenants were Martin Spangberg and Alexei Tschirikof. With them and the rest of the expedition he left St. Petersburg on the 5th of February, 1725. During that year they got as far as the Ilim, where they wintered. In the spring of 1726 they sailed down the Lena to Yakutsk, where they parted company for a time owing to the difficulties of the route to Ochotsk, the way not being passable in summer with wagons, or in winter with sledges, on account of the marshes and rocky ground. So Spangberg set out, working along the rivers Aldan, Maia, and Judoma, with part of the provisions and heavy naval stores, while Bering followed overland through uninhabited country with more stores on horses, and Tschirikof remained to collect still more and follow in the track of his commander.

Bering reached Ochotsk first. Spangberg was frozen up in the Judoma, and thence he walked to Ochotsk with the most necessary materials; but he suffered so much from hunger on the way that he had to support life by eating leather bags, straps, and shoes, and did not reach Bering till the 1st of January, 1727, nearly two years after leaving St. Petersburg. In the beginning of February he returned to the Judoma and brought away about half of his lading, the other half being left for a third journey, which he made from and to Ochotsk on horses. Meanwhile Tschirikof was toiling along from Yakutsk, and did not arrive to complete the party until the 30th of July.

On arrival Bering had to build a vessel to take his most necessary naval stores and his shipbuilders across the sea of Ochotsk to Bolscheretzkoi, which, in her, he reached on the 2nd of September. From here he followed the shipwrights, who went on ahead to fell the trees, taking with them the provisions and stores, over the backbone of the isthmus and down the Kamchatka River to the mouth, a distance of some two hundred miles, the journey being very slow on account of the travelling being by dog-sledge. In short, it was not until the 4th of April, 1728, that is, more than three years after leaving St. Petersburg, that it was possible to put on the stocks the vessel in which the voyage to the north was to be made. But she took only three months to build, being launched on the 10th of July, when she was named the Gabriel.

Laden with stores for forty men during a year's voyage, she put to sea ten days afterwards, Bering keeping close to the coast so that he could map it as he went. On the 10th of August he was off the island of St. Lawrence, which he so named, as it was the day of that saint. In a day or two he had passed the East Cape without seeing the American coast, and had entered the Arctic Circle. And on the 15th he was well through the strait, out in the Arctic Ocean, in 67° 18´ off Serdze Kamen, a promontory behind which the coast trended to the west, as the Chukches had told him it did; and he assumed, and rightly so, though he had not gone far enough to prove it, that there was no land connection between Asia and America. Whereupon, as he had in his opinion accomplished his mission, seeing no need for wintering in those parts, he put the Gabriel about and was back in the Kamchatka River on the 20th of September, after a voyage of seven weeks in a vessel that took three months to build on a spot that took over three years to reach—the plan of campaign being much the same as that in which a mountain stronghold is advanced on across a desert, besieged for a few days, and captured by assault.

THE ALEUTIAN ISLANDS

After wintering, Bering went off next year on a voyage due east in search of reported land, but, after some hundred and thirty miles out, he was blown back, and, rounding the south end of Kamchatka, put in at the River Bolschaia; thence he crossed to Ochotsk, whence he started for St. Petersburg, where he arrived after an absence of five years. Catherine was dead and another empress reigned in her stead, who was pleased and satisfied if no one else was, and the 21st of February, 1733, saw him starting again in the same laborious fashion to arrange other voyages as part of a great scheme for the exploration of Northern and North-eastern Asia. Some of these expeditions on the north coast have already been mentioned; Bering's particular task was to send Spangberg in search of Japan, while he and Tschirikof, in separate ships, went eastward to America. More stores and provisions went overland across Siberia than before; Spangberg got again frozen up on the Judoma and had to continue on foot to Ochotsk, where he found plenty of food owing to Bering having sent on ahead, in case of any such trouble, a hundred horses, each of them laden with meal. In June, 1738, Spangberg, in two newly-built vessels and the Gabriel, was off to Japan, to reach the Kuriles and return to winter in Kamchatka; but next year he arrived there all well and found to his astonishment that the Japanese knew as much about maps as he did. He was still more astonished on his return to be told by those high in office at St. Petersburg that he could not possibly have been there as they had not got it on their maps where he said it was, and, consequently, he was to go where he had been as soon as he could to make sure. He started on this voyage of verification, but circumstances were against him and he did not reach there; and his Japanese trip remained discredited until the Russian geographers knew better. His voyage thither had, however, used such a stock of provisions that it was two years before the deficiency could be made up, and it was actually the 4th of September, 1740, seven and a half years after leaving St. Petersburg, when Bering, in the specially-built St. Peter, and Tschirikof, in her sister the St. Paul, got off outward bound to America.

In about three weeks they were at Awatcha Bay on the east of Kamchatka, anchored in the fine harbour named Petropaulovsk after the two ships, and here they had to stay for the winter, so that they did not leave Russian territory until the 4th of the following June. A few days out the ships were separated in a fog and storm, and the St. Paul reached the American coast first, at Kruzof Island on the western shore of Sitka Sound. The St. Peter three days afterwards, on the 18th of July, drifted to the coast more to the northward, at Cape St. Elias near the mighty mountain of that name. In this neighbourhood amid much fog Bering stayed six weeks until he was blown out to sea, when, his men beginning to die from scurvy, he resolved to return to Kamchatka. It was a voyage of misfortune in a continual downfall, the men in want, misery, and sickness, continuously at work in the cold and wet, becoming fewer and fewer, so that there were not enough to work the ship properly. It ended on one of the Commander Islands by the vessel being lifted by the sea clear over a reef into calm water. Bering died—the island is named after him—and the survivors of the crew, building a boat from the materials of the St. Peter, arrived at Petropaulovsk on the 27th of August, bringing with them a quantity of sea-otter skins, which did more for discovery in those seas than any imperial expedition.

DRIVING THE FUR SEAL

As the sable had brought about the conquest of Siberia, so did the sea-otter lead to the seizure of the islands of the Bering Sea and the coasts of Alaska. Three years after the return of the survivors of the St. Peter, Nevodtsikof wintered on one of the Aleutian Islands, and in a few years the fur-hunters were at their exterminating work over the whole chain. In time the fur-seal attracted as much attention, and, with Pribylov's discovery, in 1786, of its rookeries on the islands named after him, the trade became of such increasing importance as to endanger in our time the peace of the world. Every one has heard of the wonderful haunts and habits of that strange eared seal which seems to have come from the south through the tropics to breed in the coldest limit of its range, now almost entirely on the Pribylovs and the Commanders; how it is pursued in skin boats and every sort of craft, and scared in long lines to slaughter by clapping of boards and bones and waving of flags and opening and shutting of gingham umbrellas, until it promises to become as extinct as Steller's sea-cow or as rare as the sea-otter.

Following Bering on the way to the north came Captain James Cook, in H.M.S. Resolution, who gave Bering's name to the strait. Cook sighted Mount St. Elias in May, 1778, and, cruising slowly along the coast with many discoveries and much accurate surveying, was off, and named, Cape Prince of Wales, the western extremity of America, on the 9th of August. He then crossed the strait and plied back until on the 18th he sighted and named Icy Cape in 70° 29´. Close to the edge of the ice, which was as compact as a wall, and seemed to be ten or twelve feet high at the least, he sought persistently for a passage through, but none was to be found; and after reaching 70° 6´ in 196° 42´ (163° 18´ W.) on the 19th, he turned westward to the Asiatic coast, along which he went until he sighted and named Cape North, as already stated. Then, blocked by ice, east, north, and west, he returned, passing Cape Serdze Kamen (Bering's farthest) and naming East Cape, confirming Bering's observation that it was the most easterly point of Asia.

On Cook's death at Hawaii Captain Charles Clerke, of the accompanying vessel H.M.S. Discovery, took command of the expedition and carried out Cook's intention of making another effort during the following year. The ice conditions were, however, worse. The two ships found the ice block further south, and as impenetrable as before, and Clerke's highest was 70° 33´ on the American side, on the 19th of July. As it was Cook's last voyage, so it was Clerke's. He was in a bad way with consumption, and continued his work in the north, though, under the special circumstances and being in command, he could at any time have given up the obviously hopeless attempt and left for a more genial climate, in which he would at least have had a chance of longer life; but, remaining at his duty, he died at sea on the 22nd of August, and was buried at Petropaulovsk.

FUR SEALS AT SEA

Captain Beechey, in H.M.S. Blossom, passed through the strait in 1826 when sent north from the Pacific with a view of meeting with his old commander, Franklin, then on his second land journey. Beechey took the ship to Icy Cape, whence on the 17th of August he despatched the barge under the master, Thomas Elson, to survey the coast to the north-eastward as far as he could go in three weeks, there and back. Elson reached his farthest on the 25th at a spit of land jutting out several miles from the more regular coast-line, the width of the neck not exceeding a mile and a half, broadest at its extremity, with several frozen lakes on it, and a village, whose natives proved so troublesome that it was thought unsafe to land. This was Point Barrow, in 71° 23´ 31˝, longitude 156° 21´ 30˝, the northernmost land on the western half of the American continent. To the eastward curved a wide bay—named Elson Bay by Beechey—the shore-line of which joined on to the ice pack that encircled the horizon. Here he was within a hundred and sixty miles of where Franklin had turned back a week before. Though Beechey did not meet Franklin he did most useful work in these parts, for by him the whole coast was surveyed between Point Barrow and Point Rodney, to the south of Prince of Wales Cape.

Franklin was also the cause of the appearance of the next British expedition in the strait. This was in 1848, Captain Henry Kellett, in H.M.S. Herald, with Commander Thomas Moore in H.M.S. Plover, forming the western detachment of the first series of search expeditions. There were three detachments, one to follow the Erebus and Terror from the eastward, another under John Richardson to descend the Mackenzie and search the northern coast, the other coming in from the west to meet the ships should they have made the passage. On this duty the Herald and Plover were hereabouts for three seasons, the Plover wintering, the Herald going south when the navigation closed.

In October, 1826, Beechey had buried a barrel of flour for Franklin on the sandy point of Chamisso Island, ample directions for finding it being cut and painted on the rock, and to call the attention of the party to the spot the name of the Blossom was painted on the cliffs of Puffin Island. When the Herald was at Chamisso Island in 1849 Captain Kellett searched for this flour and found it. A considerable space was cleared round the cask, its chimes were freed, and, only adhering to the sand by the two lower bilge staves, it required the united strength of two boats' crews, with a parbuckle and a large spar as a lever, to free it altogether. The sand was frozen so hard that it emitted sparks with every blow of the pickaxe. The cask itself was perfectly sound and the hoops good, and out of the 336 lb. of flour which it contained, 175 lb. were as sweet and well tasted as any he had with him; so good indeed was it that Captain Kellett gave a dinner party, at which all the pies and puddings were made of this flour.

THE PARKA OF THE ALASKAN INNUITS
(THE SHORTER COAT IS THAT WORN BY THE MEN)

After the dinner party, on the 18th of July, the two vessels started for the north, being joined as soon as they stood from the anchorage by Robert Shedden in his yacht the Nancy Dawson, who at his own initiative had come up from Hong Kong to join in the search. From Wainwright Inlet Kellett sent off the boats under Lieutenant Pullen, two of which made the journey along the northern coast and up the Mackenzie, their crews thence making their way home eastwards to York Factory.

When Kellett was about to commence his observations at the inlet he drew a semicircle on the sand from water's edge to water's edge, and placed the boats' noses between its points. The natives seemed to understand the meaning of this line. Not one of them attempted to overstep it, and they squatted down and remained perfectly quiet and silent. When a stranger arrived they shouted to him, and he no sooner comprehended the directions than he crept rather than walked to the boundary, and squatted among the rest. Afterwards they danced and sang and played football with the seamen—who stood no chance with them at that game—and when they had gone off, after all this good behaviour, it was discovered that they had been picking the pockets of some of the party, one losing a handkerchief, another a glove, and Commander Moore a box of percussion caps.