The Book of the Ocean

by Ernest Ingersoll

PART II—FROM COLUMBUS TO COOK

Why to Spain? It is an “oft-told tale,” and the merest reminder is all that is needed here. Columbus was a young seafaring man, born at Genoa about 1434, and ambitious to become a master of his profession, and especially to acquire great wealth. He traveled to Venice, Barcelona, and other cities where learning was to be gained, and became thoroughly acquainted with all the astronomical and geographical science of the time, and especially proficient in the art of cartography. Attracted by the naval activity in Portugal under that indefatigable Prince Henry, Columbus went to Lisbon about 1454, and endeavored to find a leading place in the sea-work that country was doing. But Portugal’s eyes were so blinded by the glamour of Africa and the East Indies that she had no time to follow the gaze of this young and ardent Genoese captain whose eyes were turned steadily toward the west, where, more and more insistently, he urged that a sea-track, straight as a line of latitude marked on a globe, lay open to the Indies and the coasts of Cathay. To prove this true would be not only a glorious exploit for any man, but an achievement of untold advantage to the nation under whose flag he sailed.

PORTRAIT-STATUE OF COLUMBUS IN MADRID.

Just how this conviction arose in the mind of Columbus we do not know. It was probably first a purely scientific conclusion from the facts of astronomy and geography that he had learned, encouraged by romantic traditions of western “Isles of the Blest.” A few scientific men agreed with him, but the great influence of the Church of Rome condemned such notions as opposed to the Bible and revealed religion; and the mass of the people, ignorant and superstitious, looked upon them as foolish, and laughed at Columbus as a dreamer or worse. Between his danger of arrest and death as a heretic on the one hand, and imprisonment as a lunatic on the other, the man of science in those days had a hard time. Columbus therefore sought far and wide for evidence to support his theories and render them acceptable. How much he learned—what, in the way of facts, he actually knew—it is hard to say. Having fallen in love with a Portuguese lady of good family, he married and apparently settled in Portugal as his home, but continued his voyaging. He knew the Mediterranean from end to end. He made several voyages to the Guinea coast, and dwelt for a time at El Mina, then newly founded, satisfying himself of the foolishness of the common assertion that men could not live “under the equinoctial”—that is, near the equator. He went north to and beyond Iceland, and acquainted himself with those waters, and thus convinced himself that the ocean was everywhere navigable, and subject to uniform laws of tides, weather, etc. His mind was cleared more and more of the mists of fable and superstition, and all he learned brought into clearer view the truth of science as a guide. He devoted more and more attention to improving the means of finding the true position of a vessel at sea, and of keeping a true course by the compass, which he continually studied; and it was he who first discovered that some leagues west of the Azores lay the meridian of no variation—a meridian that has now moved eastward until it lies near London. Everywhere he interrogated explorers, discussed navigation with experienced captains, and sought the aid of new maps, improved instruments, and advancing knowledge; and yet mixed with all seem to have been a childlike vanity, credulity, and superstition, hard to reconcile with his courage and acumen.

How much actual evidence he had of the existence of lands below the Atlantic horizon unknown to his countrymen can never probably be satisfactorily answered. The latest critical biographer of Columbus, the great Spanish liberal statesman Emilio Castelar, considers that he was led to his discoveries by little, if anything, outside of pure reasoning upon the rotundity of the earth and other scientific data, and dismisses as fables or things unknown to Columbus all the Scandinavian discoveries of Greenland and the rest, and other stories of men who, it is said, had already seen the transatlantic world he sought. We are told that he learned of woods and canes like none that grew in Africa, of strange carvings, and even of the dead bodies of men, resembling those of the far East, being cast upon the shores of Africa and the islands near it, especially the Azores. It seems impossible that when he was in Iceland and the other northern regions, a man of his inquiring mind should not have learned something of Greenland and the continental shores beyond, especially when one remembers that for centuries previous Catholic missionaries had been reporting progress to Rome from that distant but real field of labor. It is quite likely that some knowledge of these facts, which must have been known to the professors of the universities of Pavia and Barcelona, where Columbus studied, and to other intelligent men of Italy and Spain with whom he came in contact, had caused Columbus to go to the north, for we know of no other errand. Perhaps he had heard of the Zeni.

Especially to be noted is the allegation that Columbus possessed information as to the experience of a Frenchman named Jean Cousin,—a Dieppe sea-captain, who, it is asserted, discovered South America and the Amazon River in 1488. This claim has been lately reviewed (“Fortnightly Review,” January, 1894) by Captain Gambier of the British navy, and he decides that it is good; and that it was because Cousin’s first mate was one of the Pinçons that that firm was willing to assist Columbus, as a good investment.

Whatever he knew or did not know, and whatever may have been the difficulties in his way, Columbus spent many weary years in fruitless efforts to interest some government in his schemes. How finally he won Spain to his support, secured the aid of the Pinçons, merchant princes of Palos, and sailed from that port on August 3, 1492,—and it was Friday!—are details that need not be repeated. Equally well remembered are the story of his daring onward voyage, and of the glorious outcome when, on October 12, land was seen,—a new world found.

Expedition after expedition followed one another from Spain to the newly found possessions, some conducted by the earlier companions of Columbus, and all filled with adventurers who cared for nothing but plunder. One of these, led by an officer named Ojeda, reached the coast of Guiana in 1499, and coasted along the north shore of South America as far, probably, as Maracaibo. This was the first of the Spanish expeditions actually to set foot upon the mainland; and it would not have been mentioned out of its place (since Cabot, as we shall presently see, had landed on the continent nearly two years before) but for the fact that one of its members was that Amerigo Vespucci whose fortune it was to have his name attached to the continent.

Amerigo Vespucci (or Vespusze, as Columbus spells it) was a Florentine engaged in the shipping business who was attracted to Spain by the maritime activity there, and became interested in equipping the second flotilla of Columbus and in other similar enterprises for the government. The wealth and influence thus gained and his general abilities led him to join that expedition of Ojeda in 1499, and during the next four years he made three other voyages to Brazil, in which the bay of Rio Janeiro was entered (New Year’s day, 1501), and an exploration southward extended probably as far as South Georgia (Islands). Upon his return from this last voyage, in 1505, he publicly asserted that he had visited, in 1497, the coast of what is now the southern United States. It has lately been shown by Spanish records, however, that at that date he was busy in the government dockyards in Spain; therefore his assertion was false. It served, however, to deceive a forgetful public, and to procure for its author the coveted glory of being the first “discoverer” of the “New World,” as he first called it (though there is no evidence that he understood it to be a continent), and hence the one entitled to give it his name.

This bold claim achieved its purpose. The oldest known map of the whole world, dated A. D. 1500, said to have been drawn by the great artist Leonardo da Vinci, from data furnished by Juan de la Cosa, and hence known to historians as the “De la Cosa Mappimundi” (it is preserved in Madrid), bears the name “America” across the new countries for the first known time; but Juan de la Cosa was with Ojeda and Vespucci on the expedition of 1499, and doubtless Vespucci managed the naming. In 1507, only a year after the death of Columbus, there appeared in France the “Cosmographie Introductio” of Waldseemüller (also called Hylacomylus), which was regarded as the most complete and authentic geography of its time; and here the name of America was boldly written across “a fourth part of the world, since Amerigo found it.” The name (a Latin derivative) was novel, easy to pronounce, no one knew or cared as to the right of it, and so it stood.

THE “SANTA MARIA”—THE FLAGSHIP OF COLUMBUS’ FLEET.

A few lines more as to the Spanish and Portuguese navigators in these waters, and then we shall have done with them for the present. In 1499 one of the Pinçons sailed from Spain straight to the Amazon, as has been mentioned, avoiding the West Indies, as if he knew precisely whither he was bound, and reached there in January of 1500. A few months later a large Portuguese expedition under Pedro Cabral, starting for India around the cape, was blown so far to the west that it ran against Brazil. Everybody was hitting upon untrodden shores in those inspiring days, and Cabral promptly took possession for his king. As this shore was outside (east of) the hemisphere assigned by the Pope to the Spanish, the Portuguese kept it for 389 years, in spite of Pinçon’s priority. In 1508 Ojeda obtained the government of the northern coast of South America, and Nicuesa of the region north of the Gulf of Darien; and with the arrival of these adventurers in New Spain began that era of rapine and horror which will forever disgrace the Spanish name. The rapacious governors and their wild crews quarreled and fought with each other as well as with the downtrodden natives, and exploration was carried on by piracy. A learned man, Martin Enciso, went out to take command in 1510, but he was deposed by his soldiers the next year and sent back to Europe, where he made the first book printed in Spanish (1519) describing America. His place was taken by Vasco Nuñez Balboa, who entered upon a career of exploration and peaceful conquest, generally conciliating the Indians, who told him of another sea not far to the west, and on September 25, 1513, guided him to the summit of a hill near Panama, whence he, first of Europeans, gazed upon the Pacific. Who can imagine the emotions of such a sight!—for it told the Spaniards that this land was not the eastern margin of Asia, but a new continent. Balboa made his way through the forests as rapidly as he could, and on the 29th, wading into the surf, banner in hand, took possession of the waters in the name of the King of Castile.

Balboa at once began preparations to utilize his discovery, for the Indians had also excited him and his men by tales of a country to the south abounding in gold. He cut and shaped timbers for small ships, and had with enormous trouble and labor transported these across the isthmus, intending there to build a fleet and sail southward, when he was superseded in command by a new governor, Pedrarias. This man, a jealous and brutal adventurer, on a false pretext of disloyalty arrested and beheaded Balboa before he could get away—an act that “was one of the greatest calamities that could have happened to South America at that time; for ... a humane and judicious man would have been the conqueror of Peru, instead of the cruel and ignorant Pizarro.” The frightful destruction of the country of the Incas soon followed, while Cortés overran Mexico and De Soto invaded Florida.

It has doubtless by this time been in the mind of more than one reader to ask whether, while the men of the Mediterranean region were making these notable searchings for new shores, the men of northern Europe were standing idle. What were the mariners of France and the Netherlands, Scandinavia and Great Britain, doing? Well, all were doing something, and some of them produced results of novel seafaring that were well worth the getting, but these were principally in far northern waters, as we shall read in the next chapter. It was not until the opening of the sixteenth century that in England, at least, that era of far voyaging began which signalized the Elizabethan age on the sea as much as the poets and dramatists and statesmen-writers of her court distinguished it on land.

A PEACEFUL DAY ON THE SPANISH MAIN.

It was, however, earlier than that—in the reign of Henry VII—that England’s story of discovery begins, and the first names are those of two Italians known in English as John and Sebastian Cabot, father and son, who were then residents of Bristol. The Bristol folk were at that time the foremost mariners of England, who often went to Iceland and all the nearer isles; and they firmly believed in certain traditional islands and coasts far away to the west, which seem to have been composed of no better material than the airy structures of the sunset clouds and the romantic tales of Phenician sailors and other travelers in the dawn of history. As long ago as when Strabo wrote, a century before the birth of Christ, these things were of old belief, and he recounts the delights then told of the “Isles of the Blest,” west of the farthest verge of Africa. When the Canary Islands became known as facts, the myth moved farther west; and when acquaintance with the Azores proved them to be only natural earth with a fair share of its ills, as well as of its good, people insisted that still other islands must lie farther away, where the Elysian Fields basked in perpetual summer and men were eternally happy. The old idea charms us even yet when we sing “Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood stand dressed in living green.”

VOYAGING TO THE ISLES OF THE BLEST.

But no such higher rendering occurred to the men of the earlier time. They believed firmly in the actual existence of these ever-fortunate islands under the sunset horizon of the Atlantic, and (in the north) called them the Isles of St. Brandon, the “green isle of Brazil” (the root of which word seems to express the idea of redness, such as appears in low sunset clouds), the Isle of the Seven Cities or Antillia, and by other names. Ferdinand Columbus, a son of Christopher, says in his “History” that his father fully expected to meet, “before he came to India, a very convenient island or continent from which he might pursue with more advantage his main design.” This does not prove that Columbus put any faith in the reality of these old notions, nor does he seem to be responsible for the fact that the name Antilles was immediately attached to the archipelago he actually did meet with, and The Brazils to a part of the mainland next found. These names had been appearing on conjectural maps of the Atlantic side of the earth for many years before his time; and that they represented realities to many hard-headed merchants and sailors of his time is shown conclusively by the fact that between 1480 and 1487 at least two carefully planned naval expeditions had gone from Bristol, England, in search of them. How much vague memories of early Norse and Irish findings in the west may have given weight in Bristol to these old myths is hard to say; but at any rate it was there the search for this pot of gold at the end of the rainbow bore unexpected and momentous results, but all were surprised at the distance involved.

About 1496 John Cabot, then a resident of Bristol, proposed to the king an expedition in search of a new route to the Indies by sailing due west from Ireland. Henry VII was excited by the news of Columbus’ southerly findings, and was eager to secure something of the kind for England. Nevertheless, although the king granted privileges that might prove profitable in case of success, he seems to have furnished no money. Cabot, therefore, sailed away, privately equipped, in a small caravel named Matthew, carrying only eighteen persons.

Never was a voyage of discovery, the consequences of which were so far-reaching, entered upon with less pomp or flourish of trumpets. So little note of it was made at the time that the very name of John Cabot narrowly escaped being lost altogether, and the record of his work came very near being replaced by a confused account of the doings of his son Sebastian; for it was not until certain letters had been found—and that within a very few years—in the contemporary archives of Spain and other European countries, that we were able to give any sure account of the matter.

It is now plain that John Cabot, in the Matthew, leaving Bristol early in May, 1497, and having passed Ireland, shaped his course toward the north, then turned to the west and proceeded for many days until he came to land, where he disembarked on June 24, and planted an English flag.

There seems to be no doubt that this was the mainland of North America, and the general opinion has prevailed that his landfall was the extremity of Cape Breton. Cabot stayed some days, but how far he traced the coast, and whether he learned of Newfoundland or Prince Edward Island, are matters of conjecture. At any rate, he soon turned homeward, and arrived in Bristol probably on August 6.

We can imagine with what eagerness his story was listened to, as he told of the fair, temperate, well-wooded land, its people and animals and fruitfulness, that he had seen. But the thing that impressed the Bristol men most was the report of the enormous abundance of codfish there. This was something these canny men could see without any illusions, and possess themselves of regardless of papal bulls; and they at once abandoned their northern fishing-grounds and began to resort to the Banks of Newfoundland, whither they were quickly followed by large annual fleets of Norman, Breton, Spanish, and Portuguese fishermen. John Cabot intended to go again the next year and make his way onward to Japan, as he believed he could do, for, like the others, he thought what he had found was only a remote eastern part of Asia; and in 1498 he actually did sail westward from Bristol with five ships, victualed for a year. None of these ships ever returned, and no evidence exists that they ever reached their goal; and with them John Cabot, to whom England owed her early supremacy in North America, disappears from view.

Sebastian Cabot was a son of John Cabot, and a skilful map-maker. Whether he went with his father on the first voyage is disputed; there seems no direct evidence that he did so. That he did not go on the second voyage is plain, for he had a long subsequent career, of which accurate knowledge is a late acquisition; here it is only necessary to add that by his statements to Peter Martyr and others he allowed the erroneous impression to pass into history, if he did not directly authorize the lie, that it was he, and not his father, who discovered America and the fishing-grounds.

Now that the way across the Atlantic was learned, chivalrous sailors hurried to add what they could to the map. Corte-Real, a Portuguese of rank, struck northwest, and hit upon and named Labrador as early as 1500. The next voyage of prominence introduces the French as competitors, Francis I sending the Florentine Verrazano, a typical sea-rover of the period, who had already been to Brazil and the East Indies and was finally hanged as a pirate, to find out what he could about northern America. He steered west from the Madeira Islands in January, 1524, found land near Cape Fear (North Carolina), and claimed to have traced the coast as far north as Nova Scotia, besides entering a large bay (either New York or Narragansett). His whole story, however, rests on certain letters and maps the authenticity of which has been hotly disputed; and at any rate little, if anything, came of this voyage.

It was far different with the next one, however,—that one sent from France in 1534, under the command of Jacques Cartier, who sailed from St. Malo in two tiny vessels to Newfoundland, and learned of the mouth of the St. Lawrence River. Then, like all the other captains, none of whom could stay over winter in America, because their vessels were too small to store provisions, and because they were beset by fears, not only of visible savages, but of invisible hobgoblins, he returned to France. The next year found him back again, however, this time steering his vessels up the St. Lawrence to “Hochelaga” (Montreal), and later carrying home an account that led to so immediate a movement on the part of France that Canada was the scene of the earliest colonization of the New World, properly speaking, for the Spanish settlements in the south were thus far nothing but military stations. France, indeed, dreamed of obtaining the whole of North America for herself, and attempted soon after to colonize Florida and the Carolinas; but these attempts failed, and she was able to hold only the valley of the St. Lawrence and the shore of its gulf. These things happened later, however, and for many years the Atlantic coast of North America was left unclaimed by any one, while the English and Dutch were busy in the far north, the Spanish were rioting in the tropics, and the Portuguese turned their attention to the southern and eastern quarters of the globe. It is one of the most striking curiosities of the history of the development of civilization on the globe, following the stagnation of the middle ages and the desolation of the plague-ridden thirteenth century, that the most remote, unprofitable, unhealthy regions were so fiercely struggled for, while the best parts of the New World were left until the last.

Having found Brazil, both Spaniards and Portuguese proceeded to trace the continent southward, hoping to find a practicable way to Peru around it. Several experienced navigators worked southward, the best known of whom is Juan Diaz de Solis, who entered the La Plata River and was killed there by the Indians in 1516. Columbus had not been a moment too soon to be first. Nevertheless it was left to a stranger in those waters, the indomitable Magellan (Fernão de Magalhães), to reap the reward of success. The Pope and all the bishops still declared that the earth was flat; but so little was this now believed, even by themselves, that Magellan, who had just quitted the service of Portugal, dared to propose to “his most Catholic majesty” the King of Spain to sail west instead of east to the Moluccas, just as though the earth were globular and might be circumnavigated; and the king not only dared to listen, but approved of the proposition, which seemed entirely practicable if South America could be passed. That was the problem Magellan set himself to solve. Should he succeed, could the Moluccas be reached by sailing westward, then they would fall into that half of the earth given by the Pope to Spain, and Portugal’s present claim to them would be overthrown. Thus the experiment was well worth making in behalf of politics as well as knowledge, and Magellan was furnished with five ships, carrying two hundred and thirty-seven men. The Trinidad was the admiral’s ship; but the San Vittoria was destined for immortality.

He struck boldly for the Southwest, not crossing the trough of the Atlantic as Columbus had done, but passing down the length of it, his aim being to find some cleft or passage in the American continent through which he might sail into the Great South Sea. For seventy days he was becalmed under the line. He then lost sight of the North Star, but courageously held on toward the “pole antarktike.” He nearly foundered in a storm, “which did not abate till the three fires called St. Helen, St. Nicholas, and St. Clare appeared playing in the rigging of the ships. In a new land, to which he gave the name Patagoni, he found giants of “good corporature”.... His perseverance and resolution were at last rewarded by the discovery of the Strait named by him San Vittoria, in affectionate honor of his ship; but which, with a worthy sentiment, other sailors soon changed to the Straits of Magellan. On November 25, 1520, after a year and a quarter of struggling, he issued forth from its western portals, and entered the Great South Sea, shedding tears of joy, as Pigafetta, an eye-witness, relates, when he recognized its infinite expanse.... Admiring its illimitable but placid surface, and exulting in the meditation of its secret perils soon to be tried, he courteously imposed upon it the name it is forever to bear—the Pacific Ocean....

And now the great sailor, having burst through the barrier of the American continent, steered for the northwest, attempting to regain the equator. For three months and twenty days he sailed on the Pacific, and never saw inhabited land. He was compelled by famine to strip off the pieces of skin and leather wherewith his rigging was here and there bound, to soak them in the sea, and then soften them with warm water, so as to make a wretched food; to eat the sweepings of the ship and other loathsome matter; to drink water that had become putrid by keeping; and yet he resolutely held on his course, though his men were dying daily. As is quaintly observed, “their gums grew over their teeth, and so they could not eat.” [This was scurvy, the dread of all mariners in those times and long afterward.] He estimated that he sailed over this unfathomable sea not less than 12,000 miles.

In the whole history of human undertakings [declares Dr. John W. Draper, from whose striking sketch of this achievement in his “Intellectual Development of Europe” I am quoting]—in the whole history of human undertakings there is nothing that exceeds, if, indeed, there is anything that equals, this voyage of Magellan’s. That of Columbus dwindles away in comparison. It is a display of superhuman courage, superhuman perseverance—a display of resolution not to be diverted from its purpose by any motive or any suffering....

This unparalleled resolution met its reward at last. Magellan reached a group of islands north of the equator—the Ladrones. In a few days more he became aware that his labors had been successful. He met with adventurers from Sumatra. But, though he had thus grandly accomplished his object, it was not given to him to complete the circumnavigation of the globe. At an island called Zebu, or Mutan, he was killed, either, as has been variously related, in a mutiny of his men, or, as they declared, in a conflict with the savages, or insidiously by poison.... Hardly was he gone when his crew learned that they were actually in the vicinity of the Moluccas [having previously wandered too far north, and discovered the Philippines], and that the object of their voyage was accomplished....

And now they prepared to bring the news of their success back to Spain. Magellan’s lieutenant, Sebastian d’Elanco, directed his course for the Cape of Good Hope, again encountering the most fearful hardships. Out of his slender crew he lost 21 men. He doubled the Cape at last; and on September 7, 1522, in the port of St. Lucar, near Seville, under his orders, the good ship Vittoria came safely to an anchor. She had accomplished the greatest achievement in the history of the human race. She had circumnavigated the earth.

The immediate result of this voyage was to impress Spain’s sovereignty upon the East Indies; but a vaster and more far-reaching consequence was the influence it exerted, by its proof that the world was really a globe, to free men’s minds from blind belief in and guidance by a tradition, which had taught that the earth was a flat plain surrounded by water,—an error sanctioned by St. Augustine and other influential teachers. Magellan impressed a name upon the greatest of the oceans, and has his own name gloriously emblazoned upon both the map of the earth and the map of the sky in the southern hemisphere; but his greatest title to honor, after all, is that he struck dogma the hardest blow it ever received.

SEA-SURF AT SANTO DOMINGO.

The sixteenth century seems to have been, outside of the Arctic regions, an era of surveying rather than of exploration by sea, yet some notable work was done in the East, where all nations now entered as competitors in the trade, seizing upon every island or mainland shore that they could, and holding their possessions as long as possible. Even the English entered heartily into this rivalry, the great East India Company having been founded in 1599. With its trading we have nothing to do, but must note that it extended knowledge of Oceanica considerably, and added greatly to Europe’s information as to India, the Malayan peninsula and larger islands, China, and Japan. The Spanish and Portuguese found themselves so busy in defending that to which they already laid claim that they had little time to search for new lands; and this sort of enterprise fell mainly to the Dutch, who, now that the Netherlands were at last free from the long and cruel tyranny of Spain, were energetically making up for lost time. Their captain, Van Noort, went out by way of the Straits of Magellan to the Philippines, and got back to Rotterdam between 1598 and 1601. Another fleet made the same voyage fifteen years later; and in 1616 Cape Horn was rounded by Willem Cornelis Schouten, who gave the name of his home village, Hoorn, to that desolate terminus of South America.

For many years geographers had held belief in a vast “southern continent,”—Terra Australis,—and most of the islands found in the South Pacific were accidental results of some attempt to reach it. New Guinea had been sighted a century before, and perhaps Australia also, of which several navigators got glimpses here and there early in the sixteenth century, satisfying them that it also was a great island. It was not until this century was half gone, however, that the map of that quarter of the “South Sea” was filled out with any accuracy; and this was due to the skill and labor of an eminent Dutch voyager, Abel Janszen Tasman, who was despatched southward with two ships by the colonial government at Batavia, where the Dutch had already gained political ascendancy.

“This voyage,” we are told, “proved to be the most important to geography that had been undertaken since the first circumnavigation of the globe.” Tasman sailed from Batavia in the yacht Heemskirk, on the 14th of August, 1642, and from Mauritius on the 8th of October. On November 24 high land was sighted in 42° 30´ S., which was named Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania), and, after landing there, sail was again made, and New Zealand (at first called Staatenland) was discovered on the 13th of December. Tasman communicated with the natives and anchored in what he called Murderers’ Bay, because several men were massacred there by the natives. Thence he took an irregular course east and north, until he arrived at the Friendly Isles of Cook. In April, 1643, he was off the north coast of New Guinea, having meanwhile sailed around New Britain and New Ireland (now New Mecklenburg), and on June 15 he returned to Batavia.

The contribution to sea-knowledge of the remaining voyages in this century were mainly in the direction of a better understanding of winds, currents, ice movements, tides, and an improvement in the methods of building, rigging, and navigating vessels intended for long voyages. Map-making received a great impetus and was especially cultivated by the Dutch, among whom Mercator became famous by inventing the useful projection that bears his name and is still most commonly used. Nevertheless, the improvement, especially in instruments of navigation, was slow. The astrolabe generally gave place to the cross-staff; and this to a better device called the back-staff, of which an improved form, invented by John Davis, remained long in use. This was called the Davis quadrant; and with it “the observer stood with his back to the sun, and, looking through the sights, brought the shadow of a pin into coincidence with the horizon.” Many variations of this instrument were made, until, in the middle of the next century, it was superseded by the sextant. Thus before the close of the seventeenth century, astronomers and navigators had learned how to determine latitude fairly accurately, and the sailor had prepared for him a variety of tables of stars, almanacs, and other mathematical guides. The determination of longitude was yet difficult, however, owing largely to the imperfection of timepieces; and it was not until the last year of the century, signalized by the first recorded sea-voyage made purely for scientific purposes, that much advance was made. This voyage, lasting two years (1699-1700), was undertaken by the eminent English astronomer Edmund Halley for the express purpose of obtaining information necessary to the improvement of the compass and methods of ascertaining the position of a ship at sea, was productive of results of the greatest service, and placed the science of navigation upon a sure footing. It was followed early in the next century by the establishment in England of the Longitude Board, a scientific commission charged with the duty of determining longitudes and studying navigation. From this board came the “Nautical Almanac,” which first appeared in 1767, but similar almanacs are now published annually by the governments of almost all maritime powers, and the editorship is esteemed in the United States one of the most honored positions in the naval service. These books contain ephemerides, or tables of positions for each day of that year of all the heavenly bodies, “predictions of astronomical phenomena, and the angular distances of the moon from the sun, planets, and fixed stars,” all referred to some stated meridian.

With such an almanac, an improved compass, and one of Newton’s new sextants as a means of quick and accurate observation of sun and moon and stars, the navigator had little need to doubt as to where he was; and maps began to show a corresponding improvement in accuracy.

“BUCCANEERS AND MANY WILD SEA-ROVERS.”

The early part of this century, as we shall see later, was the era of the buccaneers and of many wild sea-rovers whose far-wandering barks, in search of adventure, picked up much information at the expense of human lives and hard-earned property. The foremost of these was Dampier, who seems to have gone almost everywhere a ship could go, and who found out many new things, which he had the power of telling well, as to Australasia; and the strait between New Guinea and New Britain, which he discovered, is named after him. Many a commander was now cruising in those waters, however, under English and Dutch flags mainly, finding new lands and pillaging old ones—such as Roggewein, Anson, Byron, Wallis, Carteret, Bougainville, and others; and such important islands as Easter, Tahiti, Charlotte, and Gloucester groups, Pitcairn, and others, were found during the first half of this century. But now the English were to redeem their good name by sending out a government expedition, or series of expeditions, whose object was scientific discovery and the humane study of the men and resources on the other side of the world, instead of forced trade or bloody rapine. These were the three expeditions commanded by Captain James Cook, one of the most capable officers in the British navy.

The first voyage was made in 1767 for the purpose of carrying a party of astronomers and naturalists to Tahiti to observe there a transit of Venus, after which a survey was made of the then almost unknown coasts of New Zealand and Eastern Australia. The second voyage was to explore the Antarctic regions, whither the French had preceded him, as we shall see in the next chapter; and we need only say here that Cook finally disposed of the tradition of a vast terra australis—at any rate a habitable one. It is to his third voyage, then, that he principally owes his fame.

This was undertaken in pursuance of the ruling idea of his day, that a sea-route might be discovered north of the American continent, which would vastly shorten the trip from Europe to China and the Spice Islands. Others were seeking it directly by way of Baffin’s Bay, and Cook was sent to attack the problem from the Pacific side. He was given command of his old ship Resolution and a new one, Discovery, outfitted in the best possible manner, and especially guarded, in the matter of provisions, against scurvy—that dread of the old-fashioned seamen, in respect to which Cook himself had introduced such new and valuable preventives as would alone have entitled his name to grateful remembrance. He was commanded to revisit, on his way out, the South Pacific Islands; and departed from England in June, 1776, steering by way of the Cape of Good Hope, and reaching the archipelagoes in the spring of 1777, where he cruised for nearly a year. In January, 1778, he sailed north from the Friendly Islands, and a few days later hit upon a large, inhabited, unknown group of islands, whose principal one was called Hawaii by the people, but which he named Sandwich Islands, in honor of an English earl who had taken great interest in his plans. Here he spent some delightful days, and then bore away to the west coast of America, which the English still claimed under Drake’s name of New Albion, and which he struck near Puget Sound. Thence he went slowly along the coast northward until he found and penetrated the deep bay since called Cook’s Inlet. His hope that this might prove a sort of northern Straits of Magellan was quickly disappointed, and he went on into and through Bering Sea and Strait until he was stopped by the ice on the north shore of Alaska, at a point still called Icy Cape. Then he turned back, surveying both shores of the strait, and again made his way to the Sandwich Islands, where, in an unfortunate quarrel with the natives, he was killed. The Hawaiians have always said that this was the act of a ruffian among them, and that the chiefs and the best of the people never wished nor intended any harm to their visitors; and this is probably true. His executive officer took the ships back to England in October, 1780.

The voyages of this able and intelligent commander bore fruit in many ways. One was the colonization of Australia, Tasmania, and New Zealand by the English, which began in 1788. Another was the voyage of Vancouver to the west coast of America in 1792, which intercepted the surveys of the Spaniards there, under Quadra and others, and enforced English possession of all the country between the Californian settlements of the Spaniards and the Russian posts in Alaska, though he curiously failed to find either Puget Sound or the Columbia River. A third direct result, and from some points of view the most important one, was the opening of a great number of the South Sea Islands to Christian missionaries.

By this time there had arisen in the New World which these voyagers had first stumbled upon, and then searched for, and afterward scrutinized so carefully, a new, composite nation, which somehow forgot that all their broad and fertile land had been given away centuries before by an old gentleman in Rome to his friends the Spaniards, and acted as though they thought it belonged to themselves; and by and by this thriving nation hoisted a starry flag of its own, and proclaimed itself the United States of America. Then, not to be behind European powers, whose navigators were enriching libraries with magnificent chronicles of scientific studies in sea-science, such as those of the French “Voyage of the Astrolabe,” the Russian narratives of Krusenstern and Kotzebue, and the English explorations of Beechey (who was accompanied by Charles Darwin), the United States sent to the Pacific a well-equipped expedition under Lieutenant (afterward Admiral) Charles Wilkes. This was gone from 1838 to 1845, surveyed the west coast of South America, wandered about Oceanica, and did its best to penetrate the icy limits of the Antarctic zone. The results were six magnificent folio volumes, containing not only the narrative of the cruise, but contributions to science by James D. Dana, Horatio Hale, John Cassin, and other men of the last generation great in American science.

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CHAPTER V
SECRETS WON FROM THE FROZEN NORTH

As soon as the sea-routes between Europe and the far East were learned, and the American coasts had been mapped, the region within the Arctic circle became the most attractive field for nautical discovery. All this earlier Arctic exploration, however, was not, as it has lately become, a system of scientific research, but was simply a series of attempts to open new roads for commerce to follow. It occurred to every navigator that as a sea-way had been gained past the southern end of America, so one around its northern border might be disclosed; and perhaps, also, a ship-route along the northern coast of Siberia. Either of these would be far shorter than to go to “Cathay” around either Cape Horn or Cape of Good Hope, and would enable the English and other northerners to avoid their enemies, the Spanish and Portuguese, who commanded the southern waters.

The first Arctic voyage of exploration, properly speaking, was that of Willoughby and Chancellor, who in 1553 penetrated the seas north of Scandinavia, where they became separated. Willoughby and his men tried to winter on the coast of Russian Lapland, but all died of scurvy.

Chancellor, however, pushed on into the White Sea, reached a monastery on the coast, and thence made his way to Moscow, where he was well received, and thus opened a trade route of incalculable advantage to both England and Russia. It led at once to the organization of the Muscovy Company, and began a commerce now regularly carried on in steam vessels to Archangel, which in 1897 was connected with Moscow by railroad.

By 1580 several other commanders had tried to improve on this performance, but none got past the Kara Sea, and the next important effort was headed toward that “Northwest Passage,” which for more than three centuries was the lodestone of Arctic students and voyagers. It was in charge of Martin Frobisher, later one of England’s most conspicuous admirals, who afterward made a larger expedition in which he learned many facts about the Labrador coast and Hudson Strait. Another English seaman, and a more scientific one, John Davis, made three remarkable voyages, between 1585 and 1589, and increased the map by a careful delineation of both coasts of the strait still called after him.

Shortly afterward Dutch merchants had sent three expeditions northward under command of William Barentz to search for a northeast passage, the third and most important of which sailed in 1596 and found it impossible to penetrate the ice east of Nova Zembla (which had been seen first by Burrough in 1556, who had been shown the way by Russian fishermen), but discovered Bear Island and Spitzbergen. The crew of Barentz’s vessel spent the winter of 1596-97 at Ice Haven, Nova Zembla—the first successfully to face a winter in the Arctic zone. When the next spring came they made their way to Lapland and homeward in boats, but Barentz died on the road. This voyage was highly important in opening to the Netherlands the whale and seal fisheries of that region which has ever since been known as Barentz’s Sea, but it discouraged the hopes of a “northeast passage.” In 1871 Barentz’s winter quarters at Ice Haven were found undisturbed, after a lapse of 274 years, and in 1875 part of the journal kept by this brave mariner was recovered. Almost every year about this time saw English, Dutch, and Danish ships going north, each adding some new fact to geography and the knowledge of polar waters and ice. One of them, in 1607, was commanded by Henry Hudson, who searched the North Atlantic, found Jan Mayen, and pointed the way to the Spitzbergen whale fisheries; yet he had hardly more than a sail-boat, and a crew of only eleven men.

The following year this intrepid man tried to go to China north of Asia, but failed as Barentz had done, and returned “void of hope of a northeast passage.” Nevertheless, he tried it again a year later in the service of Amsterdam merchants, but his men were obstreperous, and, yielding to his own inclination as well as to theirs, he turned west to find that “Northwest Passage” in which everybody then believed because they hoped, and because of the difficulty of getting so great a fact as the real North American continent proved to be accepted by the popular imagination, which was used to small things in geography. Very willingly, then, Hudson’s little ship, the Half Moon, was turned toward the southwest; and it found something better than it sought, for the Hudson River and the site of the future metropolis of the New World were added to the map.

Hudson’s success in this voyage led to his immediate engagement by a company of English merchants and speculators, who were willing to risk additional money in searching for a northwest passage if he would lead.

In 1610, therefore, Hudson took command of a new ship, the Discoverie, and sailing in her to Baffin’s Bay, found the great opening of Hudson Strait, and with high hope that his goal was now in view followed it westward into Hudson Bay. Here he coasted south to what we term James Bay, and, after a comfortable winter, resumed his examination of the west coast, whereupon the majority of his men mutinied, set Hudson and several sick men adrift in a rowboat, and turned back. Most of the mutineers died, but the vessel was finally taken back to London, where the murderers were promptly questioned and nearly as promptly hanged.

The story of another remarkable voyage closes the story of this early attempt at the problem which, two hundred and fifty years afterward, was to be solved only by proof of its uselessness. In 1616 another Discovery—a caravel of only fifty-five tons—went north from England in charge of William Baffin. “On the 30th of May he had reached Davis’ farthest point, Sanderson’s Hope, in 72° 41´ N., ... and reached, 1st July, an open sea, the ‘North Water’ of the whalers of to-day. Passing Capes York, Atholl and Parry, he yet pushed northward, and on 5th July attained his farthest point within sight of Cape Alexander.

His latitude, about 77° 45´ N., remained unequaled in that sea for two hundred and thirty-six years.” Arctic success depends on good luck.

FANTASTIC ICEBERGS IN HUDSON STRAIT.

The next century (1700 to 1800) was a period of active polar research in the Old World. The Russians completed their knowledge of their Arctic coasts, Popoff reaching East Cape in 1711, and bringing back an account not only of various islands, but also of a continental shore eastward. It was this report that caused Peter the Great to set on foot a costly scheme of research upon the northeastern coasts of Siberia, which was placed in the hands of Vitus Bering, a Dane, in his navy, but accomplished nothing of any value; and it was not until 1740 that Bering finally crossed over in a blundering sort of way and made a brief examination of the coast of Alaska, where his ship was finally wrecked, and he died of discouragement and chagrin. He saw neither the sea nor the strait that bears his name, was not the first to reach the American continent, and never learned whether or not it was connected with Siberia. Nevertheless his voyage had fruitful results, for it led to vast fisheries and fur-gatherings, and the writings of his naturalist, Steller, had and still have great scientific importance.

A WALRUS BREEDING-GROUND, BERING STRAIT.

By this time the whaling and allied marine industries, and the work of such excellent explorers as the Dutchman Martens, had made mariners thoroughly acquainted with the North Atlantic from Nova Zembla to Greenland, and a vast advance had been effected in the knowledge of navigation amid the ice, and in the building and equipment of ships and the proper methods of provisioning and clothing and treating crews in order to maintain health and comfort as well as mere safety. These well-fitted and daringly managed whalers had at the beginning of the nineteenth century begun to penetrate far into the waters west of Greenland, in spite of a very curious fact, which would make anybody but a British whaleman pause—namely, that there were no such waters. So their best maps and treatises said!

Two hundred years had now passed since Baffin’s return from his wonderful voyage of 1616, and during all that time not a white man’s keel had plowed the chilling solitudes he had left, except lately these venturesome whalers, who did not frequent libraries. Consequently Baffin’s work had first been forgotten and then disbelieved; so that at last first-class maps were published which omitted Baffin’s Bay altogether, and books were written, such as Barrows’ “Arctic Voyages” (London, 1818), that denied the authenticity of his narrative. As the nineteenth century opened, however, England began to turn her attention to the renewal of polar studies. The Hudson’s Bay Company’s men were reaching the coast of their Territories here and there; but otherwise the whole Arctic Ocean north of British America was unknown.

To relieve herself of the shame of this Great Britain soon sent into that field a rapid succession of explorers, many of whom soon became famous. The very first of these, John Ross, despatched in 1818, confirmed fully the geography laid down by Baffin as far as Cape York, in spite of the learned book-makers, and reported a great number and variety of interesting facts; whereupon a much larger expedition was at once arranged and placed in command of a naval officer named William Edward Parry, who went out in 1819 with orders to find the northwest passage, and who had in his staff such men as Sabine, Liddon, James Ross, Reid, Crozier, and similar material, all stimulated not only by naval and scientific pride, but by the offer by Parliament of a reward of $100,000 to him who should first discover the desired thoroughfare.

This first voyage was a grand success. Forcing his way into Lancaster Sound in midsummer, Parry found that Ross’s report that it was a landlocked bay was erroneous. As Greely tells it:

The mirage-mountains of the previous year had vanished, and as Parry crowded sail westward, he opened a series of magnificent waterways hitherto unknown. The way lay through an archipelago (Parry), with North Devon, Cornwallis, Bathurst and Melville islands to the north, and Cockburn, Prince of Wales, and Banks islands to the south. Lancaster Sound, broken at its western end by Prince Regent Inlet, gave way to Barrow Strait, which broadened into Melville Sound, while yet farther to the west the encroaching land formed Banks Strait wherethrough these channels open into polar ocean.

If you will look at the map you will see that this list comprehends pretty nearly everything south of Smith Sound. Many details of course were lacking, and these Parry was sent a second time to work out, but he added really little to geography by two seasons of hard work; and a third voyage, begun in May, 1824, was still more unfortunate. These voyages, however, enabled Parry, who was one of the greatest of all Arctic students and navigators, to state that the western sides of all northerly and southerly bodies of water are always more encumbered with ice than the eastern sides; and to make many most valuable improvements in ice navigation and equipment. His illustrated narratives remain among the most readable books of Arctic experience, and little has been added to their accounts of eastern Eskimo life and customs.

Meanwhile (1819) another navy officer, who was ardent in the scientific branches of his profession, as well as distinguished in seamanship and naval warfare, and who had acquired Arctic experience under Buchan in the ill-starred expedition of 1818, was sent overland to coöperate with others in defining the mainland coast of America. This was Lieutenant John Franklin—a name destined to become the most famous of all among the explorers of the frozen North. For several years he and his parties lived and traveled among the Eskimos, tracing the coast-line from a considerable distance east of the mouth of the Coppermine River westward almost to Point Barrow, Alaska, where they came within one hundred and forty-six miles of meeting Beechey’s coöperative examination by sea from Bering’s Strait; and it was out of these trips that we got the valuable treatises upon the natural history of British America, published by his assistants, Hearne and Richardson. This ended in 1826.

The next prominent expedition was that of Captain John Ross and his nephew James, afterward celebrated in Antarctic exploration; and it turned out an exceedingly productive one. Meeting fortunate conditions in Lancaster Sound he easily reached where the Fury had gone ashore, and refilled his ship with a portion of the stores Parry had thoughtfully landed and made safe there—a provision which later kept this expedition from destruction. Then he pressed on beyond where Parry had gone, and added largely to the details of his map, but curiously failed to recognize Bellot Strait as a thoroughfare, and so unaccountably missed the thing he was in search of. Ross discovered Boothia Felix; and during the three winters spent on its eastern shore, the younger Ross, by sledging, discovered Franklin Passage, Victoria Strait, and King William’s Land, and largely explored their coasts; but his most important work, “giving imperishable renown to his name,” as Greely declares, was the determination of the position of the north magnetic pole on the west coast of Boothia Felix.

“The experiences, duration, and results of this voyage,” writes General A. W. Greely, “are among the most extraordinary on record. The party passed five years in the Arctic regions without fatality, save three (two from non-Arctic causes), discovered a new land, the northern extremity of the continent of America, and made other extensive geographical discoveries. Its observations are probably the most valuable single set ever made within the Arctic circle.”

ESKIMOS IN SUMMER TENTS.

During the third winter (1833) a rescuing party under Captain C. Back had gone from England overland in search of Ross; and recruited by Hudson’s Bay Company men of experience had descended Fish (or Back’s) River to its mouth, thus noting a new point on the map; but it failed to reach Ross. By similar overland journeys from their trading-posts on Great Slave Lake and elsewhere, the Hudson’s Bay Company’s men, especially Simpson, Dease, and Rae, connected various points of the coast, so that before 1850 it was known with substantial accuracy from Melville Peninsula to Bering Strait. In much the same way Russian sledge-travelers had traced the northern Asiatic coast by descending to the mouths of rivers; but no ship had yet succeeded in passing Gape Chelyuskin, the northernmost point of Asia or any continental land.

Then came a period of the keenest rivalry and richest results in the history of polar conquest, but also one of the greatest catastrophes. The expeditions of Lieutenant John Franklin in 1818 and 1819 were spoken of a moment ago. His services then and subsequently had been recognized by the British king, who, among other honors, had made Franklin a knight, and sent him to be governor of Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), where he remained from 1836 to 1843, founded a prosperous colony, and was regarded as one of the wisest, kindest, and most upright men of his day. Upon his return to England Franklin was made commander of the most important expedition that had ever yet been fitted out to search for the Northwest Passage, and his reputation brought the best men as volunteers to his standard. Having selected 134 officers and men, and made the best equipment possible, Captain Sir John Franklin sailed on May 19, 1845, in the Erebus and Terror, Parry’s old ships. On the 26th of July they were seen proceeding prosperously up Baffin’s Bay by a whaler, who reported them in due course, but neither ships or crews were heard of again for many years.

Anxiety over the long silence at length aroused the people of England and the United States to begin a search for them which lasted through many years. It was fruitless as to its first object,—the rescue of Franklin or any survivors,—but it gradually cleared up the sad mystery, and it was the means of learning all, and more than all, that Franklin sought to ascertain.

The search began by the despatch, early in 1848, of Sir James Ross in two ships, Investigator and Enterprise, which wintered near the northeast point of North Devon, and returned the following year with no tidings, although they afforded the second officer, Lieutenant F. R. M’Clintock, an opportunity to acquire a knowledge of sledging, which he afterward used to advantage. This failure only aroused England to renewed efforts.

Many ships were started out at once, and also parties overland, of which mention will be made later. The Herald and Plover, during 1848 and 1849, scanned the whole coast from Bering Sea to the mouth of the Mackenzie, and discovered Herald Island. Following them, in March, 1850, went the Enterprise, under Collinson, and the Investigator, under M’Clure, via Bering Strait, while the Assistance and Resolute, with two steam tenders, under Captain Austin, went to renew the search by Barrow Strait, and two brigs, the Lady Franklin and Sophia, under a whaling captain named Penny, followed them. The eastern expeditions discovered Franklin’s winter quarters of 1845-46 at Beechey Island, but no record of any kind indicating the direction taken by his ships. Admirable arrangements were made for passing the winter, and their combined sailing and sledging work added much to the map of that district, and to our knowledge of life in polar latitudes, but it learned nothing whatever of Franklin’s fate.

A FLOATING ICE-CASTLE OF THE FROZEN NORTH.

“Out from the dark, mysterious North,

With all its glamour, every night

Tingling with unforgotten dreams,

And every day flood-full of light.”

Meanwhile the expedition via Bering Sea had become separated in the Pacific, and M’Clure, in the Investigator, got so far ahead that he was able to pass through Bering Strait and work his way eastward north of British America, and through the narrow Prince of Wales Strait until he reached Princess Royal Islands, where he wintered. Here he was only thirty miles from Barrow Strait; and when he had climbed a high hill and saw its ice gleaming in the distance, he had in reality discovered the Northwest Passage. Yet he was not the first, as we now know, for when the survivors of Franklin’s ships, in their attempt to escape, had reached Cape Herschel, they, too, saw this same passage they had been sent to find, but then, as now, it was closed by perpetual ice, so that although we now know the way, we can no more avail ourselves of it than could they, except by going south of King William’s Land, through a strait of which they had not yet learned. The next summer was spent in a fruitless struggle to get north along the western side of Banks (or Baring) Land, in which he succeeded only far enough to get frozen in so firmly on the north shore of that great island that even the summer warmth did not release his ship. He would have perished had it not been that musk-oxen were plentiful; and by the spring of 1853, it was plain that the Investigator must be abandoned.

The Enterprise meanwhile had followed M’Clure in the spring of 1851, and passed two years in searching every shore and passage she could find, while her men made sledge-journeys far and near, as M’Clure’s men were doing, and once came within a few miles of Point Victory, where Franklin’s remains would have been found. At last, in the spring of 1854, she succeeded in making her way back along the American coast, and returned to England, completing one of the most remarkable of Arctic voyages.

During their absence the friends of Franklin had not been idle. The apparent sacrifice of this fine character aroused almost or quite as much interest in America as in England, and Yankee shipmasters knew the north as well as did the men of England and Scandinavia. Henry Grinnell, a prominent merchant in New York, furnished the money to fit out two ships, the Advance and Rescue, commanded by Lieutenants De Haven and Griffiths, of the United States navy. They assisted in the search about Beechey Island, then struck north and discovered Grinnell Land, after which they returned before the winter had closed in. With them was a young physician and traveler, Dr. Elisha Kent Kane, who persuaded Mr. Grinnell to send him again to the north, less to search for Franklin, whom he had despaired of, than to prosecute explorations in higher latitudes. In 1853, in command of the little brig Advance, manned principally by whaling men, he left New London, Conn., and made his way straight up to the head of Baffin’s Bay, which narrows northward into Smith Sound, where, on the eastern, or Greenland, shore of its expansion, since called Kane Basin, he was stopped by ice and remained a prisoner until rescued in 1855.

Dr. Kane wrote the histories of these expeditions, and especially of the latter one, in books so charmingly expressed, and abounding in such novel information, that they were read like romances in every home in the land, and did more to fire the ardor for Arctic discovery which has ever since glowed in this country, than anything else that had been said or done. The most immediate result was that Dr. I. I. Hayes, who had been with Kane, took a ship to Smith Sound and spent the winter of 1860-61 there, but with little result. More came from the expeditions led by an enthusiastic journalist of Cincinnati, Charles F. Hall, but before speaking of these, let us return to the English search for Franklin.

Undeterred by the failure of Austin and Penny, or the silence of Collinson and M’Clure, the British government in 1852 despatched again the four vessels used by Austin, and added a fifth, the Assistance, and a store-ship, the North Star, to form a depôt of supplies at Beechey Island. The old haphazard ways had given place to very systematic methods of advance and rescue; but steam was little employed as yet, because of the trouble and cost of supplying coal, although two small steam vessels, as tenders, accompanied this, the largest and most bountifully equipped expedition that had yet started out. The fleet, under command of Sir Edward Belcher, proceeded through Lancaster Sound, beyond which they scattered somewhat, and spent the first winter in extensive sledge-journeys, during which they discovered (by a message that M’Clure had left on Melville Island) where the Investigator was imprisoned, and rescued all its people in June, 1853.

This great expedition learned nothing of Franklin, although it did learn much of other Arctic matters, and left the map substantially complete south and west of Jones Sound; but its honors rested upon M’Clure, who, first of all recorded men, had really made the Northwest Passage by sailing and sledging around the northern end of America. The settlement of this long-discussed matter had proved it of no practical value; but the British Parliament kept its word, and gave £10,000 (half of the promised reward) to the officers and crew of the Investigator, besides raising M’Clure to knighthood. An incident of this expedition is the fact that Kellett’s abandoned ship Resolute survived crushing long enough to drift out through Barrow Strait and Lancaster Sound and down into Davis Strait, where in September, 1855, she was found and towed home by an American whaler. As she was little injured, she was presented to the British government with the compliments of the United States, and a few years later, when she came to be broken up, a fine table was made from her oaken timbers, and returned as a present to Uncle Sam; and it now stands in the private office of the President of the United States in the Executive Mansion at Washington.

Two great facts had now been ascertained. One was that none of Franklin’s men or ships survived. The other fact was, that although there was plenty of water north of the American continent, it was so obstructed by permanent ice that probably no vessel could ever make its way through from the Atlantic to the Pacific; none has done so yet, despite the determined effort of the steam yacht Pandora in 1875, but ships from the east have reached points also reached by ships from the west. The everlasting ice sheet of the polar ocean, ever crowding down upon this northern coast and into the channels between the islands north of it, forms a barrier that will very rarely, if ever, pause or open long enough to let a vessel through, even south of King William and Victoria lands. The outflowing warm waters of the rivers or other influences may sometimes produce a narrow space comparatively free from ice in summer along the shore of the continent and greater islands; but everywhere off shore, and never at a great distance, begins a thick mass of perpetual ice, which, it is believed, extends across the pole like a cap, and reaches on the other side nearly to Petermannland. To this has been given the name of the Paleocrystic Sea, or sea of ancient ice, and nothing is known of it beyond the blue cliffs of its margin that confronts the explorer as he gazes abroad from the hills of the Parry Islands or Banks Land, or vainly seeks in some lone vessel north of Alaska or Siberia to penetrate its glassy front.

So thoroughly were the islands of this archipelago explored, and so unpromising seems further study, that Arctic voyagers have long ceased to risk their ships there, and the story of Franklin’s fate was finally learned by land travelers. As early as 1854 Dr. Rae and a party of Hudson’s Bay Company’s men had traveled over land and ice to King William’s Land, proved it an island, and heard stories of the death by famine and cold of white men who could be no other than the Franklin crew, as was further shown by various relics which Dr. Rae obtained from the Eskimos. Dr. Rae claimed and received £10,000 of the reward offered by the British government. The next year another party, going down the Great Fish River, recovered many other articles from Eskimos at the mouth of the river and on Montreal Island. It was evident even then that every one had perished in an attempt, nearly successful, to reach the mainland at the mouth of this river. Lady Franklin, however, despatched an expedition in the Fox, under the command of the experienced M’Clintock, which at last brought back, not her husband, but the satisfaction of knowing fully his fate.

All along the west and south coast remains of articles belonging to the ships were found, and skeletons—two of them in a broken boat; and finally in a stone cairn a written record that briefly told the tale of disaster.

WORKING THROUGH AN ICE-FLOE, IN TOW OF A BERG.

In 1845-46 Franklin quartered at Beechey Island, on the southeast coast of North Devon, after having ascended Wellington Channel to latitude 77°, and returned west of Cornwallis Island, which was an exceedingly successful season’s work. In the autumn of 1846 he had turned toward the south, but had been stopped by and frozen into the masses of ice that come ceaselessly down M’Clintock Channel and press upon King William’s Land. Had he known King William’s Land to be really an island he need not have exposed himself to this. During all the summer of 1847 the ships remained firm in their icy bonds. Sir John Franklin died, and Captain Crozier took command. The spring of 1848 brought no hope, and in April the ships were abandoned. The crews started southward along the shore, dragging two boats (one of which was soon abandoned) and many sledges. The Eskimos said the men dropped down one at a time, from weakness and hunger; but it is believed that many of them were killed by the savages for the sake of what few things they had with them—precious articles to those natives. It appears that one of the vessels must have been crushed in the ice, and the other stranded on the shore of King William’s Land, where it lay for years, forming a mine of wealth for the neighboring Eskimos. Some years later Lieutenant Schwatka and W. H. Gilder, traveling with Eskimo parties in the region near the mouth of the Great Fish River, found the graves of the last remnant of the party, and recovered still other relics of this dreadful calamity. Let me copy for you here the postscript, written by Crozier and Fitzjames, to the short record of their work. It is startlingly brief and impressive:

April 25, 1848. H. M. ships Terror and Erebus were deserted on 22nd April, five leagues N. N. W. of this [Point Victory], having been beset since 12th September, 1846. The officers and crews, consisting of 105 souls under the command of Captain F. R. M. Crozier, landed here in lat. 69° 37´ 42´´ N., long. 98° 41´ W. Sir John Franklin died on the 11th June, 1847; and the total loss by deaths in the expedition has been to this date 9 officers and 15 men. We start on to-morrow, 26th April, 1848, for Back’s Fish River.

It would be tedious to attempt to chronicle the almost yearly excursions into the north, but a few ought to be spoken of. One such has been alluded to—that of Charles Hall, a Cincinnati journalist,—who enlisted the aid of the American Geographical Society, and then prepared himself by going upon a whaler and spending the winters of 1860-61 and 1861-1862 among the Eskimos near Cumberland Sound, where he found the remains of a stone house built by Frobisher in 1578. Again, from 1864 to 1869 he was living with the wandering Eskimo north of Hudson’s Bay, preparing himself to undertake an expedition which may be said to be the first whose avowed object was to try to reach the North Pole. The United States government furnished him the steamer Polaris, and a small but efficient body of scientific assistants, one of whom was Emil Bessels. The Polaris passed through Smith Sound, and after completing the exploration of Kennedy Channel, and discovering that beyond its expansion into Hall Sound it continued straight northeastward, forming Robeson Channel, Hall stopped his ship and by sledge-journeys reached Cape Brevoort, above 82° N., whence he could see the open polar sea. This was not only far beyond any previous northing, but his work added immensely to our knowledge of both Grinnell Land and northwestern Greenland, and prepared the way for further successes.

This sledge-journey was, however, too great a strain, for he had hardly returned to his ship when he sickened and died. The next season (1872) Dr. Bessels and Sergeant Mayer reached on foot 82° 09´ N., a few miles farther than Hall. This accomplished, an attempt was made to return, but the steamer was soon inclosed in the pack, and drifted helplessly southward for two months, until off Northumberland Island, when a violent gale loosened the pack and nearly destroyed her.

At length the danger became so great that on October 15th boats and provisions were put on the ice, on which nineteen of the crew had disembarked. Suddenly the ship broke away, and the party on the ice drifted slowly 195 days, and were picked up off the coast of Labrador, in 53° 35´ N., by a whaling steamer 1,300 miles from where they had parted with the Polaris. The party in the ship reached Littleton’s Island, where they passed the winter, building two boats from the boards of the vessel, in which they set sail southwards in June, 1873. On the 23d of that month they were picked up by a Dundee whaler, and ultimately reached home.

Only three years before that a very similar experience had happened to the smaller ship of a German expedition under Captain Koldewey, of which the larger went up the east coast of Greenland to 75½° N., where a grim headland was named Cape Bismarck. It is just south of the land sighted by Lambert in 1670. The little Hansa, however, was crushed in the ice near Scoresby Sound. The crew escaped to the floe, where they built a house of blocks of patent fuel, filled it with provisions, and trusted themselves to the great Arctic current which carried them south, at the rate of about sixty-five miles a day at first, until finally, in June, 1870, it took them to the Moravian missions near Cape Farewell, more than twelve hundred miles from where they were wrecked.

The seas and archipelagoes north of Europe were being questioned, all this time, as well as those north of America. The Norwegian fishermen had been familiar with Spitzbergen waters from long ago, but it was not until 1863 that the group was circumnavigated. The next year Captain Tobieson sailed around Northeast Land, and in 1870 Nova Zembla was circumnavigated, and the mouth of the Obi reached.

The men who did these feats were sealers or shark-fishers in small stanch Norwegian schooners, which flocked in Barentz Sea at this period, and they furnished invaluable material, as did the whalers and sealers of American and Scotch ports, for the ice-pilots and crews of the scientific expeditions which now began to go to the north: moreover many of the commanders were trained by amateur service in such vessels. It was thus Nordenskjöld began his experiences in 1864. Among these earlier expeditions was an Austrian naval lieutenant, Julius von Payer, who became notable, not only because he interested a new nation in Arctic research, but because of his discoveries. His first experience was with the German expedition to Greenland in 1869, and in 1871 he and another Austrian navy officer named Weyprecht spent the summer in examining the edge of the ice between Spitzbergen and Nova Zembla.

Their observations led them to project an expedition to try again at that place to penetrate eastward, and effect the Northeast Passage, which had been regarded as hopeless for the past hundred years. The idea of making an Austro-Hungarian expedition of it aroused great enthusiasm in that empire, and Payer and Weyprecht were furnished with the large steamer Tegethoff, equipped as well as possible, with Weyprecht in command, while von Payer was to lead all sledge-parties. She reached the northern end of Nova Zembla in time to get into comfortable winter quarters, but instead of escaping in the spring was kept imprisoned in the ice, drifting steadily northward before the prevailing wind until, in October, land was approached, near which the ship again became a fixture for the winter of 1873-74. In March Payer began to make exploratory journeys, and found that they had discovered a group of mountainous islands, separated by broad and deep channels, which he named Francis Joseph Land, in honor of the Emperor of Austria-Hungary.

A SUMMER SCENE OFF NOVA ZEMBLA

By this time summer was approaching, when it was plain that the Tegethoff must be abandoned, and an attempt made to get home afoot. On the 24th of May three boats were placed on sledges, other sledges were loaded with provisions, and the ship’s company started on another one of those Arctic marches that often end at so sad a goal. Until the 14th of August they were plodding over the ice before they reached the edge of the pack and launched their boats, in which they sailed for three weeks before being picked up by a Russian vessel.

This has always been regarded as one of the greatest achievements in polar work of this century, not only because of the heroism and skill shown, and the new lands discovered, but because it promised so much for the future—a promise that has been largely fulfilled.

The next important expedition was another attack upon the Northeast Passage, the hope of which would not “down”; and it was under the leadership of Professor Adolf Erik Nordenskjöld, a Swedish geologist and naturalist of Stockholm, although born in Finland, who had made several previous journeys to Greenland, Spitzbergen, etc., which were fruitful of scientific results. Then he turned his attention to Siberia; and in 1875 and again in 1876 he sailed to the mouth of the Yenisei, as also Captain Wiggins of Sunderland, England, was then doing, in a profitable trade with the Siberians, which has been kept up more or less regularly ever since. These experiences convinced him that it was worth while to try once more to work one’s way through the Siberian ocean to Bering Strait.

He obtained and outfitted the steamer Vega, and arranged that a smaller supply-steamer, the Lena, should accompany him as far as the mouth of the river Lena—a bold proposition in itself, for that was a thousand miles beyond the Yenisei. Nevertheless, this program was carried out; for leaving Gothenberg on July 4, 1878, a month later they were traversing the Kara Sea, and on August 19 passed Cape Chelyuskin, which, up to that time, had defied all attempts and has since closed the gate to all but the daring Nansen. A week later the mouth of the Lena was reached, and the little tender, unloading her coal and other stores into the depleted hold of the Vega, turned west, and actually sailed back to civilization uninjured.

The Vega then hastened on eastward, and came near getting right through to Bering Strait in that one season; but this was more than the indulgent Arctic gods could grant, and at the end of September the men found themselves frozen into the ice off North Cape (where Cook turned back in 1778), only one hundred and twenty miles from Bering Strait. Here they were near shore, the country was inhabited by Tchuktches—a nomadic people, with herds of reindeer, who take the place in Siberia of the Eskimos of Arctic America; and the time was well spent in gathering a knowledge of these people and their country, and in making very valuable collections in zoology and anthropology.

It was not until July 18, 1879, however, that their prison-gates opened, and the Vega steamed on. These waters were familiar enough to navigators; and Nordenskjöld proceeded straight east, passed down through Bering Strait on the next day but one (so near was he), and thus easily accomplished that which had baffled men since first it had been tried by the unfortunate Willoughby three hundred and twenty-six years before.

But though the Northeast Passage had thus been found, it was of no more practical value to commerce than the solving of the Northwest Passage had been, and the value received from the cruise was in the scientific information gained, the more accurate delineation of the coast, and the increased knowledge of winds, currents, magnetic phenomena, and the behavior of the floating ice-fields on that side of the polar area. When at last, however, the Vega had circumnavigated the globe by this extraordinary course, returning home through the Suez Canal, as no Arctic expedition had ever been expected to do, its commander was made a baron, and all his men were loaded with praises and honors, while his book, “The Voyage of the Vega,” printed in four or five languages, spread their fame throughout the world.

Now while the Vega was drifting slowly about northeast of Siberia during that early summer of 1879, not only were Schwatka hunting for Franklin relics with the Eskimos of King William’s Land, the Danish Captain Jansen tracing the northeast coast of Greenland, and Dutch and English explorers investigating the neighborhood of Francis Joseph Land, but within a few leagues of Nordenskjöld and his men there was beginning one of the most dreadful of those tragedies that have seared with suffering the track of Arctic exploration since men began to pry into the secrets of the frozen North: I mean the story of the Jeannette.

Many readers of this book will easily remember the intense interest which the starting of this expedition created in the United States, for it was organized at the suggestion and expense of James Gordon Bennett, the proprietor of the New York Herald. The government coöperated, however, lending from its navy the officers and men needful, and otherwise aiding the project. The vessel itself was the steam yacht Pandora, which had been proved a worthy craft by Sir Allen Young in his search for the magnetic pole in 1875, and which Mr. Bennett had bought and rechristened.

Supplied with everything science and experience could suggest, the Jeannette sailed from San Francisco on July 8, 1879, and missing the incoming Vega among the fogs of Bering Sea, passed through into the Siberian ocean, bound poleward. The last report of her was that she had been seen September 3d steaming toward Wrangell Land, which had been sighted by American whalers in 1867, and was generally regarded as of continental extent northward. It is now known that De Long intended to reach it and winter there; but to his dismay he could not escape from the ice-pack, and to his astonishment found himself drifting past the northern margin of Wrangell Land, thus proving it an island about seventy miles long.

When two years had passed and no tidings had been received, the United States government equipped a search expedition in the steamer Rodgers, commanded by Lieutenant Berry, which in 1881 reached and examined Wrangell Land, and then went north farther even than Collinson, reaching 73° 44´, the highest point yet attained immediately north of Bering Strait, where the paleocrystic ice spreads much farther from the pole than on the American side. But he found no trace of the Jeannette, and himself had a hard time getting home, for the Rodgers was burned in her winter quarters.

What then had befallen the lost vessel? She had become beset in the ice and drifted with the pack around the north end of Wrangell Island, and then west, until at the end of twenty-two months she had been crushed, and sunk on June 12, 1881, in latitude 77° 15´ N., and longitude 155 E. Two small islands, named Jeannette and Henrietta, had been visited some distance east of the scene of the catastrophe; but when the crews, saving themselves and what little they could on the ice, started to drag their boats and sledges homeward, they headed directly south, and soon found a new island, named Bennett, which is the northernmost of the New Siberia group.

It would be a sad task, were it possible, to relate here the frightful hardships of that journey through the fast-gathering Arctic night toward the bleak coast of Siberia. Having passed the islands, open water was found, and the starving men embarked in their three boats for the mouth of the Lena; but soon they were separated in a storm, and each one proceeded as best he could. One boat foundered in the first gale. Another, in charge of Melville (now engineer-in-chief, U. S. N.), reached an eastern mouth of the river and ascended it to a Russian village. A third boat, with De Long and others, also reached the Lena delta, but only two seamen were able to proceed afoot to Bulun, a far-away Russian settlement. Melville heard of this, and made haste to start out searching parties, but they were too late. De Long and his crew had died of exhaustion, and it was not until the next season that their bodies and records were fully recovered.

Nevertheless, as we are assured by experts, the results of this unfortunate expedition were important, physically and geographically. “They covered some 50,000 square miles of polar ocean, and clearly indicate the conditions of an equal area between their line of drift and the Asiatic coast.” De Long believed the Siberian ocean to be a shallow sea, dotted with islands; and his conclusions have been confirmed by the admirable scientific work since of Toll, Bunge, and other Europeans who have explored the Liachoff Islands and other places in that part of the Arctic realm.

The desire for scientific study of the polar world had now become the motive for northern research, though men were still ambitious to reach the pole; and when Sir George Nares returned from the great British expedition of 1875, to tell how the men of the Alert had reached a wintering-point beyond Robeson Channel, on the west coast of Greenland, in latitude 82° 27´ N., and that Markham and a sledge-party had gone about one degree farther (to 83° 20´ 26´´ N.), greater pride was felt in this fact, perhaps, than in the careful observations and collections that the ships had made. This remained the advance record until the memorable feat of Lieutenant Lockwood of the American Greely expedition eight years later.

This expedition was one of several acting in concert, according to a scheme suggested by Weyprecht, and perfected at international congresses of interested men meeting at Hamburg in 1879 and at St. Petersburg in 1882. This plan was for the establishment by various governments of a ring of stations as far within the Arctic circle as practicable, where simultaneous daily observations of the weather, magnetic conditions, tides, currents, etc., might be made. The arrangement was begun in the summer of 1883, and observing stations were established by Austria on Jan Mayen Island; by Denmark at Godthaab, Greenland; by Germany on Cumberland Bay, west of Davis Straits; by Great Britain at Great Slave Lake, Canada; by Holland at the mouth of the Yenisei; by Norway at Alten Fjiord, Norway; by Russia at the mouth of the Lena, and on Nova Zembla; by Sweden on Spitzbergen; and by the United States at Point Barrow, Alaska, and, farthest north of all, Lady Franklin Bay, Greenland. Nothing need be said about most of these stations—all were successful except the Dutch; but to the last-named belongs a story that Americans will not forget.

The command of the Lady Franklin Bay Station was assigned to Lieutenant A. W. Greely—not a naval lieutenant, but, like Schwatka, a cavalry officer, then assigned to duty in the Signal Service, to which (because it then supervised the Weather Bureau) the government had intrusted this matter. A steamer easily conveyed Greely and his party to Lady Franklin Bay, and left them there with a good house ready to be set up, and supplies of all sorts for two years. The prescribed series of observations with barometers and thermometers, wind-gages, tide-gages, magnetic instruments and all the rest, were at once begun, and two winters passed comfortably enough. Dogs and Eskimo drivers had been obtained, and several journeys were made, of which the most important was Lockwood’s advance toward the pole, of which an account has been succinctly supplied by General Greely himself in his admirable “Handbook of Arctic Discoveries.”

SCENERY OF GRINNELL LAND AND THE ARCTIC SEA.

Lieutenant J. B. Lockwood, one of the principal assistants, who had already displayed great skill and energy in sledging, even in prolonged temperature as low as 81° F. below freezing, undertook a long exploring trip up the Greenland coast, to or beyond Cape Britannia. A large party went with him at first, but gradually men were sent back, after establishing supply-depots. “The journey onward was marked by severe storms, rough ice, broken sledges, snow-blindness, minor injuries, and—worst of all for loaded sledges—soft, deep snow.” At last, some distance north of Cape Bryant, all turned back except Lockwood, Sergeant Brainard, and an Eskimo, Christiansen, who, with twenty-five days’ rations, pushed on. In five and one half days they had reached Cape Britannia—the farthest north of the Nares expedition—82° 20´ N. Halting here only long enough to study the landscape from its summit, and make sure of the remarkable fact that this northern end of Greenland is free from the ice-cap, whose northern limit is about lat. 82° N., they rounded a cape, and crossing channel after channel filled with ice, which showed that all this district is an archipelago, reached on May 10th Mary Murray Island, 83° 19´ N. “A violent gale delayed them sixty-three hours, the cold exhausting them physically and the delay mentally. If weather forbade travel, life must be sustained; but they tasted insufficient food only at intervals of fifteen, twenty-four, and nineteen hours—the last as clearing weather made progress possible. Floes so high that the sledge was lowered by dog-traces, ice so broken that the ax cleared the way, and widening water-cracks in increasing numbers impeded progress. But, despite all obstacles, they reached, May 13, 1882, Lockwood Island, 83° 24´ N., 42°, 45´ W., the farthest of their journey, and the highest north [by land], then or now.”

They could see land several miles northeast, which they named Cape Washington, the highest known land, and toward the north could overlook a polar sea to within three hundred and fifty miles of the pole. Even here plants were numerous, and foxes, hares, lemmings, and ptarmigans existed. The three heroic travelers returned safely, reaching headquarters on June 3d. Another expedition by Lockwood and his two companions explored and located the west coast of mountainous and glacier-girt Grinnell Land, where the musk-ox and Eskimo hunters range to the northern border.

The summer of 1883 brought no relief-ship, and the plan of escape must be put into execution at once. A ship had, in fact, tried to reach Greely in 1882, but, failing, had left supplies of provisions at Cape Sabine and elsewhere. In 1883 another relief expedition sent north was dreadfully mis-managed, and finally the ship itself was lost, and, instead of leaving supplies, took away all that had been stored at Cape Sabine—the precise point where they were to be needed.

Leaving Lady Franklin Bay in August in open boats, the party managed, after desperate exertions, to get near Cape Sabine, and safely landed on Bedford Pim Island, on the northwestern shore of Smith Sound, October 15, 1883. Of the misery that followed, let Greely himself tell us:

Winter had begun, the polar night was imminent, clothing in rags, fuel wanting, and forty days’ rations must tide over 250 days, till help could come. The main party put up a hut of rocks, canvas, boat- and snow-slabs, while selected men scoured the coasts for caches, sought land-game, and watched seal-holes, until utter darkness drove all to the hut. Scientific observations were unremittingly made, amusements devised, a spring campaign planned, and the returning sun found only one dead. Efforts to cross Smith Sound failed, and a hunting trip to the west found a new (Schley) land, but no game. Finally game came so inadequately that food failed, and one by one men died—Jens seal-hunting, and Rice striving to bring in a cache. Courage and solidarity continued; and if Greely gave to the maimed Ellison double food while it lasted, he did not hesitate to order in writing the execution of a man serving under an assumed name of Henry, who repeatedly stole sealskin thongs, the only remaining food. Flowers, plants, seaweed, and lichens eked out life for the six, till June 22, 1884, when the relief-ships, Thetis and Bear, under Captain W. S. Schley and Commander W. H. Emory, rescued them. Records, instruments, and collections were saved to tell the story of an expedition that failed not in aught intrusted to it, and whose members perished through others.

To another piece of brilliant work, that of Lieutenant R. E. Peary, U. S. N., I can give only a few words, because, like so much else that might be said of Arctic researches, it was by land rather than by sea. By extraordinary courage, skill, and endurance, he twice crossed northern Greenland, showed that it is an island having a northern shore free from inland ice in about 82° north latitude, and made stronger Greely’s conclusion that the lands visited and seen by Lockwood, north of Cape Britannia, are detached islands. Peary’s work may be said to have completed the map of the continental boundary of the Arctic Ocean, but he is still busy there.

Of Nansen, on the contrary, I ought to say as much as I can, because his extraordinary voyage in the Fram was perhaps more purely an examination of the Arctic Sea than any other ever made. Dr. Fridtjoff Nansen was a young Norwegian who had already made his mark in Greenland, where, soon after 1880, articles began to be found that had belonged to the Jeannette, and apparently must have drifted thence from where she was lost off Siberia. This was only a part of the indications that convinced Dr. Nansen that a current flowed across the unknown polar space from the neighborhood of Alaska to the northeast coast of Greenland, and thence became the great Arctic current that we recognize south of Iceland. He argued that if a vessel could find this current north of eastern Siberia, she would be moved with it until she emerged into the Atlantic. Incidentally she might drift directly over the pole.

With this in view, he raised funds to build and equip a small wooden vessel, furnished with both steam and sails, which was so shaped by the roundness of her bottom, and so amazingly braced and strengthened within, that before any “nips” of the ice would crush her, the pressure would lift her out of water—as, in fact, happened many times in the course of her wonderful excursion. Nansen chose twelve companions,[3] and though some of them were educated men of science, others skilful sea-captains, and others common sailors, all lived and worked together in one cabin as brothers—the happiest and healthiest lot of men that ever ventured into the hyperborean kingdom of desolation.

Leaving Norway in July, 1893, he struggled through the Kara Sea, and it was not until late in September, 1894, that he found himself permanently frozen into the great polar pack, north of the New Siberian Islands; but even then he was neither so far north nor so far west as he hoped to get, and feared that he was south of his supposed current. For the story of the strange life led by those thirteen men on that drifting ship, safe, abundantly provisioned, dry, warm, lighted by electricity (power for the dynamos being gained by a windmill), I can only refer you to Dr. Nansen’s book, “Farthest North,” one of the most interesting Arctic volumes ever penned. Turning, zigzagging, now advancing and again retreating as the constantly moving ice swayed here and there under the pressure of wind or the dragging of currents, they nevertheless made a gradual progress westward.

By March they had reached a point near the crossing of the 70th meridian and 85th parallel, and were still fixed in the ice. Then Nansen, taking with him Lieutenant Johansen, started north by dog-sledges, in an attempt to reach the pole. They could take very few supplies of any sort, and how far north they would be able to travel must depend upon their ability to return, not to the Fram, which would drift on, but to the islands of Francis Joseph Land, far away south. The ice, bad at first, grew worse as they proceeded, being one long stretch of hummocks and jagged ditches, with now and then a lane of open water around which they would toil in misery only to find a worse one ahead. On April 7th it became certain that they must turn back. This was “farthest north,” indeed—just above the 86th degree, hardly 275 miles from the North Pole. Then it was a race against death by cold, or drowning, or starvation. One by one the dogs were killed to furnish food for the remainder. At last, after almost superhuman labors and thrilling escapes from freezing and drowning and the attacks of famished bears, they reached Francis Joseph Land, and spent a winter in a hut made out of stones, earth, and raw walrus hides. The next spring they plodded on, and by good chance found the camp of the Jackson Harmsworth surveying party (which a few days later would have gone away in its steamer), by whom Nansen and Johansen were carried to Norway in August, 1896.

A week later the Fram came in, with every one well and hearty, having emerged from the ice just northwest of Spitzbergen.

Since Nansen’s return another Scandinavian, S. A. Andrée, with two companions, has disappeared into this same desert of ice and silence, in a balloon carrying a boat, sledge, tent, and various supplies. It was his intention to reach the pole if possible, and to do whatever else circumstances permitted. Since his departure, on July 10, 1897, from Spitzbergen, he has not been heard from, except by a pigeon-message two days later.

THE SOUTH POLE

We have followed up to date the history of adventurous and scientific exploration of the hardly yielding, yet steadily narrowed, circles of unknown coasts and waters about the North Pole. Let us now see what, thus far, has been done to wrest from the ocean and ice of its Antarctic antipodes the secrets of the South Pole.

A PENGUIN-ROOST ON THE BEACHES OF VICTORIA LAND.
Drawn by the Antarctic explorer Borchgrevink.

Almost three hundred years ago the existence of islands far to the southward of any continents became known to navigators, who were driven thither by bad weather, and little by little was added to the map of this desolate region; but it was not until 1772 that any one went into that terrible Antarctic sea for the express purpose of a survey. This man was the intrepid Captain Cook, and though he sailed a third of the way around the globe in his efforts to find an entrance through the icy barrier, he could never penetrate beyond 71° south latitude, which is equal to North Cape, or the town of Upernavik, in the Arctic region. Later captains did little better, until 1841, when Sir James Ross, in his ships Erebus and Terror,—the same vessels which afterward met their destruction with the ill-fated Franklin expedition,—skirted the edge of the thick ice that everywhere clothed the land, though it was midsummer, and finally reached the base of the southernmost land yet known on the globe—a magnificent mountain-chain stretching away to the south from latitude 78° 10´.

The most conspicuous point of all this range of polar mountains, which rises from an unexplored continent or great island called Victoria Land, is the volcano Mt. Erebus. It was in eruption at the time of Ross’s visit, and the explorer tries to tell us of the splendor of its display when the wide glistening waste of snow and the deep blue of the ocean and the starry sky are lit up by the column of fire hurled thousands of feet heavenward from its crater: but who can picture the grandeur of such a scene! This volcano is about 12,400 feet high, and an extinct neighbor, Mt. Terror, is still higher; while a third peak, Mt. Melbourne, exceeds 15,000 feet in altitude, and like all the rest is covered with everlasting snow and glaciers from the tempestuous water’s edge to its lonely crest.

Meager as this information is, it is about all we know of the surface of the globe within the Antarctic circle; and it will be extremely difficult to learn much more. In a latitude much farther from the pole than that where in the north vegetation is abundant, and men and animals live all the year round, the severity of the Antarctic climate cuts off all life, and constantly seals the water under a cap of ice. The coasts and outlying islands thus far examined appear to be wholly volcanic, often composed of nothing but alternate layers of ashes and ice; but the Challenger staff dredged up from the edge of the ice south of the middle of the Indian Ocean pieces of granite-like and other rocks, such as belong to land regularly formed; so that probably the whole uplift does not consist of volcanic materials; and, furthermore, rocks containing fossil plants have been found on some of the southernmost islands which show that in past ages—the period of the coal deposits—the climate of that end of the world was mild enough to support forests of trees and, doubtless, a large variety of herbage and animals. Now most of the coast is unapproachable on account of a border of sea-ice, or else cliffs of moving land-ice (glaciers) that give off the flat, table-topped icebergs characteristic of the south polar waters. No trace of any land animal—except visiting sea-fowl—has been found, and only a little of the simplest plants (lichens); nor is this surprising when we learn that the highest noonday heat of summer is only a little above the freezing-point.

Why this intense cold and dreadful desolation exists so much farther from the pole in the southern than in the northern hemisphere, I need hardly explain to you; for you will recall that in the north the continents are so broad as to form almost an unbroken wall about the narrow polar sea, confining its cold waters, warming the air by wide radiation, and guiding the heated flood of the Gulf Stream straight into the northern sea. In the southern hemisphere, on the other hand, an immense breadth of ocean south of latitude 40° is broken by no land of any account, and the southward flowing warm water from the equator becomes spread out so thin upon the vast surface that it is rapidly chilled. It is now generally believed, as has been hinted, that the south polar region is a continental mass, deeply buried in an ice-sheet that is ever fed in the center as fast as it wastes away at the circumference; for the prevailing winds there tend toward the pole from all sides, and carry loads of moisture to be condensed and fall in ceaseless snows.

ICE-CLIFFS AND TABLE-TOPPED BERGS, CHARACTERISTIC OF THE ANTARCTIC REGION.

The Antarctic seas, however, are by no means lifeless, but abound not only in fishes,—cod are said to throng in these waters in prodigious numbers,—but several varieties of whales, dolphins, and their kin (which will be described in one of the later chapters), and many kinds of seals, notably the huge sea-elephant, now becoming rare elsewhere. Then, too, the Antarctic islands and headlands are the resort of enormous flocks of certain sea-birds, all different from the Arctic species of their families, which subsist upon the fishes and less creatures in the water, and go to the lonely shores outside the ice-cap only for rest and to make their nests. Of all these the penguins are most numerous and most hardy, and a whole chapter might easily be given to their quaint appearance and quainter ways. It also appears probable that certain migratory birds—especially beach-feeding kinds—regularly visit the Antarctic continent in summer from Patagonia, and breed there.

Now what has been gained by all the expense, exertion, and hardship of polar exploration? What has been the charm that has led wise and brave men to overcome terrific obstacles, and turn again with deeper and deeper longings toward the mystic icy regions? Lieutenant Maury has given one answer: “There icebergs are framed and glaciers launched. There the tides have their cradle: the whales their nursery. There the winds complete their circuits, and the currents of the sea their round in the wonderful system of interoceanic circulation. There the Aurora Borealis is lighted up, and the trembling needle brought to rest; and there, too, in the mazes of that mystic circle, terrestrial forces of occult power and vast influence upon the well-being of man are continually at play.... Noble daring has made Arctic ice and waters classic ground. It is no feverish excitement nor vain ambition that leads man there. It is a higher feeling, a holier motive, a desire to look into the works of creation, to comprehend the economy of our planet, and to grow wiser and better by the knowledge.”

To polar explorers we owe not only the discovery of the waters, coasts, and archipelagoes that now are accurately outlined upon our maps within the Arctic and Antarctic circles, but vast and valuable products—whale-fisheries, seal-fisheries, cod-fisheries, and many other additions to the wealth of the world from the sea, while the Arctic lands have yielded furs and other valuable things in great quantity. The study of the people living under those adverse northern conditions has been highly instructive, assisting us to reconstruct the life in the primitive world; and what we have learned from the records of the Arctic rocks has thrown a bright and unexpected light upon the antiquity of the globe.

To studies of the ocean and atmosphere in very high latitudes science is largely indebted for new facts in magnetism, in the movements of the air and causes of climate, in the formation and behavior of ice and icebergs, in the action of tides and ocean-currents, and in many other departments of knowledge, all of which have been made of use especially to the navigator. Nor has this cost over much. Attention has been called to every casualty, and the romantic light of adventure has brought into high relief all the hardships and sometimes horrors of Arctic experience; but the records show that the average of loss and suffering in Arctic work is not greater than that of ordinary seafaring and naval careers. Sir Leopold M’Clintock has stated publicly that during the thirty-six years when Great Britain was most active in polar research, she lost only one expedition and 128 persons out of forty-two successive expeditions sent out, and never lost a sledge-party out of a hundred that made overland journeys.

After all, no doubt, the best result has been the human heroism displayed, and the human sympathy developed. “There are,” exclaims Professor Nourse, “and ever will be, fair fruits born out of such acts of high aspiration, energy, and fortitude, in those who have gone out, and in their liberal supporters; exemplars for the lifting up of the discouraged, the education of the young. Certainly volunteers for the paths of discovery will offer themselves until the fullest additions to the domain of science have had their ingathering.”

EAGER TO BE FIRST ASHORE IN A NEW LAND.

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DRAWN BY HOWARD PYLE. ENGRAVED BY M. HAIDER.
THE “CONSTITUTION’S” LAST FIGHT.

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CHAPTER VI
WAR-SHIPS AND NAVAL BATTLES