On the 3rd Sept./22nd Aug. the ice began to be pressed together by a light W.S.W. wind. Convinced that the vessel would soon be nipped, the men on board began to save the stock of provisions and the boats, by placing them on the ice, but the pressure soon ceased. There fell a heavy rain, which afterwards, when the wind changed to north-west, passed into snow. On the 7th Sept./26th Aug. the coast of Yalmal was sighted. A fathom-thick ice-floe shot under the vessel and caused it to heel over to starboard. The following day there was a storm from the S.S.W. with snow. The ice forcing itself forward shook the vessel several times so violently that the crew rushed up to save the provisions, &c., on the ice. They were now in the neighbourhood of 70° N.L. and 65° E.L. (Greenwich), almost right off the mouth of the Kara river. The crew worked the whole day with axes and iron bars hewing off the sharp projecting corners of the ice-blocks that were pressed against the vessel. On the 11th Sept./20 Aug. there was warm weather with rain. The ice was in so violent motion that it was impossible to walk upon it. On the afternoon of the same day the Yermak sustained several violent concussions, and the hull was lifted one foot. On the 13th/1st September, a violent storm broke out, which drove the vessel to the north-east. It was expected every moment that the vessel would be nipped, and a tent was accordingly pitched on the ice, in order that part of the provisions from the hold might be placed in it. Wood even was carried to it. It was Russia's thousand-years' day, and it was celebrated with a festive ball and merry songs, although they every instant expected their vessel to be crushed by the masses of ice that were pressed together by the fearful storm. On the 14th/2nd September, the stem of the vessel was forced five feet above the water-line, and the whole night a continual cracking of timbers was heard in the hull. The water rose rapidly to a depth of two feet. Every man left the vessel and removed to the ice, but soon after the immense ice-field on which the tent was pitched went in pieces, while the leak in the vessel closed, and the crew in consequence went on board again. On the 15th/3rd September, the vessel was again pressed so, that the deck at times was bent to the form of a vault. On the 19th/7th September, von Krusenstern called the crew together that they might choose from their number three persons to advise with the commander on the best means of making their escape, and two days after the vessel was abandoned, after a meal at which the crew were literally offered all the house afforded. They then broke up for a journey to land, which was exceedingly difficult on account of the unevenness of the ice. They were soon obliged to leave the boat, which they had at first endeavoured to drag along with them over the ice, and take the most indispensable of the provisions on their own backs. On leaving the ship a sailor had secretly got possession of so much brandy, that during the first day's march he had the opportunity of drinking himself dead drunk. To carry him along was not possible, to wait was not advisable. He was left therefore to sleep off the drink; and in order that he might do so as soon as possible they took off his clothes and left him lying upon the ice with only his shirt on. Next day, however, he got up with his comrades after following their track in the darkness the whole night. Open places were often met with, which the travellers had to cross on pieces of drift-ice rowed forward by boat-hooks. Once when the shipwrecked men were ferrying themselves over upon a piece of ice which was already fully loaded, six walruses were seen in the neighbourhood. They showed a disposition to accompany the seafarers on the piece of ice, which in that case would certainly have sunk, and it was only after a ball had been sent through the leader's head that the animals gave up their plan for resting, which gave evidence of a gregariousness as great as their want of acquaintance with mankind. After Krusenstern and his companions had for several days in succession drifted backwards and forwards on a piece of ice in the neighbourhood of land, and traversed long stretches by jumping from one piece of ice to another, they at last reached the shore on the 28/16th September. In the immediate neighbourhood they found an encampment, whose inhabitants (Samoyeds) gave the shipwrecked men a friendly reception, and entertained them with the luxuries of the reindeer herd—raw and cooked reindeer flesh, reindeer tongues, reindeer marrow—raw fish and goose-fat. After the meal was finished the exhausted wanderers lay down to sleep in the Samoyed tents on the soft reindeer skins; "all sorrows and difficulties were forgotten; we felt a boundless enjoyment, as if we had come to paradise." Thence they travelled in reindeer sledges to Obdorsk, everywhere received in a friendly and hospitable manner by the wild tribes on the way, although the hospitality sometimes became troublesome; as for instance when an Ostyak compelled von Krusenstern to drink tea six times a day, and six cups each time, and offered him as a special luxury an extract of tobacco in brandy.[170]
Krusenstern's adventurous journey across the Kara Sea is one of the many proofs that a Polar navigator ought above everything to avoid being beset. The very circumstance that the ice-field, in which he became fixed in the neighbourhood of Yugor Schar, could drift across to the east coast of the Kara Sea, shows that it was for the most part open, and that a steamer or a good sailing-vessel that year, and probably also the preceding, might very readily have reached the mouth of the Ob or the Yenisej. The narrative of von Krusenstern's journey is besides the first complete sketch we have of a passage from west to east over the Kara Sea. Little idea could any one then have that within a single decade a number of vessels should sail free and unhindered along this route.
Soon after the two voyages I have described above, and before they became generally known in the geographical literature of Western Europe, a new era began in the navigation of the Kara Sea, which was brought about by the Norwegian hunters being compelled to seek for new fields of sport on and beyond Novaya Zemlya.
The history of the Spitzbergen hunting has not yet been written in a satisfactory way, and is in many respects very obscure. It is supposed that after the discovery of Spitzbergen in 1596 by Barents, the hunting in the Polar Seas began during BENNET'S first voyage in 1603, and that the whale-fishing was introduced by JONAS POOLE in 1610. But already in the following year Poole, whose vessel was then wrecked on the west coast of Spitzbergen, found in Horn Sound a ship from Hull, to which he gave charge of saving his cargo, and two years after the English were compelled, in order to keep foreigners from the fishing field they wished to monopolise, to send out six men-of-war, which found there eight Spanish, and a number of Dutch and French vessels (Purchas, iii. pp. 462, 716, &c.). Even in our days the accounts of new sources of wealth do not spread so speedily as in this case, unless, along with the history of the discovery which was written by Hakluyt, Purchas, De Veer, &c., there had been an unknown history of discovery and the whale-fishing, of which it may still be possible to collect some particulars from the archives of San Sebastian, Dunkirk, Hull, and other ports.
However this may be, it is certain that the English and Dutch North-east voyages gave origin to a whale-fishery in the sea round Spitzbergen, which increased by many millions the national wealth of these rich commercial states. The fishing went on at first immediately along the coasts, from which, however, the whales were soon driven, so that the whale-fishers had to seek new fishing-grounds, first farther out to sea between Spitzbergen and Greenland, then in Davis' Strait, and finally in the South Polar Sea, or in the sea on both sides of Behring's Straits.
Spitzbergen, when the whale-fishing ceased in its neighbourhood, was mostly abandoned, until the Russians began to settle there, principally for the hunting of the mountain fox and the reindeer. Of their hunting voyages we know very little, but that they had been widely prosecuted is shown by the remains of their dwellings or huts on nearly all the fjords of Spitzbergen.
They seem to have often wintered, probably because the defective build of their vessels only permitted them to sail to and from Spitzbergen during the height of summer, and they could not thus take part without wintering in the autumn hunting, during which the fattest reindeer are got; nor could the thick and valuable fur of the winter-fox be obtained without wintering.[171] But the hunting voyages of the Russians to Spitzbergen have also long ceased. The last voyage thither took place in 1851-52, and had a very unfortunate issue for most of those who took part in it, twelve men dying out of twenty. On the other hand, the Norwegian voyages to Spitzbergen for the seal and walrus-hunting, begun in the end of last century, still go on. Their history, too, is, even here in the North, very incompletely known, at least to 1858, when the Swedish scientific expeditions began regularly to visit those regions, and to include in the narratives of their voyages more or less complete accounts of the Norwegian hunting, an example that has since been followed, though by no means very completely or systematically, by the editors of Norwegian and foreign journals, in the first place by Petermann's Mittheilungen.[172]
Between 1860 and 1870 the game (walrus, seal, bear, and reindeer) began to diminish in such a degree that the hunters were compelled to seek for themselves new hunting-grounds. They turned to the north and east, the less accessible parts of Spitzbergen, afterwards still farther eastwards towards Novaya Zemlya, and beyond this island to the Kara Sea, and they penetrated farther than all their predecessors. In the history of the North-east Passage therefore some pages must always be devoted to the bold voyages to Novaya Zemlya of these small hunting sloops, provisioned only for the summer.
