When one has been at the headquarters of these Arctic expeditions, a good idea is gained of the difficulties and privations of those engaging in polar research. Peary was here, over eight hundred miles in a straight line from the pole, forced to make many trips to transport his provisions and outfit to the farthest land before he could attempt his dash across the rough Arctic pack for the pole. The pluck and daring of such men are to be admired, but the waste of energy, life and money in a useless and probably unsuccessful attempt to reach the pole can only be deplored, as no additional scientific knowledge is likely to be gained by this achievement.
Cape Herschel, Ellesmere Island.
On our return to the boat, we found that a very large floe had come between us and the ship, and in doing so a corner of it had caught on a small island and had gone completely over it, showing the momentum of these great cakes, and the hopelessness of the attempt to build a ship sufficiently strong to withstand the pressure exerted by such ice moving on the tide when suddenly arrested by land or by motionless ice. A narrow lane of water still showed between the floe and the land, and by hard rowing we got safely through before it closed, when the ship butted the way through other ice and finally took us on board.
Ross bay was now crossed in order that a record might be left at Cape Herschel on the mainland of the great island of Ellesmere, Cape Sabine being on an island separated from the mainland by a narrow strait. When about a mile from Cape Herschel, going full speed, and while an attempt was made to pass between two small icebergs, the ship struck heavily on a sharp point of rock. Luckily she did not hang, but bounced over it, striking again amidships and finally on the stern post. A sounding taken within two hundred yards of the rock gave a depth of seventy fathoms, from which it was concluded that the rock was a sharp submerged peak, with the icebergs grounded on two sides of it. The pumps were immediately sounded, but the ship was found to be making very little water, and the full extent of the damage was not known until the vessel was placed in dry-dock at Halifax, when it was found that the blow in the bow had loosened the iron stemplate, which was subsequently lost in butting the heavy ice, and the lower stem was carried away to the ends of the planking. Luckily the Neptune is eight feet thick in the bow, and could stand a great deal of damage there without serious danger to her floating qualities. Seventy-five feet of the keel was removed by the second blow and the stern-post twisted and broken by the third.
It took little time to attend to the duties of the landing at Cape Herschel, where a document taking formal possession in the name of King Edward VII., for the Dominion, was read, and the Canadian flag was raised and saluted. A copy of the document was placed in a large cairn built of rock on the end of the cape.
The return to the ship was made at half past six in the morning, when, steaming southward, the heavy dangerous ice from Smith sound was soon left behind. We continued southward all day, passing as close to the land as the ice would allow, so as to make a chart of this badly surveyed coast. The survey was carried to a point about fifteen miles to the south of Cape Isabella, where the weather became foggy, and progress through the ice was only possible by following leads of open water running southeast or diagonally away from the coast.
The ice met with during the crossing of Smith sound and for a few miles southward of Cape Sabine was chiefly large masses of thick Arctic ice, lately brought south by the northern current from Kennedy channel, where the fast ice appeared to have broken loose only a short time previous to our arrival, and was quickly emptying out of the great channel leading direct to the Arctic sea. All of this ice was solid, and from twenty to forty feet in thickness, and could not be of the previous winter’s formation as no ice of that thickness can be formed in one season. The greater part of it probably had been formed on the surface of the Arctic ocean, during one or more years’ drift across the polar regions before it entered the northern part of Kennedy channel, where it had remained during the past winter, and was now passing south to mingle with the other ice of the ‘middle pack’ of Baffin bay. Much of the ice met with to the southward was composed of large sheets of similar heavy Arctic ice cemented together by thinner ice of one season’s formation, evidently drifted out of some bay to the southward of Cape Sabine. It had quite recently broken away in great sheets (one of which took three-quarters of an hour to steam past) from the mouths of the bays whose inner surfaces were still tightly frozen as we passed them. The diverse character of these large sheets is further increased by the number of small icebergs often seen frozen into the mass along with the polar sea ice.
The eastern side of Ellesmere island is quite high, the probable general elevation exceeding 2,000 feet and perhaps 3,000 feet. The coast-line is broken by many deep bays and prominent headlands. The land rises precipitously from the frozen sea into irregular mountains, whose partly rounded peaks are as a rule masked by an ice-cap which appears to be continuous along this eastern coastal region, although it is said not to continue for any great distance inland. Great glaciers fill all the valleys and actively discharge icebergs into the bays. Only the projecting rocky headlands and some of the lower points facing south in the bays are free of snow and ice, so that at least nine-tenths of the surface is permanently covered by an icy mantle. This is in marked contrast to the Greenland coast opposite, where all the outer cliffs and the shores are comparatively free from snow and ice. The cause of this marked difference of climate is probably due to a divergence of direction of currents along these coasts. On the Greenland side a southerly current, comparatively free of ice, allows the open sea to raise the general temperature, while on the Ellesmere side the Arctic current, with its continuous stream of ice, blocks the bays and does not allow the open water to ameliorate the cold of the ice-covered lands. The prevailing easterly winds also carry more moisture to the west side, causing it to be masked by fog at the time of brilliant sunshine on the opposite coast.
The 12th proved thick and dirty, with much rain. Land was only seen in the early morning, and not again until five o’clock in the evening, when a number of small islands showed our position to be off Cape Horsburg, the northeastern point of Philpot island, on the northern side of the entrance to Lancaster sound; we had therefore passed across the mouth of Jones sound without a sight of the land on either side.