Explorers and Travellers

by A. W. Greely

Adrift on a Berg.

After this preliminary journey Hayes laid down supplies at the nearest point on the Greenland shore south of, and facing, Cape Hawks. This place, called Cairn Point, was to be the base of his summer’s campaign to the north. Finally everything was ready for the main journey, and the party started on the night of April 3, 1861. Twelve men, the entire available force, were put into the field: Jansen with an eight-dog sledge, Knorr with a six-dog sledge, and a ten-man sledge on which was mounted a twenty-foot metallic life-boat, with which Hayes hoped to navigate the Polar Sea. The journey lay directly to the north over the frozen surface of Kane Sea, where the difficulties of travel through the broken hummocky ice were so great, and the unfitness of some of the men for Arctic travel so speedily developed, that Hayes was forced to abandon his efforts to get the boat across the frozen sea, which, he says, “could not have been done by one hundred men.” On April 24th Hayes records that he had been twenty-two days from the schooner, and was now distant only thirty miles from Cairn Point. Four days later, still struggling across the rough ice of Kane Sea, the party was practically broken down, being, as Hayes chronicles, “barely capable of attending to their own immediate necessities without harboring the thought of exerting themselves to complete a journey to which they can see no termination, and in the very outset of which they feel that their lives are being sacrificed.”

In this critical condition Hayes changed his plans, and sent back the entire party to the brig, except Knorr, Jansen, and McDonald, whom he selected as best fitted to make the northern journey, which he had decided to make with fourteen dogs and two sledges. Turning northward with renewed confidence and vigor, though yet struggling with various misfortunes through a tangle of broken hummocks, Hayes reached Cape Hawks on May 11th. The condition of the ice may be judged from the fact that he had been thirty-one days in making a distance of eighty miles, a little more than two miles a day. Three days’ farther march took him to Cape Frazier, where the flagstaff erected by him in 1853 yet stood erect. At the end of the next march, where they were driven to the sea ice owing to the impossibility of following the ice-foot, Hayes ascended the hillside, whence, he says, “No land was visible to the eastward. As it would not have been difficult through such an atmosphere to see a distance of fifty or sixty miles, it would appear therefore that Kennedy Channel is somewhat wider than heretofore supposed.”

On May 15th Jansen was disabled for travelling by a sprained back and injured leg, and the next morning was scarcely able to move. Hayes decided to leave the disabled man in charge of McDonald and proceed with Knorr, his purpose being “to make the best push I could and travel as far as my provisions warranted, reach the highest attainable latitude and secure such a point of observation as would enable me to form a definite opinion respecting the sea before me.”

Rough ice and deep snow so impeded his progress the first day that he only made nine miles in as many hours. Ten hours’ march compelled them to again camp, and four hours of the third day brought them to the southern cape of a bay which he determined to cross. After travelling four miles the rotten ice and frequent water-channels proved that the bay was impassable, and therefore they went into camp. The next day Hayes climbed to the top of the cliff, some eight hundred feet high, whence, he says, “the sea beneath me was a mottled sheet of white and dark patches multiplied in size as they receded until the belt of the water-sky blended them together.... All the new evidence showed that I stood upon the shores of the polar basin, and that the broad ocean lay at my feet.... There was seen in dim outline the white sloping summit of a noble head-land, the most northern known land upon our globe. I judged it to be in latitude 82° 30´ N., or four hundred and fifty miles from the North Pole.... There was no land visible except the coast on which I stood.”

Hayes, before returning to his ship, deposited in a cairn a record, dated May 19, 1861, setting forth his trip, stating that his observations placed him in 81° 35´ N. latitude, and 70° 30´ W. longitude; that his further progress was stopped by rotten ice and cracks; that he believed the polar basin was navigable during the months of July, August, and September, and that he would make an attempt to get through Smith’s Sound when the ice broke that summer.

The extent and scope of Hayes’s discoveries, as set forth in his account of the expedition in “The Open Polar Sea,” gave rise to persistent and adverse criticism both as to the soundness of his judgment and also as to the accuracy of his observations. Three expeditions, by their later surveys, have demonstrated that the astronomical position assigned by Hayes to his “farthest” on the east coast of Grinnell Land is impossible. There is unmistakably an error either of latitude or of longitude. Cape Joseph Goode, it is to be remarked, is in the longitude assigned by Hayes, while Cape Lieber is no less than six and a half degrees to the eastward; reversely, Lieber corresponds nearly to Hayes’s latitude, while Cape Joseph Goode is a degree and a half to the south. Grave and undisputable errors in other latitudes, all being too far to the north, indicate that the mistake in this instance is also of latitude. In justice to Hayes it should be said that the latitude of his “farthest” depended solely on a single observation with a small field sextant of the meridian altitude of the sun. While this is the common method on shipboard it is exceedingly objectionable in Arctic land determinations. It depends not only on the honesty of the observer, but on the condition of the sextant and also on the manner in which it is handled; either of these three qualities being faulty the observation is incorrect. The tendency of the sextant to “slip,” as it is turned over for reading, and the almost invariably benumbed condition of the hands of the traveller, indicate the extreme difficulty of making any single reading with accuracy. Again, with haste demanded so often by adverse circumstances, the index of a very small sextant may be misread a whole degree. It is unquestioned that one or the other of these accidents happened to Hayes, for the independent investigations of Bessels, Schott, and others lead to the inevitable conclusion, which any scientist may verify by examination of Hayes’s widely separated data, that his “farthest” is placed too far north. The consensus of opinion in the Lady Franklin expedition pointed to Cape Joseph Goode, 80° 14´ N., as Hayes’s “farthest,” as it agreed better with Hayes’s description than any other point; it may be added that from this cape Hayes could not see the Greenland coast above Cape Constitution, which he leaves blank on his chart, and again, here the unusually heavy spring tides, of nearly twenty-five-foot range, break up the southern half of the floes of Kennedy Channel, thus forming early in the year large water-spaces—the Open Polar Sea of Hayes and Morton.

Even if Hayes’s sight of the Open Polar Sea proved visionary, and certain unskilled observations failed of verification, yet his adventurous voyage was not barren of geographical results. He was the first civilized man to land on the shores of Ellesmere Land, along the coasts of which, between the seventy-seventh and seventy-eighth parallels, he made important discoveries; while farther to the northward, Hayes Sound, Bache Island, and other unknown lands and waters were added to our maps through his strenuous exertions.

Breaking out his schooner on July 10, 1861, an unprecedentedly early date for an Arctic ship, he quickly decided that he could hope for no further northing in a sailing vessel. However, he crossed the strait to the unvisited shores of Ellesmere Land, where he made such an examination of the coast as was practicable, and then turned his face homeward.

Hayes was fully alive to the absolute necessity of steam-power for complete Arctic success, but strictly limited means obliged him to go in a sailing vessel or not at all. He plainly foresaw the magnificent success awaiting the first expedition that should carry steam-power into Smith Sound, and full of dreams of future Arctic work he impatiently returned to the United States. It was not to be. Civil war raged, and the country called its loyal sons to arms. Hayes was not the man to falter at such a juncture. He at once tendered his schooner to the government for such use as was possible, and volunteered for the war, where his activity as the head of a great war hospital taxed to the utmost the mental and physical powers which had so long been occupied in arduous efforts to solve the riddle of the ice-free sea.