Three full years were long enough for Knight to have circumnavigated the globe. By 1721, the Company was so thoroughly alarmed that it bought The Whalebone, sloop—John Scroggs, master—and sent it from Gravesend on the 31st of May to search for Knight. Two years Scroggs searched the northwest coast of the bay, but the northwest coast of the bay is one thousand miles in and out, and Scroggs missed the hidden hole-in-the-wall that might have given up the secret of the sea. Norton traveling inland with the Indians hears disquieting stories, and some whalers chancing North, in 1726, discover a new harbor at the bottom of which lie cannon, anchors, bits of iron, but it is not till fifty years later that the story is learned in detail.
Here it is:
Knight steered for that western arm of the sea known as Chesterfield Inlet. It was here that Norton had heard legends of copper mines and seen evidences of tide water. Just south of Chesterfield Inlet is a group of white quartz islands the largest five by twenty miles, known as Marble Island, from the fact that it is bare of growth as a gravestone. Bedford whalers of modern days have called it by another name—Dead Man’s Island.
At the extreme east is a hole-like cavity in the rock wall where Eskimos were wont to shoot in with their bladder boats and hide from the fury of the northeast gale. One night as the autumn storms raged, the Indians were amazed to see two huge shadows emerge from the lashing hurricane like floating houses—driving straight as an arrow for the mark to certain destruction between an angry sea and the rock wall. If there were cries for help, they were drowned by the shrieks of the hurricane. In the morning, when the storm had abated, the Indians saw that the shadows had been whitemen’s ships. The large one had struck on the reefs and sunk. The other was a mass of wave-beaten wreckage on the shore, but the white men were toiling like demons, saving the timbers. Presently, the whites began to erect a framework—their winter house. To the wondering Eskimos, the thing rose like magic. The Indians grasped their kyacks and fled in terror.
It need scarcely be told—these were Knight’s treasure-seekers, wrecked without saving a pound of provisions on an island bare as a billiard ball twenty miles from the mainland. How did the crews pass that winter? Their only food must have been such wild cranberries as they could gather under the drifting snows, arctic hares, snowbirds, perhaps the carcass of an occasional dead porpoise or whale. When the Indians came back in the summer of 1720, there were very few whitemen left, but there was a great number of graves—graves scooped out of drift sand with bowlders for a tombstone. The survivors seemed to be starving. They fell like wild beasts on the raw seal meat and whale oil that the Eskimos gave them. They seemed to be trying to make a boat out of the driftwood that had been left of that winter’s fuel. The next time the Eskimos visited the castaways, there were only two men alive. These were demented with despair, passing the time weeping and going to the highest rock on the island to watch for a sail at sea. Their clothes had been worn to tatters. They were clad in the skins of the chase and looked like madmen. From the Indians’ account, it was now two years from the time of the wreck. What ammunition had been saved from the ships, must have been almost exhausted. How these two men kept life in their bodies for two winters in the most bitterly cold, exposed part of Hudson Bay, huddling in their snow-buried hut round fires of moss and driftwood, with the howling north wind chanting the death song of the winding sheet, and the scream of the hungry were-wolf borne to their ears in the storm—can better be imagined than described.
Why did not they try to escape? Possibly, because they were weakened by famine and scurvy. Surely Bering’s Russians managed better when storm cast them on a barren island while they were searching this same mythical passage. They drifted home on the wreckage. Why could not these men have tried to escape in the same way? In the first place, they did not know they were only twelve miles from the main coast. Cast on Marble Island in the storm and the dark, they had no idea where they were, except that it was in the North and in a harbor facing east. Of the two last survivors, one seemed to be the armorer, or else that surgeon who was to receive £50 for the extraordinary dangers of this voyage, for he was constantly working with metal instruments to rivet the planks of his raft together. But he was destined to perish as his comrades. When his companion died, the man tried to scoop out a grave in the sand. It was too much for his strength. He fell as he toiled over the grave and died among the Eskimo tents. So perished Captain Knight and his treasure-seekers, including the veteran Bailey—as Hudson had perished before them—taken as toll of man’s progress by the insatiable sea. Not a secret has been wrested from the Unknown, not a milepost won for civilization from savagery, but some life has paid for the secret to go down in despair and defeat; but some bleaching skeleton of a nameless failure marks where the mile forward was won. The lintel of every doorway to advancement is ever marked with some blood sacrifice.
Whalers in 1726, saw the cannon and anchors lying at the bottom of the harbor, also casks with iron hoops—that were to bring back the gold dust. Hearne, in 1769, could count where the graves had been scraped up by the wolves, and he gathered up the skeletons along the beach to bury them in a common grave. Latterly, oddly enough, that island was the rendezvous of Northern whalers—where they came from the far North to bury their dead and set up crosses for those who lie in the sea without a grave. It was known as Dead Man’s Island.
After giving an account of three wrecks in four years, I hope it may not seem inconsistent to say that I believe the next century will see a Hudson’s Bay route to Europe. What—you say—after telling of three wrecks in four years? Yes—what Atlantic port does not have six wrecks in ten years? New York and Montreal have more. If the Hudson’s Bay route is not fit for navigation, the country must make it fit for navigation. Of telegraphs, shelters, light-houses, there is not now one. Canals have been dug for less cause than the Upper Narrows of Hudson Straits. If Peter the Great had waited till St. Petersburg was a fit site for a city, there would have been no St. Petersburg. He made it fit. The same problem confronts northwest America to-day. It is absurd that a population of millions has no seaport nearer than two thousand miles. Churchill or York would be seaports in the middle of the continent. Of course, there would be wrecks and difficulties. The wrecks are part of the toll we pay for harnessing the sea. The difficulties are what make nations great. One day was the delay allowed the fur ships for the straits. Who has not waited longer than one day to enter New York harbor or Montreal?