The Alert and the Discovery left the shores of England in May 1875. After a voyage of five weeks’ duration they arrived at Lievely, the port of Disco Island, on the west coast of Greenland. This small settlement numbers about ninety-six inhabitants, Danes and Eskimos,—generally speaking, a mixed race. The Danish Inspector of North Greenland resides here, and he received the expedition with a salute from three brass cannon planted in front of his house. There is a well-conducted school, attended by about sixteen children; and a small church, where the schoolmaster reads the Lutheran service on Sundays,—the priest coming over from Upernavik occasionally, to perform marriages, christenings, and other religious services.
The Alert having taken on board thirty Eskimo dogs and a driver, the expedition left Disco at one o’clock on July 16th, and next morning reached Kiltenbunto, about thirty miles further north.
Kiltenbunto is a little island in the Strait of Weigattet, between Disco and the mainland. Here the Discovery took on board thirty dogs; and shooting-parties from both ships made a descent on a “loomery,” or “bird-bazaar,” frequented by guillemots, kittiwakes, and other ocean-birds. Two or three days later the expedition arrived at a settlement named Proven, where it was joined by the Eskimo dog-driver, Hans Christian, the attendant of Kane, Hayes, and Hall, in their several expeditions. At Proven the adventurers received and answered their last letters from “home.”
Striking northward through Baffin Bay, they reached Cape York on the 25th of July, and met with a company of the misnamed Arctic Highlanders, who traversed the ice-floes in their dog-sledges, and soon fraternized with the seamen. A narwhal having been harpooned, a quantity of the skin and blubber was given to these Eskimos. Mr. Hodson, the chaplain of the Discovery, describes them as exceedingly greedy and barbarous, eating whatever fell in their way, but living chiefly upon seals. They were not so far advanced in civilization as to be able to construct kayacks, and apparently they had never before seen Europeans. They wore trousers of bear-skin, and an upper garment of seal-skin.
Proceeding northward by Dr. Kane’s Crimson Cliffs, they soon reached that brave explorer’s celebrated winter quarters, Port Foulke, and took advantage of a day’s delay to visit the Brother John Glacier. They found Dr. Kane’s journal, but no relics; shot a reindeer, and a large number of birds.
Between Melville Bay and the entrance to Smith Sound no ice was met with; but on the 30th of July the “pack” was sighted, off Cape Sabine, in lat. 78° 41´ N. Here, at Port Payer, the ships were fast held by the ice for several days. An attempt to proceed further northward was made to the west of the islands in Hayes Sound; but the water-way not leading in the right direction, the ships returned. On the 6th of August they made a fresh start, and thenceforward maintained an uninterrupted struggle with the ice. The Alert led the way, with Captain Nares in her “crow’s-nest,” anxiously looking out for practicable channels. At Cape Frazer the huge solid mass again delayed them. Then they succeeded in crossing Kennedy Channel to the east side, and taking shelter in Petermann Fiord—so named after the great German geographer. After a few days they again pushed northward; and on the 25th of August, after many narrow escapes from being crushed in the ice, a well-sheltered harbour received them, on the west side of Hall Basin, north of Lady Franklin Sound, in lat. 81° 44´ N. This was at once selected as the winter quarters of the Discovery. Her sister-ship, continuing her course, rounded the north-east point of Grant Land; but instead of falling in with a continuous coast-line, stretching one hundred miles further towards the north, as all had anticipated, found herself on the border of what was evidently a very extensive sea, with impenetrable ice on every side. As no harbour could be found, the ship was secured as far north as possible, inside a kind of embankment of grounded ice close to the land. There she passed the winter; and during the eleven months of her detention no navigable water-way, through which she could move further to the north, presented itself.
Far from meeting with the “great Polar Sea” dreamed of by Kane and Hayes, our adventurers discovered that the ice-barrier before them was unusually thick and solid. It looked as if composed of floating icebergs which had gradually been jammed and welded together. Henceforth it will be known on our maps as the Palæocrystic Sea, or Sea of Ancient Ice; and a stranded mass of ice disrupted from an ice-floe is to be termed a floeberg.
Ordinary ice does not exceed ten feet in thickness; but in the Polar Sea, generation after generation, layer has been superimposed on layer, until the whole mass measures from eighty feet to one hundred and twenty feet; it floats with its surface nowhere less than fifteen feet above the water-line. It was this wonderful thickness which prevented the Alert from driving ashore. Owing to its great depth of flotation, sixty feet to one hundred feet, the mass grounded on coming into shallow water, and formed a breakwater within which the ship was comparatively secure. “When two pieces of ordinary ice are driven one against the other, and the edges broken up, the crushed pieces are raised by the pressure into a high, long, wall-like hedge of ice. When two of the ancient floes of the Polar Sea meet, the intermediate lighter broken-up ice which may happen to be floating about between them alone suffers; it is pressed up between the two closing masses to a great height, producing a chaotic wilderness of angular blocks of all shapes and sizes, varying in height up to fifty feet above water, and frequently covering an area upwards of a mile in diameter.”