The Desert World

by Arthur Mangin

N countries which enjoy an always elevated temperature, the excess of their fertility is not much more favourable than extreme dryness to the material and moral development of man. There can be no doubt that the exuberant vegetation is a potent cause of the insalubrity of the atmosphere. And thus it comes that civilization, commerce, industry, labour, have only been able to establish themselves and to make any considerable progress in temperate or even cold countries, where man has found a climate more healthy, but at the same time sufficiently unequal, and often sufficiently inclement, to compel him to defend himself by various means against the rigour of the atmosphere, and a soil capable of furnishing him abundantly with the products necessary for his wants, but on the condition that he gains them by intelligent and persistent toil—by the “sweat of his brow.”

When we arrive under a latitude or a thermometrical mean which exceeds by some degrees that of England or France, we find the inhabitants giving way to sloth and indolence; their manners are at once softer and yet fiercer, their passions more violent and their tastes more fertile; arts and poesy occupy them to the neglect of the exact sciences; industry and commerce languish, agriculture is despised. But if, on the contrary, we proceed towards the north, we discover a greater degree of civilization, a warmer devotion to labour. The most industrious peoples of the world, the English and the Dutch, inherit a cold, humid, and even foggy atmosphere. In Canada and the northernmost States of the American Union, the Anglo-Saxon race has lost nothing of its laborious habits and its enterprising audacity. In Sweden and in Norway, in Russia, even in Siberia, the traveller meets with towns and villages in a flourishing condition up to the 60th parallel of north latitude and beyond, under a climate whose mean annual temperature is inferior to the mean winter temperature of France, and where the thermometer frequently descends in winter below—40° R. Thus, then, we see that the warm bland tropical air enervates the mind as well as the body, while the cold of the north seems to increase their energy. It is also true that cold climates, all things considered, are healthier than hot countries, where disease is more rapid and fatal in its inroads; and that, finally, civilization furnishes man with the means of protecting himself against the injurious effects of a very low temperature, while it leaves him without defence against those of excessive heat. We shall see hereafter that the human organism modifies itself, in the Polar regions, in such a manner as to support, without too great suffering, a degree of cold which at the outset it appears to us must be absolutely intolerable.

We may place between the isothermal lines of +5° and of 0° the limit where commences the territory which, in the northern hemisphere, merits the name of the Region of the Polar Deserts. Already, in effect, under this glacial latitude, the landscape assumes a sombre and desolate aspect, which seems to indicate the propinquity of the “funereal glaciers” of the Pole. The daring traveller who beards the Winter-king in his own realms meets no more with massive and lofty mountain-crests; a few only of the great chains of Europe and Asia—here the Scandinavian Alps, there the Oural Mountains; still further, at the easternmost extremity of Asia, some scattered summits, which we may consider as belonging to the elevation of the Altai, prolong even to the Arctic shores their cantled and snow-shrouded peaks. Everywhere, also, immense steppes, intersected by swamps and relieved with woods of fir and birch, spread for leagues upon leagues in the dull light of a wintry sky, until they merge into those rent and rocky plains, bare of all vegetation except a few lichens and mosses, which are almost always encrusted in glittering snow and ice, and mingle in the distance with the frost-bound waters of the Arctic Sea.

It is in America that these icy deserts are most extensive; not only because that continent stretches much nearer the Pole than does the Old World, but because, owing to its geographical disposition and geological structure, it is much more exposed, even towards the south, to that combined action of the atmosphere, land, and water, whose effects constitute the Arctic climate.[190]

This climate, then, prevails over nearly the whole of Danish America, the recently-acquired possessions of the United States, the Hudson’s Bay Territory, and Labrador, down to that inconsiderable watershed which separates from the tributaries of Hudson’s Bay, the three basins of the St. Lawrence, the five great lakes, and the Mississippi. This line of watershed undulates between the 52nd and 49th parallel of latitude, from Belle-Isle Strait to the sources of the Saskatchewan, in the Rocky Mountains, where it inflects towards the Pacific Ocean, skirting on the north the basin of the Columbia.

“Thus circumscribed on the side of the south,” say Messieurs Hervé and F. de Lanoye,[191] “the Arctic lands of America, including the archipelagoes of the north and north-east, cannot measure less than 560,000 square leagues. They therefore greatly exceed in superficies the mass of the European lands, estimated at about 490,000 square leagues.”

The same authors divide the Arctic lands into three regions, of which one—they name it “the Province of the North-West”—belongs rather to those undulating Prairies described in Book III. than to the Polar Deserts. The two others are the “Middle or Wooded Region,” and the “Barren Landes.” The Wooded Region comprehends the basins of the Upper Mackenzie, the Churchill, the Nelson, and the Severn. Hudson’s Bay cuts into it on the east with its deep anfractuosities. The navigation of this Mediterranean of the North, open to the currents and to the drift of the Polar ices, begins only in the month of June, to close in that of September; yet in this interval the obstruction of the ices is so great that it occupies a stout vessel two months to traverse the diameter of the bay. Along the littoral of this sea the soil never thaws below the surface, and it often freezes on the very surface in the middle of summer.

Like a fierce and despotic tyrant does Winter reign on these shores for from eight to nine months. From the end of September the earth, the rivers which flow into the bay, their affluents, and the chaplet of lakes which connect them with one another, all disappear under a layer of hoar-frost. “The provinces of New Wales and of Maine do not enjoy for a longer period than three months the temperature of +11° (centigrades), necessary for the development of vegetation. The southern shores of the Great Bear and Slave Lakes possess that temperature for only two months at the most.” It is not until the month of May that the thermometer rises ever so little above zero in the Wooded Region, and that a breath of life passes into the plants. Then only the reddish shoots of the willows, the poplar trees, and the birches attire themselves in their long cottony pods; the thickets grow green; the dandelion, the burdock, and the saxifrages flourish at the foot of the rocks; then the sweet-brier, the gooseberry, and the strawberry put forth their fruity burden; and above these dwarf shrubs the pines, the larches, the thuyas display all the luxury of their sombre verdure. But at the same time the melted snows have transformed the soil, recently so hard and polished like marble, into peaty bogs, where myriads of mosquitoes swarm—an intolerable scourge, which the traveller can only escape by surrounding himself with clouds of smoke.