WALRUS.++
CHAPTER III.
A Haul of the Dredge—Norman Lockyer Island—Traces of an Eskimo Exodus—Midnight on 12th August—Mysterious Cairns—Forcing the Tidal Barrier—“Kane’s Open Polar Sea”—Hannah Island—Grant Land Reached—Musk Oxen—“Discovery’s” Winter Quarters.
AN anxious watch was always kept for any favourable movement of the ice. But, meanwhile, the broad smooth floe alongside afforded a tempting exercising ground, whereon, after working hours, some played football and others took their first lessons in dog-driving. The ships happened to be secured in a sort of basin fifteen fathoms deep, but with shallower water all round, so that the bottom was protected from the scrapings of icebergs. It was evidently a favourable spot for a haul of the dredge. Our expectations were more than realised. The net came up full of strange creatures. Here a fish with a sucker under his chin; there a brittle feather star with long branched arms. He has to be extracted most carefully from the bag, and supplied with some cotton to grasp before being consigned to our naturalist’s ever-ready bottle. Next comes a Terebratula, or lamp shell, anchored by a strange chance to a fossil Terebratula drifted from some neighbouring rock. Here are pale vermilion-coloured antlers of Escharella, and delicate lacework of Retepore Polyzoa, and here, perhaps greatest prize of all, a little calcareous sponge with a double frill glistening like spun glass. The dredging operations were continued far into the nominal night, and, after a little necessary rest, we started to explore the island. A steep wall of ice-foot encircling the land disputed our inroad. Clambering up over it, we were at once struck with the terraced condition of the shores. On the north side of the island especially, the ridges rose one over the other in long horizontal waves to the number of twenty or more. Even on the highest, sea shells were to be picked up. Each ridge was tipped here and there with little mounds of yellow clay, sometimes in lines at right angles to the ridges. The shore was very barren; a few little grey tufts of grass, or Draba, found root in the mounds of yellow clay, all the rest was small stones weathered into sharp points like cinders.
When we reached the northern shores of the island, a number of conspicuous white objects strewn along the lower terraces excited our curiosity. They were bones of walrus and seal, much broken evidently by the hand of man, but fragile and moss-grown with age. Some long-vanished tribe had doubtless found this lonely island a rich hunting-ground. The western point of the island was covered with the foundations of a complete town. In some places mere rings of stones had served to keep down the edges of summer tents of skins; in others, rectangular enclosures three yards broad, with excavated floor and with traces of porch opening seawards, gave unmistakable evidence of more permanent habitation. Deep carpets of velvety moss found rich soil in the floors of the huts, which had doubtless been no cleaner than that of modern Eskimo. A little further inland we came upon a bird-shelter, such as the natives of Danish Greenland still use to encourage geese and duck to settle on their shores. It consisted of four stones piled together like a miniature “Druid’s altar,” so as to form a chamber large enough to shelter a nest. Generations of eider duck had been hatched in it in security since the last wild hunter left the shore. When we found it, it held a deep nest of eider down with three eggs, fresh, but cold, probably belonging to a duck we had killed before landing. The traces of former human habitation found on this island, as well as at other places further northwards, seemed to be about equally ancient. All told—not of fixed habitation in these inhospitable lands, but of the exodus of some migrating tribe whose hunters must have travelled far with their dog sledges if the walrus and seal were as scarce then as now. No doubt the Arctic Highlanders who told Kane that an island rich in musk oxen lay far to the north, had occasionally despatched hunters in that direction; but no mere hunters would require such a town of huts, nor would they take the trouble to build on a new site at each visit without disturbing the circles of stone close beside them. Similar ancient remains have been found far westward through the Parry group, and have been attributed to that host which, in the fourteenth century, swept downwards from the unknown north and annihilated the Norsemen; but in our case the broken walrus and seal bones, though lichen-grown and evidently very old, could hardly have lasted five centuries even in an Arctic climate.