ESKIMO TENT-CIRCLES.
After three days’ detention in Franklin and Pierce Bay, the ships succeeded in creeping up inshore past Cape Prescott and a broad glacier-headed bay, which has since been called after Professor Allman. Every one was on deck as we rounded Cape Hawkes into Dobbin Bay at midnight on the 12th August, for the scene that was opening beyond the tall shadow of the cape was one of unusual splendour, altogether different from such ideas of far Northern scenery as we had gleaned from books. It has somehow or other become conventional to represent Arctic skies as dark and lowering, and Arctic day as little better than uncertain twilight. Nothing could be wider from the mark, at least during the months that travel by ship and sledge is possible. Washington Irving Island threw a long shadow towards us across the lilac-tinted floes and gleaming water-spaces, which broke into ripples as our iron prow pushed towards them. As we rounded in close to the island, every telescope was fixed on a strange point on the top of the bluff standing out clear and sharp against the northern sunlight. It was either a very odd pinnacle of rock or a cairn, and that, too, remarkably well placed. We could soon decide, for the back of the bluff afforded a steep but practicable ascent. The conglomerate rock of the summit was smoothed off like a mosaic by the action of some ancient glacier, but near the edges it broke into a succession of rocky ledges, and on the topmost of these stood the object of our curiosity—a conical pile of well-packed stones. A second similar one stood a little lower down to the southwards, both plainly the work of a painstaking builder. But who was that builder? Not Eskimo. Structure and site forbade that suggestion. Civilised man had but once visited this shore, and that was when Dr. Hayes, in the spring of 1861, halted his tired dogs on the floes beside the island. He did not climb the bluff, and, besides, such an active sledge traveller would not have loitered to build a pair of cairns except at some crisis of his journey, and then he would have referred to them in his Journal. But the cairns themselves bore witness that they were not the work of any modern builder. Lichens grow but slowly in these regions. Dr. Scott found Sir Edward Parry’s cairn untouched by them after thirty-two years, and the wheel tracks of his cart were fresh as yesterday’s when, after the same interval, Sir Leopold M’Clintock crossed his track. These stones, on the other hand, were cemented together by deep patches of orange lichen—the growth of many generations. We found no record or scratched stone to tell us the names or fortunes of the men who had left the cairns as witnesses to us, their successors. Perhaps some baffled wanderer, whose fate is unknown to fame, had thus marked his furthest north. There is plenty of room for conjecture. Many have sailed for the northern Eldorado since Karlsefne, Celtic Norseman, left his Greenland home and launched his three ships on the first Arctic Expedition, eight hundred and seventy years ago.
CAPE HAWKES.
For a week after leaving the island our progress northward was a constant struggle with the pack. Here, in the broad basin opposite Humboldt glacier, the Atlantic tidal wave through Baffin’s Sea terminates, and leaves an icy barrier to mark its limits. Had not that barrier consisted of much broken floes lying off a continuous coast-line, it would have been impossible to force any ship through it; but, aided as we were by the shore, twenty-eight miles were made good in a week. Never did the prospects of the Expedition seem less cheering, but we comforted ourselves with the knowledge that the “Polaris,” a fortnight later in the season, had made her magnificent run into Robeson Channel without much difficulty. With constant watchfulness and unremitting labour the way northward was won mile by mile. Every hour opened up some fresh possibility of advance, or some new danger to be combated. The tired watch-keepers found little rest during their short spell below. Almost every one “turned in” without undressing. The tearing and splintering of the ice along the ship’s sides, and the creaking and crushing as she charged the floes, made sleep difficult. “All hands up screw and rudder,” became a familiar order. And twice during the week it became necessary to cut docks in the floes to shelter the ships from pressure. On the first occasion, the heavy ice-saws, swung on tripods and worked by every hand on board, did their work readily; but on the second day they were found too short to reach through the thick ice, and nothing but rapid blasting with gunpowder saved the ships from an overwhelming crush. At length we found the rising tide flowing—not from the south as it had done, but from the unknown north. It was the 19th August. The barrier was past. Pools and lanes of water became more frequent, and on the 21st we steamed through a sea which Morton, leader of Kane’s northern party, might well call open, for the ice fragments floating in its intensely green water were not numerous enough to prevent a slight swell, which gave our wardroom lamps the old familiar swing.
