Plate IV.—FLOEBERG BEACH AND THE POLAR SEA, LOOKING NORTH FROM THE CREST OF CAPE RAWSON, July, 1876—p. [29].
WHERE Robeson Channel opens out into the Polar Sea, the cliffs of Grant Land give place to a more shelving shore. This sketch, made late in July, 1876, and looking due north across the winter quarters of H.M.S. “Alert” at Floeberg Beach, shows the poleward prospect from the last of the cliffs. The coast-line curves away to the west into Black Cliff Bay, then turns north, and ends in the peaked mountains of Cape Joseph Henry, the point from which the northern sledge-parties started. Patches of melting snow, under Cairn Hill on the left, and under the slaty crest in the foreground (where some pink saxifrage is still in flower), send rivulets across the mud-flats to the South Ravine, and help to flood the green one-season ice between the grounded edge of the perennial pack and the shore. The floes are mapped out by hedges of hummocks, and look deceptively smooth from this height.
The whole sea was covered with floes varying from a few yards to miles in diameter. Their surfaces were undulating, and assumed peculiar blue and metallic greens in low sunlight. Small angular spaces between them were choked with fragments broken from the parent masses, and long irregular hedges made of similar débris surrounded each ice-field. These hedges rarely reflected the same tint as the floes; when one was purple, the other was green, and vice versa. It was months before we realised the full import of this ice. At first it seemed impossible that the great masses grounded along the shore could be mere fragments of sea ice we saw spread before us. We mistook them for icebergs. Like them, they were stratified. They grew in the same way, only the land is the parent of one, and the sea of the other. The Polar floes are in fact a floating glacier, and we accordingly called the fragments floebergs. In this the sea before us differed from ordinary frozen seas. Baffin’s Bay, for example, renews its ice year by year. Every summer great part of it is, as we saw it, free from ice; in autumn, its surface freezes first into a pasty mass, then into floes nearly as flat as a frozen pond. During the winter, frost and snow thicken them, and wind piles them into hummocks. Sometimes part of the ice lasts for more than one year—thus whalers talk of ice of one or more seasons old. But the floes of the Polar Sea are perennial. They bear the plainest evidences of great age. They grow from above, and are stratified by seasonal deposits of snow slowly converted into ice. Excepting in insignificant spots along shore, the surface of the Polar Sea never freezes into new floe; it is never long enough exposed. The only ice of a single season possible here is a frozen together conglomerate of boulder blocks between the thick old floes. With this distinction in view, the term “Paleocrystic” was applied to this “sea of ancient ice.” “Archäiocrystic” would more exactly represent what we meant, but sounds, if possible, more pedantic. The age of the floes is a subject for speculation; whether there is any limit to their thickness is also unknown. It does not in any way depend on crushing or piling together. They should be thinnest near land, where they are most frequently broken, and yet there were several on our beach—Floeberg Beach, as we called it—over eighty feet in thickness. We met with others floating so high out of water that they could not be less than two hundred feet deep. When strong winds and tides occur together during autumn, pools and fissures, crevasses rather, sometimes form in the edges of this polar-ice cap, but only those who have seen it can fully appreciate the utter impossibility of “boring” any ship through this polar pack; a nut-shell would have as much chance under a steam-hammer as a ship between the closing walls of such a crevasse. This was the open polar sea we had heard so much of, but which in truth no one in the Expedition had ever expected to sail in. What we had not calculated on was the absence of land northward; and that the coasts shown in the maps were absent was soon beyond all doubt. Day by day our disappointing position became plainer. The continuous coast-line upon which every hope depended was at least not in sight. One chance still remained. Possibly the land beyond Cape Joseph Henry turned to the northward, and though the ship had reached the utmost limit of navigation, sledges could travel along the frozen shore. Depôts pushed far northwards on a continuous coast-line would yet enable us to reach a high latitude, if that northward-running coast-line could be found at any reasonable distance from the ship. Meanwhile, it was plainly necessary to accommodate our aspirations to the stern negatives before us. The infinite possibilities of the unknown were no longer at our disposal. We could no longer cherish little unspoken hopes of rapid success, more navigable seas, richer hunting-grounds, or milder climate, polewards. Our ship lay about a hundred yards from the beach, her bows pointed to the north, her right side against the grounded ice which protected her, and on her left a space of shallow water stretching to the shore. Even this space was by no means “open water;” it was, on the contrary, filled with floating lumps of ice of every size, from that of a hailstone to that of a house, moving about with every change of tide. Some of the large ones were troublesome neighbours, and had to be secured with hawsers to prevent them getting into damaging positions. One of them, more erratic and less manageable than the rest, was commonly known as the Wandering Jew. The poet, by-the-bye, who placed that hero on a piece of polar pack, must have had a prophetic glimpse of these perennial floes ever drifting slowly round and round the pole. A few days after the gale the whole space between the ship and the shore froze hard, and it was possible to walk to land. The shelving beach was of rough shale, but, like the rest of the land, was almost entirely covered with snow. Much of the latter was soft and white, and had fallen recently; but here and there, in sheltered hollows, hard brown patches had evidently remained through the summer. Half-a-mile inshore low undulating hills rose to about four hundred feet. None of them had anything characteristic about them; they were simply rounded-off banks of brown slate and grey shale, with long straight slopes of hard snow on their northward faces—splendid places for headlong “toboggoning,” as we found later on. Nothing could be more dismal than our new territory. But we still hoped that the next spring tides might allow the ship to advance a little way into some more favoured spot before she was finally frozen in for the winter. Two short excursions had already been made in search of safer quarters, but the reports they brought back were not encouraging. There were several bays not far north of the ship, but most of them were blocked with ice, which had evidently remained unmoved for many seasons. Under any circumstances, it was perfectly plain that the ship would be obliged to winter within a few miles of where she lay, and preliminary exploration of the coast westward, in preparation for the autumn sledging, could no longer be delayed. Accordingly, three dog-sledges were got ready to pioneer the road towards Cape Joseph Henry, to push forward a small depôt, and to search likely-looking spots for game.
Dog-sledges are to an Arctic Expedition what cavalry is to an army. They act as the feelers of the advancing force, do the scout work, carry despatches, keep up communications, and are in fact the Uhlans of a sledging campaign. Speed is their strong point, but in the long run dogs are unable to carry their provisions as far as men. They have, nevertheless, accomplished long journeys in latitudes where the pick and shovel had not to travel before the sledge, and where an occasional seal or bear helped out their provender. Looked at from a distance, there is a deal of romance about dog-sledging. Imagination immediately pictures the lively galloping team flying along over the crisp snow, and the comfortably muffled driver, covered with furs, reclining on the sledge, without a trace of baggage or provisions to inconvenience him. Alas! one half-hour’s experience of the real thing is enough to take the whole gloss off the subject. The sledge is heavily laden with tent and sleeping-bags, provisions, and fuel—an item not considered by many people, without which even a drink of water is an impossibility. The driver toils along behind the sledge, guiding it by its handles as he would a plough, or flogging the dogs with all his might. Striding along in the deep snow gives him a peculiar waddling gait universal amongst the Eskimo. His companions run in front or behind, and keep up as best they can, painfully panting in the icy air, which sometimes brings blood from the lungs. When the sledge sticks in the snow, or falls into a crack, or jams between two lumps of ice, the dogs make one violent effort, and then stop doggedly till the sledge is lifted out for them. Then the driver hisses out “Kis, kis, kis,” and the whip encourages any dogs that wont understand good Eskimo or forcible English, and off they go again. The Eskimo dog is, as a rule, utterly destitute of the ordinary virtues of his species. He is simply a wolf that has found slavery convenient. After the autumn sledging season, we tried hard to rear pups. Sometimes we got them large enough to toddle about the decks, and the fat little morsels would begin to answer to their names; but if we took our eyes off them for an instant, little “Samuel” or “William Henry” would suddenly disappear, and some near relative would look a little less hungry than before. When travelling, there is generally some unpopular individual in the team, and he is snapped at by all the rest. The dogs pull in the shape of a fan, constantly changing places, and thus tangling their tails in the traces. One elderly dog, appropriately called Bruin, had lost his tail in that way; some former Eskimo master had found it simpler to amputate than to unravel. More than once dogs were so severely bitten by their fellow-labourers that they had to be tied up in bread-bags, and carried on the sledge till they recovered a little. The meat biscuit provided for their diet was the only thing they would not eat. Hide sledge-lashings or whip-thongs were luxuries to them. One brute, called Michael, invariably ate his canvas harness, and upon one occasion ran off with the cook’s metal ladle, and bit a large piece out of it. With all their faults, our dogs worked wonderfully hard. Their value to the Expedition can not be overrated. They could pull at a pinch nearly one hundred pounds each for a long day’s march. Then when camping-time came, the driver whistled the signal to halt. A meal of preserved meat was served out to them, and they coiled themselves down in the snow, and slept with their bushy tails wrapped round their heads.