The programme of our Expedition stipulated that the “Alert,” in order to keep up communication with her consort, was not to winter more than two hundred miles from her. An officer and sledge crew belonging to the “Discovery” had accompanied us northwards with the intention of returning to their ship as soon as the “Alert” had reached her winter quarters. We had advanced but sixty miles, and yet the most gallant and persevering efforts to communicate with the “Discovery” were again and again unsuccessful. The deep soft snow lying piled against the cliffs of Cape Rawson and Black Cape barred the way. The men, buried to their waists in the snow, dug a path for the sledge till the excavation became a tunnel, and a day’s hard labour could be measured by a few paces. The last and most determined effort to force a road southward was undertaken on the 2nd October, but on the 12th the party returned without having got further than six miles from the ship. This failure to communicate with the “Discovery” over so short a distance as only 60 miles was altogether unlooked for, and could not but suggest uncomfortable reflections. It had been assumed that even two hundred miles would not interrupt communication between our ships, and that sledges could travel the whole length of Smith’s Sound to reach a relief ship, or to deposit despatches at its entrance. Where was the error in the assumption? Were our men degenerate? Our picked crews, full of health and strength, and enthusiastic to a man, were equal to the best of their predecessors. The conclusion was inevitable—the conditions and not the men were to blame. Within half-a-mile of our ship, there were many places that would stop the finest crew that ever drew a sledge. The ice was massive beyond all expectation; but it was not the ice that stopped our travellers—it was the soft snow. Some idea of its fleecy lightness may be gathered from the fact that ten measures of it could easily be pressed into one, and that one melted into only one-tenth its bulk of water. Everyone noticed the beauty of its crystals; they were delicate eighteen-rayed stars, rayed not in one plane, but in all. In British Columbia and other parts of Canada, when such soft snow interferes with travelling, it is usual to camp for a day or so—perhaps under a comfortable tree—and, when the snow has hardened a little, make a firm path for the sledge, or long tobbogin, by tramping in advance on snow-shoes. But we might have waited till permanent darkness set in before our snow hardened. Our sledges, perfect as they were for their own work, were not suited for land travelling over soft snow; and as snow-shoes had never been used by Arctic Expeditions, we had but two pairs in the ship. There are two causes that tend to harden and cake the surface of snow—the first is wind, and we had comparatively little of that; the second is a contrast in temperature between the earth below and the air above the snow. When the lower part of the snow is twenty or thirty degrees warmer than the upper, evaporation takes place from the one, and condensation in the other. At Floeberg Beach the earth was permanently cold. Even in midsummer only a few inches of the surface thawed, and during the whole winter it remained close to zero, so that it was not until the intensely cold weather of spring that any marked contrast was established.
INSIDE THE UNIFILER HOUSE.
Two days before the return of the last autumn party the sun sank below the south horizon, not to return for nearly five months. We climbed Cairn Hill to have a last look at him, but the high land southwards hid him from view. His refracted rays still lit up the ice of the northern horizon, but Floeberg Beach and the pack, for a mile outside the ship, lay in the shadow of the land. Away southwards to the right, the sides of the Greenland hills caught the sunlight, and through the gaps in their undulating outline a distant horizontal plain of mer de glace, the northern termination of Greenland’s continental ice, was yet distinguishable at intervals.
After the return of the depôt detachment from Cape Joseph Henry, the twilight had darkened so much that further sledging was impossible, and all hands set about making preparations to encounter the fast closing-in winter. Firm ice had formed round the ship, and cemented her to the grounded floebergs on her right; but, in order to guard against being again blown from shore, she was secured to the beach by two strong chain cables, supported at intervals by barrels, so that the heavy metal links should not sink into the ice. The “crow’s nest” and all the rigging that could be spared were taken down from aloft and packed away. A thick felty awning was spread overhead across spars fastened between the masts so as to completely roof in the greater part of the ship. Then snow was heaped up all round her black hull as high as the crimson stripe along her bulwarks. But for her masts and yards she might have been taken for a great marquee, with stove-pipes coming through at intervals. Her unshipped rudder was hung across the stern, safe from any ice pressure during the winter. To enter the ship, one had to pass through a narrow gap in the snow embankment, near the middle of her left side, ascend two or three steps, and lift up a hanging door closing an entrance cut in the bulwarks. The whole of the upper deck was covered with a deep layer of snow, so as to keep the heat in. Snow passages, with double wooden doors, self-closing by means of weights, were made over the two hatch-ways leading down below. The skylights were all covered up. Lamps and candles had already been in use for some time. By means of eight stoves, distributed in various parts between decks, and each burning twenty-eight pounds of coal per day, an average temperature of forty-nine was maintained through the winter. It was intended to utilise all the heat by leading the flues along the deck overhead before they passed up into the outer air; but the horizontal flues smoked so much that it was necessary to let them pass directly upwards, and even then they were as smoky as ships’ stoves usually are. Meantime, the bleak beach opposite the ship was also undergoing metamorphosis. Boats, spars, blocks of patent fuel, casks, and cans of stores innumerable had been carried to it from the ship, so as to increase the habitable space on board. The casks and barrels were piled into walls, and roofed in with spars and sails, so as to make a large storehouse to hold everything that could be taken from the ship. A short distance off, a great pyramid of pemmican, stearine-fuel, bacon, and other sledging stores rose above the snow. Next came the preparations for the scientific observations of the winter. The wooden observatory, on a firm foundation of snow-filled casks, looked like a bathing-box unaccountably gone astray. Then a whole group of beehive-shaped snow-houses, each one the temple of some special instrument, the “Declinometer,” the “Unifiler,” and so on, and a whole system of catacomb-like passages cut in the deep snow and roofed in, connected the buildings.
Plate V.—WINTER QUARTERS OUTSIDE, FROM THE FLOES ASTERN OF H.M.S. “ALERT,” December, 1876.—p. [37].