CHAPTER X.

Arctic Summer—Flowers and Butterflies—Feathered Visitors—A Strange Shot—Deceptive Game Tracks—The Land Ransacked—No Vestige of Man—Nature’s Records—The Raised Beaches—The Break-up—Farewell to Floeberg Beach—Running the Gauntlet—Robeson Channel Ice-drift—A “Nip”—Walled in by Floebergs—Escape—Reunion with the “Discovery.”

SUMMER at Floeberg Beach was an affair of weeks, almost of days. The turning-point came silently and quickly—not in quite the demonstrative fashion some of us expected, with an abrupt bursting forth of ravines and a general rush of torrents to the sea, but still suddenly. Three-fourths of the snow disappeared as if by magic, and the dark patches of bare land grew broader and broader every day. In some places the earth passed at once from frozen rock to dust; in others marshy spots formed, and there the whole ground was cut up into the hexagonal bosses that form a very striking feature in Arctic foregrounds. A view of Floeberg Beach from Cape Rawson ([Plate No. 4]), sketched on 18th July, gives an idea of how the land looked in summer. Even near the shores it is never altogether free from snow. Permanent drifts lie in the hollows, and from the crests of the cliffs at Cape Rawson a great bank several hundred feet in height sloped downward to the “mud flats” below. Trickling streams cut their way vertically down through the snow or flow in tunnels under it, then wind across the marshy flats, and end in some of the ravines that intersect the land like Lancashire “cloughs.” For great part of the year the ravines are merely more or less deep grooves in the monotonous undulating whiteness, but in summer they hold brown foaming torrents rushing between steep undermined banks of snow, quite unfordable if deeper than the knee. These are the rivers of the country, but they cannot run out to sea, like ordinary streams; the grounded pack-edge prevents them; so they expend much of their energy in destroying the green one-season’s ice, filling the lagoon between barrier bergs and beach. The snow was no sooner off the land than the flowers were in bloom—not very gorgeous specimens certainly, but still flowers, and with more than their share of tender sentiment, as might be seen by many bright little nosegays gathered for our invalids by the rough hands of messmates. First came close clumps of magenta-tinted saxifrage, with scarcely a trace of a leaf, and fading as fast as it bloomed; then tiny yellow Drabas, and white coltsfoot, and woolly willow catkins; and later, when the sorrel leaves, each as large as a sixpence, began to get red and tasteless, the yellow poppies appeared, and with them the delicately-tinted strawberry-like flowers of Dryas octopetala. Plants were of course few and far between—for example, four men searching all day could just gather one plateful of the valuable sorrel. All, too, were on the most Liliputian scale, seldom more than an inch above ground, but with immensely long roots. Sometimes, as we sat sketching or picking sorrel, a mosquito or two would present themselves, but they did not bite like their brethren of the Greenland settlements. A small sort of dragon-fly was not uncommon near pools, and now and then a small brown butterfly, an Argynnus, or, more rarely, a yellow Colias, would flit by, looking somewhat incongruous amongst the rocks and snow. Birds soon became comparatively plenty; graceful grey tern fluttered about over cracks in the floes, and dipped into the pools for the little shrimps that came to the surface; flocks of knots, exceedingly wild and quick of wing, were commonly seen wading about in marshy places. A pair of snowy owls reared a brood on the cliffs of the north ravine. The parents supplied an excellent dish, and the young ones were made pets of. One of them, called “Mordecai” on account of his Asian profile, became a great favourite in consequence of his quaintly gluttonous habits. A few king-duck and Brent geese chose Grant Land as a safe nursery for their coming broods. Stringent game laws were enacted, in order that they might not be frightened away before they had made up their minds on the subject. We altogether underrated the sagacity of these creatures. Birds accustomed to winter perhaps on our own shores would of course be familiar with man, but we hoped they might take us for Eskimo armed with bows and arrows, and we were not at all prepared for their accurate knowledge of the range of Eley wire cartridge in our Guy and Moncrieff “central fires.” All were not so well informed, however. One day, an officer wandering about the “mud flats” was brought to a standstill by the extreme stickiness of the ground, and was endeavouring to extract his boot from a muddy place, where it had stuck fast, when a pair of geese, impelled by most convenient curiosity, flew round him once or twice, and lit within a hundred yards, then, stretching out their necks straight in front, walked deliberately up till there was less risk of missing than of blowing them to fragments. These birds no doubt come north in search of safety for themselves and their broods during the nursing season, for the moulting of both parents, just before the young are able to fly, leaves them peculiarly defenceless. Later on, when the Expedition was on its way southward, two of our sportsmen encountered a large flock thus deprived of their pinions, and secured no less than seventy birds in fourteen shots.

A propos of shooting, the following curiously improbable personal incident is perhaps worth narrating:—One evening, shortly before the ship broke out of winter quarters, I took my rifle and went shoreward to try and find a hare, but, after a long search, was returning unsuccessful, when I happened to discover a king-duck swimming about in a small lake; there was little chance of hitting her, but she would at any rate give an excuse for a shot. After trying for twenty minutes to get within moderate range, it was plain that there was nothing for it but to walk straight up through the crunching snow; but the bird’s patience was exhausted, and she rose on the wing a good hundred yards off. In sheer annoyance and chagrin I fired, when, most unexpectedly, out flew the feathers and down fell the duck. On going to pick her up, marvelling greatly at the Munchausen-like luck of the shot, and hoping that the hole was not through the best part of the bird, what was my amazement to discover that she was not only alive, but perfectly unhurt. Turn her over how I would, there was not a speck of blood on the feathers, or a scratch on any part of the body. At last the secret was discovered; the bullet had clipped the pinions off one wing, and the fall had stunned the bird. She afterwards lived some time in captivity in a hen-coop, and laid two eggs.

We had not spent many days roaming over our newly uncovered lands, before we began to suspect that tracks of game were, in our part of the Arctic regions at any rate, extremely misleading. On the way northward, whenever the ship came to a standstill amongst the floes, men and officers often made hurried visits to the shore, and invariably came off with the stereotyped report that “traces of game were numerous and recent.” We found so many traces and so little game that the phrase acquired an inverted meaning, and passed into a proverb, but the discrepancy remained unaccounted for. At Floeberg Beach tracks of game were certainly numerous enough. The hard frozen mud at the margins of every pool showed footprints of birds, often so sharp and distinct that “rubbings” with pencil and paper were easily made of them, and sometimes in relief where dust had filled the impression and ice evaporation afterwards lowered the mould. In some places tracks of musk oxen were abundant, and of every size, from the little round footprints of calves to the broad hoof-marks of full-grown animals; but there was absolutely no way of telling when or in what numbers the game had been there. Once frozen, a footprint may last indefinitely, especially if protected by snow; and, for aught we could prove to the contrary, some of the tracks may have been as old as the celebrated mammoth frozen up in the Siberian mud. On 5th July, however, those who contended that the tracks were practically fossil were confounded by the appearance of three musk oxen on a hill-top beyond the north ravine. Their discoverer instantly sent off news to the ship, and, very judiciously, waited patiently till the arrival of assistance rendered their escape impossible. A few mornings afterwards, a fine bull walked innocently down to the beach near the ship, and was forthwith slaughtered. Being a good specimen, and close at hand, he was transferred to the naturalist, and he now represents his species in the British Museum.

All through the earlier weeks of July the pack gave warnings of approaching disruption. Decided motion first occurred on 16th, and on 21st the old familiar sound of “breaking plates” came from the offing, and with a loud crack the ship suddenly righted herself from the heel towards shore, which had slowly increased during the winter. Nevertheless, as long as it remained calm no important movement was likely to occur, except at high tide. We were, therefore, still able to extend our hunting expeditions to several days from the ship. It was not the search for game only, exciting as it was, that made these late trips interesting. Our hunters enjoyed a privilege that has rarely fallen to the lot of any discoverers in either past or recent times—they traversed a shore never before trodden by the foot of man. Everywhere south of the steep cliffs of Robeson Channel some vestiges of humanity were discoverable; a broken sledge-runner, a chipped flint, or a musk ox bone broken to extract the marrow, told us that wandering Eskimo had been before us; but from the cliffs northward all traces ceased—no savage hunter had ever disturbed the ice-borne boulders of Floeberg Beach to fasten down his tent of skins, or form a rough hearth for his travelling camp, and no sledges but our own were ever launched towards the icy horizon beyond—

“We were the first that ever burst

Into that silent sea.”

Yet though there was no trace of man or his doings, Nature had left deeply significant records of her own to tell the history of the land. The neighbourhood of the ship was rich in such evidences. No one could walk over the broad “mud flats” half-a-mile inland from the ship without being convinced that the land had risen from the sea at, geologically speaking, no very distant period. Shells similar to those still living in the sea two hundred feet below lay strewn in abundance on the fine sand. Here a pair of valves, enormously thickened to bear the crush of ice, there a whole bed of slighter shells, still covered with their brown filmy skins, and connected by their gristly hinges. The mud itself was so salty, that where it dried in the sun a white briny coat formed on its surface. Stems and roots of laver sea-weeds were sometimes picked up, but the most interesting and eloquent witnesses of the past were the splinters and logs of drift-wood that lay imbedded in the mud, or scattered along the crests of these raised beaches. The wood was easily recognised by the microscope as the wood of pine trees, and though probably very many centuries old, was often so apparently fresh as to smell woody when cut. It was not for us to conjecture when or where that wood had grown, or how it had drifted to its present elevated site; but we could not help thinking that it told of a time when the shores, though perhaps far more deeply laden with glaciers, were washed by a less ice-bound sea.