Here and at many subsequent points of our voyage, where we had forcible evidence of the value of steam in ice-navigation, we learned to appreciate the work done by the old sailing expeditions. Much that was easy to us would have been impossible to them; and often as we advanced in a perfect calm, or steamed head-to-wind through narrow leads between wheeling fields of ice, we wondered at the distances safely navigated by such ships as the “Hecla” and “Griper,” or “Enterprise” and “Investigator,” along shores exposed to as heavy Polar ice as any our vessels encountered.
A few Eskimo still inhabit the Greenland shores north of Melville Bay, cut off from all intercourse with their kind by one hundred miles of glacier; these, the Arctic Highlanders of Sir John Ross, amongst whom Kane and Hayes wintered, are undergoing steady diminution. They appear to have fallen back on the southern parts of their territory, and are making their last stand in the neighbourhood of Cape York. Our dog-driver Hans there communicated with his wife’s kindred, and through him we learnt that the tribe was now reduced to eighty souls. The object of our visit was to pick up Hans’s brother-in-law, but he was absent on a hunting excursion. Leaving them to wonder what brought white men northwards, we continued our course, trying to keep warm a hope that yet another human community, Norse, or at least Eskimo, might possibly be found beyond the threshold of the unknown regions we were so fast approaching. With calm weather and warm sun, giving us a temperature of 40° on deck, we steamed northwards with the utmost possible economy of fuel. A fleet of large icebergs lay along the coast north of Cape York. One time two hundred and thirty were in sight, many of them islands of glacier a thousand feet thick, and looking too large to have come from the adjacent coast.
From this time forwards land was never out of sight. Panoramas of coast-line continually unrolled on one side or the other. A certain sameness of rock and snow necessarily ran through all, but there was a sort of speculative pleasure in watching the changing profile of the next headland, or the gradual opening of some unknown bay. Northwards from Cape York lay the “crimson cliffs of Beverly,” owing their colour not to the “red snow” of their glaciers, as in Sir J. Ross’s time, but to rich lichens covering their brick-red rocks. The brilliant orange lichens of Cape Dudley-Digges will not be readily forgotten. Passing between the terraced precipices of Northumberland and Hakluyt Islands, we reached the most eastern of the Carey Islands on 27th July. Here a depôt of provisions and a boat were landed, forming the first of a series of reserves to be deposited along the route northwards, so as to give some help to our retreating crews, if unhappily the fate of our predecessors should be in store for us. Going and returning from the island in our boats we miserably slaughtered ten eider ducks, swimming about with their young broods. There was no help for it; in the Arctic region “the pot” is peremptory. Even here, however, we were not alone in our cruelty. Looking over the side of the boat into the blue water, numbers of little pink-tipped “clio,” like miniature daggers, could be seen eagerly chasing and devouring fluttering black-winged sea-snails almost as large as themselves. Captivity in a tea-cup did not abate their voracity. A victim was no sooner introduced than he was pounced upon, caught by strong sucker-armed tentacles, turned round till the defenceless opening of his shell was opposite his captor’s mouth, and pulled out by two sets of sharp hooks, after the manner of a periwinkle with a pin.
ESKIMO BOY WITH FISH.++
CHAPTER II.
Classic Ground—A Ramble over the “Doige Mountains”—Foulke Fiord—The Mer de Glace—Pack Ice—The First Check—Hayes’ Sound—Twin Glacier Valley—Charged by a Berg—Varying Fortunes—Walrus.