WORKING THROUGH AN ICE-FLOE, IN TOW OF A BERG.
In 1845-46 Franklin quartered at Beechey Island, on the southeast coast of North Devon, after having ascended Wellington Channel to latitude 77°, and returned west of Cornwallis Island, which was an exceedingly successful season’s work. In the autumn of 1846 he had turned toward the south, but had been stopped by and frozen into the masses of ice that come ceaselessly down M’Clintock Channel and press upon King William’s Land. Had he known King William’s Land to be really an island he need not have exposed himself to this. During all the summer of 1847 the ships remained firm in their icy bonds. Sir John Franklin died, and Captain Crozier took command. The spring of 1848 brought no hope, and in April the ships were abandoned. The crews started southward along the shore, dragging two boats (one of which was soon abandoned) and many sledges. The Eskimos said the men dropped down one at a time, from weakness and hunger; but it is believed that many of them were killed by the savages for the sake of what few things they had with them—precious articles to those natives. It appears that one of the vessels must have been crushed in the ice, and the other stranded on the shore of King William’s Land, where it lay for years, forming a mine of wealth for the neighboring Eskimos. Some years later Lieutenant Schwatka and W. H. Gilder, traveling with Eskimo parties in the region near the mouth of the Great Fish River, found the graves of the last remnant of the party, and recovered still other relics of this dreadful calamity. Let me copy for you here the postscript, written by Crozier and Fitzjames, to the short record of their work. It is startlingly brief and impressive:
April 25, 1848. H. M. ships Terror and Erebus were deserted on 22nd April, five leagues N. N. W. of this [Point Victory], having been beset since 12th September, 1846. The officers and crews, consisting of 105 souls under the command of Captain F. R. M. Crozier, landed here in lat. 69° 37´ 42´´ N., long. 98° 41´ W. Sir John Franklin died on the 11th June, 1847; and the total loss by deaths in the expedition has been to this date 9 officers and 15 men. We start on to-morrow, 26th April, 1848, for Back’s Fish River.
It would be tedious to attempt to chronicle the almost yearly excursions into the north, but a few ought to be spoken of. One such has been alluded to—that of Charles Hall, a Cincinnati journalist,—who enlisted the aid of the American Geographical Society, and then prepared himself by going upon a whaler and spending the winters of 1860-61 and 1861-1862 among the Eskimos near Cumberland Sound, where he found the remains of a stone house built by Frobisher in 1578. Again, from 1864 to 1869 he was living with the wandering Eskimo north of Hudson’s Bay, preparing himself to undertake an expedition which may be said to be the first whose avowed object was to try to reach the North Pole. The United States government furnished him the steamer Polaris, and a small but efficient body of scientific assistants, one of whom was Emil Bessels. The Polaris passed through Smith Sound, and after completing the exploration of Kennedy Channel, and discovering that beyond its expansion into Hall Sound it continued straight northeastward, forming Robeson Channel, Hall stopped his ship and by sledge-journeys reached Cape Brevoort, above 82° N., whence he could see the open polar sea. This was not only far beyond any previous northing, but his work added immensely to our knowledge of both Grinnell Land and northwestern Greenland, and prepared the way for further successes.
This sledge-journey was, however, too great a strain, for he had hardly returned to his ship when he sickened and died. The next season (1872) Dr. Bessels and Sergeant Mayer reached on foot 82° 09´ N., a few miles farther than Hall. This accomplished, an attempt was made to return, but the steamer was soon inclosed in the pack, and drifted helplessly southward for two months, until off Northumberland Island, when a violent gale loosened the pack and nearly destroyed her.
At length the danger became so great that on October 15th boats and provisions were put on the ice, on which nineteen of the crew had disembarked. Suddenly the ship broke away, and the party on the ice drifted slowly 195 days, and were picked up off the coast of Labrador, in 53° 35´ N., by a whaling steamer 1,300 miles from where they had parted with the Polaris. The party in the ship reached Littleton’s Island, where they passed the winter, building two boats from the boards of the vessel, in which they set sail southwards in June, 1873. On the 23d of that month they were picked up by a Dundee whaler, and ultimately reached home.
Only three years before that a very similar experience had happened to the smaller ship of a German expedition under Captain Koldewey, of which the larger went up the east coast of Greenland to 75½° N., where a grim headland was named Cape Bismarck. It is just south of the land sighted by Lambert in 1670. The little Hansa, however, was crushed in the ice near Scoresby Sound. The crew escaped to the floe, where they built a house of blocks of patent fuel, filled it with provisions, and trusted themselves to the great Arctic current which carried them south, at the rate of about sixty-five miles a day at first, until finally, in June, 1870, it took them to the Moravian missions near Cape Farewell, more than twelve hundred miles from where they were wrecked.
The seas and archipelagoes north of Europe were being questioned, all this time, as well as those north of America. The Norwegian fishermen had been familiar with Spitzbergen waters from long ago, but it was not until 1863 that the group was circumnavigated. The next year Captain Tobieson sailed around Northeast Land, and in 1870 Nova Zembla was circumnavigated, and the mouth of the Obi reached.
The men who did these feats were sealers or shark-fishers in small stanch Norwegian schooners, which flocked in Barentz Sea at this period, and they furnished invaluable material, as did the whalers and sealers of American and Scotch ports, for the ice-pilots and crews of the scientific expeditions which now began to go to the north: moreover many of the commanders were trained by amateur service in such vessels. It was thus Nordenskjöld began his experiences in 1864. Among these earlier expeditions was an Austrian naval lieutenant, Julius von Payer, who became notable, not only because he interested a new nation in Arctic research, but because of his discoveries. His first experience was with the German expedition to Greenland in 1869, and in 1871 he and another Austrian navy officer named Weyprecht spent the summer in examining the edge of the ice between Spitzbergen and Nova Zembla.