Death now entered the devoted camp: Jefferson Baker died of lockjaw on the 7th of April. A meeting with a party of Esquimaux now enabled Kane to reinforce his dog-team, and encouraged him to start, late in April, upon his grand sledge-excursion to the north. It failed, however, completely. Kane became delirious on the 5th of May, and fainted every time he was taken from the tent to the sledge. He was conveyed back to the brig, and from the 14th to the 20th lay hovering between life and death. Short as the expedition was, however, several remarkable discoveries were made. "Tennyson's Monument" was the name given to a solitary column of greenstone, four hundred and eighty feet high, rising from a pedestal two hundred and eighty feet high,—both as sharply finished as if they had been cast for the Place Vendôme. But the most wonderful feature was the Great Glacier of Humboldt,—an ice-ocean of boundless dimensions, in which a complete substitution had been effected of ice for water. "Imagine," Kane writes, "the centre of the continent of Greenland occupied through nearly its whole extent by a deep unbroken sea of ice that gathers perennial increase from the water-shed of vast snow-covered mountains and all the precipitations of the atmosphere upon its own surface. Imagine this moving onward like a great glacial river, seeking outlets at every fiord and valley, rolling icy cataracts into the Atlantic and Greenland seas, and, having at last reached the northern limit of the land that has borne it up, pouring out a mighty frozen torrent into unknown Arctic space.... Here was a plastic, moving, semi-solid mass, obliterating life, swallowing rocks and islands, and ploughing its way with irresistible march through the crust of an investing sea."
Other sledge-parties were from time to time sent out. One of six men left the brig on the 3d of June, keeping to the north and reaching Humboldt Glacier on the 15th. Four returned to the ship on the 27th, one of them entirely blind. Hans Christian and William Morton kept on, and finally, in north latitude 81° 22', sighted open water,—an open Polar sea. To the cape at which the land terminated Morton gave the name of Cape Constitution. A lofty peak on the opposite side of the channel, but a little farther to the north, and the most remote northern land known upon our globe, was named Mount Edward Parry, from the great pioneer of Arctic travel.
A second winter now stared the explorers in the face. "It is horrible," says Kane, "to look forward to another year of disease and darkness, without fresh food or fuel." Still, preparations were made for the direful extremity. Willow-stems and sorrel were collected as antiscorbutics. Lumps of turf, frozen solid, were quarried with crowbars, and with them the ship's sides were embanked. During the early months a communication was kept up with the nearest Esquimaux station, seventy-five miles distant, and thus scanty supplies of fox, walrus, seal, and bear meat were occasionally obtained. These failed, however, during the months of total darkness. Early in February, Kane wrote in his journal:—"We are contending at odds with angry forces close around us, without one agent or influence within eighteen hundred miles whose sympathy is on our side." On the 4th of March, the last fragment of fresh meat was served, and the whole crew would have perished miserably of starvation, had it not been for the successful issue of a forlorn-hope excursion to the Etah Esquimaux station undertaken by Hans and two dogs. Dr. Kane ate rats, and thereby escaped the scurvy. The bunks were warmed by oil-lamps, after the Esquimaux fashion: the beds and the men's faces became in consequence black and greasy with soot. The sufferings endured by the party were perhaps the most dreadful to which Arctic adventurers have ever been subjected.
The abandonment of the brig had been resolved upon before the setting in of winter, and the misery of the hours of darkness had been in some measure alleviated by the progress of the preparations for that event,—in making clothing, canvas moccasins, seal-hide boots, and in cutting water-tight shoes from the gutta-percha speaking-tube. Provision-bags were made of sail-cloth rendered impervious by coats of tar. Into these the bread was pressed by beating it to powder with a capstan-bar. Pork-fat and tallow were melted down and poured into other bags to freeze. The three boats—none of them sea-worthy—were strengthened, housed, and mounted on sledges rigged with shoulder-belts to drag by: one of them they expected to burn for fuel on reaching water. The powder and shot, upon which their lives depended, were distributed in canisters: Kane took the percussion-caps into his own possession, as more precious than gold. The 17th of May was fixed upon for the departure.
The farewell to the brig was made with due solemnity. The day was Sunday, and prayers and a chapter of the Bible were read. Kane then stated in an address the necessities under which the ship was abandoned and the dangers that still awaited them. He believed, however, that the thirteen hundred miles of ice and water which lay between them and North Greenland could be traversed with safety for most and hope for all. A brief memorial of the reasons compelling the desertion of the vessel was fastened to a stanchion near the gangway, to serve as their vindication in case they were lost and the brig was ever visited. The flags were hoisted and hauled down again, and the men scrambled off over the ice to the boats, no one thinking of the mockery of cheers.
SEEKING EIDER DOWN.
We have not space to detail the perils, adventures, and narrow escapes from starvation of this hardy party in their romantically dangerous escape to the south. On the 16th of June, the boats and sledges approached the open water. "We see its deep-indigo horizon," writes Kane, "and hear its roar against the icy beach. Its scent is in our nostrils and our hearts." The boats, which were split with frost and warped by sunshine, had to be calked and swelled before they were fit for use. The embarkation was effected on the 19th: the Red Eric, the smallest of the three boats, swamped the first day. They spent their first night in an inlet in the ice. Sometimes they would sail through creeks of water for many successive hours: then would follow days of weary tracking through alternate ice and water. During a violent storm, they dragged the boats upon a narrow shelf of ice, and found themselves within a cave which myriads of eider had made their breeding-ground. They remained three days in this crystal retreat, and gathered three thousand eggs. They doubled Cape Dudley Digges on the 11th of June, and spent a week at Providence Halt, luxuriating on a dish composed of birds sweeter and juicier than canvas-backs and a salad made of raw eggs and cochlearia. The coast now trended to the east; the wide expanse of Melville Bay lay between them and Upernavik,—that Danish outpost of civilization. The party was at one moment in the actual agonies of starvation, when a lucky shot at a sleeping seal saved them from the dreaded extremity. They soon saw a kayak—a native boat—in which one Paul Zacharias was seeking eider-down among the islands. Not long after, the single mast of a small shallop—the Upernavik oil-boat—loomed up through the fog. They landed the next day in the midst of a crowd of children, and drank coffee that night before hospitable Danish firesides.