The northern voyage of Captain Constantine John Phipps (afterwards Lord Mulgrave) deserves some notice, inasmuch as it was a distinct attempt to reach the North Pole. The Hon. Daines Barrington and others had, prior to 1773, agitated the subject before the Royal Society, and the President and Council of that learned body had memorialised the Government to fit out an expedition for the purpose, which His Majesty was pleased to direct should be immediately undertaken. Two vessels, the Racehorse and the Carcass, were selected, the former having ninety and the second eighty men on board. The ships left the Nore on June 10th, 1773, and seventeen days later had reached the latitude of the southern part of Spitzbergen, without having met ice or experiencing cold. But from the 5th of July onwards, when off Spitzbergen, they met immense fields, almost “one compact, impenetrable body,” and the most heroic and persevering efforts failed to penetrate it or find an opening. In Waigatz Strait, where some of the officers landed on a low, flat island, large fir-trees, roots and all, and in other cases timber which had [pg 155]been hewn with an axe, were noticed on the shore. These had, undoubtedly, drifted out from some of the great rivers of the mainland. While here they wounded a sea-horse, which immediately dived, and brought up a whole army of others to the rescue. They attacked the boat, which was nearly upset and stove in, and wrested an oar from one of the sailors.
ENCOUNTER WITH SEA-HORSES.
On July 30th the weather was exceedingly lovely, and the scene around them, says Captain Phipps, “beautiful and picturesque; the two ships becalmed in a large bay, with three apparent openings between the islands that formed it, but everywhere surrounded with ice as far as we could see, with some streams of water; not a breath of air; the water perfectly smooth; the ice covered with snow, low and even, except a few broken pieces near the edges; the pools of water in the middle of the pieces were frozen over with young ice.” On August 1st the ice began to press in, and places which had before been flat and almost level with the water were forced higher than the main-yards of the vessels. The crews were set to work to try and cut out the ships, and they sawed through ice sometimes as much as twelve feet thick, but without effecting their escape. Meantime the ships drifted with the ice into fourteen fathoms, and Captain Phipps, greatly alarmed, at one time proposed to abandon the ships and betake to the boats. On August 7th, keeping their launch out and ready for emergencies, they crowded all sail on the vessels, and three days later, after incurring much danger, reached the open water, and anchored in Fair Haven, Spitzbergen. A remarkably grand iceberg,[27] or, more properly, glacier, was observed here. The face towards the sea was nearly perpendicular, and about 300 feet high, with a cascade of water issuing from it. The contrast of the dark mountains and white snow, with the beautiful green colour of the near ice, made a very pleasing and uncommon picture. Phipps describes an iceberg which had floated from this glacier and grounded in twenty-four fathoms (144 feet). It was fifty feet above the surface of the water.
Captain Phipps did not pursue his investigations farther, but bore for England, which he reached late in September. The unfavourable termination of his voyage did not deter the Government from other efforts. Another voyage was ordered, and the celebrated navigator, Captain James Cook, appointed to the command. The object was to attempt once more the north-west passage, but in a new manner. Hitherto all efforts had been made from the Atlantic side; on this occasion the plan was reversed, and the vessels were to enter the Polar seas from the Pacific Ocean. The two vessels employed, the Resolution and Discovery, are now historically famous from the extensive voyages made in them, in the Pacific more particularly. The first was commanded by Cook, and the latter by Captain Clerke. By an Act of Parliament then outstanding a reward of £20,000 was held out to ships belonging to any of His Majesty’s subjects which should make the passage, but it excluded the vessels of the Royal Navy. This was now amended to include His Majesty’s ships, and a further reward of £5,000 offered to any vessel which should approach within one degree of the North Pole.
The two ships, after making many discoveries in the Pacific, entered Behring Strait on August 9th, 1779, and anchored near a point of land which has been subsequently found to be the extreme western point of North America, and to which Cook gave the name Cape Prince of Wales. Some elevations, like stages, and others like huts, were seen on this part of the coast, and they thought also that some people were visible. A little later Cook stood over to the Asiatic coast, where, entering a large bay, he found a village of the natives known now-a-days as Tchuktchis. They were found to be peaceable and civil, and several interchanges of presents were made.
In 1865 and 1866 the writer of these pages, when in the service of the Russian-American Telegraph Expedition, had an opportunity of visiting an almost identical village in Plover Bay, Eastern Siberia.[28] The bay itself, sometimes called Port Providence, has generally passed by the former name since the visit of H.M.S. Plover, which laid up there in the winter of 1848-9, when employed on the search for Sir John Franklin. Bare cliffs and [pg 157]rugged mountains hem it in on three sides, and a long spit, on which the native village is situated, shelters it on the ocean (or Behring Sea) side. The Tchuktchis live in skin tents. The remains of underground houses are seen, but the people who used them have passed away. The present race makes no use of such houses. Although their skin dwellings appear outwardly rough, and are patched with every variety of hide—walrus, seal, and reindeer—with here and there a fragment of a sail obtained from the whalers, they are in reality constructed over frames built of the larger bones of whales and walruses, and very admirably put together. In this most exposed of villages the wintry blasts must be fearful, yet these people are to be found there at all seasons. Wood they have none,[29] and blubber lamps are the only means they have for warming their tents. The frames of some of their skin canoes are also of bone. On either side of these craft, which are the counterpart of the Greenland canoes it is usual to find a sealskin blown out tight and the ends secured. These serve as floats to steady the canoe. They have very strong fishing-nets, made of thin strips of walrus hide.
TCHUKTCHI INDIANS BUILDING A HUT.
The Tchuktchis are a strongly-built race, although the inhabitants of this particular village, from intercourse with whaling vessels, have been much demoralised. One of these natives was seen carrying the awkward burden of a carpenter’s chest weighing two hundred pounds without apparently considering it a great exertion. They are a good-humoured people, and not greedier than the average of natives; they are very generally honest. They were of much service to a large party of men who wintered there in 1866-7, at the period when it was proposed to cross Behring Straits with a submarine cable in connection with the land lines then partly under construction by the Western Union Telegraph Company of America.