Parry’s Polar journey can hardly be dismissed without some reference to the remarkable expeditions made by Wrangell, the great Russian explorer. Between 1820 and 1823 inclusive he made four expeditions on the ice northward from the Siberian coast, starting from the town or settlement of Nijni Kolymsk, on the Kolyma River. These excursions were made with dog sledges, and the condition of the ice must therefore have been much superior to that encountered by Parry, who found that the [pg 186]reindeers he had intended for the same purpose could not be employed at all. The provisions taken by Wrangell were rye-biscuit, meat, and portable soup; smoked fish; the great Russian speciality, tea; spirits; and tobacco. A conical tent of reindeer skin, inside of which a fire was lighted, was part of the outfit. He proceeded on one occasion 140 miles, and on another 170 miles, from the land to the margin of the open sea, having often to cross ridges of broken and hummocky ice sometimes eighty and ninety feet above the general level. At the edge of the frozen field the ice was found to be rotten and unsafe; and on his last journey, when the ice on which he travelled was broken up by a gale while he was seventy miles from land, nothing but the swiftness of his dogs, who tore over the opening gaps, saved him from destruction. A very thankful man was Wrangell when he reached terra firma once more.
CHAPTER XX.
The Magnetic Pole.—A Land Journey to the Polar Sea.
Sir John Ross and the Victory—First Steam Vessel employed in the Arctic—Discovery of the Magnetic Pole—The British Flag waving over it—Franklin and Richardson’s Journeys to the Polar Sea—The Coppermine River—Sea Voyage in Birch-bark Canoes—Return Journey—Terrible Sufferings—Starvation and Utter Exhaustion—Deaths by the Way—A Brave Feat—Relieved at length—Journey to the Mouth of the Mackenzie—Fracas with the Esquimaux—Peace Restored.
Immediately after the return of Parry’s expedition in 1827, Sir John Ross submitted to the Admiralty the plans for the voyage of which we are about to speak. Hitherto all voyages of discovery in the Arctic seas had been made in sailing vessels. Ross deserves the credit of having been the first to urge the employment of a steam-ship in that service. His proposals were not accepted, and he therefore laid the scheme before a wealthy friend, Mr. Sheriff Booth. At that time the Parliamentary reward of £20,000 was still outstanding to the discoverer of a north-west passage, and Mr. Booth declined to embark “in what might be deemed by others a mere mercantile speculation.” Not long afterwards, the Government reward being withdrawn, Mr. Booth immediately empowered Ross to provide, at his own private expense, all that was necessary for the expedition. A paddle-wheel steamer, the Victory, was purchased. The vessel was strengthened and many other improvements made. She was provisioned for a thousand days, and was to have been accompanied for some distance by a store-ship. The men on the latter mutinied at Loch Ryan, and the larger part of them immediately left the ship, which, to make a long story short, never proceeded on this voyage. Misfortune befell the Victory; her engines proved a total failure, and at the commencement of the voyage were the cause of much anxiety and worry to the commander. It must be remembered that sea-going steamers were then of very recent introduction, while long ocean voyages in steam-ships were almost unthought of. Symington’s first river steamer had indeed made her first trip on the Clyde as early as 1788, but the earliest sea-going steamboat of which we have record did not make a trip till 1815. The voyage was only from Glasgow to London. As we have seen, an American steamer crossed [pg 187]the Atlantic Ocean to Liverpool in 1819; but it was not till 1838, when the Great Western and Sirius crossed the Atlantic, that this great steamship route was really opened. Ross was therefore very early in the field, and should be regarded as a man of penetration for his epoch. Nowadays, as we all know, vessels with at least auxiliary, if not complete steam power, are nearly always employed in Government expeditions, and even by whalers in the Arctic seas.
The expedition left England May 23rd, 1829, and arrived home again on October 18th, 1833, having thus been absent for the lengthened period of four years and five months. The coast surveys made by Ross of King William’s Land and Boothia Felix (named after the munificent merchant who had so liberally provided the expedition) were careful, and doubtless accurate, but not very extensive. The most interesting feature of all was the determination of the exact locality of the Magnetic Pole, which was accomplished by the nephew of Sir John Ross (later Sir James Ross) on June 1st, 1831.
Before leaving the vessel it was perfectly understood that they were in the immediate vicinity of the Magnetic Pole; and, indeed, it was afterwards proved that Commander Ross had been, in a preceding land journey in 1830, within ten miles of the spot, but had been unprovided with the necessary instruments to determine that fact. The weather on the trip was tempestuous and blustering, but no special disaster occurred, and on the morning of May 31st they found themselves within fourteen miles of the calculated position. Leaving behind the larger part of their baggage and provisions on the beach, the party hurried forward in a state of excitement pardonable under the circumstances. At eight o’clock the next morning their journey was at an end, and never, doubtless, were exhausted men more thoroughly happy. It will interest the reader to learn how the Magnetic Pole looks.
“The land,” wrote Ross the younger, “at this place is very low near the coast, but it rises into ridges of fifty or sixty feet high about a mile inland. We could have wished that a place so important had possessed more of mark or note. It was scarcely censurable to regret that there was not a mountain to indicate a spot to which so much of interest must ever be attached; and I could even have pardoned any one among us who had been so romantic or absurd as to expect that the Magnetic Pole was an object as conspicuous and mysterious as the fabled mountain of Sinbad, that it was even a mountain of iron, or a magnet as large as Mont Blanc. But Nature had here erected no monument to denote the spot which she had chosen as the centre of one of her great and dark powers, and where we could do little ourselves toward this end.... We were, however, fortunate in here finding some huts of Esquimaux that had not long been abandoned.” A series of scientific observations were at once made, the most conspicuous results of which were as follows:—At their observatory the amount of the dip, as indicated by the dipping-needle, was 89° 59′, being thus within one minute of the vertical, while the proximity of the Magnetic Pole was confirmed by the absolute inaction of the several horizontal needles. “These were suspended in the most delicate manner possible, but there was not one which showed the slightest effort to move from the position in which it was placed.” In other words, the magnetic force was dead in that very spot to which millions of compasses are ever pointing.
The British flag was fixed on the spot, and the discoverers took possession of the Magnetic Pole in the name of Great Britain and King William IV. A limestone cairn was erected, in which a canister containing the record of the visit of Ross and his companions was deposited. Ross says that “had it been a pyramid as large as that of Cheops, I am not quite sure that it would have done more than satisfy our ambition under the feelings of that exciting day. The latitude of this spot is 70° 5′ 17″, and its [pg 189]longitude 96° 46′ 45″ W.” On the return journey to the ship they encountered blinding snow-storms, but eventually reached it in safety, after an absence of twenty-eight days.