After this General Greely proceeds to prove the falsity of all my assumptions. Respecting the objects from the Jeannette, he says plainly that he does not believe in them. “Probably some drift articles were found,” he says, “and it would seem more reasonable to trace them to the Porteus, which was wrecked in Smith Sound, about 1000 miles north of Julianehaab... It is further important to note that, if the articles were really from the Jeannette, the nearest route would have been, not across the North Pole along the east coast of Greenland, but down Kennedy Channel and by way of Smith Sound and Baffin’s Bay, as was suggested, as to drift from the Porteus.”
We could not possibly get near the Pole itself by a long distance, says Greely, as “we know almost as well as if we had seen it that there is in the unknown regions an extensive land which is the birthplace of the flat-topped icebergs or the palæocrystic ice.” In this glacier-covered land, which he is of opinion must be over 300 miles in diameter, and which sends out icebergs to Greenland as well as to Franz Josef Land,[13] the Pole itself must be situated.
“As to the indestructible ship,” he says, “it is certainly a most desirable thing for Dr. Nansen.” His meaning, however, is that it cannot be built. “Dr. Nansen appears to believe that the question of building on such lines as will give the ship the greatest power of resistance to the pressure of the ice-floe has not been thoroughly and satisfactorily solved, although hundreds of thousands of dollars have been spent for this end by the seal and whaling companies of Scotland and Newfoundland.” As an authority he quotes Melville, and says “every Arctic navigator of experience agrees with Melville’s dictum that even if built solid a vessel could not withstand the ice-pressure of the heavy polar pack.” To my assertion that the ice along the “Siberian coast is comparatively thin, 7 to 10 feet,” he again quotes Melville, who speaks of ice “50 feet high, etc.” (something we did not discover, by-the-way, during the whole of our voyage).
After giving still more conclusive proofs that the Fram must inevitably go to the bottom as soon as it should be exposed to the pressure of the ice, he goes on to refer to the impossibility of drifting in the ice with boats. And he concludes his article with the remark that “Arctic exploration is sufficiently credited with rashness and danger in its legitimate and sanctioned methods, without bearing the burden of Dr. Nansen’s illogical scheme of self-destruction.”
From an article Greely wrote after our return home, in Harper’s Weekly for September 19th, 1896, he appears to have come to the conclusion that the Jeannette relics were genuine and that the assumption of their drift may have been correct, mentioning “Melville, Dall, and others” as not believing in them. He allows also that my scheme has been carried out in spite of what he had said. This time he concludes the article as follows: “In contrasting the expeditions of De Long and Nansen, it is necessary to allude to the single blemish that mars the otherwise magnificent career of Nansen, who deliberately quitted his comrades on the ice-beset ship hundreds of miles from any known land, with the intention of not returning, but, in his own reported words, ‘to go to Spitzbergen, where he felt certain to find a ship,’ 600 miles away. De Long and Ambler had such a sense of honor that they sacrificed their lives rather than separate themselves from a dying man, whom their presence could not save. It passes comprehension how Nansen could have thus deviated from the most sacred duty devolving on the commander of a naval expedition. The safe return of brave Captain Sverdrup with the Fram does not excuse Nansen. Sverdrup’s consistency, courage, and skill in holding fast to the Fram and bringing his comrades back to Norway will win for him, in the minds of many, laurels even brighter than those of his able and accomplished chief.”
One of the few who publicly gave to my plan the support of his scientific authority was Professor Supan, the well-known editor of Petermann’s Mitteilungen. In an article in this journal for 1891 (p. 191), he not only spoke warmly in its favor, but supported it with new suggestions. His view was that what he terms the Arctic “wind-shed” probably for the greater part of the year divides the unknown polar basin into two parts. In the eastern part the prevailing winds blow towards the Bering Sea, while those of the western part blow towards the Atlantic. He thought that, as a rule, this “wind-shed” must lie near the Bering Sea, and that the prevailing winds in the tracts we purposed traversing would thus favor our drift. Our experience bore out Professor Supan’s theory in a remarkable degree.
[1] Frost-giants.
[2] First Crossing of Greenland, Vol. I., p. 30.
[3] Mr. Lytzen, of Julianehaab, afterwards contributed an article to the Geografisk Tidsskrift (8th Vol., 1885–86, pp. 49–51, Copenhagen), in which he expressed himself, so far at least as I understand him, in the same sense, and, remarkably enough, suggested that this circumstance might possibly be found to have an important bearing on Arctic exploration. He says: “It will therefore be seen that polar explorers who seek to advance towards the Pole from the Siberian Sea will probably at one place or another be hemmed in by the ice, but these masses of ice will be carried by the current along the Greenland coast. It is not, therefore, altogether impossible that, if the ship of such an expedition is able to survive the pressure of the masses of ice for any length of time, it will arrive safely at South Greenland; but in that case it must be prepared to spend several years on the way.”