In point of dramatic interest, few of the Arctic expeditions can rival the second and last voyage of Dr. Kane, which, to avoid interrupting the narrative of the discovery of Franklin’s fate by Dr. Rae and Sir James M’Clintock, I have refrained from mentioning in chronological order.
Weak in body, but great in mind, this remarkable man, who had accompanied the first Grinnell expedition in the capacity of surgeon, sailed from Boston in 1853, as commander of the “Advance,” with a crew of 17 officers and men, to which two Greenlanders were subsequently added. His plan was to pass up Baffin’s Bay to its most northern attainable point, and thence pressing on towards the pole as far as boats or sledges could reach, to examine the coast-lines for vestiges of Franklin.
Battling with storms and icebergs, he passed, on August 7, 1853, the rocky portals of Smith’s Sound, Cape Isabella and Cape Alexander, which had been discovered the year before by Inglefield; left Cape Hatherton—the extreme point attained by that navigator—behind, and after many narrow escapes from shipwreck, secured the “Advance” in Rensselaer Bay, from which she Avas destined never to emerge. His diary gives us a vivid account of the first winter he spent in this haven, in lat. 78° 38´, almost as far to the north as the most northern extremity of Spitzbergen, and in a far more rigorous climate.
“Sept. 10, +14° F.—The birds have left. The sea-swallows, which abounded when we first reached here, and even the young burgomasters that lingered after them, have all taken their departure for the south. The long “night in which no man can work” is close at hand; in another month we shall lose the sun. Astronomically, he should disappear on October 24, if our horizon were free; but it is obstructed by a mountain ridge; and, making all allowance for refraction, we can not count on seeing him after the 10th.
“Sept. 11.—The long staring day, which has clung to us for more than two months, to the exclusion of the stars, has begun to intermit its brightness. Even Aldebaran, the red eye of the bull, flared out into familiar recollection as early as ten o’clock; and the heavens, though still somewhat reddened by the gaudy tints of midnight, gave us Capella and Arcturus, and even that lesser light of home memories, the polar star. Stretching my neck to look uncomfortably at the indication of our extreme northernness, it was hard to realize that he was not directly overhead; and it made me sigh as I measured the few degrees of distance that separated our zenith from the pole over which he hung.
“Oct. 28.—The moon has reached her greatest northern declination of about 25° 35´. She is a glorious object; sweeping around the heavens, at the lowest part of her curve, she is still 14° above the horizon. For eight days she has been making her circuit with nearly unvarying brightness. It is one of those sparkling nights that bring back the memory of sleigh-bells and songs, and glad communings of hearts in lands that are far away.
“Nov. 7.—The darkness is coming on with insidious steadiness, and its advances can only be perceived by comparing one day with its fellow of some time back. We still read the thermometer at noonday without a light, and the black masses of the hills are plain for about five hours, with their glaring patches of snow; but all the rest is darkness. The stars of the sixth magnitude shine out at noonday. Except upon the island of Spitzbergen, which has the advantages of an insular climate, and tempered by ocean currents, no Christians have wintered in so high a latitude as this.[19] They are Russian sailors who made the encounter there—men inured to hardships and cold. Our darkness has ninety days to run before we shall get back again even to the contested twilight of to-day. Altogether our winter will have been sunless for one hundred and forty days.
“Nov. 9.—Wishing to get the altitude of the cliffs on the south-west cape of our bay before the darkness set in thoroughly, I started in time to reach them with my Newfoundlanders at noonday, the thermometer indicating 23° below zero. Fireside astronomers can hardly realize the difficulties in the way of observations at such low temperatures. The breath, and even the warmth of the face and body, cloud the sextant-arc and glasses with a fine hoar-frost. It is, moreover, an unusual feat to measure a base-line in the snow at 55° below freezing.
“Nov. 21.—We have schemes innumerable to cheat the monotonous solitude of our winter—a fancy ball; a newspaper,’The Ice Blink;’ a fox-chase round the decks.
“Dec. 15.—We have lost the last vestige of our midday twilight. We can not see print, and hardly paper; the fingers can not be counted a foot from the eyes. Noonday and midnight are alike; and, except a vague glimmer in the sky that seems to define the hill outlines to the south, we have nothing to tell us that this Arctic world of ours has a sun. In the darkness, and consequent inaction, it is almost in vain that we seek to create topics of thought, and, by a forced excitement, to ward off the encroachments of disease.