But by far the most remarkable feature of the Great White North visited by Dr. Kane was the “Great Glacier of Humboldt.” “I will not attempt to do better by florid description,” he writes. “Men only rhapsodize about Niagara and the ocean. My notes speak simply of the ‘long evershining line of cliff diminished to a well-pointed wedge in the perspective’; and again, of ‘the face of glistening ice, sweeping in a long curve from the low interior, the facets in front intensely illuminated by the sun.’ But this line of cliff rose in solid glassy wall three hundred feet above the water-level, with an unknown, unfathomable depth below it; and its curved face, sixty miles in length from Cape Agassiz to Cape Forbes, vanished into unknown space at not more than a single day’s railroad travel from the Pole. The interior with which it communicated, and from which it issued, was an unsurveyed mer de glace, an ice-ocean, to the eye of boundless dimensions.
“It was in full sight—the mighty crystal bridge which connects the two continents of America and Greenland. I say continents, for Greenland, however insulated it may ultimately prove to be, is in mass strictly continental. Its last possible axis, measured from Cape Farewell to the line of this glacier, in the neighborhood of the eightieth parallel, gives a length of more than twelve hundred miles,—not materially less than that of Australia from its northern to its southern cape. Imagine now the centre of such a continent, 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 precipitation 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 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.
“It is thus, and only thus, that we must form a just conception of a phenomenon like this Great Glacier. I had looked in my own mind for such an appearance, should I ever be fortunate enough to reach the northern coast of Greenland. But, now that it was before me, I could hardly realize it. I had recognized in my quiet library at home, the beautiful analogies which Forbes and Studen have developed between the glacier and the river. But I could not comprehend at first this complete substitution of ice for water.
Humboldt Glacier
“It was slowly that the conviction dawned on me that I was looking upon the counterpart of the great river system of Arctic Asia and America. Yet here were no water-feeders from the south. Every particle of moisture had its origin within the polar circle, and had been converted into ice. There were no vast alluvions, no forest or animal traces borne down by liquid torrents. 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.”
RETURN AND ILLNESS OF DR. KANE
By May 5, Dr. Kane became delirious and fainted every time he was taken from the tent. “My comrades would kindly persuade me that, even had I continued sound, we could not have proceeded on our journey. The snows were very heavy, and increasing as we went; some of the drifts perfectly impassable, and the level floes often four feet deep in yielding snow. The scurvy had already broken out among the men, with symptoms like my own; and Morton, our strongest man, was beginning to give way.
“It is the reverse of comfort to me that they shared my weakness. All that I could remember with pleasurable feeling is, that to five brave men, Morton, Riley, Hickey, Stephenson, and Hans, themselves scarcely able to travel, I owe my preservation. They carried me back by forced marches, after caching our stores and India-rubber boat near Dallas Bay, in lat. 79° 5´, long. 66°.”
Such was the “failure” of the Grand Expedition!