Our Arctic province

by Henry Wood Elliott

This chert is that which the Eskimo of the entire Alaskan arctic region (before the coming of white men) used for tipping their lance- and arrow-heads when ivory was not employed. They, aided with a small piece of bone, were able to “flake” it off in slices that were easily reduced to the desired forms. They still work a little of it up every year, in a desultory or perfunctory manner, however, more for amusement than anything else, since they have a profusion of iron and steel now in their possession. The fashion in which they chip it gives ample evidence of their full understanding of a flat conchoidal fracture peculiar to flint, and of which they take advantage.

To the northwest of Cape Thompson the coast runs out abruptly as a low spit, projected into the Arctic Ocean for a distance of twenty miles. This is Port Hope. The beach everywhere is principally formed of dark basaltic gravel. To the north of a considerable stream not far from this point, and on a low and diluvial shore, is a large hamlet of Innuits, who have covered the turfy thatches on their winter houses with heavy blocks of angular clink-stones picked up from the sea-beach. The whole surface of the interior country here is raised several hundred feet above tide-level, and is diversified with saddle-backed hills of gray and bronzed tints, separated by wide valleys in which a rich green summer verdancy is characteristic. Here and there conical eminences and perpendicular shelving cliffs arise from a general evenness of the whole landscape. These cliffs seem to be composed of limestones, while their acclivities are of slate and shale.

As we near Cape Lisburne a jutting range of bluffs, stratified in bands of grayish-brown and black, receive the full wash of the sea, and are called Cape Dyer; but Cape Lisburne is the striking landmark, and a most important one for the navigator to recognize. It is composed of two remarkable promontories: the southwestern one rises abruptly from the surf, is covered with loose gray stones, divested of the smallest traces of vegetation. The northeastern one rises gradually, and, although but thinly clad with verdure, it forms a pleasing and marked contrast with the gray head of the other. The first is elevated from the sea in distinct strata, with a southwestern dip, and consists of layers of impure chert in its central and most prominent projections, and of a soft, friable slate and shale in its worn and more retiring sides. The front of the second is rugged and shelving, with very indistinct bandings; it is partly covered with tundra vegetable-growths, and with fallen masses of gray flint. Both points to this double-headed cape of Lisburne are easily accessible; they are about one thousand feet in height from the shore of the ocean, and both stretch their ridges away inland far to the southeast.

The highly elevated country here ceases at once to the northeast of Cape Lisburne, where the entire coast-line, away on and off to Icy Cape, and beyond again, forms a deep and extensive bay skirted by a dark, low beach. A gravel-flat fronts this again, filled with shallow estuaries and lagoons. The land of the interior rises from that beach in a series of low, earthy cliffs and in gradual acclivities.

The coal-veins, which Beechey visited in 1826, are about fifty miles to the eastward of Lisburne, embedded in a ridge some three hundred feet high where it juts into the ocean. This point is known as Cape Beaufort. A narrow vein of pure carboniferous coal is exposed there, about a quarter of a mile from the beach. “It was slaty, but burned with a bright, clear flame and rapid consumption.” Again, at a point about midway between Beaufort and Lisburne, directly at the surf-margin, the officers of the United States Revenue Marine cutter Corwin mined a few tons of this same coal in 1880-81. But no harbor for a coaling ship is near by; the steady north and westerly winds of summer, which blow right on shore almost all of that short time in which a vessel can navigate the Arctic, make it very doubtful whether these remote mines of Alaskan “black diamonds” will ever be of real economic value.

That sand- and shingle-spit ahead of us, which the whalers have named Icy Cape with perfect fitness, is in itself almost invisible, since it is a mere continuation of the outer rim to a remarkable lagoon which borders this coast from Cape Beaufort to Wainright Inlet, over one hundred miles in length, and varying in width from five to ten miles, with an average depth of two fathoms. It is spanned by occasional sand-bars, some of them entirely dry, so that it is not navigable except for those small boats and oomiaks of the natives, who haul these craft across as they journey, thus safe and snug, up and down a desolate coast. This lagoon of the Arctic Ocean has several openings to the sea itself. Small schooners can run in and escape from ice-pack “jams,” if they draw less than eight or ten feet of water. The coast-line of the mainland at Icy Cape is a series of low mud-cliffs, varying from ten to fifty feet in height above a shingly beach, which is everywhere composed of fine, minutely comminuted, pebbly bases of granite, of chert, of sienite, and of indurated clay, the last being a predominant form.

From this point clear around to the boundary of our Alaskan Arctic coast at Point Demarcation that country presents the same appearance which we note here. It is low and slightly rolling, and falls in small cliffs of mud or sandstone at the sea-shore. During the midsummer season it wears a hue of gray and brown, with little patches of bright green where the snow has melted early in sunny, sheltered spots. The lines of many streams, as they course in carrying off melting snows, are plainly marked over a dreary tundra by the dark fringes of dwarfed willows, birches, and alders which only grow upon their banks.

Innuit Whaling-camp at Icy Cape.

All along this cheerless northern sea-shore are small and widely scattered settlements of our Innuits, who burrow in their turfy underground winter huts, and who tent outside in summer-time upon these shingly gravels and clink-stones of the Arctic coast. They then live upon the walrus and kill an occasional calf-whale. For the better apprehension of these animals they erect lookouts on the beach by setting up drift-wood scaffolds, and climbing as lookouts to an elevated platform thus made. In the winter, when the weather permits, they net a ringed seal (Phoca fœtida) under the ice, make short inland trips, where they camp for weeks at a time in rude snow-houses, hunting reindeer, which are shy though abundant, and they trap a few wolves and foxes. Every July and August they expect the visit of a few whaling-vessels at least, and they are seldom disappointed, for such craft are compelled by ice-floes to hug this shore very closely, in order to get as far to the eastward as the whales are found; sometimes, in spite of all the wariness and skill of our own hardy whalemen, great floe-booms, of icy make, suddenly shut down on that land so quickly from the north as to catch and crush the staunchest ships like egg-shells under foot. Then, indeed, is the sadness and the distress of the white men sharply contrasted with that great joy and happy anticipation of an Innuit who feasts his eyes and gloats in fancy over the abandoned vessels as they lie riven by ice upon those shallow strands of Icy Cape or Point Barrow.