The effect of these low temperatures upon the snow is very striking. It becomes hardened to such a degree that it almost equals sand in grittiness, and the friction to the sledge-runner is increased accordingly. The same circumstance was noted by Baron Wrangel, but it is not new to the Esquimaux. The sledge runs most glibly when the snow is slightly wet. To obviate in some measure the difficulty thus occasioned, the native covers the sole of his runner with moisture. Dissolving in his mouth a piece of snow, he pours it out into his hand and coats with it the polished ivory sole, and in an instant he has formed a thin film of ice to meet the hardened crystals. Kalutunah stopped frequently for this purpose; and, upon trying the experiment with my own sledge, I found it to work admirably, and to produce a very perceptible difference in the draft.
It would be needless for me to give from day to day the details of this journey. As I have said before, it was merely experimental, and it was continued until I had satisfied myself fully that the route northward by the Greenland coast was wholly impracticable. The condition of the ice was very different from what it was in 1853-54. Then the coast ice was mainly smooth, and the hummocks were not met until we had gone from ten to twenty miles from the shore. Now there was no such belt. The winter had set in while the ice was crowding upon the land, and the pressure had been tremendous. Vast masses were piled up along the track, and the whole sea was but one confused jumble of ice-fragments, forced up by the pressure to an enormous height, and frozen together in that position. The whole scene was the Rocky Mountains on a small scale; peak after peak, ridge after ridge, spur after spur, separated by deep valleys, into which we descended over a rough declivity, and then again ascended on the other side, to cross an elevated crest and repeat the operation. The traveling was very laborious. It was but an endless clambering over ice-masses of every form and size.
KALUTUNAH PUZZLED.
Kalutunah was much puzzled to understand my object. He had never heard of a journey into that region except to catch bears, and then only in great emergencies; and when bear-track after bear-track was crossed without our giving chase, he became even more and more concerned. He had a double motive,—to have the sport and to see the effect of our rifles; but none of the tracks were fresh, and the chase would have been too long to agree with my purposes. At length, however, we came to a trail evidently not an hour old, and which we might have pursued to a successful issue, for the tracks were made by a mother and a small cub. Kalutunah halted his team, and was loud in his pleadings for leave to make a dash. He argued for the sport, for the skin which would make the Nalegaksoak such a fine coat, for his wife and children, who had not tasted bear-meat for ever so long a time, and finally for his dogs. "See how unhappy they are," said he, pointing to his tired team, which seemed to possess little appreciation of the eloquence that was being wasted upon them, for they had all fallen down in their tracks as soon as we had halted the sledges. Four days of hauling through drifts and hummocks had made them care little for a bear-hunt.
SIGHTING HUMBOLDT GLACIER.
Despite the difficulties of the traveling, three days more brought me within view of the great Humboldt Glacier, but the ice was becoming worse and worse, the icebergs were multiplying, my dogs were being worn out to no purpose; and much as I should have liked to continue the journey, there was no object to be gained by doing so. The ground had been covered by Dr. Kane's parties, and there was nothing to be learned further than I had experienced already, namely, that, in no event, could I get my boat to the polar sea in this direction. Whether I could do any better by the passage across the Sound to Grinnell Land remained to be seen. In any case, this last was clearly my only route.
The Humboldt Glacier was visible from the top of an iceberg. It revealed itself in a long line of bluish whiteness. Cape Agassiz, the last known point of the Greenland coast, bounded it on the right, and to the left it melted away in the remote distance. The line of its trend appeared to me to be more to the eastward than given in the original survey of Mr. Bonnsall, of Dr. Kane's expedition; and, although of little practical importance, yet this circumstance, coupled with observations hereafter to be recorded, have caused me to deviate somewhat, in the small chart which accompanies this volume, from the chart of Dr. Kane.
FATE OF THE "ADVANCE."
The coast along which I had been traveling was a succession of well-remembered landmarks. The tall sandstone cliffs were as familiar as the rows of lofty warehouses and stores on Broadway. Both up and down the coast I had gone so often from Van Rensselaer Harbor that I knew every point of land, and gorge, and ravine as if I had seen them but yesterday. But when I got down into the harbor itself how changed was every thing! Instead of the broad, smooth ice over which I had so often strolled, there was but a uniform wilderness of hummocks. In the place where the Advance once lay, the ice was piled up nearly as high as were her mast-heads. Fern Rock was almost overridden by the frightful avalanche which had torn down into the harbor from the north, and the locality of the store-house on Butler Island was almost buried out of sight. No vestige of the Advance remained, except a small bit of a deck-plank which I picked up near the site of the old Observatory. The fate of the vessel is of course a matter only of conjecture. When the ice broke up—it may have been the year we left her or years afterward—she was probably carried out to sea and ultimately crushed and sunk. From the Esquimaux I obtained many contradictory statements. Indeed, with the best intentions in the world, these Esquimaux have great trouble in telling a straight story. Even Kalutunah is not to be depended upon if there is the ghost of a chance for invention. He had been to the vessel, but at one time it was one year and then again it was another; he had carried off much wood, as many other Esquimaux had done. Another Esquimau had seen a vessel drifting about in the North Water among the ice, and finally it was sunk in the mouth of Wolstenholme Sound. This was four summers ago. Another had seen the same vessel, but the event had happened only two years before; while still another had accidentally set fire to the brig and burned her up where she lay in Van Rensselaer Harbor. No two of them gave the same account. Indeed, one of them asserted quite positively that the vessel had drifted down into the bay below, was there frozen up the next winter, and he had there boarded her when on a bear-hunt. Kalutunah had nothing positive to say on the subject, but he rather inclined to the story of the burning.
Every object around me was filled with old associations, some pleasant and some painful. I visited the graves of Baker and the jovial cook, Pierre, and looked for the pyramid which Dr. Kane mentions as "our beacon and their tomb-stone," but it was scattered over the rocks, and the conspicuous cross which had been painted on its southern face was only here and there shown by a stone with a white patch upon it.