April 26th.
THE SITUATION.
The progress to-day has been even more unsatisfactory than yesterday. The men are completely used up, broken down, dejected, to the last degree. Human nature cannot stand it. There is no let up to it. Cold, penetrating to the very sources of life, dangers from frost and dangers from heavy lifting, labors which have no end,—a heartless sticking in the mud, as it were, all the time; and then comes snow-blindness, cheerless nights, with imperfect rest in snow-huts, piercing storms and unsatisfying food. This the daily experience, and this the daily prospect ahead; to-day closing upon us in the same vast ice-jungle as yesterday. My party have, I must own, good reason to be discouraged; for human beings were never before so beset with difficulties and so inextricably tangled in a wilderness. We got into a cul-de-sac to-day, and we had as much trouble to surmount the lofty barrier which bounded it as Jean Valjean to escape from the cul-de-sac Genrot to the convent yard. But our convent yard was a hard old floe, scarce better than the hummocked barrier.
I feel to-night that I am getting rapidly to the end of my rope. Each day strengthens the conviction, not only that we can never reach Grinnell Land, with provisions for a journey up the coast to the Polar Sea, but that it cannot be done at all. I have talked to the officers, and they are all of this opinion. They say the thing is hopeless. Dodge put it thus: "You might as well try to cross the city of New York over the house-tops!" They are brave and spirited men enough, lack not courage nor perseverance; but it does seem as if one must own that there are some difficulties which cannot be surmounted. But I have in this enterprise too much at stake to own readily to defeat, and we will try again to-morrow.
April 27th.
THE SITUATION.
Worse and worse! We have to-day made but little progress, the sledge is badly broken, and I am brought to a stand-still. There does not appear to be the ghost of a chance for me. Must I own myself a defeated man? I fear so.
I was never in all my life so disheartened as I am to-night; not even when, in the midst of a former winter, I bore up with my party through hunger and cold, beset by hostile savages, and, without food or means of transportation, encountered the uncertain fortunes of the Arctic night in the ineffectual pursuit of succor.
MEN USED UP.
Smith Sound has given me but one succession of baffling obstacles. Since I first caught sight of Cape Alexander, last autumn, as the vanishing storm uncovered its grizzly head, I have met with but ill fortune. My struggles to reach the west coast were then made against embarrassments of the most grave description, and they were not abandoned until the winter closed upon me with a crippled and almost a sinking ship, driving me to seek the nearest place of refuge. Then my dogs died, and my best assistant became the victim of an unhappy accident. Afterward I succeed in some measure in replacing the lost teams, on which I had depended as my sole reliance; and here I am once more baffled in the middle of the Sound, stuck fast and powerless. My men have failed me as a means of getting over the difficulties, as those of Dr. Kane did before me. Two foot parties sent out by that commander to cross the Sound failed. Ultimately I succeeded in crossing with dogs, but the passage was made against almost insuperable difficulties, so great that my companion, convinced that starvation and death only would result from a continuance of the trial, resolved to settle it with a Sharp's rifle-ball; but the ball whizzed past my ear, and I got to the shore notwithstanding,—discovered Grinnell Land, and surveyed two hundred miles of its coast. But the ice is now infinitely worse than it was then; and I am convinced that the difficulties of this journey have now culminated and the crisis has been reached. The men are, as I have before observed, completely exhausted from the continued efforts of the past week, and are disheartened by the contemplation of the little progress that was made as well as by the formidable nature of the hummocks in front, which they realize are becoming more and more difficult to surmount as they penetrate farther and farther into them. Their strength has been giving way under the incessant and extraordinary call upon their energies, at temperatures in which it is difficult to exist even under the most favorable circumstances, each realizing that upon his personal exertions depends the only chance of making any progress, and recognizing that after all their efforts and all their sacrifices the progress made is wholly inadequate to accomplish the object in view. Besides this prostration of the moral sentiments, there is the steady and alarming prostration of the physical forces. One man is incapacitated from work by having his back sprained in lifting; another is rendered useless by having his ancle sprained in falling; the freezing of the fingers and toes of others renders them almost helpless; and the vital energies of the whole party are so lowered by exposure to the cold that they are barely capable of attending to their own immediate necessities, without harboring a thought of exerting themselves to complete a journey to which they can see no termination, and in the very outset of which they feel that their lives are being sacrificed.