Let us pause here a few moments, in order that we may take a brief survey of the Polar Basin and arrive at a correct understanding of what is meant by the term, "Open Polar Sea," so often used.
BOUNDARIES OF THE POLAR BASIN.
By referring to the circumpolar map, the reader will be able to form a more accurate judgment than he could from the most elaborate description. He will observe that about the North Pole of the earth there is an extensive sea, or, more properly, ocean, with an average diameter of more than two thousand miles. He will observe that this sea is almost completely surrounded by land, and that its shores are, for the most part, well defined,—the north coasts of Greenland and Grinnell Land, which project farthest into it, being alone undetermined. He will note that these shores occupy, to a certain extent, a uniform distance from the Pole, and are everywhere within the region of perpetual frost. He will remember that they are inhabited everywhere by people of the same race, to whom the soil yields no subsistence, who live exclusively by hunting and fishing, and confine their dwelling-places either to the coast or to the banks of the rivers which flow northward. He will observe that the long line of coast which gives lodgment to these Arctic nomads is interrupted in three principal places; and that through these the waters of the Polar Sea mingle with the waters of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans,—these breaks being Baffin Bay, Behring Strait, and the broader opening between Greenland and Nova Zembla; and if he traces the currents on the map and follows the Gulf Stream as it flows northward, pouring the warm waters of the Tropic Zone through the broad gateway east of Spitzbergen and forcing out a return current of cold waters to the west of Spitzbergen and through Davis Strait, he will very readily comprehend why in this incessant displacement of the waters of the Pole by the waters of the Equator the great body of the former is never chilled to within several degrees of the freezing-point; and since it is probably as deep, as it is almost as broad, as the Atlantic between Europe and America, he will be prepared to understand that this vast body of water tempers the whole region with a warmth above that which is otherwise natural to it; and that the Almighty hand, in the all-wise dispensation of His power, has thus placed a bar to its congelation; and he will read in this another symbol of Nature's great law of circulation, which, giving water to the parched earth and moisture to the air, moderates as well the temperature of the zones—cooling the Tropic with a current of water from the Frigid, and warming the Frigid with a current from the Tropic.[11]
[11] The temperature of the air at the North Pole has furnished a fruitful theme of speculation, both in connection with the influence of the sea and of the sun. I have before me a highly instructive paper on the climate of the North Pole, read before the Royal Geographical Society of London, April 10th, 1865, by W. E. Hickson, Esq., from which I extract the following:—
"It had always been supposed that the immediate areas of the Poles must be the coldest regions of the globe, because the farthest points from the equator. Hence the argument that the higher the latitude the greater must be the difficulties and dangers of navigation. Quite an opposite opinion, however, had begun to prevail among meteorologists on the publication, in 1817, of the Isothermal system of Alexander Von Humboldt, which showed that distance from the equator is no rule for cold, as the equator is not a parallel of maximum heat. The line of maximum heat crosses the Greenwich meridian, in Africa, fifteen degrees north of the equator, and rises, to the eastward, five degrees higher, running along the southern edge of the Desert of Sahara. In 1821, Sir David Brewster pointed out, in a paper on the mean temperature of the globe, the probability of the thermometer being found to range ten degrees higher at the Pole than in some other parts of the Arctic Circle. No new facts have since been discovered to invalidate this conclusion—many, on the contrary, have come to light tending to confirm it."
POLAR CURRENTS
Bearing these facts in mind, the reader will perceive that it is the surface-water only which ever reaches so low a temperature that it is changed to ice; and he will also perceive that when the wind moves the surface-water, the particles which have become chilled by contact with the air mingle in the rolling waves with the warm waters beneath, and hence that ice can only form in sheltered places or where the water of some bay is so shoal and the current so slack that it becomes chilled to the very bottom, or where the air over the sea is uniformly calm. He will remember, however, that the winds blow as fiercely over the Polar Sea as in any other quarter of the world; and he will, therefore, have no difficulty in comprehending that the Polar ice covers but a small part of the Polar water; and that it exists only where it is nursed and protected by the land. It clings to the coasts of Siberia, and springing thence across Behring Strait to America, it hugs the American shore, fills the narrow channels which drain the Polar waters into Baffin Bay through the Parry Archipelago, crosses thence to Greenland, from Greenland to Spitzbergen, and from Spitzbergen to Nova Zembla,—thus investing the Pole in an uninterrupted land-clinging belt of ice, more or less broken as well in winter as in summer, and the fragments ever moving to and fro, though never widely separating, forming a barrier against which all the arts and energies of man have not hitherto prevailed.
THE ICE-BELT.
If the reader would further pursue the inquiry, let him place one leg of a pair of dividers on the map near the North Pole (say in latitude 86°, longitude 160° W.), and inscribe a circle two thousand miles in diameter, and he will have touched the margin of the land and the mean line of the ice-belt throughout its wide circuit, and have covered an area of more than three millions of square miles.
Although this ice-belt has not been broken through, it has been penetrated in many places, and its southern margin has been followed, partly along the waters formed near the land by the discharging rivers of the Arctic water-sheds of Asia and America, and partly by working through the ice which is always more or less loosened by the summer. It was in this manner that various navigators have attempted the northwest passage; and it was after following the coast line from Behring Strait to Banks Land, and then pushing through the broken ice that Sir Robert McClure finally succeeded in effecting this long-sought-for passage—not, however, by carrying his ship completely through, but by traveling over the winter ice three hundred miles to Wellington Channel, whence he returned home through Baffin Bay in a ship that had come from the eastward. And it was in this same manner that Captain Collinson, passing from west to east, reached almost to the spot where perished Franklin, who had entered the ice from the opposite direction. And it is thus, also, that the Russians have explored the coasts of Siberia, meeting but two insurmountable obstacles to the navigation from the Atlantic to the Pacific side, namely, Cape Jakan, against which the ice is always jammed, and which Behring tried in vain to pass, and Cape Ceverro Vostochnoi, which the gallant young Lieutenant Prondtschikoff made such heroic efforts to surmount. And it was by the same method of navigation that the Amsterdam pilot, earnest old William Barentz, strove, in 1598, to find by the northeast a passage to Cathay.