The journey northward was pursued with very varying fortunes. The ice was exceedingly bad, and when the ships were not actually beset in it, they were occupied in charging their way through it. Little by little, however, they made their way up the channel, caching large stores of provisions as they went, among the chief being a depot of 3600 rations on the Carey Islands, another depot of the same size at Cape Hawks, and one of 1000 rations at Cape Lincoln.
But ice was not the only difficulty with which Nares had to contend, for Hayes’ chart was a source of perpetual annoyance to him, and a great part of his time was spent in correcting its errors. Cape Frazer was placed eight miles and Scoresby Bay twenty miles too far north, and the rest of the western coast was so badly delineated that Nares pathetically remarked that it was often difficult to know exactly where he was.
Hugging the western shore and taking advantage of every channel that opened near the ship, he succeeded in reaching Lady Franklin Bay, on the other side of which he found a land-locked inlet; this he named Discovery Harbour, and in it he decided to leave his companion ship while he himself pushed on in the Alert.
As he ascended the strait he observed that the character of the ice changed rapidly. Off Cape Sabine the biggest floes were only eight or ten feet thick; off Cape Fraser their thickness increased to twenty feet, and the ice was obviously older, “but,” he says, “up to the present time, when the main pack consisted entirely of heavy ice, I had failed to observe that, instead of approaching a region favoured with open water and a warm climate, we were gradually nearing a sea where the ice was of a totally different formation to what we had ever before experienced, that few Arctic navigators had met, and only one battled with successfully; that in reality we must be approaching the same sea which gives birth to the heavy ice met with off the coast of America by Collinson and M’Clure, and which the latter in 1851 succeeded in navigating through in a sailing vessel for upwards of 100 miles, ... which Sir Edward Parry met with in the same channel in 1820, ... which, passing onwards to the eastward from Melville Strait down M’Clintock Channel, beset, and never afterwards released, the Erebus and Terror under Sir John Franklin and Captain Crozier; and which, intermixed with light Spitzbergen ice, is constantly streaming to the southward along the eastern shore of Greenland, and there destroyed the Hansa of the last German Arctic expedition.” In other words, Nares was in the middle of the ice formed in the Polar Sea, now known as Palæocrystic, and was the first man really to understand its character.
With some difficulty, the Alert succeeded in making her way as far as Floeberg Reach, in lat. 82° 25´ N., long. 62° W., the highest point yet attained by a ship. Here Nares determined to spend the winter, for, though the situation seemed at first sight to be rather exposed, it was well protected by a fringe of heavy floes which were grounded in eight to twelve fathoms of water. No land was to be seen to the northward, and Nares was forced to come to the conclusion that, though he had reached the shores of the Arctic Ocean, it was the very reverse of that open Polar sea which he had hoped to find.
On September 16 the ship was effectually frozen in for the winter, and ten days later Captain Markham, Lieutenant Parr, and Lieutenant May set off on a sledging expedition with the object of establishing depots of provisions as far north as they could. They accomplished their work well, but at terrible cost, for seven men and one officer returned to the ship badly frost-bitten, and in three cases amputations were necessary. At the same time Pelham Aldrich went out on an exploring trip in which he succeeded in reaching Parry’s latitude of 82° 48′ N.
The winter was fairly fine, but bitterly cold—the coldest, in fact, on record. The Alert experienced a mean temperature for five days and nine hours of 66.29° below zero, while for two separate periods of fifteen days each the mercury remained frozen. In the middle of March Lieutenants Egerton and Rawson attempted to open up communications with the Discovery, but the attempt ended with disaster, for Petersen, who accompanied them, was taken ill on the journey, and the whole party had to return. The two officers made the most heroic exertions to bring him back to health, depriving themselves of their own warm clothing and suffering severely in consequence. Their efforts were, however, of no avail, for Petersen was found to be so badly frost-bitten that both his feet had to be amputated, and three months later he died of exhaustion. Setting out again, Rawson and Egerton, accompanied by two sailors, reached the Discovery, and found that her crew had passed a comfortable winter, though one man was down with scurvy.
As soon as April came round Nares began the serious work of the spring by sending out two great sledge parties, one of which, under Commander Markham, was to push as far north as possible, while the other, under Lieutenant Aldrich, was to explore the northern shores of Grinnell Land.
Having been accompanied by a supporting party as far as Cape Henry, Markham set out over the Polar Sea on April 10, 1876. Fearing that they might chance upon an open sea, the party took with it two boats, which added greatly to their labours, making it necessary for them to cover every mile of their journey four times. Their way, moreover, lay in peculiarly unpleasant places, for the ice-field over which they had to travel was like a frozen ocean, the depressions between the waves being filled with snow and broken pack-ice. One of the boats was soon abandoned, but the men dragged the other as far as lat. 83° 20´, the highest point attained up to that time.
The homeward journey was even more trying, for scurvy had broken out among the men, five out of the seventeen had to be placed on the sledges, and many of the others could barely drag themselves over the ice. It soon became obvious that they could not reach the ship without assistance, so Lieutenant Parr gallantly volunteered to set out by himself, and performed the truly astonishing feat of covering the thirty miles which lay between his starting-point and the ship in twenty-four hours. The help that he brought back was only just in time, for one man died on the way, while eleven of the others had to be dragged to the ship on sledges.