7. The first practical application of the theory of an open Polar Sea was long ago devised by Plancius; the discovery, namely, of a route in high latitudes to China. But the expeditions to the North Pole, properly so termed, sprang also from this theory, which was held with the greatest pertinacity. The evidence of unsuccessful undertakings was always met and outweighed by the counter-experience of one favourable year in the ice. Thus Barentz, in the exceedingly propitious summer of 1594, advanced without difficulty one degree of latitude beyond the northern extremity of Novaya Zemlya, while his successors frequently encountered insurmountable difficulties at Cape Nassau, and he himself in the following year, 1595, found the state of the ice changed much for the worse. In the years 1871, 1874, Mack, Carlsen, and the two Austro-Hungarian expeditions came upon an open sea in the very places where very few, if any, water-ways were to be seen in 1872 and 1873. In the summers of 1816, 1817, the mighty stream of ice on the coast of East Greenland had decreased to such an extent that Scoresby met with little ice between 74° and 80° N.L., but since then whalers have constantly seen the heaviest ice there, heavier than anywhere else. In 1753 and 1754, the Sea of Kara and the Novaya Zemlya Sea were free from ice. But in subsequent years the whale-fishers knocked in vain at their ice-barred entrances. In 1823 Lütke from a point on the west coast of the Sea of Kara saw that sea without ice; but, in the middle of August, 1833, Pachtussow found the western side of that sea open, while in the previous year he himself could not pass the Karian Gates. Again in 1743 and 1773, the North Spitzbergen Sea held out promises the most inviting, which might possibly have permitted the reaching of a still higher degree of latitude than that which Nordenskjöld and Koldewey attained in 1868. Sir John Ross, in the first year of his second voyage, found all things most favourable for navigation; but in the following year the very reverse; and Sir James C. Ross experienced the same alternation of circumstances in the Southern Polar Sea. In 1850, Penny found the Wellington Channel free from ice, but in 1852, Belcher, although he penetrated far further than Penny, was confronted in the same channel by pack- and drift-ice. Scoresby the younger, to whose profound faculty of observation we owe the most significant hints on the nature of the Polar Sea, although he had navigated the Greenland ice-ocean for twenty years, landed only once on its coast. The Swedish expedition (1861) could approach the north-east of Spitzbergen only in boats; Smith sailed over the sea there (1871) as far as Cape Smith. The walrus-hunter, Matilas, sailed round (1864) the north-east island completely, and Carlsen, an ice navigator, as successful as he was skilful, in 1863 circumnavigated Spitzbergen, and in 1871 Novaya Zemlya, and discovered there the relics of Barentz’s winter quarters. In 1872, King Karl Land was circumnavigated, although both Koldewey and Nordenskjöld (1868) as well as the first Austrian expedition (1871) had in vain attempted to approach it. How greatly also, in the same year, the state of the ice varies in different places, is proved by the fact, that Franklin learnt from the whalers that they never saw the ice so thick and so strong in Davis Straits as at the end of July 1819, while Parry, more to the north by some degrees of latitude, pursued his path of discovery even to Melville Island, and in the following year returned to England without meeting any special obstacles. These examples, to which many more might be added, show how variable are the chances of ice-navigation from one year to another. But however variable the conditions of the ice may be, the impediments, even under the most favourable circumstances, are so very great, that we have never been able to penetrate the innermost Polar regions,—penetrate, that is, to where, according to the views of an earlier time, the open Polar Sea should be found.
8. Those propitious ice-years amount therefore to nothing more than a greater recession of the outer ice-barrier—trifling when compared with the mighty whole—or to an increased navigability of certain coast-waters, or to a local loosening of the inner Polar ice-net. In reality the whole Arctic Sea, with its countless ice-fields and floes, and its web of fine interlacing water-ways, is nothing but a net constantly in motion from local, terrestrial, or cosmical causes. All the changes and phenomena of this mighty network lead us to infer the existence of frozen seas up to the Pole itself; and according to my own experience, gained in three expeditions, I consider that the states of the ice between 82° and 90° N.L. will not essentially differ from those which have been observed south of latitude 82°; I incline rather to the belief that they will be found worse instead of better.
9. If this view be correct, it will remain an insuperable difficulty to reach the Pole with a ship. The penetrating to 82° or 83° exhausts, according to all past experience, the disposable time for navigation, and presupposes moreover the most favourable conditions for the attaining of such high latitudes. A ship which reaches 82° N.L. by the beginning of autumn must risk nothing more, should only navigate really open water, and the expediency of securing a winter harbour should then outweigh every other consideration.
10. He who expects with a ship of the present construction to reach the Pole in a single summer, necessarily believes in an ocean at the Pole. But even if an expedition should penetrate to 84° in Smith’s Sound, or should reach Cape Tcheljuskin on the north-east route, it would not follow that such an ocean exists, but only that the Polar Sea presents at different times and in different places open water-ways, which may enable a ship to advance beyond a point hitherto reached; but it is improbable that the circumstances which favoured this will be repeated the next summer, so as to permit the ships to penetrate still further—or to return. The last American expedition returned without being able to speak decisively as to the possibility of navigating Lincoln Sea, and since this has not yet been verified by fact, we must suspend our judgment on the matter. To the English expedition, which has taken this route to the Pole, is reserved the great work of throwing light on the region of Upper Smith’s Sound, and the whole civilized world will hail with joy any successes which a nation, so long conspicuous for its perseverance in the cause of discovery, may happily achieve.
CHAPTER V.
THE FUTURE OF THE POLAR QUESTION.
1. The eagerness of human nature for gain and material prosperity is so great, that we are wont to estimate the value of all undertakings by the standard of utility; and too often it is forgotten, that each generation is destined to fulfil the task of acquiring and collecting the knowledge which is to benefit only a later generation. If, then, the Polar question be valueless for our material interests, is it therefore valueless for science? and assuming that it is for the present worthless as far as gain and wealth are concerned, must it continue so for all time? Not that we are entitled, even from this narrower point of view, to deny the usefulness of Polar exploration, as Cook seems to have done when he said, “Never from those regions will any advantage accrue to our race;” but rather bear in mind what Sir James Ross tells us: “The profit which accrued to England, in each year after the voyage (1818) of my uncle (Sir John Ross) in North Baffin’s Bay, from those rediscovered parts of the Arctic seas, was more than enough to defray all the expenses of the voyages of discovery undertaken from 1818 to 1838.” Scoresby with his single ship made a million thalers by the capture of whales, and the Americans had for many years a clear profit of eight million dollars from the fisheries of the frozen seas of Behring’s Straits. There were also, it is true, very considerable losses; for, in 1830, nineteen English ships engaged in the whale fishery were “beset” in the ice of Melville Bay, and nearly all destroyed; in 1871, twenty-six American ships were crushed to pieces in Behring’s Straits, and as many as seventy-three Dutch vessels sank in one year in the seventeenth century from the pressure of the ice.
2. We do not, however, mean to assert, that the progress of Polar discovery is always followed by a corresponding increase in the capture of fish in the Arctic seas. On the contrary, the take of oil-yielding animals is steadily decreasing, and even if an open sea should be discovered in 82° N.L., in which whales should be found in as great abundance as ice-floes unhappily are, the whaler with his poor equipment would never be able to follow them thither. The fur countries, once as productive as the mines of Peru, are incapable of further extension; even the treasures of mammoths’ tusks have become rare, and in order to bring thirty tons of lignite from the north-east of Greenland, a ship must expend seventy tons of sound coal in the transit, besides passing the winter there. That the teas of China, the silks of Japan, the spices of the Moluccas will never descend to us from the ice-fields has long been settled. No one at the present day thinks any longer of the commercial value of the North-West and North-East passages. Modes of escape from the perils and caprices of the ice have grown out of the endeavour to discover routes of commerce, which lay beyond the reach of the cannon of the Spaniards at the time when they aspired to the monopoly of the trade of the world. The reward of 25,000 gulden, offered by the Dutch government for the discovery of a North-East passage, and that of £20,000 by the English parliament for the North-West passage, have never been paid, because never claimed, nor are they, in the least degree, likely to be claimed.[12]
3. Yet, quite independent of material results, Polar exploration presents no unworthy object for scientific investigation—a region of the globe 120,000 square miles in extent never yet entered by man. The Polar question, as a problem of science, aims at determining the limits of land and water, at the perfecting of that network of lines with which comparative science seeks to surround our planet, even to its Poles. The completion of this labour will serve to discover those physical laws which regulate climates, the currents of the atmosphere and sea, and the analogies of geology with the earth as we see it.