and I remembered too, to a more practical purpose, that Amundsen navigated the tiny “Gjea,” a sailing sloop with a gasoline engine, from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
CHAPTER III
On The Ice Pack
Our task was before us and it was to be entered upon at once. Perhaps you are thinking that we were hopelessly amateurish, inconsiderate, improvident and foolish. BUT WE SUCCEEDED. Nor were we forgetful or ignorant. Everything had been read. The elaborate preparations for polar exploration in the great expeditions had been studied. Two of us had been in the north before. The apparent simplicity of our outfit arose from a peculiar circumstance, and that was an imbedded conviction, perhaps only in me shaken by recurrent fits of alarm, that Krocker Land was a reality, and that it was habitable. And that meant life and living.
Then too we had fallen under a spell of imagination, we had become hopelessly enthralled in the visions of a new order of things. It was as if we had drunk draughts of some Medean drug that had stolen away our common sense and immersed us in a flood of fantasies. I don’t think we confessed anything concretely to one another; we talked together about Krocker Land just as men might talk about some portion of the earth that they had never seen, but which as a geographical certainty was on the maps and was known to possess an unusual interest. Perhaps, after all, the Professor was responsible for the orientation of thought that made us clairvoyant and credulous.
Still our plans had been fixed with a dry precision, as those of other explorers had been, and our supplies comprised just the things that stock the most prosaic and methodically arranged scientific expeditions. We had our tins of pemmican, of biscuit, of sugar, of coffee, condensed milk, our oil and our oil stoves. We were each provided with a rifle, a shotgun and ammunition. There were matches, hatchets, can openers, salt, needles and thread, bandages, quinine, astringents, liniments, sledges and kayaks, dogs and harness, tents, furs, alcohol, rugs, snowshoes, pickaxes, saw-knives, kamiks, certainly more things than Nansen and Johannsen had had when they left the “Fram” and scooted for the pole over the paleocrystic sea; and we were not looking for the pole, we were engaged in a trip to a continent, most certainly impingeable, because it stretched over 90 or 100 degrees of longitude, and 20 or 30 degrees of latitude.
And then—Ah, here our minds, irised, so to speak, like cracked crystals, furnished us a journey into fairy land—once there, we were to be entertained by wonders and comforts, then more wonders and comforts! Had we ever said that to each other consciously in our waking moments, we would have forlornly concluded that piblokto, the Eskimo hysteria, had carried us into the seventh heaven of affectation and madness. No; it was not fairy land indeed, but something more marvelous, a miracle of realities that to recall even now makes my head spin with the vertigo of a confessed self-delusion. LISTEN!
We had staked everything on the naphtha launch. As an invention it was ideal. We expected to drive it over the ice floes, and to sail it across the leads. It would hold all we needed, and our team of dogs, forty or fifty in number, would be able to pull it over the ice. If it was too heavy in the snows it could be lightened of its load on the sledges, or on the sledge teams which we expected would accompany it. The project appeared a little cumbersome but safe. We had noticed the striking absence from the western polar sea of icebergs, and we concluded that the sea north of Point Barrow, like the sea generally north of Cape Columbia or Cape Sheridan was a frozen water, smooth or interrupted only by the pressure ridges which scarred its surface with cyclopean walls of massed ice. We had indeed gone further in our inferences, and assumed that no mountainous elevations, with their chasms, intervening valleys and gorges made up the coasts of Krocker Land, for if they had, as in Greenland or Grant Land or as usually in the eastern archipelago, the discharge of the ice streams that filled them would have produced icebergs. Or was the annual snowfall inadequate?
Certainly the spectacular processions of the icebergs every spring and summer in the east were absent in the west. The conditions presented seemed to be a convincing assurance that our naphtha launch and ice boat, in its composite adaptation to land or water, would successfully traverse the flat ice sheet. Not indeed that it would actually be a plane table, but the obstacles of hummocks, piled up ice floes, ridges, mounds and walls could be circumvented, avoided, and the launch bodily driven over the pack. Such maneuvers might add much to the distance, but the resources were sufficient for a long journey, and, were we made to feel that the launch offered insurmountable difficulties, we would abandon it, increase the loads of our sledges with its distributed freight, and go on.
The naphtha launch was a simple and interesting vessel. It was a long, narrow, strong wooden raft with curving sides, and a broad, smooth sloping bow, reinforced by steel binders, bolts and rivets, set on runners, with a short tiller, easily unshipped, and a peculiar slanting propeller which was simply one rotating blade of alternating plates of wood and steel, allowing a shifting attachment to the engine, so that its stem could be shortened or lengthened, or withdrawn altogether, and the propeller disk sheathed in a pocket in the body of the vessel.