I also remember distinctly the feelings with which I watched the Hope, a more powerful ship, less than a mile north of us, moving steadily along through ice of the same character, finally emerging into the open water on the outside of the stream, and disappearing from sight to the south before the Windward was completely through.
The introduction of steam revolutionized polar navigation as it did all other kinds, though the first attempt to utilize it in the Victory was a rank failure. To whalers fitted with engines as well as sails, voyages, which before were a gamble, now became a regular certainty, and fishing-grounds were sought and utilized that before were absolutely impossible.
Without steam the conquest of the south polar regions would have been impossible despite Weddell’s surprising voyage in the early thirties. Without steam the Northwest Passage and the Northeast Passage might still be unnegotiated, and without steam the north pole would still be undiscovered.
As late as the fifties and sixties the ships of Kane and Hayes were propelled by sails alone. Hall in the seventies was the first American to have a steam vessel.
With the construction of the powerful Roosevelt, built not only for avoiding ice pressure, but for forcing her way through it and, when necessary, smashing it with powerful blows, ice navigation became a gladiatorial contest, a royal sport, with the Roosevelt’s steel-clad bow as cæstus and her fifteen hundred tons of displacement to drive it home.
There is probably no place where ice navigation is so hazardous as in the Smith Sound, or American, route to the pole, where the heaviest of ice, swift currents, narrow channels, and iron shores make the pressures sudden, erratic, almost continuous, and of great intensity. The negotiation of the three hundred and fifty miles of virtually solid ice of all conceivable shapes and sizes that lie between Etah and Cape Sheridan presents problems and difficulties, which will test the experience and nerve of the ablest navigator, and the powers of the strongest vessel that man can build. The value of detailed experience in such strenuous work cannot be too strongly accentuated. In my earlier expeditions I have traveled the shores of these channels anywhere from three to eight times, and know every foot of the coast from Payer Harbor in Ellesmere Land to Cape Joseph Henry on the Grant Land shore, and the ice conditions to be encountered. It was my minute familiarity with the tides of these regions, the small bays or indentations which would afford shelter to a ship, as well as the places which grounding icebergs would make impracticable and dangerous, together with the ice experience and determination of Captain Bartlett, that made it possible four times for the Roosevelt successfully to navigate these channels, a feat which was long regarded as utterly impossible.
Scotch “Aurora”
Norwegian “Fram”
American “Roosevelt”
Italian “Stella Polare”
German “Gauss”
British “Discovery”
COMPARATIVE PICTURES OF VARIOUS EXPLORING SHIPS