A glance at the history of north polar exploration will show that it is studded with crushed and foundering ships.
Barents, in 1594–95, lost his ship and his life, his crew barely escaping. Following him came Bering, whose vessels were wrecked, causing the loss of his life, and much suffering on the part of his men before they reached safety on the coast of Kamchatka. The Dorothea of Franklin’s expedition in 1818 was badly crushed in the ice; in the expedition of Parry and Lyon in 1823–24 Lyon’s vessel was nearly wrecked on two occasions, and Parry’s vessel, the Fury, was actually lost; Captain Ross who started out in the Victory in 1829, was obliged to abandon her. Franklin’s two ships, the Erebus and Terror, were lost. The Assistance, Pioneer, Intrepid, Resolute, Investigator, were all lost in the course of the search for the Franklin expedition. The Bremen exploring vessel Hansa was wrecked (1860–70), and the crew forced to take to the drift ice and later to their boats. Hall’s ship, the Polaris, in 1872 was caught in and drifted with the ice, nearly destroyed in a violent gale off Northumberland Island, and later grounded. In 1874, Payer and Weyprecht, leaders of the Austrian expedition which discovered Franz-Josef-Land, were obliged to abandon their ship, and with their crew, in four small boats, struggled with the ice-pack for three months before they reached the open sea on their way to safety. In 1879 the Jeannette, under the command of DeLong, was caught in the ice, and two years later was crushed and sunk, a number of the party, including DeLong himself, losing their lives.
Some of these disasters have been the result of inexperience, others have been due to the disregard of the first principles of ice navigation, and still others are directly attributable to the utter unfitness of the ship for ice-work. Striking examples of the latter were the Jeannette and Polaris. These ships, because of their build, should never have gone into the ice. Wall-sided as they were, once caught between opposing fields of ice there was no escape for them, as their shape made it utterly impossible for them to rise and escape the deadly pressure.
ICE NAVIGATION BEFORE THE ADVENT OF POWERFUL STEAMERS
THE “ROOSEVELT” BESET IN WRANGEL BAY
The difficulties of ice navigation increase with higher latitude. Any vessel navigating in polar waters may at any time be crushed so suddenly that nothing below can be saved. At Etah I have always made preparations for such an emergency, and had all the pemmican, tea, coffee, biscuits, sugar, oil, ammunition,—in fact, all the essentials necessary to sustain life and health,—placed on deck close to the rail, where it could easily be thrown off to the ice. In addition to this, the whale-boats, fully equipped for a week or ten-days’ voyage, were ready at a moment’s notice to be lowered. Each boat, beside the required complement of oars, oar-locks, boat-hooks, a liquid compass, and a bailer, contained pemmican, conveniently packed in six-pound tins; biscuits, fifty pounds; coffee, ten pounds; compressed tea, five pounds; sugar, ten pounds; condensed milk, ten cans; salt; oil, five gallons; a small oil-stove; one rifle and one hundred cartridges; one shotgun and fifty shells; one box of matches in a tightly-corked bottle; one hatchet; knives; a can-opener; needles, and thread; and medical supplies consisting of quinine, astringent, bandages, cotton, gauze, boracic acid, dusting powder, needles, catgut, and liniment. And every member of the party, including the Eskimos, had a small bundle of extra clothing packed, and stood ready to leave the ship immediately after throwing off the supplies and lowering the boats.
The heavy pack-ice which surges down Smith Sound past Littleton Island usually makes it almost impossible to follow the coast of Greenland northward, and on leaving Etah it is necessary to cross to Cape Sabine, on the Ellesmere Land side.
As a rule, the trip from Etah to Cape Sabine presents no particular difficulty to a ship like the Roosevelt, and it may at times be made in continuous open water.