KNOCKING AT THE GATEWAY TO THE POLE
From Etah to Cape Sheridan! Imagine about three hundred and fifty miles of almost solid ice—ice of all shapes and sizes, mountainous ice, flat ice, ragged and tortured ice, ice that, for every foot of height revealed above the surface of the water, hides seven feet below—a theater of action which for diabolic and Titanic struggle makes Dante's frozen circle of the Inferno seem like a skating pond.
Then imagine a little black ship, solid, sturdy, compact, strong and resistant as any vessel built by mortal hands can be, yet utterly insignificant in comparison with the white, cold adversary she must fight. And on this little ship are sixty-nine human beings, men, women, and children, whites and Eskimos, who have gone out into the crazy, ice-tortured channel between Baffin Bay and the Polar Sea—gone out to help prove the reality of a dream which has bewitched some of the most daring minds of the world for centuries, a will-o'-the-wisp in the pursuit of which men have frozen, and starved, and died. The music that ever sounded in our ears had for melody the howling of two hundred and forty-six wild dogs, for a bass accompaniment the deep, low grumbling of the ice, surging around us with the impulse of the tides, and for punctuation the shock and jar of our crashing assaults upon the floes.
We steamed northward into the fog beyond Etah, Greenland, on the afternoon of August 18, 1908. This was the beginning of the last stage of the Roosevelt's journey. All now on board would, if they lived, be with me until my return the following year. As an ungentle reminder of what was ahead of us, though going at half speed because of the fog, we struck a small berg a little way out from the harbor. Had the Roosevelt been an ordinary ship instead of the sturdy ice-fighter that she is, my story might have ended right here. As it was, the shock of the impact jarred things considerably. But the berg suffered more than the ship, which only shook herself like a dog coming out of the water, and with the main mass of the berg swaying heavily on one side from the blow we had given it, and a large fragment we had broken off churning the water on the other side, the Roosevelt scraped between them and went on.
This little incident made a strong impression on the new members of my party, and I did not think it necessary to tell them that it was only a mosquito bite to the crunching and grinding between the jaws of the heavier ice that was in store for us a little farther on. We were working in a northwesterly direction toward the Ellesmere Land side, and headed for Cape Sabine, of terrible memories. As we steamed on, the ice became thicker, and we had to turn south to get out of the way of it, worming our course among the loose floes. The Roosevelt avoided the heavier ice; but the lighter pack she shoved aside without much difficulty. South of Brevoort Island we were fortunate in finding a strip of open water, and steamed northward again, keeping close to the shore.
It must be remembered that from Etah to Cape Sheridan, for the greater part of the course, the shores on either side are clearly visible,—on the east the Greenland coast, on the west the coast of Ellesmere Land and Grant Land. At Cape Beechey, the narrowest and most dangerous part, the channel is only eleven miles wide, and when the air is clear it almost seems as if a rifle bullet might be fired from one side to the other. These waters, save in exceptional seasons, are filled with the heaviest kind of ice, which is constantly floating southward from the Polar Sea toward Baffin Bay.
Whether this channel was carved in the solid land by the force of pre-Adamite glaciers, or whether it is a Titanic cleft formed by the breaking off of Greenland from Grant Land, is a question still undetermined by geologists; but for difficulty and danger there is no place to compare with it in the whole arctic region.
It is hard for a layman to understand the character of the ice through which the Roosevelt fought her way. Most persons imagine that the ice of the arctic regions has been formed by direct freezing of the sea water; but in the summer time very little of the floating ice is of that character. It is composed of huge sheets broken off from the glacial fringe of North Grant Land broken up by contact with other floes and with the land, and driven south under the impetus of the violent flood tides. It is not unusual to see there ice between eighty and one hundred feet thick. As seven-eighths of these heavy floes are under water, one does not realize how thick they are until one sees where a huge mass, by the pressure of the pack behind it, has been driven upon the shore, and stands there high and dry, eighty or a hundred feet above the water, like a silver castle guarding the shore of this exaggerated and ice-clogged Rhine.
The navigation of the narrow and ice-encumbered channels between Etah and Cape Sheridan was long considered an utter impossibility, and only four ships besides the Roosevelt have succeeded in accomplishing any considerable portion of it. Of these four ships, one, the Polaris, was lost. Three, the Alert, the Discovery, and the Proteus, made the voyage up and back in safety; but one of those, the Proteus, was lost in an attempt to repeat the dash. The Roosevelt had on the expedition of 1905-6 made the voyage up and back, though she was badly smashed on the return.
Going north, the Roosevelt of necessity followed the coast a portion of the way, as only close to the shore could any water be found which would enable the ship to advance. With the shore ice on one side, and the moving central pack on the other, the changing tides were almost certain to give us an occasional opportunity to steam ahead.