“I was sitting,” writes Amundsen on August thirty-first, “entering the day’s events in my journal, when I heard a shriek—a terrific shriek, which thrilled me to the very marrow. It takes something to make a Norseman shriek, but a mighty flame with thick suffocating smoke was leaping up from the engine room skylight. There the tanks held two thousand two hundred gallons of petroleum, and close beside them a pile of soaked cotton waste had burst with a loud explosion. If the tanks got heated the ship would be blown into chips, but after a hard fight the fire was got under. All hands owed their lives to their fine discipline.”
A few days later the Joy grounded in a labyrinth of shoals, and was caught aground by a storm which lifted and bumped her until the false keel was torn off. The whole of the deck load had to be thrown overboard. The only hope was to sail over the rocks, and with all her canvas set she charged, smashing from rock to rock until she reached the farther edge of the reef which was nearly dry. “The spray and sleet were washing over the vessel, the mast trembled, and the Gjöa seemed to pull herself together for a last final leap. She was lifted up and flung bodily on the bare rocks, bump, bump, with terrific force.... In my distress I sent up (I honestly confess it) an ardent prayer to the Almighty. Yet another bump worse than ever, then one more, and we slid off.”
The shock had lifted the rudder so that it rested with the pintles on the mountings, and she would not steer; then somehow the pins dropped back into their sockets, the steersmen regained control and the Joy was saved, after a journey across dry rocks which ought to have smashed any ship afloat. She did not even leak.
Near the south end of King William’s Land a pocket harbor was found, and named Joy Haven. There the stores were landed, cabins were built, the ship turned into a winter house, and the crew became men of science. For two years they were hard at work studying the magnetism of the earth beside the Magnetic Pole. They collected fossils and natural history specimens, surveyed the district, studied the heavens and the weather, hunted reindeer for their meat and clothing, fished, and made friends with the scented, brave and merry Eskimos. During the first winter the thermometer dropped to seventy-nine degrees below zero, which is pretty near the world record for cold, but as long as one is well fed, with bowels in working order, and has Eskimo clothes to wear, the temperature feels much the same after forty below zero. Below that point the wind fails to a breathless calm, the keen dry air is refreshing as champagne, and one can keep up a dog-trot for miles without being winded. It is not the winter night that people dread, but the summer day with its horrible torment of mosquitoes. Then there is in spring and autumn, a hot misty glare upon the snow-fields which causes blindness with a deal of pain. The Arctic has its drawbacks, but one remembers afterward the fields of flowers, the unearthly beauty of the northern lights, the teeming game, and those long summer nights when the sun is low, filling the whole sky with sunset colors.
The greatest event of the first year was the finding of an Eskimo hunter to carry letters, who came back in the second summer, having found in Hudson’s Bay an exploring vessel of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police of Canada. Major Moody, also the captain of the Arctic, and the Master of an American whaler, sent their greetings, news of the outer world, some useful charts, and a present of husky dogs.
The second summer was over. The weather had begun to turn cold before a northerly gale smashed the ice, and sea lanes opened along the Northwest passage. On August thirteenth the Joy left her anchorage, under sail and steam, to pick her way without compass through blinding fog, charging and butting through fields of ice, dodging zigzag through shoals, or squeezing between ice-fields and the shore. There was no sleep for anybody during the first three nights, but racking anxiety and tearing overstrain until they reached known waters, a channel charted by the old explorers. They met an American whaler, and afterward had clear open water as far as the mouths of the Mackenzie River. A few miles beyond that the ice closed in from the north and piled up-shore so that the passage was blocked and once more the Joy went into winter quarters. But not alone. Ladies must have corsets ribbed with whalebone from the bowhead whale. Each whale head is worth two thousand pounds, so a fleet of American whalers goes hunting in the Arctic. Their only port of refuge is Herschel Island off the Canadian coast, so there is an outpost of the Northwest Mounted Police, a mission station and a village of Eskimos.
The Joy came to anchor thirty-six miles to the east of Herschel Island, beside a stranded ship in charge of her Norse mate, and daily came passengers to and fro on the Fort Macpherson trail. From that post runs a dog-train service of mails connecting the forts of the Hudson’s Bay Company all the way up the Mackenzie Valley to Edmonton on the railway within two thousand miles. The crew of the Joy had company news, letters from home, and Captain Amundsen went by dog-train to the mining camps on the Yukon where at Eagle City he sent telegrams.
At last in the summer of 1906 the Joy sailed on the final run of her great voyage, but her crew of seven was now reduced to six, and at parting she dipped her colors to the cross on a lone grave. The ice barred her passage, but she charged, smashing her engines, and charged again, losing her peak which left the mainsail useless. So she won past Cape Prince of Wales, completing the Northwest passage, and entering Bering Sea called at Cape Nome for repairs. There a thousand American gold miners welcomed the sons of the vikings with an uproarious triumph, and greeted Captain Amundsen with the Norse national anthem.
XXX
A. D. 1588 JOHN HAWKINS
Master John Hawkins, mariner, was a trader’s son, familiar from childhood with the Guinea coast of Africa. Worshipful merchants of London trusted him with three ridiculously small ships, the size of our fishing smacks, but manned by a hundred men. With these, in 1562—the “spacious times” of great Elizabeth—he swooped down on the West African coast, and horribly scared were his people when they saw the crocodiles. The nature of this animal “is ever when he would have his prey, to sob and cry like a Christian bodie, to provoke them to come to him, and then he snatcheth at them.” In spite of the reptiles, Master Hawkins “got into his possession, partly by the sword, and partly by other means,” three hundred wretched negroes.