The arriving sledges, dragged by men soaking with perspiration, stopped these meditations. Both sledges were on the point of breaking up, such had been the strain upon them during the last fortnight. They were extra strongly built, and the runners were protected with metal sheaths, yet there was not a sound joint left in them. The metal had all been scraped and torn away, the runners smashed up. If ordinary arctic travel were as rough as this work over crevassed inland glaciers, such a sledging expedition as Nansen made from the Fram would be impossible, for no sledge could hold out a tenth part of his course. Our sledges, moreover, were lightly laden with about a third of the normal arctic load. Had they been heavier, they could not have been dragged along at all, or if forced forward they would have broken up the first day.
It is only on returning to the coast that one obtains a correct realisation of the silence of the higher regions. The glacier-front kept “calving”; the floating ice kept cracking up and turning over; there was a noisy torrent flooding down close to camp. Stones fell; waves broke on the shore. Such noises for a long time drove sleep away. When I did slumber it was to dream of glacier-lakes bursting, of avalanches falling, and other catastrophes.
Next day we had the boat to drag down to the sea—two hours’ work—all our baggage to overhaul, pack, and portage, so that it was late in the afternoon before we were ready to sail. The long hours of work were enlivened by the charm of the scenery beneath the grey roof of sea-fog, which still remained just where it had hung for so many days. The variety of effects was extraordinary, for there was no wind to move the fog, nor sunshine coming through it. The floating ice sometimes stood out white against the purple background and dark sky, sometimes dark against a white curtain of mist, and sometimes it glittered behind a vaporous veil. The water was now dark, like lead, now bright as burnished steel. There was continual change, yet no visible cause for change. Out into this fairy region of calm water and pure ice at last we rowed in search of new scenes, new beauty, and new delights.
Our first goal was one of Lovén’s Islands, away out in the midst of the bay, right over against the ice-cliff of the Kings Glacier. To reach this we had to row through a bed of water so closely covered with broken ice that a way was made for the boat by pushing the fragments asunder. They were of all sizes and colours. Surfaces that had been exposed to the air for some time were white, as all ice becomes under such conditions. Others newly cloven, or that had formed till recently the submerged face of floating blocks, were blue or green. There were pink pieces, dusted over with sandstone débris; but the majority of the small blocks, and most were small, were crystal clear, like lumps of purest glass. The water was absolutely still. Sunshine lay upon it, and the great glacier-cliff, along which we rowed, was reflected from the watery mirror. Every few minutes the glacier “calved,” and the resulting waves rattled the ice about us, whilst the booming thunder came echoing back from remote hollows of the hills. Nielsen was reminded of days spent by him as a sailor in fogs on the Newfoundland banks, when, as he said, they used to smell the icebergs long before they loomed into view. Kings Bay, of course, presents no bergs comparable in size to those that drift southward down the coast of Greenland, though the floating masses we were soon to approach were much larger than those ordinarily met with in Spitsbergen waters. As our distance from the south shore of the bay increased, the mountains behind it were better seen, and proved to be a fine ridge with many peaks, the watershed between Kings and English bays. A series of glaciers descend in their hollows, but none reach the sea, for there is a broad belt of flat land all along the southern shore. The view up Kings Glacier now became of entrancing beauty as the fog cleared away, and all our peaks from Mount Nielsen round to the Diadem were disclosed. How different was this view to our eyes, which recognised every feature and knew what was behind every impediment, from our first outlook there last year, in a brief interval between two storms! The culmination of the charm came when the small, partly ice-covered island rose into our foreground, and the surging waves of splintered glacier thrown up behind it contrasted with the smooth wide-spreading snowfields far beyond. The ice-cliff north of the island was more shattered than any we had yet beheld. Here the greatest floating bergs enter the sea. They do not fall into it, but simply float away, being already quite detached from one another by the deep clefts of the ice.
From an examination of a great many sea-fronting glacier-sections we learnt that crevasses, however long and wide, seldom penetrate very far down into the mass of ice. I do not remember ever to have seen any crevasse (except at this point) which cut a glacier-cliff down to sea-level. Higher up in the névé region crevasses may be more profound, but towards a glacier’s snout I am sure that their depth is often greatly overestimated. The ice in the foundation of a glacier exists under great pressure and behaves very differently from the surface ice, which is free to break up under lateral strain. A careful study of arctic ice-cliffs would, I think, give rise to several unexpected revelations. The opening up of Spitsbergen to ordinary summer travellers would enable such simple but illuminating researches to be undertaken by holiday-making men of science.
The archipelago, which I have named Lovén’s Islands, after the explorer who first recorded a visit to them, was now close at hand. We made for a convenient cove and landed. Countless screaming terns saluted us with a chorus of unmistakable imprecations. No bird that ever I saw can swear like a tern. Till it opens its mouth you would think it the very incarnation of gentleness and grace, such the purity of its white plumage, the slenderness of its form, and the elegance of all its motions. But it is my matured conviction that in every tern there resides the spirit of a departed bargee. On these islands Lovén found countless nesting birds of many sorts, besides the spoor of reindeer and foxes. We found only eider-ducks, terns, and a very few geese; of reindeer not a trace. There are no reindeer left on the west coast of Spitsbergen. We never saw a footprint on the shores of Klaas Billen Bay, Kings Bay, or Horn Sound this year, though in all three bays are square miles of country admirably suited to feed and maintain them and once supporting large herds. The ruthless Norwegian hunter has exterminated them utterly.
I need not expatiate on the gorgeousness of the view from these islands. It was especially fine to the north where white icebergs of all fantastic forms floated in the dark purple reflections of the hills. The only sound heard, besides the screaming of the terns and the boom of the glacier-cliff, was the innumerable ploppings of water against the myriad floating blocks of ice. We landed on another island to cook a meal and survey. The little plants were putting on their autumnal colourings, most of the birds-nests were abandoned, the young broods—alas! sadly few in numbers—disporting themselves in the neighbouring waters. All the islands are smoothed by ice, for the Kings Glacier was once at least 500 feet thicker and very much longer than now. Probably, there are other mounds of rock, continuing under the glacier the line of these islands, and rumpling up the ice into a crevassed condition otherwise difficult to account for.
Turning away from the islands, we rowed toward the east end of the rounded hill standing out into the fjord, to which we gave the name Blomstrand’s Mound. From the published account of the Swedish Expedition of 1861, we were led to expect that Scoresby’s Grotto would be found in this direction. It was only afterwards, when we procured a copy in the original Swedish, to which are appended maps, not reproduced in the German translation, that we discovered the whereabouts of this grotto in Blomstrand’s Harbour.[9] We now had to wind about amongst large floating towers and castles of ice, entrancingly beautiful. The number of the great floating bergs seemed countless. We passed by devious ways along channels, between them, often being so entirely surrounded as to seem on a lake built all about with ice-castles. Some were hollowed out into caverns with walls thin enough to let the light of the low hanging midnight sun shine through. We manœuvred to get one of these directly between us and the sun, so as to enjoy the resplendence of its opalescent shimmer, contrasted with the blueness of the shadowed side of the ice. Deep in the substance of the crystalline wall shone out a host of sparkling points like many-faceted diamonds enclosed in cloudy crystal. The evening was perfect: calm, bright, mellow, clear to the remotest distance, save just at one point where a sea-mist came pouring over a pass from English Bay, with a rainbow mantling on its shoulder.
The drowsily creaking oars at length brought us to the mainland, where camp was quickly pitched on soft ground near a brook. There was no grotto anywhere in the neighbourhood. The slope of Blomstrand’s Mound rose temptingly behind. With plane-table and camera we hastened forth to gain a more commanding panorama. About 500 feet up was a convenient knoll, whence the upper part of the mound was displayed as an undulating plateau bending away to the culminating dome of the hill over a couple of miles of bog land and broken rocks, extraordinarily disagreeable to walk upon. The whole mound is encircled on three sides by the bay, whilst on the fourth a large glacier descending from the north abuts against it, and sends an arm down into the sea on either side. The view was, of course, most extensive and beheld under rarely favourable conditions, for the low-striking, golden sunlight mellowed all the glaciers and the hills. The bay spread abroad below, as in a map, and the icebergs on its surface were tiny dots of white, whilst the areas closely covered with smaller, broken ice resembled surfaces crisped by some gentle breeze.
At 4 A.M. (August 10) we turned in. A few hours later the weather was still fine, but at noon the Crowns began to put on caps of cloud. Mists gathered in all directions, wind rose, and soon all was overcast and rain was falling on the tent. The spell of fine weather was, in fact, at an end. By 3 o’clock we were rowing away in water no longer calm. Yet it was charming to watch the graceful rocking of the smaller pieces of floating ice, and to see them turn over as their equilibrium was disturbed. The old white surface went under, the new blue side came up. There was now but one day left before the Kvik ought to call for us. The weather was too thick for surveying, so we settled to make at once for Coal Haven, where tertiary fossil plants had been found, though not the characteristic Taxodium.[10] Accordingly we rowed straight across the bay, though no sign could be seen of any inlet such as the chart marks. There is, in fact, no inlet at all, but only a low headland that protects the anchorage from westerly winds. It is completely open to north and east. On reaching the south coast and finding no trace of the expected inlet, we rowed along the shore toward Quade Hook for a couple of miles. It was an open, pebbly beach, on which we might have hauled up the boat, but whence it could not have been launched in face of any sea, like that now threatening to rise. Leaving the men to keep the boat off shore, Garwood and I landed to prospect. Just behind the narrow beach was a low cliff, the front of a wide area of boggy and stony ground from which the hills rise, half a mile or so inland. Westward was no bay whatever, so we concluded that Coal Haven lay to the east, where, in fact, we presently discovered it, behind a low spit of shingle a few yards wide, enclosing a lagoon.