While the men pitched camp, Garwood and I walked inland to look for the coal-bed. Its position is carefully described by Lamont, but we had only the book on the Swedish expedition of 1861 with us, and, though the members of that party visited and, I believe, discovered the coal, they give no accurate account of its position. We dimly remembered that it was found where a glacier-stream cuts a section into the ground. There were two glaciers ending about a mile inland from the bay, so we walked towards them and tracked up every stream flowing from them, but found no coal. I then went to the west, Garwood to the east, till every inch of land within Coal Haven had been traversed. It was no good. A big stone man planted on a mound, and with a slanting stick built into it, seemed likely to be a guide to the hidden treasure; but there was no coal in the mound, nor anywhere in the direction to which the stick pointed. We have since learnt that the cairn marks one of the points whose position was astronomically fixed by the Swedes,[11] and that it has nothing to do with the coal, which in fact is not found within Coal Haven at all, but within the next bay to the east, where of course we did not look for it.
A low cloud-roof, intermittently dropping rain, hung continuously over Coal Haven during our visit. Only the bases of hills and the grey snouts of glaciers emerged beneath it. Sometimes a dense mist came up; rarely the drizzle held off for half an hour. In this cheerless case black melancholy invaded Svensen. At a moment of gloomy forgetfulness he filled the pot with sea-water for brewing soup. The mistake was fortunately discovered in time, for there was no food to spare. When Garwood returned with half a dozen guillemots, the last shot-cartridge had been fired off. Svensen skinned the birds for the pot with the sadness of a man condemned to death. “We will only eat half of them to-night,” he said. “Why?” I asked. “Because this is the last proper food we shall have, and we may as well make it hold out as long as possible. When did you say the Kvik is coming for us?” “At midnight to-night,” I answered. “Not a bit of it. Ikke! I heard the sailors on the boat say the captain would not come for us at all. We shall starve here.” “Skittles! They’ll come for us to-day or to-morrow.” “Ikke! they’ll not come at all, I believe.” “I tell you they will; the captain undertook to come.” “Ikke, ikke!” We finished all the birds, but the food almost stuck in Svensen’s throat.
When supper was done (it was the morning of the 11th) a surprising vigour seized our gloomy companion. He jumped into the boat, pitched its mast, sail, and some spars on shore, and carried them away to the point. We watched him build a big stone-heap and plant the mast in it with the sail suspended as a flag. Then he turned in and was heard loudly and solemnly prophesying to himself in his fine declamatory style. We breakfasted late in the afternoon on one of our last soups and some mouldy biscuits fried in the scrapings of the butter-pot; then we began to look out for the Kvik. The mouth of Kings Bay was not visible from camp, so we went for walks to various higher points, besides spending some hours over another hunt for coal; but neither coal nor Kvik appeared. The drizzling night dragged its slow hours along. A meagre supper in the morning of the 12th was the occasion of more loud lamentations from our Norwegian Jeremiah. The others then turned in, whilst I went off to the ruins of an old Russian hut on the neighbouring cape to watch for the expected steamer.
Less than a century ago there was a big winter settlement of Russian trappers in and about Kings Bay. As in the case of other Russian settlements, there were a central house and a number of outlying huts widely scattered from one another. The central house of this group was in Cross Bay, in Ebeltoft’s Haven, I believe. The Coal Haven hut was only an outlyer, inhabited by a solitary individual, who at stated intervals visited the central depôt to leave his catch of furs and renew his meagre stock of provisions. Numbers of these trappers annually died of scurvy. The rock on which I sat had assuredly been witness to such unrecorded tragedies. There now remains nothing but the ground plan of the hut, with a few bits of mouldering wood and broken brick lying about. There were fragments of both Dutch and Russian bricks, as is not uncommon on these sites, for the Russians used the remains of older Dutch whaling “cookeries” in building their stoves. Against a big rock was a piece of stone wall and a rotting beam, apparently part of an old store-cupboard. Moss had crept up over it, and little arctic flowers were growing upon it with unwonted luxuriance. The bones of foxes and bears were in the ground, which was pervaded with corrupting wood-fibre and carpeted with a peculiarly rank moss that only grows thus luxuriantly on the abandoned sites of human habitation. What a desolate place for a winter dwelling, planted between a bog and the icy bay! Who lived here? I asked myself. What did he think about? Were the hills anything to him—the Three Crowns and those other peaks rising all around? Did the beauty of the long sunset heralding the arctic night find recognition in his eyes? Or was life too hard for the growth in him of any sense of beauty? Was he some poor creature forced as a last resource to come here for the bare means of subsistence, or some criminal forcibly expatriated to these inhospitable shores? Such indeed was the custom in Northern Russia before Siberia came into fashion as a place of exile. Long I sat, musing on these things in the grey night, and listening to the far-off rumble of the calving glacier. Every few minutes I scanned the sea horizon off Mitra Hook, and always thought I could trace the faint appearance of a remote steamer’s smoke. Imagination is a dreadful trickster, but time always shows up its character. No steamer came in sight, though the appointed hour had passed. My watch completed, I returned to camp and sent up Nielsen to look out. “They haven’t come,” said Svensen, “and they won’t come. Ikke, ikke! We shall never get away from here.” This croaking raven of a man began to grate upon our nerves.
In the afternoon all turned out again. No signs of the Kvik. We assured one another that it was of no consequence. A fire was lit, the pot set on to boil and all our remaining provisions turned into it. If this was to be our last meal it should be as big a one as we could provide. Slowly the water came to the boil, all of us anxiously and greedily watching. Nielsen wandered forlornly off to the point. “The Kvik, the Kvik!” he shouted. “Ikke, ikke!” said Svensen, but no one heeded him; this time there was no mistake. Before our last food was swallowed she had rounded into the bay and cast anchor close by us.
CHAPTER IX
KINGS BAY TO HORN SOUND
On boarding the Kvik we were again in contact with the outside world. There was much to hear and something to tell, so that time passed quickly. Baron Bornemisza, returning from a week’s cruise in Wijde Bay and along the north coast, was full of information about the condition of the ice in that direction. It was not so open as at the same time in the preceding year. Hinloopen Strait was blocked about halfway down; the Kvik had been unable to reach the Seven Islands. At Advent Bay we found the more boldly navigated Expres, with our friend Herr Meissenbach on board, in a happy and triumphant state of mind. He had had the best kind of time, and enjoyed himself vastly, spending three weeks in the neighbourhood of the Seven Islands, and pushing as far east as Cape Platen. Two bears had fallen to the rifles of the party, and I know not how many seals; now he was on his way home.
That was a busy day at Advent Point, and a blustery withal, for the autumnal bad weather was setting in. All our baggage had to be packed for transfer to the Lofoten, in which we were to sail for Horn Sound that evening. At the inn were two Swiss artists and Professor Wiesner of Vienna, come to take observations on the intensity of the light. Presently a tourist steamer arrived and carried the artists away. People were coming and going all the time; it was the culmination of the tourist season.