With ski & sledge over Arctic glaciers

by Sir William Martin Conway

I have read in the London press that Spitsbergen, nowadays, is “overrun” with tourists. This is far from being the case. A considerable number come up with the Lofoten and other tourist ships, and pay a brief visit to the west coast, but few of them ever land except for an hour or two at Advent Point. Apart from Herr Andrée’s party, the only visitors who spent any time in Spitsbergen this year were Baron Bornamisza and a few people who made trips on the Kvik, the German party who hired the Expres, and ourselves. Besides Garwood and me, only Baron Bornamisza and the artists made any attempt to go into the interior. The Baron spent two or three days with one of our tents in the Sassendal, shooting reindeer; whilst the artists dragged a little sledge a day’s journey into the hills west of Advent Bay, and camped there for a couple of nights. So much for the overrunning of Spitsbergen. The simple fact is that to spend any time in the interior of the island is no easier now than it was fifty years ago, nor is there much probability that it will become easier in the immediate future. All of Spitsbergen that the ordinary tourist needs to see is visible from the deck of a ship, whence it can be beheld without either labour or discomfort. To penetrate the heart of Spitsbergen glaciers now involves just the same kind of work that the crossing of North-East Land demanded of Nordenskiöld in 1873.

When the hour came for the Lofoten to sail, such was the boisterousness of the embarkation that some intending passengers preferred to stay behind for a week rather than be soused. The disturbing wind was only a local draught, such as often blows down the boggy valleys of Spitsbergen, and especially down the Advent Vale. When we were out in the midst of Ice Fjord the gale diminished to an ordinary breeze, by which we were well rolled all night long off the west coast. It was past noon (August 14) when the Lofoten turned into Horn Sound; she steamed straight up the bay and finally came to off the mouth of a small bay in the south coast, the Goose Haven of the old whalers. Our whaleboat was hoisted overboard, and such goods as we needed for a week lowered into it. Svensen, who was to be left on board, eagerly helping, and joyous to see the last of the hated sledges. He said good-bye to us with monstrous enthusiasm, mixed in apologies for not having enjoyed our company more keenly. If we would come to his home and go a-fishing with him he assured us that we should find no more active or willing companion.

The exchange from the warmth and solidity of the steamer to the rawness of the foggy day and the unrest of the tumbling sea was, to say the least, undesirable. Our friends on board watched our departure without envy, and it must be confessed that we rowed away with little eagerness. Clouds hung low and heavy upon the hills, and no scene could have been more desolate. In half an hour we landed on the stony beach of the east shore of Goose Haven; the Lofoten was then small in the distance and just rounding out of sight. There was no novelty of the unknown now ahead of us. We had come to make the ascent of Mount Hedgehog or Horn Sunds Tind, which Garwood had almost succeeded in accomplishing just twelve months before in company with Trevor-Battye and a seaman. The object of this repetition was to see the view from the top, a hope little likely to be fulfilled in such weather as was prevailing. Garwood also desired to investigate certain rocks, which he thought might prove interestingly fossiliferous. Save for these rocks I do not think we should have come to Horn Sound again. They proved to be a fraud, but that was not Garwood’s fault. My own wish had been to spend our last week in Ekman and Dickson bays for the purpose of completing and joining my two maps; but I could hardly expect Garwood to be eager for such an arrangement, seeing that the area contained no geological novelties for him. My alternative proposition was that we should hire the Kvik and make a run for Wiches Land—the islands approached by us the preceding year, but never as yet landed on by any geologist. Unfortunately, we could learn nothing of the condition of the ice east of Spitsbergen, so hesitated to incur a considerable expense for a very problematical advantage. If only we had known! It was the one year of all recorded years in which the sea to the eastward was most free of ice, and, during these very days, Mr. Arnold Pike was steaming round and round and landing on the islands in question, where he shot fifty-seven bears.

For better or worse, we had decided on Horn Sound, and here we were by the resounding shore of Goose Haven. There was no good landing-place or protected creek for the boat. We had to land on the open beach. The baggage was pitched ashore and the boat completely emptied. Nevertheless, our reduced strength did not avail to haul it out of the water. We began to regret the loss of Svensen sooner than we expected. Camp having been pitched just above high-water line, there was nothing for us to do on the dreary shore, so we rowed across to the far point of the bay—Hofer Point—a convenient position for my survey. Garwood, knowing the way about, steered the boat into a tiny cove, whither we thought of transferring camp. The change was not made, fortunately, as will hereafter appear. At the head of the cove are ruins of a Russian settlement, on an exposed mound as usual, whilst on neighbouring knolls are two groups of graves. There remains also a bench in a protected corner. When the miserable life lived in these remote and solitary huts by most of the exiles is considered, these poor benches, of which I have now seen several examples, are peculiarly pathetic. Many a sad hour must successive, lonely, fur-clad watchmen have passed while seated upon them, marking the slow passage of miserable days. The sentiment of the melancholy landscape is strangely enhanced by a human interest of this kind, however remote. The savage regions of the earth are always impressive to a spectator’s imagination, but they become infinitely more impressive when they can be regarded as a theatre of human suffering or endurance.

The others returned to camp by boat, whilst I pursued my task and wandered home round the bay’s head, at first over sea-eaten rocks, afterwards, when the hills receded, over boggy land between the shelving beach and the iceflat at the foot of the great moraine of the glacier filling the bay’s valley—the Goose Glacier, as we afterwards called it. On a mound of the bog are ruins of a considerable whalers’ settlement, with quantities of great bones lying about, and the inevitable group of graves not far away. In the seventeenth century the Horn Sound whalers were English; in fact, this was one of the largest English settlements. The beach seems to have risen considerably since that time, for the whales used to be flensed between high and low water marks, whereas the bones now lie far beyond reach of the highest tides. It rained heavily as I walked on round the shore and waded the streams that flow out from the glacier. The clouds descended lower than ever, and the gloom, if possible, increased, so that the dreariness, by its very intensity becoming almost novel, became also indued with the pleasantness of novelty.

TORRENT IN A GLACIER ICE-FOOT.

During our explorations of the previous year in the belt of boggy interior between Advent Bay and the east coast, every glacier we came across had an iceflat below its snout, formed by the freezing of the winter snow when impregnated by water drained out of the glacier. This year we had met with no examples of such iceflats before this one in Goose Haven. It was of great extent and evidently destined to survive the rapidly departing summer, for it still averaged about six feet in thickness. The glacier streams had cut deep channels through it, which the first heavy snowfall would easily block, again compelling the water to soak into the new bed of snow and prepare it in its turn to be frozen solid later on. The intermittent thaws of spring may be more effective in forming the snow-bog, which is the needful preliminary condition of an ice-foot, than is the autumn drainage held back by the autumnal snowfall. As to this we possess no information. Between the two the phenomenon is produced. As a rule the summer thaw must suffice to melt the ice-foot away, for, if it did not, there would be a continual increase in the thickness of the ice, and a kind of glacier would be formed. Of such glaciers, however, we have seen no examples. Though we found several cases of ice-foot apparently destined to survive the summer, they probably owed their survival either to the fact that they were produced by exceptionally heavy local falls of snow, or to the summer’s thaw being below the average in total amount. One year with another, the balance of formation and thaw appears to be equalised. At all events, we have no evidence yet of any glacial ice-foot that steadily increases. If, however, such an increasing ice-foot were to arise, it would tend to bury the terminal moraine and unite itself to the snout of the glacier, but before the process had advanced very far the surface of the ice-foot would begin to acquire a slope, on which a snow-bog could hardly be formed. The glacial water would be drained quickly away and the conditions for further increase of the ice-foot would no longer exist.

Considering such questions, I dawdled about on the beach and the ice, to the great disgust of some glaucous gulls, who kept swooping down close to my head with horrid cries. Rain falling heavily did not add perceptibly to the discomforts of the cold and blustery day. Near camp was another ruined whalers’ settlement or cookery, surrounded by quantities of bleached and rotting bones, and with the inevitable grave-mound close by. The ruins in this case were better preserved, so that their character was recognisable. A whalers’ cookery consisted essentially of two parts, a “tent” and a cauldron. The tent was a building of four low stone walls roofed with sailcloth passed over a ridge-pole and held down by rocks round the edges. The walls of the tent are still standing on a mound. Close by are the wrecks of the brickwork belonging to two cauldrons for boiling down blubber. Quantities of coal-slag showed the nature of the fuel employed. All about the ruins and amongst the bones, moss was growing with the peculiar rankness already mentioned as characteristic of the sites of human habitation in Spitsbergen.