The swarms of sandflies, called brulots by the Canadians, it appears by the following account of Captain Back, are as annoying as the mosquitoes:—“As we dived into the confined and suffocating chasms, or waded through the close swamps, they rose in clouds, actually darkening the air. To see or speak was equally difficult, for they rushed at every undefended part and fixed their poisonous fangs in an instant. Our faces streamed with blood as if leeches had been applied, and there was a burning and irritating pain, followed by immediate inflammation, and producing giddiness which almost drove us mad. Whenever we halted, which the nature of the country compelled us to do often, the men—even the Indians—threw themselves on their faces, and moaned with pain and agony. My arms being less encumbered I defended myself in some degree by waving a branch in each hand; but, even with this and the aid of a veil and stout leather gloves, I did not escape without severe punishment. For the time I thought the tiny plagues worse even than mosquitoes.”
The ardour which can bear a man onward through difficulties and annoyances of this nature is admirable; but love is united with our admiration when Capt. Back gives the following testimony to the benevolence of Sir John Franklin:—
“It was the custom of Sir John Franklin never to kill a fly; and though teased by them beyond expression, especially when engaged in taking observations, he would quietly desist from his work and patiently blow the half-gorged intruders from his hands—‘the world was wide enough for both.’ This was jocosely remarked upon by Akaitcho and the four or five Indians who accompanied him. But the impression, it seems,” continues Captain Back, “had sunk deep, for on Manfelly’s seeing me fill my tent with smoke, and then throw open the front and beat the sides all round with leafy branches to drive out the stupified pests before I went to rest, he could not refrain from expressing his surprise that I should be so unlike ‘the old chief,’ who would not destroy so much as a single mosquito.” So true it is that the real hero, he for whom danger has no terrors, has the kindest and gentlest nature!
CHAPTER III.
He who first committed himself to the perils of the great waters must have been peculiarly distinguished among men for his intrepidity. Modern adventure on the wide ocean, or in comparatively unknown seas, is not accompanied with that uncertainty and sense of utter desolation which must have filled the mind of early adventurers when driven out of sight of land by the tempest; but neither the discovery of the compass nor the many other aids to safety possessed by modern navigators free their enterprises from appalling dangers. The persevering courage of travellers evermore commands our admiration; but the voyager takes his life in his hand from the moment that he leaves the shore. The freedom from fear—nay, the cheerfulness and exultation he experiences when surrounded by the waste of waters, far away from the enjoyments of house and home; the unsubduable resolution with which he careers over the wave and encounters every vicissitude of season and climate; the strength and vastness of the element itself which is the chief scene of his daring enterprise: these are considerations that ever interweave themselves with our ideal of the sea-adventurer, and render him the object of more profound and ardent admiration than the mere traveller by land.
To ourselves, as natives of a country whose greatness is owing to commercial enterprise and superiority in the arts of navigation, these remarks forcibly apply. Maritime discovery has been oftener, much oftener, undertaken by England and Englishmen than by any other country or people in the world. Many secondary reasons for this might be alleged in addition to the primary one of discovery. Such undertakings are the means of training our sailors to hardihood and young officers to the most difficult and dangerous situations in which a ship can be placed. They accustom the officers how to take care of and to preserve the health of a ship’s company. They are the means of solid instruction in the higher branches of nautical science, and in the use of the various instruments which science has, of late years especially, brought to such perfection.
The career of the navigator thus assumes a higher character, being that of a pioneer of science and corroborator of its discoveries, than the employ or profession of any other man, however elevated the station allotted him by society. Reflection will convince the young reader that such men as Cook and Vancouver, Parry and Ross, are much more deserving of triumphal monuments than martial heroes. The dangers they encountered were fully as great, while the tendency of their grand enterprises was not to inflict suffering on mankind but to enlighten it with the knowledge of distant quarters of the globe, and to bless and enrich it by the improvement of navigation and commerce. For these reasons, the claim of the navigator to a high rank in our brief chronicle of the “Triumphs of Enterprise” would boldly assert itself, independent of the exciting nature of sea adventures.
Here is an hour of danger described by the heroic Ross, and occurring in the month of August, 1818, during that intrepid commander’s search for the long wished-for “North-West Passage.” “The two ships were caught by a gale of wind among the ice, and fell foul of each other. The ice-anchors and cables broke, one after another, and the sterns of the two ships came so violently into contact as to crush to pieces a boat that could not be removed in time. Neither the masters, the mates, nor those men who had been all their lives in the Greenland service, had ever experienced such imminent peril; and they declared that a common whaler must have been crushed to atoms. Our safety must, indeed, be attributed to the perfect and admirable manner in which the vessels had been strengthened when fitting for the service. But our troubles were not yet at an end; for, as the gale increased, the ice began to move with greater velocity, while the continued thick fall of snow kept from our sight the further danger that awaited us, till it became imminent. A large field of ice was soon discovered at a small distance, bearing fast down upon us from the west, and it thus became necessary to saw docks for refuge, in which service all hands were immediately employed. It was, however, found to be too thick for our nine-feet saws, and no progress could be made. This circumstance proved fortunate, for it was soon after perceived that the field, to which we were moored for this purpose, was drifting rapidly on a reef of icebergs which lay aground. The topsails were therefore close-reefed, in order that we might run, as a last resource, between two bergs, or into any creek that might be found among them; when suddenly the field acquired a circular motion, so that every exertion was now necessary for the purpose of warping along the edge, that being the sole chance we had of escaping the danger of being crushed on an iceberg. In a few minutes we observed that part of the field into which we had attempted to cut our docks, come in contact with the berg, with such rapidity and violence as to rise more than fifty feet up its precipitous side, where it suddenly broke, the elevated part falling back on the rest with a terrible crash, and overwhelming with its ruins the very spot we had previously chosen for our safety. Soon afterwards the ice appeared to us sufficiently open for us to pass the reef of bergs, and we once more found ourselves in a place of security.”