With the World's Great Travellers, Volume 1

by Unknown

The same reasoning which deduces the subsidence of the coast from the actual base of the Temple of Serapis, proves that the depression of the Greenland coast, which I had detected as far north as Upernavik, is also going on up here. Some of these huts were washed by the sea or torn away by the ice that had descended with the tides. The turf, too, a representative of very ancient growth, was cut off even with the water’s edge, giving sections two feet thick. I had not noticed before such unmistakable evidence of the depression of this coast: its converse elevation I had observed to the north of Wostenholme Sound. The axis of oscillation must be somewhere in the neighborhood of latitude 77°.

We reached Cape York on the 21st, after a tortuous but romantic travel through a misty atmosphere. Here the land-leads ceased, with the exception of some small and scarcely practicable openings near the shore, which were evidently owing to the wind that prevailed for the time. Everything bore proof of the late development of the season. The red snow was a fortnight behind its time. A fast floe extended with numerous tongues far out to the south and east. The only question was between a new rest, for the shore-ices to open, or a desertion of the coast and a trial of the open water to the west.

[They had at this time but thirty-six pounds of food per man and fuel enough to last them three weeks.]

I climbed the rocks a second time with Mr. McGary, and took a careful survey of the ice with my glass. The “fast,” as the whalers call the immovable shore-ice, could be seen in a nearly unbroken sweep, passing by Bushnell’s Island, and joining the coast not far from where I stood. The outside floes were large, and had evidently been not long broken; but it cheered my heart to see that there was one well defined lead which followed the main floe until it lost itself to seaward.

I called my officers together, explained to them the motives which governed me, and prepared to re-embark. The boats were hauled up, examined carefully, and, as far as our means permitted, repaired. The “Red Eric” was stripped of her outfit and cargo, to be broken up for fuel when the occasion should come. A large beacon-cairn was built on an eminence, open to view from the south and west, and a red flannel shirt, spared with some reluctance, was hoisted as a pennant to draw attention to the spot. Here I deposited a succinct record of our condition and purposes, and then directed our course south by west into the ice-fields.

By degrees the ice through which we were moving became more and more impacted, and it sometimes required all our ice-knowledge to determine whether a particular lead was practicable or not. The irregularities of the surface, broken by hummocks, and occasionally by larger masses, made it difficult to see far ahead, besides which we were often embarrassed by the fogs. I was awakened one evening from a weary sleep in my fox-skins to discover that we had fairly lost our way. The officer at the helm of the leading boat, misled by the irregular shape of a large iceberg that crossed his track, had lost the main lead some time before, and was steering shoreward, far out of the true course. The little canal in which he had locked us was hardly two boats’-lengths across, and lost itself not far off in a feeble zigzag both behind and before us; it was evidently closing, and we could not retreat.

Without apprising the men of our misadventure, I ordered the boats hauled up, and, under pretence of drying the clothing and stores, made a camp on the ice. A few hours after the weather cleared enough for the first time to allow a view of the distance, and McGary and myself climbed a berg some three hundred feet high for the purpose. It was truly fearful; we were deep in the recesses of the bay, surrounded on all sides by stupendous icebergs and tangled floe-pieces. My sturdy second officer, not naturally impressible, and long accustomed to the vicissitudes of whaling life, shed tears at the prospect.

There was but one thing to be done: cost what it might, we must harness our sledges again and retrace our way to the westward. One sledge had been already used for firewood; the “Red Eric,” to which it had belonged, was now cut up, and her light cedar planking laid upon the floor of the other boats, and we went to work with the rue-raddies as in the olden time. It was not till the third toilsome day was well spent that we reached the berg that had bewildered our helmsman. We hauled over its tongue and joyously embarked again upon a free lead, with a fine breeze from the north.

Our little squadron was now reduced to two boats. The land to the northward was no longer visible, and whenever I left the margin of the fast to avoid its deep sinuosities, I was obliged to trust entirely to the compass. We had at least eight days’ allowance of fuel on board; but our provisions were running very low, and we met few birds, and failed to secure any larger game. We saw several large seals upon the ice, but they were too watchful for us; and on two occasions we came upon the walrus sleeping, once within actual lance-thrust; but the animal charged in the teeth of his assailant and made good his retreat.