Round About the North Pole

by W. J. Gordon

On the east coast of North East Land, in 1743, a Russian whaler was caught in the pack, and the mate, Alexis Himkoff, remembering that a house had been built there some years before, went on shore with his godson, Ivan Himkoff, and two sailors, Scharapoff and Weregin, in search of it, in case the ship should have to be abandoned. They found the house, but, on returning to the shore next morning, could see nothing of the ship, which had apparently been carried away and crushed in the ice. They had brought with them a musket, a powder-horn with twelve charges of powder, twelve bullets, an axe, a small kettle, a bag with about twenty pounds of flour, a knife, a tinder-box and tinder, a bladder of tobacco, and every man had his pipe. That was their outfit.

The house was thirty-six feet in length, and eighteen in height and breadth. It contained a small antechamber about twelve feet broad, which had two doors, one to close it from the outer air, the other admitting to the inner room in which was a Russian stove, a kind of oven without a chimney, serving at will for heating, for baking, or for sleeping on. Realising that they had a long stay before them, they began by shooting twelve reindeer, one for each bullet. They then repaired the house, stopping up all the crevices with moss; and they then laid in a store of fuel from the driftwood, there being no trees on the island. On the beach they found some boards with nails in them, and a long iron hook and a few other pieces of old iron. And also there was a root of a fir tree in shape not unlike a bow. Those were the materials they had to make the best of.

A large stone served for an anvil, a pair of deer horns did duty for tongs, and with these and the fire, the iron hook was made into a hammer; and then two of the nails were shaped into spear-heads, which were tied to sticks from the driftwood with strips of deerskin. With these weapons they began by killing a bear, whose flesh they ate, whose skin they kept, and whose tendons they made into thread and a string for the bow formed out of the root of the fir tree. More nails were forged into arrow-heads, tied with sinew on to light sticks cut with the knife, the shafts being feathered from the feathers of seafowl. With these weapons they shot, before they had finished, two hundred and fifty reindeer, and they kept the skins, as they did also those of a large number of blue and white foxes, as we shall see in the sequel. In their own protection they killed nine bears, the only one they deliberately attacked being the first.

To be sure of keeping their fire alight they modelled a lamp out of clay, which they filled with deer-fat, with twisted linen for a wick; but the clay was too porous, the fat ran through it; so they made another lamp of the same stuff, dried it in the air, heated it red hot, and cooled it in a sort of thin starch made of flour and water, strengthening the pottery by pasting linen rags over it. The result was so successful that they made a second lamp as a reserve. Some wreckage gave them a little cordage and a quantity of oakum, which came in for lamp-wicks. The lamp, like the sacred fire, was never allowed to go out. To make themselves clothes, they soaked skins in fresh water till the hair could be pulled off easily, and rubbed them well, and then rubbed deer fat into them until they were pliant and supple. Some of the skins they prepared as furs. Out of nails they, after many failures, made awls and needles, getting the eyes by piercing the heads with the point of the knife, and smoothing and pointing them by rounding and whetting them on a stone.

For six years they lived in this desert place. Then one of them, Weregin, died of scurvy, and their gloomy forebodings as to which was to be taken next were broken in upon by their sighting a ship, to which they signalled with a flag made of deerskin. The signal was seen and they were rescued; and they took back to Archangel two thousand pounds weight of reindeer fat, their bales of skins and furs, their bow and arrows and spears, and in short everything they possessed. And they arrived there on the 28th of September, 1749, comfortably off from the value of the goods they brought with them—the heroes of one of the very best of true desert island stories.

Like most Russians they do not seem to have suffered much from the cold or to have been inconvenienced by the summer heat, which is also considerable. In 1773, on the 13th of June, when Phipps and Lutwidge anchored in Fair Haven, round by Amsterdam Island, they found the thermometer reach 58½° at noon and descend no lower than 51° at midnight, and on the 16th it rose in the sun to 89½° till a light breeze made it fall almost suddenly ten degrees. This was the expedition sent out to the North Pole, mainly at the instigation of Daines Barrington, Gilbert White's friend. The ships were the Racehorse and Carcass; and, as every one knows, or ought to know, as midshipman with Captain Lutwidge went Horatio Nelson, then a boy of fourteen, who was to figure largely in the world, though on this occasion he did nothing remarkable beyond attacking a polar bear, whose skin he thought would make a nice present for his father, and bringing his boat to the rescue when one of the Racehorse boats was attacked by walruses. For another thing the expedition is memorable, that being that the useful apparatus for the distillation of fresh water from sea water, known to every seafarer, was first used on this voyage, Dr. Irving, its inventor, being the surgeon of the Racehorse. Another item to be noted is that Phipps had with him a Cavendish thermometer, which he tried the day after he crossed the Arctic Circle, and found that at a depth of 780 fathoms the temperature was 26°, while at the surface it was 48°.

Phipps did all he could to go north, and, in longitude 14° 59´ east, reached 80° 48', the nearest to the Pole up to then, but he was foiled by the ice barrier, which he tried to penetrate again and again. He got his ships caught in the ice and took to his boats, thinking he would have to abandon them, when fortunately the pack drifted south, and the vessels, clearing themselves under sail, caught the boats up and took them on board. Then he went along the edge of the ice westward, and, finding no opening, gave the venture up and sailed for home.

The next to do good work within this area was William Scoresby the elder, whose only equal as a whale-fisher was his son. To him we owe the invention of the crow's nest, that cylindrical frame covered with canvas, entrance to which is given by a trap-hatch in the base, reached by a Jacob's ladder from the topmast crosstrees, the conning-tower, so to speak, carried since by every ship on Arctic service. He was also the inventor of the ice-drill and many another implement and device used in Polar navigation; and he it was who sloped off his fore and main courses to come inboard to a boom fitted to the foot, used by every whaler, by which, in fact, you may know them. He also, long before the America, discovered the advantage of flat sails, and, in order to get his weights well down, he filled his casks with water as ballast and packed them with shingle, so that, instead of going out light, he was in the best of trim, with a power of beating to windward that took him to the fishing ground in double quick time and further into the ice, when he chose, than any of his competitors.

WHALERS AMONG ICEBERGS