Round About the North Pole

by W. J. Gordon

From Little Table Island, where they left a reserve as they had done at Walden, they started for the north—two heavy boats laden with food for seventy days and clothing for twenty-eight men, with a compact equipment including light sledges, travelling in a sea crowded or covered with ice in every form, large and small, over which they were dragged up and down hummocks, round and among crags and ridges, along surfaces of every kind of ruggedness, of every slope and irregularity, the few flat stretches broken with patches of sharp crystals or waist-deep snow; through lanes and pools of water with frequent ferryings and transhipments, in sunshine and fog, and, strange to say, frequently in pouring rain. They travelled by night and rested by day, though, of course, there was daylight all the time. "The advantages of this plan," says Parry, "which was occasionally deranged by circumstances, consisted, first in our avoiding the intense and oppressive glare from the snow during the time of the sun's greatest altitude, so as to prevent in some degree the painful inflammation in the eyes called snow-blindness which is common in all snowy countries. We also thus enjoyed greater warmth during the hours of rest and had a better chance of drying our clothes; besides which no small advantage was derived from the snow being harder at night for travelling. When we rose in the evening we commenced our day by prayers, after which we took off our sleeping dresses and put on those for travelling, the former being made of camlet lined with racoon skin, and the latter of strong blue, box cloth. We made a point of always putting on the same stockings and boots for travelling in, whether they had dried during the day or not, and I believe it was only in five or six instances that they were not either still wet or hard frozen." When halted for rest the boats were placed alongside each other, with their sterns to the wind, the snow or wet cleared out of them, and the sails, held up by the bamboo masts and three paddles, were placed over them as awnings with the entrance at the bow.

Progress was not great, sometimes fifty yards an hour, occasionally twelve miles a day, that is on the ice, for soon it was apparent that the distance gained by reckoning was greater than that given by observation, and Parry realised to his dismay that the pack was drifting south while he was going north. But he kept on till on the 21st of July he reached 82° 45´, which remained the farthest north for forty-nine years.

PARRY'S BOATS AMONG THE HUMMOCKS

During the last few days he had been drifting south in the day almost as far as he had advanced north in the night, and, having used up half his provisions, he reluctantly abandoned the struggle as hopeless. "As we travelled," he says, "by far the greater part of our distance on the ice, three, and not infrequently, five times over, we may safely multiply the road by 2½; so that our whole distance, on a very moderate calculation, amounted to five hundred and eighty geographical miles, or six hundred and sixty-eight statute miles; being nearly sufficient to have reached the Pole in a direct line."

In 1858 a Swedish expedition under Otto Torell started from Hammerfest for Spitsbergen. He was accompanied by A. Quennerstedt and Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld. They explored Horn Sound, Bell Sound, and Green Harbour. In Bell Sound they dredged with great success for mollusca; they made a botanical collection, chiefly of mosses and lichens, found tertiary plant fossils, and, in the North Harbour, carboniferous limestone beds with the tertiary plant-bearing strata above them—in short, Nordenskiöld entered upon his long and fruitful study of Spitsbergen geology. Three years afterwards Torell took out another expedition, Nordenskiöld going with him, which was to explore the northern coast and then make for the far north; but the ice conditions kept them in Treurenberg Bay, where they visited Hecla Cove and found Parry's flagstaff. In the course of their journeys they noticed in Cross Bay the first known Spitsbergen fern, Cystopteris fragilis; by the side of a freshwater lake in Wijde Bay an Alpine char was picked up; and, at Shoal Point, Torell discovered in a mass of driftwood a specimen of the unmistakable Entada bean, two and a quarter inches across, brought there from the West Indies by the Gulf Stream, as other specimens have been drifted to European shores.

In 1864, the year that Elling Carlsen found the navigation so open that he passed the Northern Gate and sailed round Spitsbergen, Nordenskiöld, at the head of a small expedition, was at work in Ice Fjord, and, unable to go north on account of the ice, rounded South Cape, entered Stor Fjord, visited Edge's Land and Barents Land, and from the summit of White Mountain, near Unicorn Bay, rediscovered the west coast of the island reported by Edge two hundred and fifty years before. In 1868, as leader of the Swedish North Polar Expedition in the Sofia, he reached 81° 42´, in 17° 30´ east, the highest latitude then reached by a steam vessel, and his farthest north; his next Polar venture, four years afterwards, in the Polhem, ending in his having to winter in Mossel Bay, where his generous endeavour to feed one hundred and one extra men, who were ice-bound, on provisions intended for his own twenty-four, would have ended in disaster had he not been relieved by Leigh Smith in the Diana.

The Diana was the steam yacht built for James Lamont, in which, like Leigh Smith, he cruised for several seasons in the Arctic seas, combining sport with exploration in a truly admirable way. To these two yachtsmen we owe much of our knowledge of Spitsbergen, Novaya Zemlya, and Franz Josef Land, but we can only give them passing mention here. We must, however, find room for Lamont's useful find of the coal mine in Advent Bay, from which he filled up the Diana's bunkers. "When I paid a visit to the coal mine," he says, "I found it quite a busy scene for a quiet Arctic shore. The engineer and fireman directed the blasting, my English hands quarried, while the Norwegians carried the sacks down the hill. The old mate, the many-sidedness of whose character I have so much valued on my various voyages, was digging away with the rest, though I am sorry that in the sketch his weather-beaten face is turned away. All the rest are portraits, and the reader will notice that Arctic work is not done in the attractive uniforms known to Cowes and Ryde. The coal-bed was about three feet thick, and lay very horizontally between two layers of soft, mud-coloured limestone. It was harder to obtain than I anticipated, because saturated, through all the cracks and interstices, with water which had frozen into ice more difficult to break through than the coal itself, thereby rendering these fissures worse than useless in quarrying. This is tertiary coal, and is of fair quality, but contains a good deal of sulphur. When we began to burn it, so much water and ice was unavoidably mixed with it that the engineers had to let it drain on deck in the hot sun and then mix it with an equal bulk of Scotch coal. Consumed in this way the ten tons obtained in three days was a useful addition to the fast-dwindling stock on board."

While Nordenskiöld was at Mossel Bay he attempted a journey to the north, but was stopped by the ice at Seven Islands, and returned round North East Land. It took him five days to pass across the twenty-three miles between Phipps Island and Cape Platen over pyramids of angular ice up to thirty feet high. On the coast, which he found extending, as Leigh Smith had reported, much further to the east than was shown on the charts, he met with the inland ice ending in precipices from two thousand to three thousand feet high. Ascending this ice they had scarcely gone a quarter of a mile before one of the men disappeared at a place where the surface was level, and so instantaneously that he could not even give a cry for help. When they looked into the hole they found him hanging on to the drag-line, to which he was fastened with reindeer harness, over a deep abyss. Had his arms slipped out of the harness, a single belt, he would have been lost. Along the level surface every puff of wind drove a stream of fine snow-dust, which, from the ease with which it penetrated everywhere, was as the fine sand of the desert to the travellers in the Sahara. By means of this fine snow-dust, steadily driven forward by the wind, the upper part of the glacier—which did not consist of ice, but of hard packed blinding white snow—was glazed and polished so that it seemed to be a faultless, spotless floor of white marble, or rather a white satin carpet. Examination showed that the snow, at a depth of four to six feet, passed into ice, being changed first into a stratum of ice crystals, partly large and perfect, then to a crystalline mass of ice, and finally to hard glacier ice, in which could still be observed numerous air cavities compressed by the overlying weight; and, when, as the surface thaws, the pressure of the enclosed air exceeds that of the superincumbent weight, these cavities break up with the peculiar cracking sound heard in summer from the glacier ice that floats about in the fjords. Occasionally broad channels were crossed, of which the only way to ascertain the depth was to lower a man into them, and frequently he had to be hoisted up again without having reached the bottom; such danger areas causing so circuitous a route that much progress was impossible.

Prior to the explorations of Sir Martin Conway in 1896, it was supposed that this inland ice extended over all the islands of the group, an area exceeding twenty thousand square miles. He, however, proved that so far as West Spitsbergen was concerned, this was not the case. Crossing it he found much of the interior a complex of mountains and valleys, amongst which were many glaciers, as in Central Europe, but with no continuous covering of ice, each glacier being a separate unit with its own drainage system and catchment area, the valleys boggy and relatively fertile, the hillsides bare of snow in summer up to more than a thousand feet above sea-level. In the rise of the country from the sea it seems to have come up as a plain which did not reach the level of perpetual snow, so that as it rose it was cut down into valleys in the usual way by the agency of water pouring off from the plateau over its edge down a frost-split rock-face, the valleys gently sloped, the head necessarily steep owing to the face of the cliff being stripped off as the waterfalls cut their way back.