Round About the North Pole

by W. J. Gordon

While resting on the glacier looking down on the semicircular terminal precipice and the gleaming host of bergs which filled the indentations of the coast, one of the men reported that his foot was swollen and ulcerated, and he had to be sent back to Hohenlohe Island. Just as the others were setting off, the snow gave way beneath the sledge, and down fell Zaninovich, the dogs and the sledge, while Payer was dragged backwards by the rope. The fall was arrested at a depth of thirty feet by the sledge sticking fast between the sides of the crevasse. Payer, on his face, the rope attaching him to the sledge tightly strained and cutting into the snow, shouted that he would sever the rope, but Zaninovich implored him not to do so as the sledge would then turn over and he would be killed; hearing, however, from Orel, that the man was lying on a ledge of snow with precipices all around him and that the dogs were still fast to the traces, Payer cut the rope, and the sledge made a short turn and stuck fast again. Then, telling Zaninovich that he must contrive to keep himself from freezing for four hours, Payer and Orel set off to run the six miles back to Hohenlohe Island. Payer, as he went on ahead, threw off his bird-skin clothes, his boots and his gloves, and ran in his stockings through the snow. In an hour he reached the camp, and leaving it unattended they all set off to the rescue with a rope and a pole. Picking up his clothes on the way, Payer and his men reached the crevasse; one of the party was let down by the rope, and finally Zaninovich and the sledge and dogs were brought from their dangerous position four hours and a half after their fall.

The advance was then resumed along the west coast of Crown Prince Rudolf Land round the imposing headland they named Cape Auk—the rocky cliffs being covered with little auks and other seabirds, enormous flocks flying up and filling the air, the whole region seeming to be alive with their incessant whirring—and following the line of Teplitz Bay, Payer mounted one of the bergs detached from a glacier and saw open water with ice bounding it on the horizon. As the sheet over which their course lay became thinner, and threatened to give way beneath them, they had to open up a track among the hummocks by pick and shovel; and when this failed they had to unload the sledge and carry the things separately. At Cape Saulen they camped for the night in the fissure of a glacier into which they had to drag their baggage by a long rope; and next day—the 12th of April, 1874—they went on again and reached Cape Fligely, in 81° 50´ 43˝, their farthest north.

With great difficulty they made their way back to the ship, a long, toilsome journey through snow and sludge, with open water in places where there had been ice, which made them fear the Tegetthoff might have drifted away again. The imminent danger of starvation was ended by their reaching their depot on Schonau Island, whence Payer went on for the remaining twenty-five miles alone with the dog-sledge, the two dogs giving much trouble until they struck the old sledge track almost obliterated by snow, when they raised their heads, stuck their tails in the air, and broke into a run. Halting on an iceberg for a meal, the berg capsized, and in a moment Payer was begirt by fissures, water-pools, and rolling blocks of ice, from which he managed to escape. When he turned into the narrow passage between Salm and Wilczek Islands, Orgel Cape, visible at a great distance, was the only dark spot on the scene. At once the dogs made for it, and about midnight he arrived there. With an anxious heart he began the ascent; a barren stony plateau confronted him; with every advancing step, made with increasing difficulty, the land gradually disappeared and the horizon of the frozen sea expanded before him; no ship was to be seen, no trace of man for thousands of miles except a cairn with the fragments of a flag fluttering in the wind, and a grave half covered with snow. Still he climbed, and suddenly three masts emerged. He had found the ship; there she lay about three miles off, appearing on the frozen ocean no bigger than a fly, the icebergs and drifts around her having hidden her amongst them. He held the heads of the dogs towards her and pointed with his arm to where she lay; and they saw her, and away they went, to find all but the watch asleep.

After another sledge journey north-westwards to Mount Brunn, from which Richthofen Peak was sighted, preparations were made for abandoning the ship and returning home. The three boats left the Tegetthoff on the 20th of May, but so slow was the progress over the difficult route that at the end of every day in the first week it was possible for Payer to go back to her on the dog-sledge to replenish the stores which had been consumed; and at the end of two months of indescribable effort the distance between the boats and the ship was not more than eight statute miles. The heights of Wilczek Land were still distinctly visible and its lines of rocks shone with mocking brilliance in the ever-growing daylight. All things appeared to promise that after a long struggle with the ice there remained for the expedition but a despairing return to the ship and a third winter there with the frozen ocean for their grave.

In the middle of July the fissures which had been opening out around them became wider and longer, progress reaching some four miles a day; then the north wind blew and the icefield commenced to drift to the south, to drift again north-east when the wind changed. Backwards and forwards, amid every variety of weather, including heavy rain, the pack ice moved until it changed to drift ice, and, on the 15th of August, the much-tried company got afloat at last in open water and laid their course for Novaya Zemlya, where they fell in with two Russian schooners off Cape Britwin.

The next to visit Franz Josef Land was Leigh Smith, whom we met with in the Spitsbergen seas. Building the Eira especially for Arctic service, he started in 1880, the year she was launched, on a cruise to Greenland and thence eastwards, which took him to the west and north-west of the ground gone over by the Austrians. He surveyed the whole coast from 42° east to the most westerly point seen by Payer, and sorted it out into several islands, but found no trace of the Tegetthoff, for where she had been left was open water. Encouraged by the success of his visit, in which the observations and collections were unusually good, he returned in the Eira the following year to meet with much more unfavourable ice conditions. Finding it impossible to get westward of Barents Hook the Eira was, on the 15th of August, made fast to the land floe off Cape Flora, and six days afterwards she was nipped and stove by the ice and slowly sank in eleven fathoms of water. As she settled down the steam winch was set to work, and by its means half a dozen casks of flour and about three hundredweight of bread were saved from the main hold; and when nothing more could be got from the lower deck the stores in the after cabin were attacked, and within the two hours from the discovery of the leak to the disappearance of the ship, all these provisions and the boats and clothes were safe on the ice; and the sails were cut away, and with them and some oars a tent was erected in which all the company, twenty-five in number, took shelter.

A move was made next day to the land. On Cape Flora a house was built mainly of earth and stones, covered with sails, in which the winter was passed. Fortunately the district abounds with bears and walruses, and the meat from these, boiled with vegetables, and served out three times a day into twenty-five plates made out of old provision tins, proved the right sort of fare to keep every one in excellent health. Thanks in a great measure to Bob, the retriever, the larder was kept full; but there being a shortness of coal, recourse for fuel had to be made to rope and blubber, so that no one could mistake the time when the cooking was on. In fact, the odour and the smoke were of great interest to the bears, who lingered about intending to pay surprise visits, and the dog had always to be sent in front of those leaving the house. One day when out on his own account, Bob discovered a school of walruses on the ice and reported the matter in his own fashion, whereupon several of these were shot, and after an exciting chase five were secured. In January he found another school, of which three were bagged and stowed alongside the house, although the thermometer stood at forty below zero. On another occasion he managed to tempt a bear up to the front door, where it was promptly tumbled over, to his evident satisfaction.

During the winter the party killed twenty-nine walruses and three dozen bears. Once, when only a fortnight's meat was left, and things began to look serious, no less than eight bears were killed in two weeks. At the end of April the birds returned, and in June the ice was cleared away by a gale and walruses were seen swimming on the water in hundreds. Never did a wintering party meet with better fortune, and never was one better managed.

On the 21st of June they started from Cape Flora in four boats, six men each in three of them, seven in the other, to reach the open sea, leaving in the house six bottles of champagne in case any person might look in, besides a few other things, and blocking up the door to keep out the bears. Before the boats reached the ice they crossed eighty miles of water, and then six weeks' hard labour began, zigzagging through channels, hauling over hummocky floes, sailing through pools, halting for days on a floe with no water in sight, but never doubting that a clearance would come. On leaving the ice they steered for Novaya Zemlya, at first in a gentle breeze, which rapidly increased to a gale in a heavy thunderstorm, so that the boats, with their sails of tablecloth and shirt-tail, had to be carefully handled as they scudded before it at such a pace that within twenty-four hours of leaving the ice they were drawn up all safe on the beach at the entrance of Matyushin Shar. Next morning the Dutch exploring schooner, Willem Barents, was descried coming out of the strait, and before the schooner was reached by the boats there came round the point the Hope, which Sir Allen Young, of the Pandora, had brought out as a rescue ship for them. They had been driven by the gale to the very spot on the very day they could be best relieved.

From the reports of Weyprecht and Payer it appeared that the north-east of Franz Josef Land would make an excellent base for a start for the North Pole, and Leigh Smith was led to the same view by his visit to Alexandra Land, but along the south he had made so many changes in Payer's map that a further examination of the region was evidently desirable. To effect this by a careful survey of the coasts, Frederick G. Jackson landed near Cape Flora on the 7th of September, 1894, and began his residence of a thousand days. Setting to work in a businesslike way, and recording his progress in similar style, he disintegrated the land masses into a group of some fifty size-able islands, through which run two main waterways, his British Channel and Payer's Austria Sound, both opening out northwards into Queen Victoria Sea; Crown Prince Rudolf Land being a large island at the northern entrance of Austria Sound, Wilczek Land at its southern entrance being about twice its size. He defined the coast-lines for over eighty miles of latitude, extending to fifteen degrees of longitude as far west as the most westerly headland, Cape Mary Harmsworth, and so cutting up Franz Josef Land that not even an island now bears the name, which is used only as that of the archipelago. Never in Arctic exploration was work rendered more evident than in the difference between the map as Jackson found it and as he left it.