Round About the North Pole

by W. J. Gordon

Chelyuskin reaches the cape—The Laptefs—Deschnef's voyage through Bering Strait—Nordenskiöld's voyages to the Yenesei—The Siberian tundra—The voyage of the Vega—Nordenskiöld rounds Cape Chelyuskin—Endeavour to reach the Siberian Islands—Liakhoff's discovery—The Vega passes the Cape North of Captain Cook—Frozen in within six miles of Cape Serdze Kamen—Completes the North-east Passage—Nansen's voyage—The Fram—Her drift in the ice—Nansen and Johansen start for the Pole—They reach 86° 13´ 6˝—Their journey to Frederick Jackson Island—The meeting with Jackson—Sverdrup's voyage to Spitsbergen.

The tundras and shores of Siberia abound with obstacles to exploration, and yet a third of the threshold of the Polar regions has been surveyed along their line. No spot remains unvisited on the northern margin of the Asiatic mainland, the northernmost point of which is Cape Chelyuskin in 77° 36·8´, so that the Arctic Circle sweeps inland for 770 miles to the south of it—in other words the cape is practically half-way between the Circle and the Pole.

CAPE CHELYUSKIN

It was chiefly from the land that the northern coast-line was surveyed by the Russians, whose Arctic work has been immense and thorough, though not marked by any striking discoveries. Cape Chelyuskin was first reached, in May, 1742, by the explorer whose name it bears, after a sledge journey from the Chatanga, he being at the time second in command to Khariton Laptef, whose first expedition in 1739 ended in the loss of his ship three hundred miles from his winter quarters, to which he had to travel on foot, losing twelve men by cold and exhaustion on the way. Within the preceding four years the survey of the coast west of it had been completed in four stages—from Archangel to Yalmal (that is Land's End); from Yalmal to the Obi; from the Obi to the Yenesei; from the Yenesei to Cape Sterlegof. In 1735 Pronchistschef, from the Lena, failed to round Cape Chelyuskin from the east, and returned to the Olenek to die but two days before his young wife, who was his companion on his perilous voyage. Two years afterwards Dmitri Laptef began his explorations east of the Lena which took him to Cape Baranoff, thus joining up to the discoveries of the sable-hunters made a century before, including those of Deschnef, who, in 1648, sailed from the Kolyma to Kamchatka and went through Bering Strait more than thirty years before Bering was born. Thus the route of the North-east Passage was known, although no man had travelled the whole way either by land or sea, before the task was undertaken by Nordenskiöld.

To begin with, Nordenskiöld made two voyages to the Yenesei. In the first voyage he left Tromsoe in the Proeven on the 14th of June, 1875, and reached what he named Dickson Harbour at the mouth of the Yenesei on the 15th of August. Sending back the Proeven, which returned through Matyushin Shar, he, with Lundstrom the botanist and Stuxberg the zoologist, and three walrus-hunters, embarked in a boat they had brought out with them and proceeded up the estuary into the river; and during the first six hundred miles they landed only twice. On the last day of the month they caught up a steamer on which they became passengers.

"We were yet," says Nordenskiöld, "far to the north of the Arctic Circle, and as many perhaps imagine that the little-known region we were now travelling through, the Siberian tundra, is a desert wilderness covered either by ice and snow, or by an exceedingly scanty moss vegetation, it perhaps may not be out of place to say that this is by no means the case. On the contrary, we saw snow during our journey up the Yenesei only at one place, in a deep valley cleft some fathoms in breadth, and the vegetation, especially on the islands which are overflowed during the spring floods, is distinguished by a luxuriance to which I have seldom seen anything comparable. Already had the fertility of the soil and the immeasurable extent and richness in grass of the pastures drawn forth from one of our walrus-hunters, a middle-aged man who is owner of a little patch of ground among the fells of Northern Norway, a cry of envy at the splendid land our Lord had given the Russian, and of astonishment that no creature pastured, no scythe mowed, the grass. Daily and hourly we heard the same cry repeated, and even in louder tones, when some weeks after we came to the grand old forests between Yeneseisk and Turuchansk, or to the nearly uninhabited plains on the other side of Krasnojarsk covered with deep black earth, equal without doubt in fertility to the best parts of Scania, and in extent surpassing the whole Scandinavian peninsula. This judgment formed on the spot by a genuine though illiterate agriculturist is not without interest in forming an idea of the future importance of Siberia."

In fact, Siberia is particularly rich in mineral and agricultural wealth, and this voyage, which opened up the route to and from Europe by the natural outlets to the north, was of such commercial promise that the explorer received for it the special thanks of the Russian Government. As, however, there were people who looked upon it as an exceptional voyage in an exceptional year, Nordenskiöld next season took another voyage to the river, this time in the Ymer, carrying the first instalment of merchandise so as to begin the trade; and he was followed in a few weeks by Captain Joseph Wiggins, in the Thames, whose subsequent voyages made the northern route well known.

Assured by the experience gained in these voyages that the North-east Passage was possible to a steam vessel of moderate size, Nordenskiöld, in 1878, was enabled to fit out the Vega, and sailed from Tromsoe on the 31st of July. Three other vessels accompanied her, two bound for the Yenesei, one for the Lena, the rendezvous being Khabarova. All went well. On the 9th of August the Fraser and Express proceeded up the Yenesei to discharge their cargoes and return to Europe in safety; next day the Vega and Lena left for the eastward, and, after some risky navigation among islands and through fog, lay for four days in Actinia Haven, between Taimyr Island and the mainland, vainly waiting for clear weather. Pushing on through fitful fog they sighted a promontory in the north-east gleaming in the sunshine, and rounding its western horn anchored in a bay open to the north and free from ice at the extremity of Cape Chelyuskin. With the rounding of the most northerly point of the Old World the first object of the expedition had been attained. The salute fired in honour of the event having frightened away the only polar bear who had stood watching the ship from the western horn, some of the party landed, the botanists to discover that all the plants of the peninsula had apparently been stopped on the outermost promontory when trying to migrate further north. The flora was not extensive—a few luxuriant lichens and twenty-three flowering plants, eight of them saxifrages, most of them with a tendency to form semi-globular tufts; the fauna consisted of the bear, a few seals, a walrus, two shoals of white whales, some ducks and geese, and a number of sandpipers. Not so long a list as was obtained at other landings, but by no means a bad one for the half-way house to the Pole.

After passing the cape the course was laid for the New Siberian Islands, but ice prevented progress in their direction beyond 77° 45´, the highest north of the voyage, and the ship had to work her way out by the route she went in, thus losing a day, which had serious consequences, though it proved the correctness of Nordenskiöld's theory that the water delivered by the Siberian rivers is, for a few months, of sufficiently high temperature to give a clear passage to vessels content to keep near the coast. On reaching the mouth of the Lena the ships parted company, Captain Johannsen taking the smaller steamer up the river as intended and bringing the news of the rounding of Cape Chelyuskin and the promise of the North-east Passage being accomplished in one season, which was not destined to be fulfilled.