Round About the North Pole

by W. J. Gordon

Another attempt was then made by the Vega to reach the islands to the north, but after sighting the two most westerly of the group the shallow sea was too crowded with rotten ice, and an idea of landing on Liakhoff Island having to be given up for the same reason, the course was altered so as to take the ship round Svjatoi Nos (the Holy Cape), where in April, 1770, Liakhoff had noticed the mighty crowd of reindeer going south. Justly considering they must have come over the ice from some northern land, he went back on their tracks in a dog-sledge, discovering two of the most southerly islands, and obtaining from Catherine the Second as a reward the monopoly of hunting the foxes and collecting the ivory there from the fossil mammoths he found in abundance.

Forced to keep to the channel along the coast, which daily became narrower, the Vega reached Cape Chelagskoi, and when off this promontory Nordenskiöld saw the first natives during his voyage. Two boats built of skin almost exactly similar to the oomiaks, or women's boats, used by the Eskimos, came out to the ship, the men, women, and children in them intimating by shouts and gestures that they wished to come on board. The Vega was brought-to that they might do so, but as none of the Chukches could speak Russian and none of the Swedes knew Chukche, the interview was not so satisfactory as expected, though the universal language of pantomime with presents ensured a favourable termination.

On the 12th of September the Vega passed Irkaipii, the Cape North of Captain Cook, and by rounding it Nordenskiöld joined up with the westernmost limit of the Arctic discoveries of the great navigator. Cook tried to weather it in August, 1778, but was turned back by fog and snow, and thinking it was "not consistent with prudence to make any further attempts to find a passage into the Atlantic this year in any direction, so little was the prospect of succeeding," he sailed for Hawaii, where his intention of making the attempt the ensuing summer came to nought owing to his death.

On the 28th of September the Vega's progress for the year was arrested by her being frozen in for the winter on the eastern side of Kolyuchin Bay in the northernmost part of Bering Strait, only six miles of ice barring the way round Cape Serdze Kamen into the open sea. During her detention of two hundred and sixty-four days the scientific investigations of many kinds that were undertaken were of lasting importance, as they had been throughout, and when she was released on the 18th of July, 1879, to come home by way of Yokohama, the collections and records she brought with her were simply enormous. No better work with greater results was done by any Arctic expedition than during this successful voyage, which was too well managed to have much adventure. For it Nordenskiöld very justly claimed the reward of twenty-five thousand guilders offered in 1596 by the States-General of Holland, the endeavour to win which sent out Van Heemskerck, Barents, and Rijp.

ADOLF ERIK NORDENSKIÖLD

We have seen how the Dutchmen built their house at Ice Haven mainly of the driftwood from the Siberian rivers. Similar wood from probably the same source is found on the shores of Greenland and of almost all the northerly islands of the Arctic Ocean. Further, the Greenland flora includes a series of Siberian plants apparently from seeds drifted there by some current. Not only do trees and seeds travel by water from Asia westward to America; at Godthaab, for instance, on the western coast of Greenland, there was found a throwing-stick of a shape and ornamentation used only by the Alaskan Eskimos; and three years after the foundering of the Jeannette to the north of the New Siberian Islands there were found on the south-west coast of Greenland a number of articles in the drift-ice that must have come from the sunken vessel. For these and other reasons it seemed clear to Fridtjof Nansen that a current flowed at some point between the Pole and Franz Josef Land from the Siberian Arctic Sea to the Greenland coast, and so he set to work to organise his daring expedition to strike this current well to the eastward, trusting to its mercies to take him to or near the Pole.

In 1893, when the Fram rounded Cape Chelyuskin, Nansen had found the Kara Sea almost as open as Nordenskiöld had done, but had met with more difficulties among the islands off the Taimyr Peninsula. A famous vessel, the Fram, the first of her kind, built specially for the ice to take her where it listed in the hope that she would drift to discovery like the Tegetthoff, and not to disaster like the Jeannette. The general idea was Nansen's, the carrying out of the idea was Colin Archer's. As Nansen says: "We must gratefully recognise that the success of the expedition was in no small degree due to this man." Plan after plan did he make of the projected ship, model after model did he prepare and abandon before he was satisfied: and never was a ship more honestly built. With her double-ended deck plan, with a side of such curve and slope that under ice pressure she would be lifted instead of crushed between the floes, and with bow, stern, and keel so rounded off that she would slip like an eel from the embrace of the ice, she was of such solidity as to withstand any pressure from any direction. Her stem of three stout oak beams, one inside the other, was four feet in thickness, protected with iron; her rudder-post and propeller-post, two feet across, had on either side a stout oak counter-timber following the curvature upwards and forming a double stern-post, with the planking cased with heavy iron plates; and between these timbers was a well for the screw and another for the rudder, so that each could be hoisted on deck, the rudder with the help of the capstan coming up in a few minutes. Her frames, ten inches thick and twenty-one wide, stood close together, carrying three layers of planking, giving altogether a side of two feet or more of solid wood, so shored and stayed for strength that the hold looked like a thicket of balks, joists, and stanchions. With a length of 128 feet over all, a breadth of thirty-six, a depth of seventeen, and a displacement of 800 tons, she was quite a multum-in-parvo engined with a 220 horse-power triple expansion, so contrived that in case of accident or for any other cause the cylinders could be used singly or two together. Rigged as a three-masted fore-and-aft schooner, with the mainmast much higher than the others—it being unusually high, for the crow's-nest on the main-topmast was 102 feet above the water—she proved equal to the demands on her, though in her case strength and warmth had to be thought of before weatherliness and speed. But her speed was not so poor, for when steaming and sailing after leaving Cape Chelyuskin on the 10th of September she was doing her nine knots.

The day after she had entered the Nordenskiöld Sea came a walrus-hunt, so graphically described by Nansen that we must find room for an extract. "It was," he says, "a lovely morning—fine, still weather; the walruses' guffaw sounded over to us along the clear ice surface. They were lying crowded together on a floe a little to landward of us, blue mountains glittering behind them in the sun. At last the harpoons were sharpened, guns and cartridges ready, and Henriksen, Juell, and I set off. There seemed to be a slight breeze from the south, so we rowed to the north side of the floe, to get to leeward of the animals. From time to time their sentry raised his head, but apparently did not see us. We advanced slowly, and soon were so near that we had to row very cautiously. Juell kept us going, while Henriksen was ready in the bow with a harpoon, and I behind him with a gun. The moment the sentry raised his head the oars stopped, and we stood motionless; when he sank it again, a few more strokes brought us nearer. Body to body they lay, close-packed on a small floe, old and young ones mixed. Enormous masses of flesh they were. Now and again one of the ladies fanned herself by moving one of her flippers backwards and forwards over her body; then she lay quiet again on her back or side. More and more cautiously we drew near. Whilst I sat ready with the gun, Henriksen took a good grip of the harpoon shaft, and as the boat touched the floe he rose, and off flew the harpoon. But it struck too high, glanced off the tough hide, and skipped over the backs of the animals. Now there was a pretty to do! Ten or twelve great weird faces glared upon us at once; the colossal creatures twisted themselves round with incredible celerity, and came waddling with lifted heads and hollow bellowings to the edge of the ice where we lay. It was undeniably an imposing sight; but I laid my gun to my shoulder and fired at one of the biggest heads. The animal staggered and then fell head foremost into the water. Now a ball into another head; this creature fell, too, but was able to fling itself into the sea. And now the whole flock dashed in, and we, as well as they, were hidden in the spray. It had all happened in a few seconds. But up they came again immediately round the boat, the one head bigger and uglier than the other—their young ones close beside them. They stood up in the water, bellowed and roared till the air trembled, threw themselves forward towards us, then rose up again, and new bellowings filled the air. Then they rolled over and disappeared with a splash, then bobbed up again. The water foamed and boiled for yards around—the ice-world that had been so still before seemed in a moment to have been transformed into a raging Bedlam. Any moment we might expect to have a walrus tusk or two through the boat or to be heaved up or capsized. Something of this kind was the very least that could happen after such a terrible commotion. But the hurly-burly went on and nothing came of it."

The Fram had to follow the coast owing to the thick pack barring the way across the sea. The mouth of the Chatanga was passed, then that of the Olenek, and then the influence of the warm water of the Lena being apparent by the clearance of the floes, the course was laid straight for the Pole in open water until 77° 44´ was reached, when, checked by the long compact edge of ice shining through the fog, the route became north-westerly until they stopped for fear they should get near land, which was the very thing they wished to avoid; and on the 25th of September in about 78½° north latitude—north-west of Sannikof Land—they were frozen in.