Round About the North Pole

by W. J. Gordon

Back set out accompanied by Wentzel and two Canadians and two Indians and their wives, crossing lakes frozen just hard enough to bear them, going wide circuits to avoid those which were open, amid mist and fog and storm, over rugged, bare country, through dense woods and snow-covered swamps, rafting across a river with pine branches for paddles, until Fort Providence was reached. From here he sent back Belanger with letters and a hundred bullets he procured on loan. Belanger arrived at Fort Enterprise on the 23rd of October alone; he had walked constantly for the last six-and-thirty hours through a storm, his locks were matted with snow, and he was encrusted with ice from head to foot, so that he was scarcely recognised when he slipped in through the doorway.

At Fort Providence Back had to wait until the Great Slave Lake was frozen over. On the 18th of November he observed two mock moons at equal distances from the central one, the whole encircled by a halo, the colour of the inner edge of the large circle a light red inclining to a faint purple; and two days afterwards two parhelia were observable, with a halo, the colours of the inner edge of the circle a bright carmine and red-lake intermingled with a rich yellow forming a purplish orange, the outer edge being a pale gamboge. On the 7th of December he left, sledging across the lake before the wind, for the North West fort on Moose Deer Island, and finding at the Hudson's Bay fort, also on the island, five packages of belated supplies and two Eskimo interpreters on their way to Franklin.

Here he was told that nothing could be spared at Fort Chippewyan, that goods had never been transported so far in the winter season, that the same dogs could not go and return, and that from having to walk constantly on snow-shoes he would suffer a great deal of misery and fatigue. Nevertheless he undertook the journey in dog-sledges with a Canadian and an Indian, leaving Wentzel behind. At times the weather was so cold that they had to run to keep themselves warm, and, owing to the snow, the feet of the dogs became so raw that an endeavour was made to fit them with shoes. With legs and ankles so swollen that it was painful to drag the snow-shoes after him, Back hurried on, reaching Fort Chippewyan on the 2nd of January to find that he and all Franklin's party had been reported to have been killed by Eskimos. Here he had to wait a month, and then, with an instalment of what he wanted, he set out on his return, arriving at Fort Enterprise on St. Patrick's Day after a memorable journey of over a thousand miles.

CROSSING POINT LAKE

During his absence he was told that the cold had been so severe that Hood had found accurate observing difficult owing to the sextant having changed its error and the glasses lost their parallelism from the contraction of the brass, a circumstance, combined with the crystallisation of the mercury of the artificial horizon, that might account for some of the diversity of results obtained by Arctic navigators. And Richardson had to tell him of an early discovery that when fishing and the hands get cold by hauling in the line, the best way to warm them is to put them in the water; and how the fish had frozen as they were taken out of the water so that by a blow or two of the hatchet they were easily split open, leaving the intestines removable in one lump, and yet that these much-frozen fish retained their vitality so that he had seen a thawed carp recover so far as to leap about with much vigour after it had been frozen for thirty-six hours.

On the 14th of June Fort Enterprise was left, and on the 25th the expedition began to cross Point Lake on the way to the Coppermine, the river being reached through Rocknest Lake on the 30th. Down the river they paddled, taking the rapids as they went—in one place three miles of them on end. "We were carried along with extraordinary rapidity, shooting over large stones, upon which a single stroke would have been destructive to the canoes; and we were also in danger of breaking them, from the want of the long poles which lie along their bottoms and equalise their cargoes, as they plunged very much, and on one occasion the first canoe was almost filled with the waves; but there was no receding after we had once launched into the stream, and our safety depended on the skill and dexterity of the bowmen and steersmen."

There were rapids day by day affording almost every possible chance of wreck except that due to driftwood; the two worst being one where the stream descends for three-quarters of a mile in a deep but narrow and crooked channel which it has cut through the foot of a hill of five hundred or six hundred feet high, confined between perpendicular cliffs resembling stone walls varying in height from eighty to a hundred and fifty feet, on which lies a mass of fine sand; the body of the river pent within this narrow chasm dashing furiously round the projecting rocky columns as it discharges itself at the northern extremity in a sheet of foam. The other being where the river flows between lofty stone cliffs, reddish clay rocks and shelving banks of white clay, and is full of shoals. Franklin's people had entered this rapid before they were aware of it, and the steepness of the cliffs prevented them from landing, so that they owed their preservation to the swiftness of their descent. Two waves made a complete breach over the canoes; a third would probably have filled and overset them, which would have proved fatal to all on board. This Escape Rapid, as it was named, was, as it were, the gate into the territory of the Eskimos who were soon met with in small parties all the way down to the sea. It was passed on the 15th of July; three days afterwards the Indians bade farewell to the expedition in the morning, and in the afternoon the canoes were afloat on the Arctic Ocean.

KUTCHIN INDIANS