Round About the North Pole

by W. J. Gordon

THE PARRY ISLANDS

Another winter went wearily, each month with a gloomier outlook than the last, and on the 5th of April the first of the scurvy patients died. Next morning M'Clure and Haswell were walking near the ship discussing how they could dig a grave in the frozen ground, when they noticed a man hurriedly approaching from the entrance of the bay, throwing up his arms and shouting at the top of his voice, his face as black as ebony. When he came within talking range the dark-faced stranger called out, "I am Lieutenant Pim, late of the Herald and now in the Resolute; Captain Kellett is in her at Dealy Island." And soon the dog-sledge with two men came into view. Pim's arrival was most fortunate for the sufferers, for the captain, as a desperate resource, was—in spite of the doctor's protests—just about to send off two sledge parties of the invalids to take their chance of escaping somehow, as there was no hope of their recovery in the ship; and on examination by the doctor of the Resolute, it was found that every man of the crew was more or less affected by the disease. So the ship was abandoned in Mercy Bay, and the officers and crew, crossing to the Resolute, reached England by way of Hudson Strait.

Collinson's was the most remarkable voyage ever accomplished by a sailing-ship in the Arctic regions. It lasted from 1850 to 1855—five years and a hundred and sixteen days—all the way out across the Atlantic and Pacific and home again in safety, traversing a hundred and twenty-eight degrees of longitude in the Arctic sea, coming nearest at the time to completing the north-west passage by ship (up Prince of Wales Strait), finding two north-west passages by sledge (one joining with Parry's discoveries across Banks Strait, the other with Franklin's up Victoria Strait), and approaching nearer than any other naval expedition to the great discovery by travelling up Franklin's route for some distance, and passing within thirty miles of the spot where the vessels he was in search of had been abandoned, though unfortunately, like Rae, he was on the west side of the waterway instead of the east.

Passing Bering Strait in July, 1850, the Enterprise went north from Wainwright Inlet into the Beaufort Sea, until she was stopped by the heavy pack. Trying east, to join with Parry's farthest, and then west, she arrived, on the 28th of August, at 73° 23´ in 164°, and here she turned south after having sailed over eleven thousand miles without having to reef her topsails, an unprecedented run of distance and fine weather combined. Returning in 1851 from wintering at Hong Kong, Collinson, with a southerly wind "too precious to be wasted," made his way up Prince of Wales Strait, knowing nothing of the visit of the Investigator, to find ice blocking his way just at the northern outlet, his furthest north, by ship, 73° 30´, forty miles beyond M'Clure's winter quarters, as given in the record he found in one of the cairns.

Unable to round the corner into Banks Strait owing to the ice block, Collinson returned down Prince of Wales Strait and followed the track of the Investigator half-way up the west coast of Banks Land, though he had found nothing to indicate she had gone in that direction. Finding the ice conditions dangerous, he retraced his route along the coast and went into comfortable winter quarters in Walker Bay, at the entrance of Prince of Wales Strait. By the end of November the natives fishing for salmon-trout had cleared off, as also had the reindeer, hares, and ptarmigan and other birds, and on the 17th of March the ravens, which had been the last to leave, were the first to return. In April sledge parties went out, one of which under Lieutenant Parkes crossed the route of the Hecla along the strait and reached Melville Island at Cape Providence on the way to Winter Harbour, short of which, within sight of Point Hearne, Parkes began his homeward journey, owing to his taking the tracks of sledges and barking of dogs as indicating the presence, not of M'Clure as it did, but of Eskimos, with whom, being without weapons, he was unable to cope.

Released on the 5th of August, the Enterprise proceeded to sea, coasting along past Rae's farthest and Cape Baring, and so, where no ship had been, through Coronation Gulf to Cambridge Bay. Here the winter of 1852-3 was spent, and hence the sledges went up Victoria Strait. At Finlayson Islands, what seemed to be a piece of a companion-door was found among the driftwood, which might have been a relic of the lost ships; but that was all. During the return along the northern coast the Enterprise was beset in Camden Bay, and here the third winter was passed, release not coming until the end of the following July, and Bering Strait not being reached until the 21st of August after a voyage, like that of the Vega, too well managed to yield much adventure. Like all the other Arctic voyages of this period, it failed in the one object it was undertaken to achieve; but in days to come the first ship to sail the passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific was to follow Collinson from Cambridge Bay along the route laboriously completed by the surveyors of the mainland from James Cook to Dease and Simpson.

M'Clure claimed and—to have done with the matter—obtained the reward of £10,000 for discovering the North-West Passage through Prince of Wales Strait, though he sailed only half-way up it and, in attempting to get round to Parry's farthest, lost his ship and started sledging on the west side of the pack; while Collinson took his ship much nearer to Parry's course on the east side; and Franklin, by linking up with Dease and Simpson over the ice by way of Victoria Strait, had previously found another of the possible passages, as shown by Collinson's voyage to Cambridge Bay. But surely what was done by M'Clure, and by Collinson in his northerly cruise, was to see where ships could pass when there was no ice in the way, which was no more than had been done by Parry, who had taken his ship within sight of both their farthest, and would have sailed into the Beaufort Sea had not the pack forbidden it. It was Parry, in fact, who discovered the main road, the route by Prince of Wales Strait, like that by Peel Sound taken by Franklin and successfully accomplished by Amundsen, being only one of the many by-roads leading off along his course.

His famous voyage to Melville Island was due to the influence of Sir John Barrow. Barrow, to whom more than any other man this country owes its position in Arctic story, was born in a small thatched cottage at Dragley Beck, near Ulverston, in North Lancashire, in 1764, and, in a remarkable course of promotion by merit, became second secretary of the Admiralty for forty years under twelve or thirteen different naval administrations, Whig and Tory; being so unmistakably the right man in the right place that he was only dispensed with once—on a change of First Lords—and then was reinstated the next year. When he was seventeen he was given the opportunity of a voyage in a Greenland whaler, which he accepted, and that was his only Arctic experience; but even when with Macartney in China and South Africa, he kept up his interest in the north, and in 1817, when at the Admiralty, proposed to Lord Melville his plan for two voyages of discovery, one to the north and the other to the north-west, which opened the new era of Polar exploration.