Round About the North Pole

by W. J. Gordon

And Ross passed on, apparently quite pleased with himself. But the Fates had again been against him, for this was the very North-West Passage he had come specially to find; the bay, as Kennedy was to show, being the entrance to Bellot Strait in which the Fox was to winter when on the Franklin search. He had blundered along from the island of North Somerset to the mainland of America, and passed unheeded its northernmost point, which M'Clintock was to name Cape Murchison.

Working down the coast of the newly-named Boothia, the Victory reached Felix Harbour, and there she wintered. No Eskimos were seen until the 9th of January, when thirty-one came to the ship and were invited on board, a return visit being paid next day to their village, which Ross named North Hendon. As this was a typical Eskimo snow camp we may as well copy his picture and quote his description.

"The village soon appeared, consisting of twelve snow huts, erected at the bottom of a little bight on the shore, about two miles and a half from the ship. They had the appearance of inverted basins, and were placed without any order; each of them having a long crooked appendage, in which was the passage, at the entrance of which were the women, with the female children and the infants. We were soon invited to visit these, for whom we had prepared presents of glass beads and needles; a distribution of which soon drove away the timidity which they had displayed at our first appearance. The passage, always long, and generally crooked, led to the principal apartment, which was a circular dome, being ten feet in diameter when intended for one family, and an oval of fifteen by ten where it lodged two. Opposite the doorway there was a bank of snow, occupying nearly a third of the breadth of the area, about two feet and a half high, level at the top, and covered by various skins, forming the general bed or sleeping place for the whole. At the end of this sat the mistress of the house, opposite to the lamp, which, being of moss and oil, as is the universal custom in these regions, gave a sufficient flame to supply both light and heat; so that the apartment was perfectly comfortable. Over the lamp was the cooking dish of stone, containing the flesh of deer and of seals, with oil; and of such provision there seemed no want. Everything else, dresses, implements, as well as provisions, lay about in unspeakable confusion, showing that order, at least, was not in the class of their virtues. It was much more interesting to us to find, that among this disorder there were some fresh salmon; since, when they could find this fish, we were sure that it would also furnish us with supplies which we could not too much multiply. On inquiry, we were informed that they were abundant; and we had, therefore, the prospect of a new amusement, as well as of a valuable market at the mere price of our labour."

ESKIMO LISTENING AT A SEAL-HOLE

A few weeks later Ross was to see how these houses were built. "Four families," he says, "comprising fifteen persons, passed the ship to erect new huts about half a mile to the southward. They had four heavy-laden sledges, drawn each by two or three dogs, but proceeded very slowly. We went after them to see the process of building the snow house, and were surprised at their dexterity; one man having closed in his roof within forty-five minutes. A tent is scarcely pitched sooner than a house is here built. The whole process is worth describing. Having ascertained, by the rod used in examining seal holes, whether the snow is sufficiently deep and solid, they level the intended spot by a wooden shovel, leaving beneath a solid mass of snow not less than three feet thick. Commencing then in the centre of the intended circle, which is ten feet or more in diameter, different wedge-shaped blocks are cut out, about two feet long, and a foot thick at the outer part; then trimming them accurately by the knife, they proceed upwards until the courses, gradually inclining inwards, terminate in a perfect dome. The door being cut out from the inside before it is quite closed serves to supply the upper materials. In the meantime the women are employed in stuffing the joints with snow, and the boys in constructing kennels for the dogs. The laying the snow sofa with skins and the insertion of the ice window complete the work; the passage only remaining to be added, as it is after the house is finished, together with some smaller huts for stores"—the design being similar to that of the yurts of the Eskimos of the north, with a change of material, snow for stone, and ice instead of seal-gut for the window over the entrance.

Making friends with the Eskimos, and gaining a great reputation by the carpenter fitting one of them with a wooden leg, Ross obtained much valuable information from them, particularly as to the geography of the district. Like all Arctic men, he was impressed by their quickness in understanding maps and their skill in drawing them upon anything, snow, paper, or otherwise, that lay handy. One of them, Ikmallik, drew in the ship's cabin a map, which he reprints in his book, showing the coast-line of the country south of the Victory's quarters, with the capes, inlets, and islands, giving the isthmus of Boothia and Committee Bay, and Repulse Bay on the other side of the Melville Peninsula, which is really wonderful, for neither the Eskimo, nor Ross, had anything to copy from, it being nearly twenty years before Rae's exploration; and the one thing it clearly demonstrated was that there was no waterway to the westward, south of Felix Harbour.

Ross owed much to Ikmallik, and really a good deal of the time of the expedition was spent in confirming the statements of that well-informed man. The west coast of Boothia was surveyed down to Bulow Bay; the east side from Cape Nicholas down to Cape Porter, including the crossing of the upper part of James Ross Strait, the discovery of Matty Island and the north-east coast of King William Land from Cape Landon, opposite Cape Porter—where Ross, as usual, missed a strait—westward to capes Franklin and Jane Franklin, within sight of which in the days that were coming, by one of those remarkable coincidences so frequent in the north, the Erebus and Terror were to meet their fate.

The one conspicuous triumph of the expedition was the journey of James Ross to the site of the Magnetic North Pole, which he found on the western coast of Boothia on the 1st of June, 1831. In the younger Ross's own words, "the land at this place is very low near the coast, but it rises into ridges of fifty or sixty feet high about a mile inland. We could have wished that a place so important had possessed more of mark or note. It was scarcely censurable to regret that there was not a mountain to indicate a spot to which so much of interest must ever be attached; and I could even have pardoned any one among us who had been so romantic or absurd as to expect that the magnetic pole was an object as conspicuous and mysterious as the fabled mountain of Sinbad, that it even was a mountain of iron, or a magnet as large as Mont Blanc. But Nature had here erected no monument to denote the spot which she had chosen as the centre of one of her great and dark powers; and where we could do little ourselves towards this end, it was our business to submit, and to be content in noting by mathematical numbers and signs, as with things of far more importance in the terrestrial system, what we could but ill distinguish in any other manner.... We fixed the British flag on the spot and took possession of the North Magnetic Pole and its adjoining territory in the name of Great Britain and King William the Fourth. We had abundance of materials for building, in the fragments of limestone that covered the beach; and we therefore erected a cairn of some magnitude, under which we buried a canister containing a record of the interesting fact; only regretting that we had not the means of constructing a pyramid of more importance and of strength sufficient to withstand the assaults of time and of the Eskimos. Had it been a pyramid as large as that of Cheops, I am not quite sure that it would have done more than satisfy our ambition, under the feelings of that exciting day. The latitude of this spot is 70° 5´ 17˝, and its longitude 96° 46´ 45˝ west."

The Victory in the short summer of 1830 sailed a few miles further south and spent the winter in Victoria Harbour, to be there abandoned in May, 1832. Ross in his boats made for Fury Beach, where, at Somerset House, as he called it, he passed the following winter. On the 26th of August, 1833, when in his boats off the eastern mouth of Lancaster Sound, he was picked up by the Isabella, his old ship, and in her he reached the Humber in October of that year after four successive winters in the ice, having been enabled to make so long a stay by his fortunate find of the stores left by Parry.