Round About the North Pole

by W. J. Gordon

The work he had set himself to do was done by William Baffin, who first appears in the Arctic record as pilot of the Patience in James Hall's Greenland voyage in 1612, which ended in Hall being killed in revenge for the kidnapping proceedings on the two previous voyages under the Danish flag. Baffin then made two voyages, as we have seen, to Spitsbergen in the service of the Muscovy Company, and, in that of the Company for the Discovery of the North-West Passage, he made his fourth, in 1615. In Hudson's old ship the Discovery, also her fourth trip to the north, he passed up Hudson Strait to the end of Southampton Island, where he abandoned the attempt to get through owing to ice and shallow water, and returned after discovering the land that Parry named after him.

In his fifth voyage, again in the Discovery, with Robert Bylot again as master, he left Gravesend on the 16th of March, 1616, and reached Sanderson's Hope on the 30th of May, discovering the great bay to the north which bears his name. Passing the Women Islands and the Baffin Islands off Cape Shackleton, he took the middle passage across Melville Bay, coasting along by Cape York, by the cape named after one of his directors, Sir Dudley Digges, and the sound named after another of his directors, Sir John Wolstenholme; along Prudhoe Land, entering the North Water of the whalers, reaching Cape Alexander in 77° 45´, his farthest north; opening up and naming Smith Sound, after Sir Thomas Smith, another of his directors, and Jones Sound, after Alderman Sir Francis Jones, another of the board, and Lancaster Sound, after Sir James Lancaster of the East India Company. Thus, coasting Ellesmere Land, North Devon, Bylot Island, and Baffin Land, he continued his voyage from the north on his way home. A good piece of work: the discoveries so many and unexpected that people ceased to believe in them, geographers going so far as to erase his bay from their maps until, two hundred years afterwards, Ross and Parry sailed over the land of the unbelievers and confirmed Baffin's work in every detail—and Ross, in his best mountain-finding manner, reported no thoroughfare at Smith Sound.

DR. E. K. KANE

CHAPTER XII
SMITH SOUND

Captain Inglefield—Dr. Kane—The open Polar Sea—Hans Hendrik the Greenlander—Kalutunah the Eskimo—An Eskimo bear-hunt—A lesson in catching auks—Dr. Hayes—His journey over the glacier—Tyndall Glacier—Captain C. F. Hall—Joe and Hannah—Voyage of the Polaris—Drift of the Polaris—The voyage on the ice-floe—The British Government Expedition of 1875—The Alert and Discovery—The cairn on Washington Irving Island—Discovery Harbour—How the Alert got into safety at Floeberg Beach—Low temperatures—Nares on sledging—Description of the sledges and their burden—Markham starts for the Pole—Reaches 83° 20´ 26˝—Outbreak of scurvy—Parr's walk—Aldrich's journey west—Beaumont's journey east—The perilous homeward voyage.

Lady Franklin, who incidentally did so much for Arctic discovery, sent out the Isabel in 1852 under Commander, afterwards Sir, Edward Augustus Inglefield to search for her husband to the north of Baffin Bay. Unlike John Ross, the names of whose ships, Isabella and Alexander, are home by the capes at its entrance, he found Smith Sound to be the highway to the north. Steaming up the open water "stretching through seven points of the compass," noting the coasts as he went, he was turned back by the ice in 78° 28´, at the entrance to the Kane Sea, with Cairn Point and the way in to Rensselaer Harbour on his right, and Cape Sabine and Ellesmere Land, which he named, on his left; the farthest north he sighted being Cape Louis Napoleon, the farthest east Cape Frederick VII, now known as Cape Russell. Needless to say he found no Franklin traces, although he really looked for them.

Twelve months afterwards Dr. Elisha Kent Kane in the United States brig Advance followed in his track and wintered in Rensselaer Harbour, nine miles further north. Ostensibly Kane was on a Franklin search, but his real object was the Pole. He explored the sea named after him, naming many landmarks, not always placing them in their true positions, and underwent many hardships. For one mistake he was famous for a time, and his reputation now suffers. One of his expedition, William Morton, almost reached Cape Constitution, in about 80½°, which he placed some sixty miles too far north, and described as the corner of the north coast of Greenland; and from the southern horn of the bay of which it is the northern boundary he looked out over the south of Kennedy Channel, which is open every summer, and mistook it for the Polar Sea. And he returned with a report of an even more wonderful discovery than the Polar Sea, for, according to the illustration, he beheld the midnight sun dipping in its waters on Midsummer Day.

In May, 1854, the month before Morton's discoveries, Dr. Hayes and William Godfrey crossed the Kane Sea to connect the northern coast with Inglefield's survey, "but it disclosed no channel or any form of exit from the bay," being, in fact, Ellesmere Land continued, and yet on reaching the shore for the first time at Hayes Point, three miles north of Cape Louis Napoleon, and following it for two miles to Cape Frazer, they quite unnecessarily named the country Grinnell Land. On the other side of this sea the chief discovery was Kane's Humboldt glacier, some fifty miles north-east of their winter quarters, which was described as "the mighty crystal bridge which connects the two continents of America and Greenland," when, of course, it does nothing of the sort.