Round About the North Pole

by W. J. Gordon

The voyage was fortunate so long as Hall lived. The Polaris found the Polar gates open before her. She steamed right up Smith Sound, through Kane Sea, up Kennedy Channel, into Robeson Channel—named after the Secretary to the American Navy—until she reached the ice, in 82° 16´, on the 30th of August, 1871, the highest latitude then attained by a ship. Hall would have pressed on into the ice, but Buddington wisely refused, and hardly had the Polaris been headed round when she was beset and carried southwards, to escape in a few days and take refuge for the winter in a harbour on the east of what is now known as Hall Basin, protected at its entrance by a grounded floeberg. The latitude is 81° 38´, the harbour Hall called Thank God Bay. There in November he died; and close by is Hall's Rest, where he is buried.

His death was the end of the enterprise. Buddington wished to return as soon as the ship was released, and eventually had his way, after a journey or two of little importance. But he stayed too long. The ship was clear in June, and he did not start until the 1st of August, and he started by driving her into the pack, anchored her to a floe, and drifted helplessly into Baffin Bay, as De Haven had done through Lancaster Sound in 1850. For eleven weeks the drift continued until she was off Northumberland Island on the 15th of October. Here in the middle of the night a violent gale arose, and the crippled ship, nipped between two masses of ice, was lifted bodily and thrown on her side, her timbers cracking loudly and her sides apparently breaking in. Two boats, all she had, were hurriedly got on to the ice, and provisions, stores, and clothing were being passed out, when with a roar the floe broke asunder, and the Polaris disappeared like a phantom in the gale. As the ice cracked and the sides lurched apart, a bundle of fur lay across the fissure. A grab was made at it, and the bundle was saved. It contained the baby of Joe the Eskimo, whose wife had been confined the year before in latitude 82°, perhaps the most northerly birthplace of any of this world's inhabitants.

A SEAL IN DANGER

On the ice were Tyson, with Sergeant Meyer, the steward, the cook, six sailors, and nine Eskimos, men, women, and children, including Hans and Joe. They built a house, from the materials thrown out from the ship, as a shelter; and they built snow houses as the time went on and the floe diminished. Provisions they had but few, but Hans and Joe were indefatigable. They speared seals, caught fish, trapped birds, and, sometimes, a bear would scramble up on to the ice for them to shoot—and they never missed. In short, without them the party would have starved to death.

The floe on which the castaways passed the winter was about a hundred yards long and seventy-five broad. On this they voyaged down the whole length of Baffin Bay and through Davis Strait, the ice melting away and getting smaller and smaller as they drifted south, until on the 1st of April, when it was only twenty yards round, they had to take to the remaining boat, the other having been used for fuel. Once they nearly touched the shore, but the wind rose and off they were driven in the snow. When they were picked up by the sealer Tigress in 53° 35´, near the coast of Labrador, on the 30th of April, they had drifted fifteen hundred miles in the hundred and ninety-six days that had elapsed since they left the ship.

The Polaris, blown to the northward, reached land at Lifeboat Cove in the entrance to Smith Sound, a little north of Foulke Harbour, and here with the aid of the Etah Eskimos the crew passed the winter; and, in the spring, some of them went on an expedition in the Hayes country and lost the famous flag. As the ship could not be made seaworthy, two flat-bottomed boats were built of her materials, and on the 21st of June these were found hauled up on a floe in Melville Bay, and their people rescued by the whaler Ravenscraig, which shifted them into the Arctic, another Dundee whaler, on board of which was Commander Markham, who, with Hans Hendrik, four years afterwards, was to follow up Hall's track to the north.

The results of this expedition were of considerable importance. In five days Captain Hall had run five hundred miles through what on most occasions has been found to be an ice-choked sea. He completed the exploration of Kennedy Channel, discovered Hall Basin and Robeson Channel, and was the first to reach the Polar ocean by this route. Greenland and Grinnell Land he extended northward for nearly a hundred and forty miles; and, north of Petermann Fiord, where he showed that the inland ice terminated, he had found a large area free from ice, with its wild flowers and herbage and musk oxen.

Hall's remarkable success in taking a ship to so high a latitude led to the Government expedition of 1875, the first British attempt to reach the Pole since Parry's failure in 1827. Three ships were employed: the Alert, a seventeen-gun sloop; the Discovery, once the Bloodhound, a Dundee whaler; and the Valorous. The Alert and Discovery were specially prepared for the voyage at Portsmouth by Sir Leopold M'Clintock who was then Admiral Superintendent of the dockyard; the Valorous, an old paddle sloop, required little alteration, as her duty was merely to carry the stores that could not safely be taken by the exploring vessels in crossing the Atlantic and hand them over at Disco.