Round About the North Pole

by W. J. Gordon

SIR GEORGE NARES

The leader, Captain George Strong Nares, when one of the Franklin search officers under Kellett at Melville Island, had distinguished himself by a sledge journey in which he had travelled nine hundred and eighty miles in sixty-nine days and reached 119½° west longitude. He was known as one of the best navigators in the Navy, and when called upon to go to the north was in command of H.M.S. Challenger, then on her famous voyage of scientific exploration in very different seas. With him in the Alert was Commander Albert Hastings Markham, whose experience, varied and considerable, gained by his spending much of his spare time within the Arctic Circle, rendered him especially well fitted for the position. In command of the Discovery was Captain Henry Frederick Stephenson; and the officers of both ships were, like the crews, all specially selected. There was no difficulty in the manning. One commanding officer called at the office at Portsmouth where the men were being entered and asked for advice. "An order," he said, "has come on board my ship, directing me to send volunteers for Arctic service to this office. What am I to do? The whole ship's company, nearly eight hundred men, have given in their names."

The three ships left Spithead on the 29th of May, 1875, and were all at Godhavn on the 6th of July. Nine days afterwards they left for Ritenbenk of the curious name, which is an anagram of that of Berkentin who was in charge of the Greenland department when it was founded. Here the Valorous parted company to return home after filling up with fuel at the coal quarries on the north side of Disco Island, while the two ships went to Proven to pick up Hans Hendrik, who this time left his wife and children behind him.

Through Smith Sound, almost choked with ice, progress was slow and difficult; but the passage was safely accomplished, and so across Kane Sea and up Kennedy Channel. On Washington Irving Island an ancient cairn was found, evidently the work of white men's hands and of great age, as shown by the state of the lichens on it—yet another of the many indications in the Polar regions that there was always a somebody before the first on record. Crossing the mouth of Archer Fiord, a snug harbour was found in 81° 44´, where the Discovery was left to spend the winter, the Alert going on, hampered much by the floes, though helped at last by a south-westerly wind, until she had to stop in 82° 27´ on the shore of the Polar Ocean, at what was named Floeberg Beach, off an open coast and with no more protection during the winter than was afforded by masses of ice ranging up to sixty feet in height aground in from eight to twelve fathoms of water.

"The protected space," says Nares, "available for shelter was so contracted and shallow, the entrance to it so small, and the united force of the wind and flood-tide so powerful, that it was with much labour and no trifling expense in broken hawsers that the ship was hauled in stem foremost. It was a close race whether the ice or the ship would be in first, and my anxiety was much relieved when I saw the ship's bow swing clear into safety just as the advancing edge of the heavy pack closed in against the outside of our friendly barrier of ice. From our position of comparative security the danger we had so narrowly escaped was strikingly apparent as we gazed with wonder and awe at the power exerted by the ice driven past us to the eastward with irresistible force by the wind and flood-tide at the rate of about a mile an hour. The projecting points of each passing floe which grounded near the shore in about ten fathoms of water would be at once wrenched off from its still moving parent mass; the pressure continuing, the several pieces, frequently thirty thousand tons in weight, would be forced up the inclined shore, rising slowly and majestically ten or twelve feet above their old line of flotation. Such pieces quickly accumulated until a rampart-like barrier of solid ice-blocks, measuring about two hundred yards in breadth and rising fifty feet high, lined the shore, locking us in, but effectually protecting us from the overwhelming power of the pack." The land had already assumed a wintry aspect, and the ship soon put on a garb of snow and ice, each spar and rope being double its ordinary thickness from the accumulation of rime. Around her everything was white and solemn; no voice of bird or beast was heard; all was still and silent save the gathering floes; and in two days the men were able to walk on shore over the new ice.

For eleven months she stayed here, secured by cables to anchors frozen on to the shore to protect her from gales on the landward side. With the ship housed in awnings of tilt-cloth, with snow a foot thick laid on the upper deck and banked up on each side as high as the main-chains, with skylights and hatchways carefully covered up, except two hatchways for ingress and egress constructed with porches and double doors so as to prevent the entrance of the bitter air, the crew here passed the long Polar night. On the 11th of October the sun disappeared, and then began those entertainments, lectures, lessons, games, not forgetting the Royal Arctic Theatre which opened on the 18th of November, with which the winter was pleasantly whiled away. "Can you sing or dance? or what can you do for the amusement of others?" every man had been asked before he was chosen, and the result was a singularly happy time kept up until sunrise.

The cold was intense and long-continued. Even the tobacco pipes froze, the stem becoming solidly clogged with ice as the smoking went on unless it was made so short as to bring the bowl unpleasantly close to the mouth. On the 1st of April the temperature was down to minus 64°, and three days afterwards it was a hundred and five below freezing, the cold weather preventing the departure of the dog-sledge for Discovery Bay.

During the autumn, sledging parties had laid out reserves of stores for the spring journeys, and a certain amount of practice had been given to the men in what was intended to be the chief work of the expedition. The field, however, was not promising. On one occasion Nares went out to look at it. He obtained a fine view of the pack for a distance of six miles from the land. The southern side of each purely white snow-covered hummock was brilliantly lighted by the orange-tinted twilight. The stranded floebergs lining the shore extended from half to three-quarters of a mile off the land. Outside were old floes with undulating upper surfaces separated from each other by Sherard Osborn's "hedgerows of Arctic landscape," otherwise ridges of pressed-up ice of every size. "It will be as difficult," was his verdict, "to drag a sledge over such ice as to transport a carriage directly across country in England." He gave a lecture on sledging at one of the winter entertainments. It was interesting but not encouraging. He told his hearers that if they could imagine the hardest work they had ever been called upon to perform in their lives intensified to the utmost degree, it would only be as child's play in comparison with the work they would have to perform whilst sledging. "These prophetic words," says Markham, "were fully realised, and were often recalled and commented on by the men."

They had four different kinds of sledges. From the illustrations it will appear how the eight-feet sledges differed from those used by M'Clintock, the Nares sledge being higher and more slender in the uprights. The eight-men sledge, such as the Marco Polo—which was bound for the Pole—had six uprights eighteen inches apart. It was eleven feet long, thirty-eight inches wide, eleven inches high, and weighed one hundred and thirty pounds. The tent, made of light, unbleached duck, was nine feet four inches long at the bottom, eight feet at the top, seven feet wide and high, and weighed forty-four pounds. The tent poles, five in number, weighed five pounds apiece. The coverlet weighed thirty-one pounds and a half, and the extra coverlet twenty pounds. The lower robe weighed twenty-three pounds, the waterproof floor-cloth fifteen. The eight sleeping-bags weighed eight pounds apiece, and the eight knapsacks, when packed, twelve pounds apiece. The shovel and two pickaxes accounted for twenty-one pounds, the store-bag for twenty-five, the cooking gear for twenty-nine, the gun and ammunition for twenty-five, the medical stores for twelve, the instruments for fifteen, and the tent for nine and a quarter. To this must be added a thousand and eighty pounds for forty-five days' provisions for the eight men, and we have the total of sixteen hundred and sixty-four pounds odd, which with seven men at the ropes gives each man a drag of about two hundred and thirty-eight pounds. In the spring the weight decreases as the provisions are consumed, but the rate of decrease is not the same in the autumn, for then the steadily falling temperature increases the weight of the outfit by the moisture it adds to the tent and clothing. In Markham's autumn journey the tent of thirty-two pounds came back as fifty-five, the coverlet as forty-eight, the lower robe as forty, the floor-cloth as forty, and everything else was heavier than at the start.

The sledges mustered for their journeys on the 3rd of April. Seven in number, they were drawn up in single line according to the seniority of the leaders, all fully equipped and provisioned, and manned by fifty-three officers and men. On each was its commander's banner—a swallow-tailed flag charged with a St. George's cross and displaying the armorial bearings. As a precaution against snow-blindness, the men had been ordered to decorate the backs of their snow-jumpers with any device they thought fit, the result being a display of comic blazonry that often formed a topic of conversation when others failed. For the same reason the two boats carried on the north-going sledges were gaily decorated with the royal arms, and the rose, shamrock, and thistle; the artist, as on other occasions, being Doctor Moss, whose great difficulty in the matter was that in spite of the quantity of turpentine used in mixing the paint it would persist in freezing so that the brush became as stiff as a stick every few seconds.