Round About the North Pole

by W. J. Gordon

A little north of the seventy-third parallel Koldewey discovered on his way home the magnificent Franz Josef Fiord. Here the grandest scenery in Greenland is to be found along its deep branches winding among the mountains, one of which, Mount Petermann, is over eleven thousand feet high. As the Germania entered this remarkable inlet, which extends inland for some five degrees of longitude, a fleet of icebergs were sailing out of it with the current; the farther she advanced the warmer seemed the temperature of the air and surface water, and the wilder and more impressive became the grouping of the mighty cliffs and peaks with their lofty waterfalls and raging torrents and deep glacier-filled ravines. It was the great geographical discovery of the expedition.

Meanwhile Hegemann, trying to pass to the north more to the westward, got the Hansa beset on the 9th of September some twenty-four miles from Foster Bay. As the ice-pressure threatened to become too great for the vessel to resist, an elaborate house was planned and built on the floe. Briquettes were used for the walls, the joints were filled up with dry snow on which water was poured, and in ten minutes it hardened into a compact mass. The house was twenty feet long, fourteen feet wide, and four feet eight inches high at the sides, with a rising roof consisting of sails and mats covered with deep snow. Into this house, which took a week to build, provisions for two months were carried, besides wood and fuel. The boats were put out, a flagstaff was set up, and quite a little settlement was started on the ice; and no sooner was it completed than a violent snowstorm, lasting for five days, buried both the ship and the house. The ice increased around, and, the pressure of the accumulation lifting the Hansa seventeen feet above her original level, everything of value was removed from her on to the ice and into the house. On the 22nd of October she sank, having drifted below the seventy-first parallel; and all through the winter the floe, which was about two miles across, leisurely made its way to the south.

Off Knighton Bay Christmas was kept with all possible honour. The briquette house was decorated with coloured-paper festoons, and, by the light of the sole remaining wax candle, the genial Germans made themselves merry around a stubby Christmas tree devised out of an old birch broom. Three weeks afterwards the floe cracked beneath the dwelling. There was barely time to take refuge, but all hands were saved in the boats. For two days they remained in them, poorly sheltered from the storm and unable to clear out the snow. Then a smaller house was built of the ruins of the old one, but it was only large enough for half the party; and as the spring advanced the floe decreased, breaking away at the edges as did that on which the Polaris people drifted to Labrador.

THE LAST DAYS OF THE "HANSA"

At the end of March it entered Nukarbik Bay and there it stayed four weeks, caught in an eddy, slowly moving round and round just far enough from the shore to render an attempt at escape impossible; twice a day they went in with the tide and out with the tide, the ice too bad for the boats and never promising enough for a dash to the land. Having become thoroughly acquainted with this portion of the coast with its bold range of hills, its deep bays, its inlets, headlands, and islands, a storm came on which cleared them out of the eddy and drove them further south. Three weeks after that the floe had become so diminished by the lashing of the surge that it was hardly a hundred yards across, and large fragments were slipping off every hour.

They had been on it for two hundred days and drifted eleven hundred miles when, on the 7th of May, water-lanes opening shorewards, they took to the boats and ventured among the masses of ice, making for the south. At first they had their difficulties in being compelled to haul up on the floes to pass the night or wait for a favourable wind, which meant severe work in unloading and reloading. Once during their painful progress of more than a month they were kept on a floe for six days by gales and snow-showers. Finally, after a long desperate effort, they reached Illuilek Island, and thence proceeded close inshore among rocks and ice to Frederiksdal, a couple of hours' walk from the southernmost point of the Greenland mainland, Cape Farewell being part of an island twenty-eight miles further to the south-east. On the 21st of June, eight days afterwards, they were at Julianehaab, whence they sailed to be landed at Copenhagen on the 1st of September, just ten days before the Germania steamed into Bremen. Thus the expedition, by its two divisions, ice-borne and ship-borne, had skirted nearly all that was then known of the east coast from end to end.

On the north coast, Beaumont's discoveries were extended by Lieutenant James B. Lockwood for ninety-five miles, the trend of the shore taking him up to 83° 24´, three minutes and thirty-four seconds nearer the North Pole than Markham reached out on the sea. This was on the 13th of May, 1882, during the ill-fated A. W. Greely expedition. Like most American expeditions up to then this began well and ended badly, worse, in fact, than any; and unlike them, and all others, it consisted entirely of soldiers—as if a detachment of Royal Engineers had been sent north on ordnance survey work. It was, however, more miscellaneous, for among its twenty-three members were representatives of three cavalry regiments, six infantry regiments, and an artilleryman.

This was to be the garrison of the International Circumpolar Station at Lady Franklin Bay. The idea of a ring of stations round the Pole for the study of the natural phenomena for which the Arctic regions afford so wide and important a field was not new, but it was first reduced to definiteness and its adoption secured by Karl Weyprecht of the Austro-Hungarian expedition of 1872. At a meeting of German scientific men at Gratz, in September, 1875, he procured assent to his general principle that the best results in Arctic inquiry were to be obtained by subordinating geographical discovery to physical investigation. It had long been evident that the most valuable results had been obtained by the ships and fixed observatories, and that the toilsome work of the sledges in their successive approaches by a few more miles towards a mathematical point, though most interesting to read about, had really been of very little practical use owing to the necessarily light equipment. Instead, therefore, of a number of isolated attempts at irregular intervals, Weyprecht suggested that the better way would be to attack the subject systematically by a group of expeditions at permanent stations working together long enough at the same time for their observations to be dealt with as part of a general scheme; and the suggestion was approved although he did not live long enough to see the stations occupied.