Round About the North Pole

by W. J. Gordon

GREENLAND

Three International Polar Conferences were held, in 1879 and the two following years, at Hamburg, Berne, and St. Petersburg, at the last of which it was arranged that the stations should be fourteen in number, two in the south and twelve in the north, these twelve being—(1) The Austrian at Jan Mayen; (2) the Danish at Godthaab; (3) the Finnish at Sodankyla in Uleaborg; (4) the German at Kingua in Cumberland Sound; (5) the British at Fort Rae on the northern arm of the Great Slave Lake; (6) the Dutch at Dickson Harbour at the mouth of the Yenesei; (7) the Norwegian at Bosekop at the head of Alten Fiord; (8) the Russian at Little Karmakul Bay in Novaya Zemlya; (9) the second Russian on Sagastyr Island in the Lena Delta; (10) the Swedish at Mossel Bay in Spitsbergen; (11) the American at Point Barrow under Lieutenant P. H. Ray, who met with marked success and brought his men all home in safety; and (12) the second American at Lady Franklin Bay, the winter quarters of H.M.S. Discovery, which Greely renamed Fort Conger.

In direct opposition to the guiding idea of the scheme, Greely's work was complicated by having tacked on to it Howgate's proposal of another dash for the Pole, his instructions requiring him to send out "sledging parties in the interests of exploration and discovery." Further, his expedition was fitted out in a way that almost invited disaster. Let one instance suffice. "In speaking of this instrument," he explains, "it is necessary to say that a dip-circle was especially made for the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition, but it was by error shipped to the United States Coast Survey. On calling for it, when the duplicate instrument ordered could not be had in time, the late Mr. Carlisle Patterson, then Superintendent, promptly promised that it should be sent on to me at New York. On the day of my sailing, a dip-circle, carefully boxed, was received; but on opening it at St. John, an old, rusty, unreliable instrument was found in the place of the new circle. This resulted in unsatisfactory and incomplete observations at Conger, for the old circle having upright standards instead of transverse ones, as in the new, but one end of the needle could be read. It must always be a matter of regret that this unwarrantable and unauthorised substitution by some person was made, which materially impaired, if not effectually destroyed, the value of our two-years' dip-observations." This sort of thing reduced International Polar Research to a farce, and the same spirit appeared in other departments, more seriously than all in the relief proceedings, which were conducted in a way that could only lead to starvation.

In August, 1881, the Proteus, with the expedition on board, made her way up Smith Sound and Kennedy Channel without serious hindrance until she entered the south-eastern part of Lady Franklin Bay, where the close, heavy pack brought her to a stop within eight miles of her destination. She had come seven hundred miles from Upernivik in less than a week, and, faced by ice twenty to fifty feet thick, she had to wait another seven days before she got into Discovery Harbour. Here the party landed and a house was built, and dissension arose which ended in one of the company returning in the ship and another endeavouring to do so and being too late, so that he had to remain as a sort of tolerated volunteer. Two others were sent away as being physically unfit; but, making up for these, were two Eskimos engaged at Upernivik.

Preliminary sledging began at once, and in the spring the two great efforts were made. The doctor's, towards the Pole, left on the 19th of March and got adrift on a floe from which the party escaped with the loss of their tent, provisions, and some of their instruments. According to Greely's report: "The farthest latitude attained by this party is given by Dr. Pavy as 82° 56´, it being estimated, as no observations for time, magnetic declination, or latitude were made at any period during his absence."

On the 3rd of April, Lockwood with twelve men left for the coast of Greenland. Up to Newman Bay four men had been sent back as unfit for field-work. On the 16th, when the party started from here for the north-east, Lockwood and Christiansen, the Eskimo, were in advance hauling about eight hundred pounds with a team of eight dogs, a three-men sledge following, and then two two-men sledges; at Cape Bryant the men-sledges were sent back, and Lockwood, Brainard, and the Eskimo went on with the dog-sledge. Cape Britannia was reached on the 5th of May, and on the 13th they camped at Lockwood Island, and there, for the first time, Americans reached a farthest north.

"I decided to make this cape my farthest," reported Lockwood, "and to devote the little time we could stay to determining accurately my position, if the weather would allow, which seemed doubtful. We built a large, conspicuous cairn, about six feet high and the same width at the base, on the lower of two benches. After repitching the tent Sergeant Brainard and I returned to the cairn, and collected in that vicinity specimens of the rocks and vegetation of the country, the sergeant making almost all the collection. We ascended without difficulty to a small fringe of rocks, which seemed from below to form the top. The ascent, at first very gradual, became steeper as we went up, but we had no difficulty, as for some distance below the summit the surface is covered with small stones, as uniform in size, position, etc., as those of a macadamised road. Reached the top at 3.45 p.m. and unfurled the American flag (Mrs. Greely's) to the breeze in latitude 83° 24´ N. (according to last observation). The summit is a small plateau, narrow, but extending back to the south to broken, snow-covered heights. It commanded a very extended view in every direction. The barometer, being out of order, was not brought along, so I did not get the altitude. The horizon on the land side was concealed by numberless snow-covered mountains, one profile overlapping another, and all so merged together, on account of their universal covering of snow, that it was impossible to detect the topography of the region. To the north lay an unbroken expanse of ice, interrupted only by the horizon."

On Midsummer Day Greely started with a four-wheel wagon to explore Grinnell Land. The wagon, in the men's vernacular, was a man-killer, and was abandoned after they had dragged it a hundred miles. On this journey much exploring work was done in the unknown country, the most interesting find being that of the Eskimo house at Lake Hazen. In this, according to Greely's description, there were two fireplaces, one in the east and the other in the south, both of which had been built outward so as to take up no part of the space of the room, which was over seventeen feet long and nine feet wide. The sides of the entire dwelling were low walls of sodded earth, lined inside with flat thin slates, the tops of which were about two feet above the level of the interior floor, and the bench was covered with flat slabs of slate. Near by was a smaller house of the same character, and around were a large number of relics, including walrus-ivory toggles for dog-traces, sledge-bars and runners, an arrow head, skinning knife, and articles of worked bone. Next year further explorations of the back country were undertaken, so that some six thousand miles of the interior were viewed, disclosing many fertile valleys with their herds of musk ox.

Meanwhile the Neptune, with supplies for Fort Conger, had in August, 1882, been vainly endeavouring to get north, and, a few miles from Cape Hawks, had turned back with the pack piling the ice as high as her rail. Six attempts she made before she gave up and retreated, after making several deposits of stores at Cape Sabine and elsewhere. In July, 1883, the Proteus, making a similar attempt to reach Greely, was crushed in the ice off Cape Albert, her side opening with a crash while the men were working in the hold, the ice forcing its way into the coal-bunkers and then pouring in so that as soon as the pressure slackened she went down, escape to the south being effected in the boats.

Next year, matters having become serious, a naval expedition consisting of the Thetis, the Bear, and Nares's old ship the Alert, presented by the British Government, was placed in the capable hands of Commander Winfield Schley, who had with him George Melville of Jeannette fame as engineer of the Thetis, and matters were conducted in quite a different way under much more favourable circumstances. Schley intended to find Greely, at all costs, and he did so. First he found a cairn at Brevoort Island, in which were the papers deposited by Greely relating how he had had to come south owing to shortness of supplies, and how his party were then—21st of October, 1883—encamped on the west side of a small neck of land distant about equally from Cape Sabine and Cocked Hat Island.