TWILIGHT AT MIDDAY, FEBRUARY 1874.

NEW LANDS
WITHIN THE ARCTIC CIRCLE.

NARRATIVE OF THE DISCOVERIES
OF THE AUSTRIAN SHIP “TEGETTHOFF”
IN THE YEARS 1872-1874.

BY
JULIUS PAYER,
ONE OF THE COMMANDERS OF THE EXPEDITION.

WITH MAPS AND NUMEROUS ILLUSTRATIONS FROM DRAWINGS
BY THE AUTHOR.

Translated from the German, with the Author’s Approbation.

NEW YORK:
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY,
549 AND 551 BROADWAY.
1877.

AUTHOR’S PREFACE.

In laying this book before the Public I desire, in the first instance, to acknowledge without reserve my sense of the great merits of my colleague, Lieutenant Weyprecht. The reader of the following pages will learn with what unwearied, though fruitless, energy he struggled to free the Tegetthoff from her icy prison, and what dauntless courage and unfailing command of resources he displayed in our hazardous retreat from the abandoned ship, till the moment of our happy rescue. The order and discipline maintained on board ship, and in the terrible march over the Frozen Ocean, as well as in the perilous boat voyage after leaving the ice-barrier, were mainly due to his distinguished abilities. He had supreme command of the expedition, as long as its duties were strictly nautical; when the operations of sledging and surveying began, I had the responsibility of a separate and independent command.

Nor ought I to be slow to pay my tribute of respect to the perseverance and constant self-denial of Lieutenant Brosch and Midshipman Orel. It would be difficult to determine, whether they shone more as officers of the ship, or as observers of scientific phenomena. The highly important duty of managing the stores and provisions was discharged also by Lieutenant Brosch with a conscientiousness that secured the confidence of all.

To the watchful skill of Dr. Kepes we owed it, that the health and constitution of the members of the expedition suffered so little from all their hardships and privations.

The conduct of the crew was on the whole praiseworthy. Their obedience to command, their perseverance and resolution shown on every occasion, will be cited as an example of what these virtues and qualities can achieve amid the most appalling dangers and trials.

With regard to my narrative, I make no claim for it founded on its literary excellence; rather I sue for indulgence to its manifold shortcomings. I have not written for the man of science, though I have not shunned a few scientific details. Nor have I aimed at presenting a record, which might be profitable to those who shall follow us in the same career of discovery, though some hints will be found in my pages which will not be without their use to those who may consult them for information and guidance. Rather I have endeavoured to narrate our sufferings, adventures, and discoveries in a manner which shall be interesting to the general reader who reads to amuse himself.

The magnetical and meteorological observations, so carefully taken and tabulated by Weyprecht, Brosch, and Orel, together with the sketches of the Fauna of the Frozen Ocean, drawn by myself from the collection of Dr. Kepes, were presented to the Imperial Academy of Sciences of Vienna, and will in due time be published under the auspices of that august body.

PRELIMINARY NOTICE BY THE TRANSLATOR.

It will be interesting to English readers to learn a few particulars concerning the two leaders of the Austrian North Polar Expeditions. Carl Weyprecht was born in Hesse-Darmstadt in 1838, and in his eighteenth year entered the Austrian navy. Ten years afterwards he was present at the action between the Austrian and Italian fleets at Lissa—July 20, 1866; was promoted to the rank of lieutenant of the second class, and decorated with the order of the Iron Cross in recognition of his services in that battle. It was shortly after this, that Weyprecht volunteered to take the command of a small vessel, manned by only four seamen, which was to sail from Hammerfest to explore the Arctic Ocean. This dauntless offer was the basis of the first German North Polar expedition. When, however, permission to act in this capacity was obtained, Lieutenant Weyprecht was serving on board the Austrian frigate Elizabeth, which formed one of the squadron sent by the Austrian Government to bring home the body of the ill-fated Maximilian. Immediately on his return to Europe he repaired to Gotha, eager to place his services at the command of the expedition which had meantime been planned by Petermann and a committee of patrons of Arctic exploration. But unhappily, just at this moment his health, which had suffered from fever caught at New Orleans, failed, and the command of the expedition, known as the first German North Polar Expedition (May 24-October 10, 1868), was undertaken by Captain Koldewey. It was only in 1871 that he recovered his health, and in the June of that year began, in the Isbjörn, his life of Arctic experience and discovery. In the following year, 1872, he was appointed to the naval command of the expedition which sailed in the Tegetthoff, whose strange and eventful history is recorded in the following pages.

His companion and colleague, Julius Payer, was born at Schönau in Teplitz, Bohemia, in 1841, and received his education as a soldier at the Wiener-Neustadt Military Academy, 1856-59, where General Sonnklar was his teacher in geographical science, and early imbued his mind with a love for the grandeurs of the glacier world. With the rank of “Ober-Lieutenant” he served in the campaign of 1866 in Italy, and was decorated for his distinguished services at the battle of Custozza. Afterwards, while serving with his regiment in Tyrol, he gained great celebrity as one of the most successful Alpine climbers, and turned his experience as a mountaineer to profit in his surveys of the Orteler Alps and glaciers. Payer gained his first experience as an Arctic discoverer in the second German North Polar Expedition, under Koldewey and Hegemann—June 15, 1869-Sept. 11, 1870. His services during that expedition were of a most distinguished character. He shared in the most important discoveries which were then made, specially those of König Wilhelm’s Land, and of the noble Franz-Josef Fjord. He acquired in East Greenland the experience of sledging, which was of such eminent use in his explorations of the great discovery of the Tegetthoff Expedition—Kaiser Franz-Joseph Land. He shines too as an author in his descriptions of Greenland scenes, in the Second German North Polar Voyage, published in 1874 by Brockhaus of Leipzig, and partially reproduced in an English translation by the Rev. L. Mercier and Mr. H. W. Bates. For these services, on the return of the expedition, he was again decorated, receiving the order of the Iron Crown.

In the voyage of the Isbjörn, June 21-Oct. 4, 1871, we find him associated with Weyprecht in the pioneering voyage described in the earlier part of this work, and lastly as joint commander of the renowned Tegetthoff expedition, June, 1872-September, 1874.

The Gold Medals entrusted to the Royal Geographical Society were awarded in 1875: the Founder’s Medal to Lieutenant Weyprecht, and the Patron’s Medal to Lieutenant Julius Payer.

As these pages are passing through the Press, the country has been deeply moved by the unexpected intelligence of the return of the Arctic Expedition. Gratulations on its safe and happy return have been unanimously and eagerly expressed by all the organs of public opinion. Disappointment, however, has, we fear, fallen on many minds as, after the first feelings of joy at the safe arrival of the officers and crews of the Alert and Discovery, they read the brief telegraphic summary sent by Captain Nares: “Pole impracticable,”—“No land to northward.” Popular enthusiasm looked rather for the conquest of the Pole; expected, perhaps, to read, one day, that the Union Jack had been hoisted there, to commemorate the triumph of England’s perseverance at last rewarded. Few, we apprehend, would pass through the chill of these two clauses of the message to mark the hope contained in the third—“voyage otherwise successful.” In what special respects the success proclaimed was achieved, we must patiently wait for a future record to reveal; but while awaiting the history which no doubt will be written to justify and prove this announcement, let us exercise our loyal belief in the skill and courage of our countrymen, and feel persuaded that what men could do under their circumstances no doubt was done by them.

The interest which will be excited afresh in Arctic discovery and adventure, will doubtless sharpen the interest in the volumes which record the fortunes of the Austrian expedition; and we venture to affirm—without undue partiality—that, though the history of Arctic exploration and discovery abounds in records of lofty resolution and patient endurance of almost incredible hardships, the narrative of the voyage of the Tegetthoff will be found to fall below none in these high qualities. The mere destiny of the vessel itself equals, if it does not exceed, in the element of the marvellous, anything which has before been recorded. Surely this is borne out when we think, that on August 20, 1872, the Tegetthoff was beset off the coast of Novaya Zemlya; remained a fast prisoner in the ice, spite of all the efforts made by her officers and crew to release her; drifted during the autumn and the terrible winter of 1872—amid profound darkness—whither they knew not; drifted to the 30th of August in the following year (1873), till, as if by magic, the mists lifted, and lo! a high, bold, rocky coast—lat. 79° 43′ E., long. 59° 33′—loomed out of the fog straight ahead of them. Close to this land—which could be visited with safety only twice, on the 1st and 3rd of November of that year—the ship remained still fast bound in the ice. Not till the winter of 1873 had passed, and the sun had again returned, was it possible to explore the land, which had been so marvellously discovered. On the 10th of March, 1874, the sledge journeys commenced, and terminated May 3rd, after 450 miles had been passed over, and the surveys and explorations completed, which enabled Payer to write the description of Kaiser Franz-Josef Land (pp. 258-270), which shows that other still undefined lands, with an archipelago of islands, have been added to the geography of the earth.

But the perils of the expedition did not end here. On the 20th of August, 1874, it was resolved to abandon the Tegetthoff in the ice, and to return in sledges and boats to Europe. Captain Nares tells us, in his telegraphic despatch, that the sledging parties of the Alert and Discovery compassed on an average one-and-a-quarter mile per day on the terrible “Sea of Ancient Ice,” and discovered, after the experience gained in seventy miles passed under these conditions, that the “Pole was impracticable.” If our readers wish to have a conception of the toils and perils of the Austrian sledge parties on their return from the Tegetthoff let them mark the single image presented to the mind by the statement (p. 364):—“After the lapse of two months of indescribable efforts, the distance between us and the ship was not more than nine English miles.” Had the ice on the Novaya Zemlya seas remained as obstinate as it seems to have done in the new desolation, the “Sea of Ancient Ice,” escape would have been as impossible to the Tegetthoff’s crew, as advance towards the Pole was to the sledge parties of our last Arctic expedition. But fortunately, soon after, “leads” opened out in the ice; the boats were launched, and after about another month of alternate rowing and sledging, the ice barrier was happily reached in the unusually high latitude 77° 40′; and the brave men who three months before had left the Tegetthoff were saved.

This is perhaps the most marked analogy between the perils of the two expeditions; so far as those of our own are yet known. But the scientific conclusions of Lieutenant Payer, as set forth in the general Introduction to his narrative, strikingly harmonize with the actual discoveries of the Alert and Discovery. Already it is authoritatively announced, that there is no open Polar Sea; that this hypothesis is as baseless as the existence of President’s Land. In the fourth chapter of that Introduction (pp. 25-31), our author has analysed with great sagacity the various theories on which that hypothesis was made to rest, working up to the conclusion, that no such sea exists. The demonstration of experience now takes the place of enlightened argument and opinion; fact and theory are here at one.

Nor can we forbear to direct attention to another statement in the same chapter. Let our readers mark the prophetic spirit of the following passage: “All the changes and phenomena of this mighty network lead us to infer the existence of frozen seas up to the Pole itself; and according to my own experience, gained in three expeditions, I consider that the states of the ice between 82° and 90° N. L. will not essentially differ from those which have been observed south of latitude 82°; I incline rather to the belief that they will be found worse instead of better” (p. 30). And “worse instead of better” they have been found, as we cannot doubt, when we weigh the ominous significance of the designation the “Sea of Ancient Ice.”

History may or may not verify the position which the telegram so briefly resumes—“The Pole impracticable.” Impracticable no doubt it was, if the condition of the ice seen by our expedition in that awful sea be its normal condition. All that it was possible for men to dare and achieve, England will feel that her officers and sailors dared and achieved under the circumstances they encountered. It may be, that later experience will show, that even that Sea may present to future explorers an aspect less tremendous; yea, that in some seasons, which science may yet predict, when her theories of the sun-spots are matured and formulated, open water will be found, as perhaps it was found in the year of the expedition of the Polaris, where the heroic sledging parties from the Alert and Discovery saw nothing and found nothing, but piled-up barriers of ice rising to the height of 150 feet.

It would be idle to predict, in the face of these results, that the Pole shall yet be reached. Any confident prediction in this spirit would, at the present moment, be singularly inopportune, as well as unwise. But despair would be equally unjustifiable, while its influence would be most hurtful and depressing, especially if Arctic exploration and the attainment of the Pole were supposed to be identical propositions. There are two things: reaching the North Pole, and the exploration of the Polar region. If the former appeals more to the imagination, and readily calls forth the emotions which are fed by the love of the marvellous, the latter enlists the sympathies of those who take a broader view of the necessities of Arctic exploration. These have found a powerful representative in one whose services entitle him to speak with authority, in the naval chief of the Tegetthoff expedition. At a meeting of the German Scientific and Medical Association held at Gratz in September of 1875, Weyprecht read a paper on the principles of Arctic exploration, in which, according to the summary of its contents, which appeared in Nature, October 11, 1875, he maintains, that the Polar regions offer, in certain important respects, greater advantages than any other part of the globe for the observation of natural phenomena—Magnetism, the Aurora, Meteorology, Geology, Zoölogy, and Botany. He deplores, that while large sums have been spent and much hardship endured for geographical knowledge, strictly scientific observations have been regarded as holding a secondary place. Though not denying the importance of geographical discovery, he maintains, that the main purpose of future Arctic expeditions should be the extension of our knowledge of the various natural phenomena which may be studied with so great advantage in those regions. He insists in that paper on the following propositions:—“1. Arctic exploration is of the highest importance to a knowledge of the laws of nature. 2. Geographical discovery in those regions is of superior importance only in so far as it extends the field of scientific investigation in its strict sense. 3. Minute Arctic topography is of secondary importance. 4. The geographical Pole has for science no greater significance than any other point in high latitude. 5. Observation stations should be selected without reference to the latitude, but for the advantages they offer for the investigation of the phenomena to be studied. 6. Interrupted series of observations have only a relative value.” The suggestions thrown out by Lieutenant Weyprecht have been taken up by one whose mind seems to rise instinctively to all high aims and objects. Prince Bismarck forthwith appointed a German Commission of Arctic Exploration, consisting of some of the most eminent men of science of whom Germany can boast, who reported to the Bundesrath in a memoir, the recommendations of which were unanimously adopted. From Nature, November 11, 1875, which we have already quoted, we borrow the following résumé of that report:—

“1. The exploration of the Arctic regions is of great importance for all branches of science. The Commission recommends for such exploration the establishment of fixed observing stations. From the principal station, and supported by it, exploring expeditions are to be made by sea and by land.

“The Commission is of opinion that the region to be explored by organised German Arctic explorers is the great inlet to the higher Arctic regions situated between the eastern shore of Greenland and the western shore of Spitzbergen....

“3. It appears desirable, and, so far as scientific preparations are concerned, possible, to commence these Arctic expeditions in 1877.”

“4. The Commission is convinced that an exploration of the Arctic regions, based on such principles, will furnish valuable results, even if limited to the region between Greenland and Spitzbergen; but it is also of opinion, that an exhaustive solution of the problems to be solved can only be expected when exploration is extended over the whole Arctic zone, and when other countries take their share in the undertaking.

“The Commission recommends, therefore, that the principles adopted for the German undertaking be commended to the governments of the states which take interest in Arctic inquiry, in order to establish, if possible, a complete circle of observing stations in the Arctic zones.”

Thus we are brought face to face with two different purposes, which may be termed, respectively, the romantic and the scientific purposes of Arctic discovery. To the former the attainment of the Pole has hitherto been the all in all of a geographical discovery. “The Pole impracticable,” telegraphed by Captain Nares, as the result of the expedition which has returned baffled to our shores, is a stern reproof to all who would still advocate a dash at the Pole as the worthiest purpose of Arctic discovery. Aims and endeavours not so glaring, nor appealing in the same degree to the love of the marvellous, are suggested in the sagacious proposals of Lieutenant Weyprecht, to whom science will not refuse her calmer and more measured respect, and in whom, as Captain of the Tegetthoff, all who love deeds of daring and energy will find a congenial spirit.

To Lieutenant Payer has fallen the distinguished honour of being not only the colleague in command and friend of Weyprecht, but the historian of their common sufferings and common glory in an enterprise, the fame of which the world, we believe, will not willingly let die.

CONTENTS.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

Transcriber’s Note: The map is clickable for a larger version, if the device you’re reading this on supports that.

MAP
of the
NOVAYA ZEMLYA SEA
for the
Austro-Hungarian
Expeditions.

AUSTRIAN ARCTIC VOYAGES.
INTRODUCTION.

CHAPTER I.
THE FROZEN OCEAN.

1. The ice-sheet spread over the Arctic region is the effect and sign of the low temperature which prevails within it. During nine or ten months of the year this congealing force continues to act, and if the frozen mass were not broken up by the effects of sun and wind, of rain, waves, and currents, and by the rents produced in it from the sudden increase of cold, the result would necessarily be an absolutely impenetrable covering of ice. The parts of this enormous envelope of ice sundered by these various causes now become capable of movement, and are widely dispersed in the form of ice-fields and floes.

2. The water-ways which separate these parts are called “leads,” or, when their extent is considerable, “ice-holes.” The meshes of this vast net, which is constantly in motion, open and close under the action of winds and currents in summer; and it is only in its southern parts that the action of waves, rain, and thaw produces any considerable detachments. Towards the end of autumn, the ice, forming anew, consolidates the interior portions, while its outer edge pushes forward, like the end of a glacier, into lower regions, until about the end of February the culminating point of congelation is attained. Motionless adhesion of the fields, which naturally reach their greatest size in winter, does not, however, exist even then; for during this period they are incessantly exposed to displacement and pressure from the currents of the sea and the air.

3. When the ice is more or less closed, so as to render navigation impossible, it is called “pack-ice,” and “drift-ice” when it appears in detached pieces amid predominating water. Since there are forces operating which promote the loosening process at its outer edge, and its consolidation within, it is self-evident, that the interior portions tend to the character of “pack-ice,” and its outer margin to that of “drift-ice.” This general rule, however, is so modified in many places, by local causes, currents, and winds, that we find not unfrequently at the outer margin of the ice thick barriers of pack-ice, and in the inner ice, ice-holes (polynia[1]) and drift-ice.

4. Ice navigation, during its course of three hundred years, has created a number of terms to designate the external forms of ice, the meaning of which must be clearly defined. Ice formed from salt-water is called “field-ice;” that from the waters of rivers and lakes “sweet-water ice.” The latter is as hard as iron, and so transparent that it is scarcely to be distinguished from water. Icebergs are masses detached from glaciers. The words “patch,” “floe,” “field,” express relative magnitude, descriptive of the smallest ice-table up to the ice-field of many miles in diameter. The term “floe,” however, is generally applied to every kind of field-ice, without reference to its size. The ice which lies along coasts, or which adheres to a group of islands within a sound, is called “land-ice.” Sledge expeditions depend on its existence and character. Along the coast-edge land-ice is broken by the waves and tide, and the forms of its upheaval and deposition on the shore constitute the so-called “ice-foot.” Broken ice, or “brash,” is an accumulation of the smaller fragments of ice which are found only on the extreme edge of the ice-belt. “Bay-ice” is ice of recent formation, and its vertical depth is inconsiderable.

5. Land-ice is less exposed to powerful disturbances, and its surface, therefore, is comparatively level, and is only here and there traversed by small hillocks called “hummocks” or “torrosy.” These are the results of former pressures, and they are gradually reduced to the common level by evaporation, by thawing, and by the snow drifting over them.

6. But ice-floes exposed to constant motion from winds and currents, and to reciprocal pressure, have a more or less undulating character. On these are found piles of ice heaped one upon another, rising to a height of twenty or even fifty feet, alternating with depressions, which collect the thawed water in clear ice-lakes during the few weeks of summer in which the temperature rises above the freezing point. The specific gravity of this water, where it does not communicate with the sea by cracks, is in all cases the same with the specific gravity of pure sweet water; and as the salt is gradually eliminated from the ice, the water produced is perfectly drinkable. In the East Greenland Sea ice-floes frequently measure more than twelve nautical miles across—these are ice-fields properly so called.[2] In the Spitzbergen and Novaya Zemlya Seas, they are much smaller, as Parry also found.

7. The thickness which ice acquires in the course of a winter, when its formation is not disturbed, is about eight feet. In the Gulf of Boothia, Sir John Ross found the greatest thickness about the end of May; it was then ten feet on the sea and eleven feet on the lakes. In his winter harbour in Melville Island, Parry met with ice seven or seven-and-a-half feet thick; and Wrangel gives the thickness of a floe on the Siberian coast, which had been formed in the course of a winter, at nine-and-a-half feet. According to the observations of Hayes the ice measured nine feet two inches in thickness in Port Foulke. He estimates it, however, by implication, far higher in Smith’s Sound: “I have never seen,” he says, “an ice-table formed by direct freezing which exceeded the depth of eighteen feet.”

8. The rate at which ice is formed decreases as the thickness of the floe increases, and it ceases to be formed as soon as the floe becomes a non-conductor of the temperature of the air by the increase of its mass, or when the driving of the ice-tables one over the other, or the enormous and constantly accumulating covering of snow, places limits to the penetration of the cold.

9. While therefore the thickness which ice in free formation attains is comparatively small, fields of ice from thirty to forty feet high are met with in the Arctic Seas; but these are the result of the forcing of ice-tables one over the other by pressure, and are designated by the name of “old ice,” which differs from young ice by its greater density, and has a still greater affinity with the ice of the glacier when it exhibits coloured veins.

10. When the cold is excessive a sheet of ice several inches thick is formed on open water in a few hours; this, however, is not pure ice, but contains a considerable amount of sea-salt not yet eliminated; complete elimination of the saline matter takes place only after continuous additions of ice to its under surface. A newly-formed sheet of ice is flexible like leather, and as it becomes harder by the continued cold, its saline contents come to the surface in a white frosty efflorescence.

11. Hayes mentions that he met with fields of ice from twenty to a hundred feet thick in Smith’s Sound. But if it is difficult in many cases to distinguish glacier-ice, when found in small fragments, from detached portions of field-ice, it is often still more difficult to distinguish between old and new ice, and the attempt to do so is merely arbitrary, because their masses depend not on their age alone, but on other processes to which they are exposed. A floe of normal thickness is never more than two or three years old; and if it is to exist and preserve its size for a longer period, it must somewhere attach itself to land-ice, so as to escape destruction from mechanical causes, and dissolution from drifting southwards. Many floes run their course from freezing to melting within a year.

12. The perpetual unrest in the Arctic Sea, which continues undiminished even in the severest winter, and the incessant change in the “leads” and “ice-holes,” are the main causes of the increase of the ice, both in its area and in its vertical depth. Were this constant movement to cease, the result would be the formation of a sheet of ice of the uniform thickness of about eight feet over the whole Polar region.

13. A layer of snow, which, like the ice itself, is at a minimum in autumn, covers the whole surface of all the ice-fields. This snow, which in winter is sometimes as hard as a rock, sometimes as fine as dust, takes, towards the end of summer, more and more the character of the glacier snow of our lofty Alpine ranges. Its grains, in a humid state, exceed the size of beans, and when in motion they make a rustling noise like sand. This granular snow is the residuum of the incomplete evaporation of what fell in the winter, and of the surface of the ice which has become “rotten” and porous. Its crystals are frequently from a third to a sixth of an inch in length, and firm ice is found even in autumn only at the depth of one or two feet. In the North of Spitzbergen, Parry observed that the surface of the ice was frequently cut up into ice-needles of more than a foot long by the drops of rain, which in summer fall upon it, and in some places he found it overspread with red snow. We ourselves never saw the phenomenon observed by Parry, and the ice-crystals we met with seldom exceeded the length given above.

14. Field-ice is of a delicate azure-blue colour, and of great density, and there is, in these respects, no difference between that of the Arctic and Antarctic regions. Cook, indeed, calls the South Polar ice colourless, though Sir James Clark Ross speaks expressly of the blueness of its ice-masses. Sea-ice surpasses the ice of the Alps both in the beauty of its colour and in its density. The glorious blue of the fissures is due to the incidence of light, the blue rays of which only are reflected, while the other rays are absorbed. A spectrum observation made in 1869 on a Greenland ice-field gave brownish red, yellow, green and blue. The yellowish spots observed in ice are due to the presence of innumerable microscopic animalculæ.

15. Sea-ice, which, when the cold is intense, is hard and brittle, loses this quality with the increase of temperature till it acquires an incredible toughness, far exceeding that of glaciers; and floes several feet thick bend under mutual pressure before they split. Hence the fruitlessness, especially in summer, of all attempts to loosen the connexion of its parts by blasting with gunpowder.

16. The specific gravity of sea-ice is 0.91, and accordingly about nine parts of a cubical block of ice are under water, while one part only rises above the surface. If, however, the ice of a floe be irregularly formed and full of bubbles, the specific gravity will be correspondingly reduced, and the volume submerged may diminish to two-thirds of the whole mass.

17. The irregularity of the forms of ice is so great, that no deduction can safely be drawn from them; cases may occur where a recently-formed ice-floe, which has been attached to old ice, is forced by its neighbour to sink under the normal level; hence the submergence of floes beneath the level of the sea is often overstated.

18. The temperature of the Arctic Sea at the surface is generally below the freezing point, and then increases slightly with the depth. Sir James Ross observed that the temperature in all oceans does not alter at great depths, and placed this constant temperature at 39° F. In summer the temperature of the atmosphere rises little above freezing point, and, according to Sir James Ross, it is still less at the South Pole, because he saw no thaw-water streaming down from the icebergs there as he did in the North. It was first observed in Forster’s days, that is about a century ago, that the salt was gradually eliminated from frozen sea-water. Of this fact Cook knew nothing; and even Sir James Ross endorses Davis’s remark that “the deep sea freezes not.” But the fact that ice is formed on the open sea, and far from the vicinity of land, was first asserted by Scoresby, and has been confirmed by all subsequent observers, though it was long disputed.

19. The crackling sound so commonly heard along the outer edge of the ice exposed to the action of the waves, is a consequence of the penetration of its pores by the sea-water, which is then immediately frozen, and disruption follows at once. But disruption on a far grander scale is due to a cause the very opposite of this, the sudden contraction and splitting of the ice, even in the great ice-fields, which is produced usually in winter by the sudden fall of the temperature.

20. When light falls on a field of pack-ice, it is reflected in the stratum of air above it, and this span of light, called the “ice-blink,” just above the horizon, warns the navigator of the impossibility of penetrating further. This phenomenon is often observed also over drift-ice, although not so intense nor so yellow in colour as over pack-ice.

21. Water spaces, on the other hand, show their presence by dark spots on the horizon, produced by the formation of clouds from ascending mists. These are the so-called “water-sky,” and faithfully indicate the “leads” beneath them. Above the larger “ice-holes,” they assume the dark colours of a thunder-sky, though they are never so strongly defined.

22. The annual evaporation from the surface of the ice, which even in winter is never entirely interrupted during the severest frost, and the destruction of ice by the action of rain and waves, are balanced, to speak generally, by its re-formation by frost. The maximum accumulation of ice takes place in spring, its minimum in the beginning of autumn. We observed in the autumn of 1873 not only the evaporation of the snow of the preceding winter, but also a vertical decrease of ice of about four feet. Evaporation is, therefore, the most potent regulator of the balance between waste and growth in the accumulation of ice; and next in importance is the drifting of its masses towards the south through all those openings by which the Polar waters mingle with the waters of lower latitudes.

23. However great the agitation of the sea may be in the open ocean, and though it may dash its waves with wild fury on the edge of the ice, within the icy girdle it is undisturbed, in consequence of the enormous weight of the superincumbent masses. It is only in the large “ice-holes,” and when the winds are very high, that the action of waves is discernible. An isolated accumulation of floes in a circular form, suffices to produce a calm interior sea, and its outer edge only encounters the beat of the ocean.

24. The ceaseless attack to which the ice is exposed on its outer edge is the cause of its excavation and undermining. Hence its centre of gravity is constantly displaced; and the overturning of its masses and its strange transformations are the consequences of this instability. The smaller the masses of the ice, the more fantastic are the shapes they assume.

25. Change of colour in the sea as we enter the ice-region is frequently, though not invariably, observed. Almost immediately on entering the ice, its normal dull green colour gives place to a deep ultramarine blue, especially in the East Greenland seas, and this colour is maintained under all changes of the weather, and is only modified by local currents. Two hundred and fifty years ago it appeared to Hudson, on the coast of Spitzbergen, that the sea, whenever it was free from ice, was green, and that its being covered with ice and its blueness of colour were intimately connected. Sir James Ross states that in both Polar oceans the colour of the sea changes in the neighbourhood of ice, and that the dull brownish colour sometimes seen near pack-ice in the Antarctic Ocean is owing to an infinite number of animalculæ. The rapid fall of the temperature of the water to the zero point is another indication that ice is near.

26. Of all the ice-formations in the Arctic Seas, icebergs are the most enormous. “It is well known that ice is not by any means so heavy as water, but readily floats upon its surface. Consequently whenever a glacier enters the sea, the dense salt water tends to buoy it up. But the great tenacity of the frozen mass enables it to resist the pressure for a time. By and by, however, as the glacier reaches deeper water, its cohesion is overcome, and large fragments are forced from its terminal front and floated up from the bed of the sea to sail away as icebergs.”[3] This process is sometimes called “the calving” of the glaciers; and the direction of the cleavage is a pre-indication of the forms of the masses when detached. The characteristic features of icebergs are their simple outline, differing widely from the fantastic shapes which the fragments of sea-ice tend to assume; their great height as compared with their breadth—their greenish-blue colour—their distinct stratification—their slight transparency—and the roughly-granulated character of their ice. Icebergs with long, sharp-pointed peaks, like those exhibited in numerous illustrations, have no real existence. It is only fragments of field-ice, raised up by pressure, exposed to the action of waves and the process of evaporation which are transformed into fantastic shapes. Icebergs are generally of a pyramidal or tabular shape, and in time they are usually rounded off into irregular cones. They vary in height from 20 to 300 feet. Sir John Ross (1818) mentions an iceberg of 51 feet; Baffin (1615) of 240 feet; Parry (1819) of 258 feet; Kane (1853) of 300 feet; and Hayes (1861) one 315 feet high, the depth of which below the water-line he estimated at half a mile. On the coast of East Greenland, Scoresby once counted 500 icebergs, some of which reached the height of 200 feet; and during the second German North-Pole expedition, we saw many at the mouth of the Kaiser Franz-Josef fiord which measured 220 feet in height. In Austria Sound, and on the east coast of Kron-Prinz Rudolph’s land, their altitude varied from 80 to 200 feet. From the covering of mist which envelops them, icebergs generally appear much higher than they really are, and their depth below the surface is not so considerable as is generally supposed. In an iceberg 200 feet above the water, a total height of 600 to 800 feet may, as a mean, be inferred. It is only glaciers of a very great size which shed icebergs; smaller glaciers, like those of Novaya Zemlya, only strew the sea with a multitude of fragments which resemble broken sea-ice. Hence the appearance of icebergs is connected with the proximity to glacier-covered lands, and with the currents which prevail along their coasts. Baffin’s Bay, Smith’s Sound, East Greenland, the South-East of Greenland, Austria Sound, are the principal places where they collect together and lie like fleets before the entrances of bays and gulfs. Under-currents of the sea take them not unfrequently in directions contrary to the drift of the field-ice, which depends only on upper-currents; and abnormal winds may sometimes carry them out to seas where they have been seldom or never seen.[4] This appears to be the case even with those met with on the north-west coast of Novaya Zemlya. On the other hand, they have never been seen on the coasts of Siberia, which have no glaciers.

27. The constant displacement of the centre of gravity of an iceberg, resulting from the unsymmetrical decrease of its form, causes its periodical oversetting; and the different temperature of the internal and external ice is the principal cause of its rending asunder with a noise like thunder; a process which occurs generally in the height of summer.

CHAPTER II.
NAVIGATION IN THE FROZEN OCEAN.

1. Although it be impossible to give any one, who has not with his own eyes seen the Arctic Sea, a perfectly clear conception of its character, the phenomena described in the preceding chapter are sufficient to indicate the difficulties and dangers to which its navigation is necessarily exposed. And to these difficulties and dangers, formidable enough in themselves, are often added the evil influences of preconceived theories and exaggerated expectations, usually followed by bitter disillusions. The calm judgment, which, to all the bold plans of navigation within the Polar basin, opposes distrust in their feasibility, while it points to the hundred expeditions which have at last returned home after penetrating but a little way into the frozen sea, is an attainment of slow growth. Years, too, must be devoted to the theoretical study of the Polar question, to the examination of all that predecessors have experienced and recorded. But this study is very important to Polar navigators; for the discoveries which they too readily regard as exclusively their own prove sometimes to have been made centuries before them.

2. A most essential element of success is the choice of a favourable ice year; and the commander of an expedition must possess sufficient self-control to return, as soon as he becomes convinced of the existence of conditions unfavourable for navigation. It is better to repeat the same attempt on a second or even a third summer, than with conscious impotence to fight against the supremacy of the ice.

3. Polar navigators have learnt in the school of experience to distinguish between navigation in the frozen seas remote from the land, and navigation in the so called coast-waters. The former is far more dangerous, entirely dependent on accident, exposed to grave catastrophes, and without any definite goal. It affords no certainty of finding a winter harbour for the long period when cold and darkness render navigation impossible. On the other hand, a strip of open water, which retreats before the growth of the land-ice only in winter, forms itself along coasts, and especially under the lee of those exposed to marine currents running parallel to them; and this coast-water does not arise from the thawing of the ice through the greater heat of the land, but from the land being an immovable barrier against wind, and therefore against ice-currents. The inconstancy of the wind, however, may baffle all the calculations of navigation; for coast-water, open as far as the eye can reach, may be filled with ice in a short time by a change of the wind. Land-ice often remains on the coasts even during summer, and in this case there is nothing to be done but to find the open navigable waters between the extreme edge of the fast-ice and the drift-ice. Should the drift become pack-ice, the moment must be awaited when winds setting in from the land carry off the masses of ice blocking the navigation, and open a passage free from ice, or at least only partially covered with drift-ice. It is evident that navigation in coast-waters must be slow and gradual, though it has always been attended with the greatest advantages. Barentz was the first who tested its value; but it was Parry, the most distinguished of all Polar navigators, who discovered its full importance, and from his day it has been accepted as an incontrovertible canon of ice-navigation. On this point he himself says: “Our experience, I think, has clearly shown, that the navigation of the Polar Seas can never be performed with any degree of certainty without a continuity of land. It was only by watching the openings between the ice and the shore that our late progress to the westward was effected; and had the land continued in the desired direction, there can be no question that we should have continued to advance, however slowly, towards the completion of our enterprise.”[5]

4. The successes of the English in the North American Archipelago were the result of this mode of navigation. Its principle is to search for and sail along the network of narrow channels when the main passage is blocked by pack-ice, and to turn to account the narrowest opening between the ice and the land. In the Siberian coast expeditions also this method of constantly following the coast-waters has been successfully observed. Where coast-water does not exist, or only to a limited extent, as on the East Coast of Greenland, this method is of course impracticable. The fate of the second German North Pole expedition is an illustration of this; it was ordered to penetrate in this direction, and its failure was inevitable. On the other hand, all the unsuccessful attempts of expeditions to penetrate northward from Spitzbergen—expeditions whose course and termination resemble each other as one egg resembles another—may be reckoned among those in seas remote from land. To the same category belong the expeditions for the discovery of a north-east passage, and simply because of the great extent of frozen sea between Novaya Zemlya and Cape Tcheljuskin.

5. In the frozen sea remote from the land, from 200 to 300, or at the most 400, nautical miles must, according to all past experience, be regarded as the greatest distance which a vessel is able to compass, under the most favourable conditions, during the few weeks of summer in which navigation is possible. The fact that Sir James Ross at the South Pole, and Norwegian fishermen in the Sea of Kara, accomplished still greater distances, only proves that they were little or not at all impeded by ice. Ross observed that the ice-floes of the Southern Arctic Seas are smaller than those of the Northern: “The cause of this is explained by the circumstance of the ice of the southern regions being so much more exposed to violent agitations of the ocean, whereas the northern sea is one of comparative tranquillity.”[6] The rarer occurrence of land at the South Pole permits freer scope to the currents of the sea, diminishes the opportunity for the growth of ice on the coasts, tends to widen the passages in the network of water-ways, and thus facilitates navigation. Even the swell of the sea within the ice is observed in the South Polar Ocean, while it is never seen in the North. Besides the greater hindrances peculiar to the whole North Polar Sea, there is the specially unfavourable circumstance, in the case of the North-East passage, that the shallowness of the Siberian Sea prevents a close navigation of its coasts.

6. The choice of the most appropriate season is another important consideration in ice-navigation; for this period does not fall at the same time in all seas, and the disregard of season was a common cause of the failures of the expeditions of earlier centuries. Since the frozen sea remains unbroken and almost unaffected by the action of the sun even in June, and at that time extends far to the south, it is evident that all attempts to force a passage in that month are labour thrown away. The ice-barrier retreating northward, or the transformation of pack into drift-ice, leaves free navigable water four or five weeks later. The month of August is the best time for ice-navigation in Baffin’s Bay; the end of July or beginning of August on the East Greenland coasts; the second half of August and the beginning of September in the Spitzbergen waters; and in the region of the Parry Islands the favourable opportunity ends about the beginning of September. In general, it seems that the time most propitious for all the coast-water routes, begins some weeks earlier than the corresponding period in the frozen seas remote from land. But since, even in the first weeks of September, the most promising conditions are often succeeded by a sudden reaction due to storms, to cold setting in rapidly, or to excessive falls of snow, navigation in the land-remote frozen seas, in itself so extremely hazardous, becomes specially critical, just when the ice-sheet at its minimum appears to promise the greatest results.

7. The help of steam power is an indispensable requisite, as by it a vessel is able to defy the capricious changes of the wind. The movements of a ship amid the ice are made in interminable curves, and the power to describe an arc with the least radius enables a vessel to follow up narrow and often blocked water-ways. As it is incessantly exposed to severe shocks from the ice, a paddle-wheel steamer is useless; and even in screw-steamers care must be taken to protect the propeller by a special construction.

8. The rate of speed of a vessel in the ice must necessarily be moderate. From three to six miles an hour are sufficient: and a rate of eight or ten miles would soon render her not seaworthy. But even with this reduced rate, her whole frame-work is shaken and loosened at last by the incessant shocks she sustains; and this condition of the ship becomes apparent when concussion with the ice is followed not by a noise as of thunder, but by a low, dull, groaning sound. The larger a vessel, the less her capacity to withstand these shocks, and the sooner will these signs of her diminished strength betray themselves.

9. An Arctic ship should be built with sharp rather than with full lines, so that when pressed by the ice, she may more easily escape being nipped and crushed. A ship built with what is called—in England—full lines, a full, round ship, is not easily raised but is liable to be crushed by ice-pressure. The Hansa was built in this manner, and was crushed by the first squeeze from the ice; the Germania and the Tegetthoff were both of them sharp-built ships, and stood the test of the ice excellently well. To protect it from the effects of grinding on ragged “ice-tongues,” the hull is generally iron-plated for some feet under water, and the bows are strengthened as much as possible, because this part of the ship is exposed to the greatest shocks.

10. The tactics of a ship in the ice are guided entirely by the character of the hindrances to be overcome. If the ice-fields be large and heavy, they are then generally separated by broader water-ways and “leads,” and a ship may often amid such ice follow her course for hours with few deviations subject always to the danger of being “beset” and crushed. When the passage is blocked by a barrier of ice, the situation becomes grave and serious; for such fields are not to be displaced by any force which the ship may exert, and nothing is left to the navigator but to await their parting asunder in a position as sheltered as possible. When the ice is loose and the floes comparatively small, the impeding barriers may be charged by the ship. She may then force asunder some of these floes or separate them by the continuous pressure of steam-power. In cases of this kind, large vessels have the advantage, and can bring to bear a greater amount of pressure, whereas smaller ones stick fast and remain immovable. These accumulations of ice, while they make a “besetment” more likely, diminish the danger of pressure.

11. Hence it is clear that small are to be preferred to large vessels for ice-navigation, except under circumstances of rare occurrence; first, because they are more readily handled, and next, because of their greater power of resistance and of their being more easily raised under pressure from the ice. Their one disadvantage of lesser momentum is of comparatively slight consequence. The experience of all the North Pole expeditions of this century shows, that ships of 150, or at the most of 300 tons, are best suited for all purposes.

12. Iron ships have often been employed, but with no success; they are far less able to bear pressure than wooden ships, as was proved, among other things, by the fate of the River Tay in 1868, in Baffin’s Bay, and of the Sophia, a Swedish ship of discovery in the north of Spitzbergen.

13. It admits of no question, that two vessels should be employed in preference to one, and this should be accepted as a first principle whenever the means at our disposal admit of it. Both ships should also be provided with steam-power, for otherwise their separation is almost inevitable,—a danger, however, for which, under all circumstances, they must be prepared.

14. All that is commonly understood about piercing the ice by sawing and boring through it is a delusion, and arises from the misunderstanding of technical expressions. Where there is navigable water, there any one can sail—where there is none, no one. In 1869 and 1870, after coming on a cul-de-sac of ice in Greenland to the east of Shannon Island, we could not penetrate a yard further; in 1871, in loose, but solid ice, we drew away only by warping on the smaller floes, without being able to make the slightest progress, and in 1872 we were twice “beset,” in heavy ice, in spite of our steam power. The penetration of close pack-ice is an impossibility: in this case patient endurance is alone of any avail, and hence Sir John Ross so emphatically recommends the Polar navigator “never to lose sight of the two words caution and patience.”[7] If a vessel, therefore, is arrested by impenetrable masses barring its way, the breaking up of the ice must be patiently awaited, and this, generally, is effected by calms, although the ebb and flow of the tide appear to have an influence on the solidity of the ice. It is then usual with sailing ships to seek the larger “ice-holes,” or keep in the freest water-ways, in order to guard against the danger of being completely inclosed. These precautions, however, are not so requisite for steam-vessels, as their power to escape quickly and in any direction secures them against this danger. A steam-vessel may even venture to fasten on to an ice-floe by means of an ice-anchor, and of course under its lee, the fires being banked up, so that by getting up steam she may shift her place as soon as the ice moves nearer. As a principle, and so far as it is possible without the exhaustion of her powers, a ship in the ice should endeavour to be in constant motion, even though this entail many changes of her course and the temporary return to a position which had been abandoned. The making fast to a floe, however, should never be attempted, except when every hope of navigating in the surrounding waters has been proved fruitless. The fastening a vessel to an iceberg diminishes, indeed, its drifting, but is, if possible, to be avoided, because of the danger of the iceberg overturning or rending asunder, things which occur far more frequently than we should be led to expect from their great appearance of stability. When a ship, notwithstanding every possible caution, is “beset,” it is then advisable to “ship” the rudder in order to protect it from injury, to which it is peculiarly liable from its unusual weight and size. A ship is exposed to considerable danger when she finds herself among icebergs in a calm; but since these are over-spread by a dazzling sheen, even in the thickest mist, the peril of the position is to be avoided at the last moment by warping.

15. As the happy choice of a sea-way is one of the essential conditions of success in ice-navigation, the ability to determine the ship’s position and to ascertain whether a surface covered with ice to the horizon, admits of being penetrated, is most desirable. Hence the employment of a balloon would be of the last importance in Arctic navigation. The advantage of being able to ascend from the ship in a balloon secured by a rope, to the height of a few hundred feet, is self-evident; and, undoubtedly, the first vessel which avails herself of this great resource will derive extraordinary benefit from it.

16. From the deck of a ship even drift-ice appears to be of such solidity at a little distance as to defy navigation, while from the mast-head more water than ice may be descried. In order then to extend the horizon, a look-out, called “the crow’s nest,” is fixed on the mast-head, in which an officer is always on the watch, and from which all the operations of the vessel are directed. In a ship of the size and height of the Tegetthoff the horizon visible from “the crow’s nest” extends to about eleven miles,[8] but at the distance of even five miles the possibility of penetrating cannot be determined with sufficient exactness. It is the business of the officer in “the crow’s nest” to observe the passages through the ice and distant objects generally, as he is in the best position to fulfil this most important duty. It is the special business of the watch on the forecastle to mark what lies in the immediate neighbourhood of the vessel, and his constant care is demanded to avoid isolated ice-floes and prevent collision with them. The seaman at the helm steers the ship by the signs and calls which come to him from “the crow’s nest,” and modifies them according to those of the watch on the forecastle. The rest of the crew remove the smaller fragments of ice from the vessel’s course, special care being taken to prevent their damaging the screw.

17. While sea-currents move the ice in close and continuous lines, winds produce great disturbances in their movement, and open long “leads” in the direction of their course, which often alternate with strips of the thickest pack-ice. This movement of the ice varies with each accumulation of floes, as its rate of motion depends on the height of the ice-field, which then acts as a sail. It is ascertained by experience that calms, on the other hand, have the remarkable property of breaking up the ice. The knowledge and application of these circumstances are essential to the Arctic navigator. If the course of a ship lies across or against a current, it is constantly deflected. The deflection on the coast of East Greenland, for example, amounted to five, even ten miles, within twenty-four hours; hence the importance of choosing routes with and not against the course of currents.

18. Lastly, it is of the greatest moment to choose betimes an appropriate winter harbour, and it is therefore necessary to keep near the coast towards the close of the season for navigation. To find one suitable for shelter during the winter in an unknown Arctic region is a matter of great difficulty, for it very often happens, that the ice drifts out from these “docks”[9] in the storms which constantly occur, or perhaps the “dock” is so sheltered, that the ice, if it breaks up at all, breaks up only in the following summer. Shallow bays which freeze almost to the bottom, lying under the lee of a current or within a fiord, are the most appropriate spots in which to winter.

CHAPTER III.
THE PENETRATION OF THE REGIONS WITHIN THE POLAR CIRCLE; THE PERIOD OF THE NORTH-WEST AND NORTH-EAST PASSAGES.

1. Around the lonely apex of the Pole stand cairns of stone which serve to mark the points to which the restless spirit of human enterprise and discovery has penetrated. In its zenith wheels the sea-gull in its flight, and the harpoon-persecuted seal finds on its ice-floes an unapproachable asylum; but the Pole itself remains the goal which no human effort has yet reached.

2. As all knowledge is perfected slowly and gradually, so man’s knowledge of the earth and its configuration forms no exception to this general rule. Of the few attempts of early antiquity to enlarge the domain of geographical knowledge, tradition tells us only of the Argonautic expedition of the Greeks, of the voyage of the Phœnicians to Ophir, and their bolder circumnavigation of Africa. With the conception of the spherical form of the earth the still vague notion of climatal zones makes its appearance, and to this, four centuries before Christ, Pytheas of Marseilles gave the first scientific elucidation and the first approximation to modern theories by his doctrine of the Polar Circle. Almost contemporaneously Alexander’s expedition to the wonder-land of India created a paradise for commerce and navigation, to secure which a shortened route, the route through the ice—the most perverse notion that ever entered into the mind of man to conceive—was one thousand eight hundred years afterwards eagerly and passionately sought.

3. Rome had extended her knowledge to Scandinavia, and Seneca’s prophetical mind foresaw the discovery of new worlds. But the deluge of religious strifes, the migrations of nations in the earlier part of the Middle Ages, the holy zeal for destruction in the apostles to the heathen, proved formidable barriers to the extension of geographical knowledge, which were broken through only by the piratical hordes of Normans so renowned in story. While the Romans boasted that Britain had never been circumnavigated, the Normans, throwing the deeds of the Phœnicians into the shade, discovered Greenland, and became the first Polar Navigators.

4. Travels by land were the principal means by which the geographical knowledge of the world was enriched; but during the Middle Ages the information which travellers communicated, uncertain and superficial even for Europe, served only to supply food for the fancies of map-makers, as far as the distant parts of the world were concerned.

5. But the grand moment at length arrived in the history of mankind when the civilization of the West, looking beyond the narrow horizon of the Old World, and awaking from the geographical dreams of centuries, burst the fetters of tradition, and within three hundred years perfected the knowledge of our planet up to the Pole.

6. When by his famous line of partition, Pope Alexander VI. granted to Spain and Portugal the new countries discovered in the East and West, the brigantines of these nations spread themselves over all seas in search of new lands and fresh glory. To the other maritime nations, to the English and the Dutch, nothing remained, if they meant to acquire gold-yielding lands, but to drive the Spaniards and Portuguese from their conquests, or to seek new Eldorados—yea, by the discovery of sea routes on the north of Asia and America, to aspire to India itself. This was the conception first entertained by both the English and the Dutch, and Geography at any rate profited by their delusions. These nations were not to blame if those routes, known afterwards as the North-West and North-East passages, degenerated into chimeras, if passages had to be sought in higher and still higher latitudes,—ultimately in the ice itself, although the Dutch geographer, Plancius, struck out the consoling theory of the open Polar Sea.

7. But who in those days could presuppose that the continents of Asia and America, just where those passages were attempted, symmetrically developed the most enormous longitudinal dimensions? Even the actual discovery of the vast extent of Siberia exerted but little influence on the question of the North-East passage, for the achievements of individuals were not then so quickly disseminated as at present. A succession of men in vessels poorly equipped now struggled against the supremacy of the ice, avoiding at first the dreaded wintering, while they attempted sometimes the North-East, sometimes the North-West, sometimes the passage over the Pole itself. In these attempts many lost their lives; many returned, despairing of but still hoping for the solution of the problems—but no one reached the goal.

8. The amazing simplicity of the first adventurers is seen in Frobisher’s project to erect forts, duly provided with cannons and men, on the commanding points of the passage, in the letters of recommendation given by kings of England to the leaders of the expedition for the small Saracenic states which were supposed to exist beyond the river Obi; but these old navigators carried no letter of recommendation to the great potentate—the ice. Gold, too, they hoped to find in the North, because the book of Job speaks of gold coming from thence, and the North-East passage was considered as free from danger, because Pliny mentions some Indians who had been driven towards Norway!

9. When another century and a half had elapsed, a series of unsuccessful attempts to force the North-East passage put a decisive check to material interests in Polar expeditions. The North-East passage belonged henceforward to the history of the past. The English and Dutch withdrew from the Novaya Zemlya seas; and after Wood’s retreat no scientific expedition entered those seas for two hundred years, until the days of the Austrian Expeditions.

10. Among the maritime nations of Europe, it was England, and especially her merchants, who had hitherto largely invested in the costs and risks of these Argonautic expeditions “for the glory of God and the good of the country.” The Dutch soon contented themselves, after Barentz’s death, with the capture of whales in the Arctic seas; France remained an unconcerned spectator, while the sylphs of Versailles consumed the whalebone of whole fleets of whalers; and Spain and Portugal early withdrew from seas in which, instead of ingots of gold, ice-floes only were to be found. But even for England the days of the prophets had now passed away—the days of a Cabot, a Mercator,[10] a Wolstenholme, and a Walsingham. Men of weight raised their voices against the chimeras of Arctic commercial routes, and Chillingworth contemptuously compared an expedition for the discovery of the North-East passage to the study of the Fathers.

11. It may be asked why nations struggled with dauntless ambition for the lost cause of the barren North-West and North-East passages, while for a century they stretched forth timid hands after the rich treasures of lands lying in the more favoured zones? The mighty stimulus of the love of the marvellous explains this series of efforts taken up by generation after generation. Frobisher, Davis, Baffin, and the Novaya Zemlya adventurers, told on their return of gold-lands far within the domains of the icy Hydra. Their tales of single combats with spear or matchlock against polar bears, of the dreadful snow-storms and fearful cold of the Arctic winter, were heard with grim delight by listeners on whom no hardships were imposed. Or they spoke of a darkness that continued for months, of the flaming arches of the northern lights, of the sun remaining visible for many weeks in the heavens, of a race of dwarfs, of unheard-of animals, of fish as big as ships of war, of monsters with long teeth which precisely resembled the Sphinxes of the plains of the Pyramids, of white and blue foxes, of floating mountains of dazzling crystal, of ships seen upside down in the air—when had ever the mind of man more food to nourish the love of the marvellous or greater incentives to stimulate the love of distinction? But besides these appeals to the imagination, every generation desires new confirmations of its convictions; and hence geographical questions, after being shelved for a time, come again to the front as by an inward necessity.

12. If the earlier Polar expeditions pursued exclusively material ends, a decided change appears in those of the present century—the Polar world itself became an object of scientific investigation. With Sir John Ross (1818) began a series of expeditions, at first subservient to the idea of a North-West passage, but which ultimately derived all their importance from their attempt—ineffectual as it proved—to rescue the lives of 139 men, who had fallen far from the fields and scenes where earthly fame is commonly achieved. It was these expeditions, still fresh in the memory of this generation, which, summoning to their aid the modern power of steam against the ice, succeeded in drawing on our Arctic maps a circle whose mean distance was 200 (German) miles from the Pole. Parry on the frozen sea of Spitzbergen had approached it within 100 miles (German); Kane, Hayes and Hall on the coast of the Kennedy Channel, the former to within 116, and the two latter to within 108 miles, and the Austro-Hungarian expedition to within 109 miles.

13. M’Clintock, who returned with the relics of the Franklin expedition, succeeded in perfecting a mode of discovery independent of the ship—that by means of sledging—admirably adapted for future Arctic expeditions. But the North-West passage for which six generations had toiled, though discovered, was shown to be utterly worthless for all material purposes—a dreary web of coast lines.

CHAPTER IV.
THE INNER POLAR SEA.

1. The Arctic Sea, in some of its features, forcibly impresses us with its resemblance to the glaciers of the Alps. In both cases, the ice presses from a region, colder and less favoured by climate, towards one warmer and more favoured. In the Alpine glaciers, the movement is from above downwards; in the Frozen Ocean, the movement is from a higher to a lower geographical latitude. In both cases, the tongues and spurs of the masses of ice formed by the configuration of the land or by currents of the sea, terminate, whenever they reach an isothermal curve of altitude or latitude, the mean temperature of which suffices to dissolve them or prevent their formation. Moraines also have their equivalent in the Arctic Sea; for it is an established fact that icebergs and ice-fields laden with the débris and rubbish of Arctic lands, deposit these burdens round the outer edge of the Frozen Ocean, and to this process, partially at least, the origin of the Newfoundland Banks is ascribed. If this comparison between the phenomena of high latitudes and great altitudes be just, then we should have as much reason to believe in the existence of the so-called open Polar Sea, as we should have to maintain, that in our glacier ranges ice ceases to be formed above a certain altitude.

2. The belief of past times[11] in such a sea shows how unsatisfactory is the simple to man’s mind, and how old is his tendency to clothe the remote and the uncommon with a garment of the marvellous. What was the open Polar Sea but the “Harz Sea” of the North, or the legendary zone of the ever-sunny Eden of the Hyperboreans, far beyond the land of the Anthropophagi over which was spread an atmosphere veiled in snow, and through which no light could penetrate! Who has ever seen this open Polar Sea? Do the accounts of navigators confirm its existence? Nay—their accounts are rather a series of counter-statements: Hudson, Baffin, Phipps, Tschitschagoff, Buchan, Franklin, Parry, Collinson, Scoresby, M’Clintock, Koldewey, Torell, Nordenskjöld, have all expressed their disbelief in its existence. If some have pretended that they have seen it, how strange it is that they never sailed on it! It has recently been attempted to make the great champion of the Polar question, Dr. Petermann, a supporter of this conception; but in the “Mittheilungen” of this highly meritorious geographer, there are many passages which most emphatically protest against it. His views extend only to an inner Polar Sea navigable under certain circumstances, and every one acquainted with those regions may adopt his point of view, though he refuses to admit the existence of the open Polar Sea.

3. In those centuries when the Natural Sciences were little cultivated, when the theories of the Trade Winds, of Equatorial and Polar sea-currents, were still unknown, and when as yet the processes in the Frozen Ocean had not been submitted to scientific investigation, we cannot be surprised at the preconceptions which were formed concerning its phenomena. In those times all beyond Norway was a chaos of ice-filled darkness; the necessity of a scientific investigation of those wastes was not felt; and down to the time of Sir John Ross, Polar navigators on their return home brought with them no kind of scientific knowledge of Nature in the Arctic regions. To reach India was the main if not the only end they had in view. The instructions which Willoughby, the first Polar navigator, received, give us an insight into the delusions of earlier times. These, for example, warned adventurers against men-eaters who swam naked in the sea, and in the rivers. It was the period of fables long since forgotten. Maldonado, de Fuca, Bernarda, Yelmer, Andrejew, Martinière, and the whale-fishers, brought home tales of passages to India discovered, of new continents, of the ascertained connexion of Novaya Zemlya with the northernmost point of Siberia (Yelmerland) or even with Greenland. Two centuries ago the failure of all attempts at a North-East passage was attributed to Russia’s commercial policy, inasmuch as it had been proved to the satisfaction of all, that the heat was greater in the north, that the seas there ceased to freeze, and that the country was covered with a luxuriant green!

4. There was, indeed, a certain logical consequence in the belief of an inner Polar Sea, as long as it was unknown that ice is formed on the open sea as well as on the coasts. There was also one argument, which made the existence of such a sea not altogether improbable. It might be assumed, that the formation of ice renewed every year in the Arctic regions, would necessarily produce eternal bulwarks of congelation and destroy all organic life, unless sea-currents modified these extremes of climate. The ice which is formed round the Pole—it was argued—is not of an unlimited but of a definite quantity. Since, then, this quantity of ice must be brought with tolerable uniformity from the innermost Polar region to lower latitudes by the action of sea-currents, there are at least one or two months of the summer when the ice is at a minimum, when no new formation takes place, and when a sea relatively ice-free may appear in the place of the sea which had been covered with ice. This sea would be the more open and navigable, just in proportion as less land might be found at the Pole. But in this assumption it is implied, that the ice moves with perfect regularity and in radial lines from a given point without any disturbance from winds, or counter-currents, or land, consequently with a quiet simplicity of hydrography, for which Nature, neither there nor elsewhere, shows any predilection. Dove makes the mean annual temperature of the North Pole, 2·5° F.; but it is probably still less. What, then, is the probability of an open Polar Sea, if this annual mean only be considered? All the accounts too of animal life increasing in exuberance as we advance northwards—from which a more favourable climate within the innermost Polar region and an open Polar Sea have been inferred—must be received with caution, for the appearance of numerous flocks of birds proves only that they remain where open water prevails for a time and that they change their abode with its change of place.

5. In more recent times great influence has been attributed to the Gulf Stream as a power influencing all the seas, known and unknown, of the whole Arctic region. Dr. Petermann, however, in a lately published work, endeavours to show that its effects are discernible only on the northern seas of Spitzbergen and Novaya Zemlya. Its action on the coasts of Spitzbergen has been indisputably established by the Swedes, who discovered there certain tropical plants (Entada gigalobium); but the penetration of the warmer waters of this current to the northern coasts of Novaya Zemlya has not been so positively ascertained. In the Austrian Expedition of 1873-4, we discovered no proofs of its existence. We found neither the constant current, nor the water of a higher temperature, which characterizes that renowned stream.

6. For a long time the “ice-holes,” seen by Wrangel and Morton, were regarded as indications of an ice-free Polar Sea. With regard to those seen by Morton in 81° 22′, Richardson very justly remarks: “The open water of the Kennedy Channel is not of greater extent in the month of June than the open spaces which have occasionally been seen in summer on the north of Spitzbergen by whale-fishers.” Wrangel, when he describes the “Polynjii,” which he saw on the east of the New Siberian Islands, accounts for them by the action of a local coast-wind; and yet Wrangel would have been the first to favour the notion of an inner Polar Sea, for he still thought, in opposition to Scoresby, that ice could not be formed on the open sea, because of the absence of land as a support for the ice in its formation.

7. The first practical application of the theory of an open Polar Sea was long ago devised by Plancius; the discovery, namely, of a route in high latitudes to China. But the expeditions to the North Pole, properly so termed, sprang also from this theory, which was held with the greatest pertinacity. The evidence of unsuccessful undertakings was always met and outweighed by the counter-experience of one favourable year in the ice. Thus Barentz, in the exceedingly propitious summer of 1594, advanced without difficulty one degree of latitude beyond the northern extremity of Novaya Zemlya, while his successors frequently encountered insurmountable difficulties at Cape Nassau, and he himself in the following year, 1595, found the state of the ice changed much for the worse. In the years 1871, 1874, Mack, Carlsen, and the two Austro-Hungarian expeditions came upon an open sea in the very places where very few, if any, water-ways were to be seen in 1872 and 1873. In the summers of 1816, 1817, the mighty stream of ice on the coast of East Greenland had decreased to such an extent that Scoresby met with little ice between 74° and 80° N.L., but since then whalers have constantly seen the heaviest ice there, heavier than anywhere else. In 1753 and 1754, the Sea of Kara and the Novaya Zemlya Sea were free from ice. But in subsequent years the whale-fishers knocked in vain at their ice-barred entrances. In 1823 Lütke from a point on the west coast of the Sea of Kara saw that sea without ice; but, in the middle of August, 1833, Pachtussow found the western side of that sea open, while in the previous year he himself could not pass the Karian Gates. Again in 1743 and 1773, the North Spitzbergen Sea held out promises the most inviting, which might possibly have permitted the reaching of a still higher degree of latitude than that which Nordenskjöld and Koldewey attained in 1868. Sir John Ross, in the first year of his second voyage, found all things most favourable for navigation; but in the following year the very reverse; and Sir James C. Ross experienced the same alternation of circumstances in the Southern Polar Sea. In 1850, Penny found the Wellington Channel free from ice, but in 1852, Belcher, although he penetrated far further than Penny, was confronted in the same channel by pack- and drift-ice. Scoresby the younger, to whose profound faculty of observation we owe the most significant hints on the nature of the Polar Sea, although he had navigated the Greenland ice-ocean for twenty years, landed only once on its coast. The Swedish expedition (1861) could approach the north-east of Spitzbergen only in boats; Smith sailed over the sea there (1871) as far as Cape Smith. The walrus-hunter, Matilas, sailed round (1864) the north-east island completely, and Carlsen, an ice navigator, as successful as he was skilful, in 1863 circumnavigated Spitzbergen, and in 1871 Novaya Zemlya, and discovered there the relics of Barentz’s winter quarters. In 1872, King Karl Land was circumnavigated, although both Koldewey and Nordenskjöld (1868) as well as the first Austrian expedition (1871) had in vain attempted to approach it. How greatly also, in the same year, the state of the ice varies in different places, is proved by the fact, that Franklin learnt from the whalers that they never saw the ice so thick and so strong in Davis Straits as at the end of July 1819, while Parry, more to the north by some degrees of latitude, pursued his path of discovery even to Melville Island, and in the following year returned to England without meeting any special obstacles. These examples, to which many more might be added, show how variable are the chances of ice-navigation from one year to another. But however variable the conditions of the ice may be, the impediments, even under the most favourable circumstances, are so very great, that we have never been able to penetrate the innermost Polar regions,—penetrate, that is, to where, according to the views of an earlier time, the open Polar Sea should be found.

8. Those propitious ice-years amount therefore to nothing more than a greater recession of the outer ice-barrier—trifling when compared with the mighty whole—or to an increased navigability of certain coast-waters, or to a local loosening of the inner Polar ice-net. In reality the whole Arctic Sea, with its countless ice-fields and floes, and its web of fine interlacing water-ways, is nothing but a net constantly in motion from local, terrestrial, or cosmical causes. All the changes and phenomena of this mighty network lead us to infer the existence of frozen seas up to the Pole itself; and according to my own experience, gained in three expeditions, I consider that the states of the ice between 82° and 90° N.L. will not essentially differ from those which have been observed south of latitude 82°; I incline rather to the belief that they will be found worse instead of better.

9. If this view be correct, it will remain an insuperable difficulty to reach the Pole with a ship. The penetrating to 82° or 83° exhausts, according to all past experience, the disposable time for navigation, and presupposes moreover the most favourable conditions for the attaining of such high latitudes. A ship which reaches 82° N.L. by the beginning of autumn must risk nothing more, should only navigate really open water, and the expediency of securing a winter harbour should then outweigh every other consideration.

10. He who expects with a ship of the present construction to reach the Pole in a single summer, necessarily believes in an ocean at the Pole. But even if an expedition should penetrate to 84° in Smith’s Sound, or should reach Cape Tcheljuskin on the north-east route, it would not follow that such an ocean exists, but only that the Polar Sea presents at different times and in different places open water-ways, which may enable a ship to advance beyond a point hitherto reached; but it is improbable that the circumstances which favoured this will be repeated the next summer, so as to permit the ships to penetrate still further—or to return. The last American expedition returned without being able to speak decisively as to the possibility of navigating Lincoln Sea, and since this has not yet been verified by fact, we must suspend our judgment on the matter. To the English expedition, which has taken this route to the Pole, is reserved the great work of throwing light on the region of Upper Smith’s Sound, and the whole civilized world will hail with joy any successes which a nation, so long conspicuous for its perseverance in the cause of discovery, may happily achieve.

CHAPTER V.
THE FUTURE OF THE POLAR QUESTION.

1. The eagerness of human nature for gain and material prosperity is so great, that we are wont to estimate the value of all undertakings by the standard of utility; and too often it is forgotten, that each generation is destined to fulfil the task of acquiring and collecting the knowledge which is to benefit only a later generation. If, then, the Polar question be valueless for our material interests, is it therefore valueless for science? and assuming that it is for the present worthless as far as gain and wealth are concerned, must it continue so for all time? Not that we are entitled, even from this narrower point of view, to deny the usefulness of Polar exploration, as Cook seems to have done when he said, “Never from those regions will any advantage accrue to our race;” but rather bear in mind what Sir James Ross tells us: “The profit which accrued to England, in each year after the voyage (1818) of my uncle (Sir John Ross) in North Baffin’s Bay, from those rediscovered parts of the Arctic seas, was more than enough to defray all the expenses of the voyages of discovery undertaken from 1818 to 1838.” Scoresby with his single ship made a million thalers by the capture of whales, and the Americans had for many years a clear profit of eight million dollars from the fisheries of the frozen seas of Behring’s Straits. There were also, it is true, very considerable losses; for, in 1830, nineteen English ships engaged in the whale fishery were “beset” in the ice of Melville Bay, and nearly all destroyed; in 1871, twenty-six American ships were crushed to pieces in Behring’s Straits, and as many as seventy-three Dutch vessels sank in one year in the seventeenth century from the pressure of the ice.

2. We do not, however, mean to assert, that the progress of Polar discovery is always followed by a corresponding increase in the capture of fish in the Arctic seas. On the contrary, the take of oil-yielding animals is steadily decreasing, and even if an open sea should be discovered in 82° N.L., in which whales should be found in as great abundance as ice-floes unhappily are, the whaler with his poor equipment would never be able to follow them thither. The fur countries, once as productive as the mines of Peru, are incapable of further extension; even the treasures of mammoths’ tusks have become rare, and in order to bring thirty tons of lignite from the north-east of Greenland, a ship must expend seventy tons of sound coal in the transit, besides passing the winter there. That the teas of China, the silks of Japan, the spices of the Moluccas will never descend to us from the ice-fields has long been settled. No one at the present day thinks any longer of the commercial value of the North-West and North-East passages. Modes of escape from the perils and caprices of the ice have grown out of the endeavour to discover routes of commerce, which lay beyond the reach of the cannon of the Spaniards at the time when they aspired to the monopoly of the trade of the world. The reward of 25,000 gulden, offered by the Dutch government for the discovery of a North-East passage, and that of £20,000 by the English parliament for the North-West passage, have never been paid, because never claimed, nor are they, in the least degree, likely to be claimed.[12]

3. Yet, quite independent of material results, Polar exploration presents no unworthy object for scientific investigation—a region of the globe 120,000 square miles in extent never yet entered by man. The Polar question, as a problem of science, aims at determining the limits of land and water, at the perfecting of that network of lines with which comparative science seeks to surround our planet, even to its Poles. The completion of this labour will serve to discover those physical laws which regulate climates, the currents of the atmosphere and sea, and the analogies of geology with the earth as we see it.

4. But how is this to be attained? At first it would appear as if the methods of ice-navigation had been followed by such success, that their continued application guaranteed still greater results. The gradual advance by means of ships, from the Polar Circle to 73°, 75°, 79°, or even to 82° N.L., has been the result and is the reward of the labours of three centuries. But to reach higher degrees, from 82° to 90°, depends on other conditions than mere time. That increased experience and boldness have removed many of the inconveniences and dangers attendant on Arctic navigation is undoubtedly true, but it is also as true, that, upon the whole, the safely and convenience of ice-navigation have more steadily increased than its successes. Hudson, Baffin, and especially Scoresby, and even some whalers of the seventeenth century, reached latitudes which have scarcely been exceeded since, and in many cases this progress was due, not to greater boldness and experience, but rather to chance and the caprices of the ice, which “to the whaler often permitted glances into its interior, which were denied to the scientific explorer.”

5. The greater perfection of our means enables us to conduct Polar expeditions with greater facility. Instead of dissipating our strength by sending out several ships, even small fleets, amounting sometimes to fifteen ships (often not larger than the boats of a modern Polar ship), since the days of Sir John Ross, we equip one or two ships only, strongly built for their “special purpose, provided with steam-power, and with all that is desirable or requisite; and instead of despatching them for short summer cruises, we provision them, send them out for several years, and, by appropriate nourishment and the aid of medical science, protect the crews from the scourge of scurvy. In those days, when even the wealthy lived during the winter on salt beef, and English squires were obliged at the beginning of winter, on account of the scarcity of food for the cattle, to kill and salt a portion of their herd, preserved and antiscorbutic victuals were an impossibility to a Hudson, a James, a Fox, in their winters amid the ice. Those introduced by Ross—then called “Donkin’s meat”—have been greatly improved since, and through them the scurvy, which used to carry off whole crews of ships, has lost its former terrors.

6. In this power to extend our expeditions without danger, and especially in sledge journeys during the autumn and spring, which are possible only to expeditions prepared to winter in the ice, are the grounds why we have not halted at the barriers “of the bulwarks built for eternity;” in the Rennselaer harbour, in the Lancaster-Barrow route, or at the Pendulum islands. It is only sledge expeditions, as Middendorf says, which have been able to effect results of any magnitude on the inaccessible coasts of the extreme north; and the great extent to which the Russians had used sledge expeditions evidently served as an example both to the English and to Kane.

7. In Polar expeditions, therefore, we have probably reached, so far as the exploration of the highest latitudes by means of ships is concerned, the limits of possibility. The extraordinary success which fell to the lot of Hall’s expedition teaches us only the possibility of encroaching but a little beyond that limit, even under the most favourable circumstances.

8. In all cases where the attempt shall be made to reach the highest latitudes with a ship, I would again recommend the route through Smith’s Sound, because, in the first place, I believe that any considerable advance is only to be expected in coast-water; and in the second place, because the Grant Coast offers facilities for sledge expeditions on a large scale. East Greenland in the higher latitudes, 73°-75°, may be regarded as inaccessible; and the attempt to penetrate northwards in its coast-water was a delusion of the second German North-Pole expedition. In the north of Spitzbergen, and in Behring’s Straits, fifty expeditions and countless whalers have heard from the ice an imperious ne plus ultra; and the same prohibition has been uttered to as many expeditions on the North-East passage. In both these routes the cause of failure was the disproportion between what could be reached in one or two summers, and the vast extent of sea blocked by impenetrable ice. In like manner, the probability of reaching the Pole itself with our present resources is so small, and the attempt to do it is so utterly disproportionate to the sacrifices exacted and the results achieved, that it would be advisable to exclude it from Arctic exploration, until, instead of the impotent vessels of the sea, we can send thither those of the air.

9. Be this as it may, the present English North-Pole Expedition will essentially contribute to solve the question, whether the Pole can be reached by the route through Upper Smith’s Sound. This, according to the views of almost all Polar navigators, holds out the greatest chances for further advance by sea. Should this expedition, equipped in so effective a manner, and sent out by a nation of such great experience, not come nearer to the goal, or, if nearer, only through sledging—which may very probably be the case—the conviction will then be strengthened, that all efforts to reach the Pole by navigation in the Frozen Ocean are hopeless, and witness only to the glorious persistency of human endeavour.

10. But until aërial navigation to the Pole shall be attempted, it would be advisable to follow the example of the Swedes, and, in the service of Natural History and Geography, content ourselves with the exploration of those Arctic lands of which, up to the present moment, we know only the coast-line, or which, situated on the outermost verge of our Polar charts, are still untrodden by man; we mean specially Gillis’, Grinnell’s, Wrangel’s Land, and above all, the interior of Greenland. The Polar question, hitherto regarded chiefly as a geographical problem, would thus, for a considerable time, be taken up in the interest of Natural Science. Lieutenant Weyprecht, after dwelling on the predominance of exploration in Polar expeditions, expresses a wish, that the great civilized nations would unite in contemporaneous Arctic expeditions for magnetical, electrical, and meteorological investigations: “In order to attain decisive scientific results, a number of expeditions should be sent to different places in the Arctic regions to make observations, at the same time, with similar instruments, and in accordance with similar instructions.” They who think such results too insignificant for the energies and sacrifices which are expended to achieve them, and who would rather that such efforts should be transferred to those still unknown regions of the earth, which may become the dwelling-places of man, will, of course, give their veto against the further agitation of the Arctic question.

CHAPTER VI.
POLAR EQUIPMENTS.

1. Every Arctic expedition should be guided by the experience of its predecessors, both in its plan and its equipment; and hence we have often to deplore the negligence of almost all Polar navigators in failing to inform those who follow them of what they actually saw, of their modes of procedure, or of the mistakes which they committed. It will not, therefore, be labour thrown away, if we state our own experience and record our own observations for the guidance of others, in order to show, with the utmost possible clearness, what future explorers have before them, and how best to meet it.

2. Undivided command in an expedition is the first of all rules; but if there be any division of command in a subordinate expedition by sea or land, the duties and rights of its commander must be clearly and exactly defined. In recent times the command of a Polar expedition has sometimes been conferred not on a seaman, but on a man of science, as in the cases of Kane, Hayes, Nordenskjöld, and Torell. Where the investigation of questions connected with Natural History is the aim and object, this precedent is admissible, but it should never be observed where the commander has an important part to fulfil as a navigator. The command of an expedition has never been conferred on a man of science by the English government. In the very commencement, indeed, of Polar discovery, an English expedition was placed under the command of Sir Hugh Willoughby, who was not bred a sailor, but down to the seventeenth century, even in their naval campaigns, such men were appointed to naval commands. The Dutch expeditions of the sixteenth century generally adopted a destructive division of command, under supercargoes and pilots, representing the mercantile and nautical elements: confusion and discord were the inevitable consequences.

3. Next to the selection of a commander, the selection of the crew demands the greatest care. This ought to be made some time before the expedition starts, in order that those unfit for the service may be discovered, and their places supplied by others; this cautious mode of procedure, and not a preference for any particular nationality, will secure the most effective crew. Although seamanlike qualities do not belong in the same degree to every nation, time and pains only are needed to secure a picked crew for a North-Pole expedition from almost any nation. Endurance of cold is not the only test of effectiveness, although this is a very common assumption; but a sense of duty, perseverance, and resolution are the virtues of a seaman. Habit soon teaches men to conquer cold, and inexorable necessity often hardens weaklings into heroes for Arctic discovery. A certain degree of intelligence is of high importance in the crew. In many cases resolution in the midst of dangers depends on their capacity to observe and think, even on their possessing certain branches of knowledge. The greater part of the crew of the Tegetthoff had these advantages. But men who, in a heavily-laded sledge, leave the old and take to recently-formed ice, without noticing the difference,—who observe a frost-bitten foot several hours after the mischief has been done,—who lose their cartridges, know nothing of their rifle, and little more of their compass, or who pass on without observing the configurations of the land, possess an indifference indeed, but of a kind very dangerous to themselves and to the whole party, though they may despise death as much as Achilles is said to have done.

4. An intelligent crew, from their greater feeling of independence, is, however, more difficult to command than an ignorant one. Devotion and blind confidence are more rarely found in an educated crew; their amenability to discipline is dependent on the good example, the kindness and unalterable calmness of those who may command them. The law of a Polar expedition is obedience, and its basis morality. Punishments are in such situations a miserable and depressing means for the preservation of order, and then employment, especially in a private undertaking, will tend rather to loosen than to maintain the bonds of discipline. If Parry, in 1820, caused corporal punishments to be inflicted, this proves the greater facility with which discipline is maintained on board of a man-of-war, but not its appropriateness generally. Coercion and threats produce no effect; and hence the folly of attempting to secure success by sending out again those who returned without having achieved anything, which was done last century by the authorities of St. Petersburg with every unsuccessful enterprise on the Arctic coasts of Siberia. The regulation that the most meritorious among the crew shall be specially rewarded, after the return of the expedition, provides for the recognition of merit, without exciting ill feeling in the less worthy. For the officers scientific success may be a perfect reward of their toils, but for the crew the reward should consist of more material advantages. Money, indeed, seems a feeble motive of action to men destined to withstand for years the inclemency of Arctic winters, and uncertain whether they shall ever return; but, notwithstanding, it is the only form by which men without sympathy for the aims of science can be gained for the attainment of such objects. The crews of Sir John Ross received for a martyrdom of four years passed in the ice about £100 a head; in the second German expedition from eight to twelve thalers were the monthly pay of each sailor. The pay of the sledgers in the Tegetthoff was, however, nearly four times as much; in some sledge journeys it amounted to 3,000 gulden a man.

5. Contrary to what might be expected, the re-employment of those who have served before is not to be recommended as a rule. The very best only should be re-enlisted. The others are too much disposed to place their experience on a level with that of their commanders; and in all cases, where their opinions differ from those of their officers, they damage by a kind of passive opposition the fundamental law of an expedition—obedience. Those who enter the Arctic regions for the first time are wont to receive the orders of an experienced commander with an attention as unquestioning as it is respectful. Married men also should be excluded, as they were by Barentz in his second (1596) expedition.

6. Some of the crew should be good shots, good pedestrians and mountaineers, but all must be of the same nationality, and in perfect health. The least symptom of rheumatism, of diseases of the lungs and the eyes, and of certain chronic maladies only too common among seamen, unfit them for the endurance of the Polar climate, and especially for sledge expeditions. Those who are addicted to drink are peculiarly liable to the scurvy.

7. The medical man of an expedition, besides professional skill and experience, must possess the most imperturbable patience, for to many of his patients he is not less a physician of the mind than of the body. He should convince himself of the sanitary condition of the crew before the expedition starts, although it may have been previously investigated by medical authorities and declared satisfactory.

8. Since an expedition, in addition to its scientific functions, should take up the illustration of Nature at the Pole, the employment of a photographer, but still better of an artist, is very desirable, for the former is too much confined to the immediate neighbourhood of the ship in his operations.

9. The records of Arctic adventure in former days tell us of equipments strangely incompatible with the object pursued. Their commercial purpose constrained them to fill the hold with bales of silk, instead of provisions for years; but the letters of recommendation which were given to the explorers of the North-East passage for the Saracen princes on the route to Chatai seem peculiarly ludicrous. Some justification may be discovered for Owczyn taking a priest with him on his Siberian expedition (1734), but hardly for his wanting fifty-seven men in a vessel only seventy feet long, and arming it with eight falconets. The employment of a drummer, twelve privates and a corporal, on Gmelin’s scientific Siberian expedition, is still more unintelligible; more so than Davis’s band of music, which was intended to charm the feelings of the Eskimos and dispose them to peaceful proceedings, his predecessor Frobisher having had the saddest experience of their barbarism. Other expeditions by the too plentiful distribution of knives and hatchets among the Eskimos placed them in a position seriously to threaten the white man, and even at the present day the so-called “Wilden-kiste” often contains articles little calculated to inspire the natives with a high opinion of our moral superiority.

10. In fitting out a Polar expedition, all respect should be paid to the principle of bestowing on those who are for a time banished, the greatest possible amount of comfort. The proportions of a ship, and the space at its disposal, narrow the limits available for this end; and since the return to the employment, as at the first, of small vessels, even these limits have been considerably diminished.

11. The following table shows that the employment of small vessels was the principle at first followed, although the English undertakings even of this present century never thoroughly adopted the example of a Fotherby, a Baffin, and a Ross:—

12. The inspection of this table shows that it was the practice of the sixteenth century to send out fleets of ships of a very small size, that in the seventeenth one small ship was commissioned, and that the employment of two vessels has been the rule since; and this would have been still more evident, if the various Franklin expeditions had been included in the above table. In 1829 Sir John Ross started with a ship drawing eighteen feet, but changed afterwards to one drawing eight feet; and from eight to twelve feet is now the recognised draught in Polar ships. Large vessels require a numerous crew, and if they have not been built exclusively for the purpose of Polar exploration, their small economy of space prevents their being fitted out for more than two years and a half. In 1819 Parry’s ship, the large Fury, had, with a draught of eighteen feet, provisions for only two and a half years, whereas the Victory (1829) of Ross with only seven feet draught had on board, besides stores for the same period, a steam-engine and coals for a thousand hours’ steaming. The Russian Novaya Zemlya navigators of this century have adopted vessels of a size which must be destructive of all comfort and convenience. These vessels are thirty or forty feet long, with a draught of five or six feet, and a crew of nine or ten men. But Arctic ships must have a crew above the ordinary strength and be provided with steam-power; so that, allowing for the necessary space for the quarters of the crew, for the engines and the coalbunkers, little room will be left for the stowage of stores. But this little should be reserved for well-chosen provisions stowed away so as to avoid all empty spaces, and secure the greatest amount of resistance to lateral pressure. The weakest parts of a ship are always the spaces left for air in the quarters of the men. A crew, which is exposed to threatening dangers from the ice, will never regret the strengthening of these void spaces by heavy horizontal tie-beams, removable when the ship is in the winter harbour, and so adjusted as not to impede communication. The mere suspension of heavy beams against the hull of a ship does not always answer the purpose of protection, since the pressure of the ice frequently drives away these protecting timbers. The practice, however, is not absolutely to be rejected.

13. The daily allowance of solid food for the effectives in an Arctic expedition amounts to about two pounds, and in sledge expeditions to 2¾ pounds, of which half a pound is bread and one pound preserved meat. Besides the usual provisions, large supplies of preserved vegetables, of cocoa, of extract of meat, of rice, of preserved peas, of dried farinaceous food (such as macaroni), are very desirable. Salted meat is to be avoided as much as possible. The luxury of fresh bread twice a week instead of the hard ship’s biscuit is an essential means of promoting health, and the want of yeast for its preparation may be supplied by “baking powder.” Once a day a ration of lemon-juice should be served out as a preservative against scurvy, and anti-scorbutic victuals should be laid in abundantly. Plenty of tea and tobacco is indispensable; the want of these is painfully felt, especially by the sailors. Cases have actually occurred, where crews have ground the wooden blocks of the rigging to powder, to serve as tea, and have used the hoops of casks for tobacco.

14. The moderate enjoyment of spirituous liquors is much to be recommended, as their influence on health and sociality is of great importance. The preservation, however, of a sufficient stock of wine, especially in winter, is a matter of much difficulty, since most kinds freeze at 21° F. or 14° F. As long as the ship is afloat, as it generally is when winters are passed in the ice, it is advisable to preserve the supply of wine at the bottom of the hold, and to place all other things most liable to be frozen in layers above it. But if a ship be nearly or entirely out of water, it is advisable to keep the wine, and other indispensable liquids, in the empty spaces of the cabin, under the cabin table, near the stove, below the berths, and under the sky-light after it has been closed for the winter. Only absolute want of space justifies the preparation of chemical wine,[13] since the volume of its constituent parts without water is only a fifth of real wine; and under all circumstances chemical wine is but a miserable shift, and the beer (even the spruce beer of Sir John Ross) which the English used to manufacture on board ship from the essence of malt and hops is far preferable. The rum and cognac, especially for sledge expeditions, in order to save weight should contain the greatest possible amount of alcohol, for its dilution before use is a matter of no difficulty.

15. During the winter, residence in the ship itself is preferable to living in log-houses, because the ship can be more easily heated and suffers less from the accumulation of ice. But since a ship in the Arctic Sea ceases for ten months of the year to be a ship and becomes in fact a house, this should be kept in view when she is being fitted out.

16. The place where the men live is always in the fore-part of the ship, but their berths should be changed in a certain rotation, because of the inequality of the condensation. It is not advisable to place the kitchen in the quarters of the crew in order to diminish the consumption of coals, because an accumulation of moisture is thereby increased. The officers and savans occupy a common messroom in the after-part of the ship, and sleep in little cabins ranged round it. The power to withdraw occasionally from the presence of those who must be together for years is an important element of harmony. Sir John Ross and his officers in 1833, even in the miserable hut built on the Fury coast, did not occupy the common messroom heated by a stove, but preferred separate cabins, the temperature of which seldom rose above the freezing point, and in which they had to suffer much from the accumulation of ice. All the living rooms should be provided with waterproof carpets. Their heating by means of the common stoves is objectionable, because of the unequal distribution of warmth. An even temperature is best maintained by the use of the Meidinger “Fullofen,” which has the further advantage of consuming only a small quantity of coals. Hot-air flues are, perhaps, preferable even to these, because they better prevent the freezing of the moisture in the cabins, and indeed in every part of the ship.

17. An Arctic ship should be provided with an iron-plated washing and drying closet, without which the washing of linen would be restricted to the few weeks of summer weather. This closet may also be used as a bath-room, an important means of promoting health. The lighting of the living rooms by petroleum sufficiently answers all purposes; in the cabins, however, stearine candles are to be preferred either to it or any other oil. The construction of the lamps used in making observations in the open air during the long Arctic darkness is a matter of the greatest importance. Those used in the second German North-Pole Expedition were of peculiar excellence, and never failed in their difficult service. Massive lamps, with glass globes protected with wire, and burning petroleum in preference to common oil, should be used on deck, and as they are employed for so many purposes and exposed to so many risks, a plentiful supply of them should be provided. In the huts on the deck, built over the hatchways, train-oil may be used with advantage, if the lamps are so constructed that the flame may heat the reservoir containing the oil.

18. So long as the crew remains on board the ship, their clothing, even in the severest winter, needs but little attention. Thick close-fitting woollen under-garments, knitted woollen gloves, outer-garments of strong cloth, are in all cases sufficient on deck, and in all those parts of the ship which are kept at a certain temperature. Leather boots lined with fur were long considered an indispensable requisite for Polar expeditions, but they have not maintained their character, as they are very heavy, become unpliable in frost, and soon quite useless through its action and the wearing off of the fur.

19. Before the departure of the expedition, all the instruments should be thoroughly cleansed from oil by a practical optician, and the fire-arms should undergo a like operation at the hands of the gunmaker, and their barrels should be browned to protect them better from rust. The ammunition, powder and matches to blast the ice, alcohol and petroleum, should be stowed in the after-part of the ship, and the two latter should be reached only through a closely-fitting pump. A very ample supply of alcohol, flannel, buffalo-skins, strong cloth, water-proof canvas, felt, leather, reindeer shoes, snow boots, shovels, cramp irons, poles, &c., articles which are too often overlooked, should be taken, both from their usefulness on board ship and also on land expeditions.

20. The costs of Polar expeditions have relatively rather diminished than increased. The expenses of Willoughby’s expedition 300 years ago amounted to the sum—quite enormous for that day—of £6,000; Moor’s (1746) cost £10,000; while Back’s difficult but successful undertaking to explore the great Fish-river (1833-1835), only £5,000. The Siberian expedition of Middendorf (1844)—costing only 13,300 rubles (£1,717)—was a matchless example of extraordinary achievements with little expenditure. The costs of the various Franklin Expeditions from 1848 to 1854 amounted, according to the statement of the English Admiralty, to twenty million francs (£833,333); those of the second German North-Pole Expedition to 120,000 thalers (£11,000), and the expenses of our own Austrian-Hungarian North Pole Expedition to 220,000 gulden (£18,333).

PIONEER VOYAGE OF ISBJÖRN.

JUNE 20-OCTOBER 4, 1871.

THE PIONEER VOYAGE OF THE “ISBJÖRN.”

1. The failure of the second German Arctic expedition directed the future efforts of Polar exploration to the seas of Novaya Zemlya. Although the geographical position and political relations of Austria prevented its Government from taking any active part in the great geographical problems and questions of our times, an interest in Polar discovery had been excited in her statesmen, which gradually ripened into a determination to send its flag, renowned for its military fame, to consecrate struggles on the peaceful domain of scientific exploration. The magnanimous act of Graf Wilczek, contributing 40,000 florins towards the equipment of an Austro-Hungarian expedition, not only strengthened but also endowed the resolve. In order, however, to obviate the possibility of spending large sums on a plan which might be unfeasible, or if feasible, of little value, it was determined to despatch a pioneer expedition to the seas of Novaya Zemlya under the joint command of Lieutenant Weyprecht and myself. The knowledge and experience gained in that voyage—which is described in the following pages—induced the Austrian Government to send another and more powerful vessel to those seas, equipped to pass two or more winters in the ice.

2. It seemed to be established as the result of many expeditions, that almost invincible difficulties opposed the reaching of the central Arctic regions by the routes through Baffin’s Bay, Behring’s Straits, along the coast of Greenland, and from Spitzbergen, mainly because on them all we are met by the great Arctic currents, which act as channels to carry off the ice of the Polar basin. These currents carry with them vast masses of ice, which they deposit on all the coasts which they strike. On the results of many Norwegian, Russian, and German voyages, partly in the interests of science, partly in the interests of commerce, many geographers maintained that the traces of the Gulf Stream did not disappear at the North Cape, but rather that it exercised a considerable influence on places and in latitudes not before imagined, as, for instance, on the north-east coasts of Novaya Zemlya. An expedition, therefore, which followed the course of the warmer waters of the Gulf Stream would find fewer and less formidable obstacles, than on the routes exposed to the Arctic currents, carrying with them colossal masses of ice towards the south. On the east of Spitzbergen there is a land which has, indeed, been often seen, but never reached, or even attempted to be reached—Gillis’ Land—lying in the course of the Gulf Stream; and it is a probable assumption, that navigable water would be found under its western coast, as at Spitzbergen, where 80° N. Lat. can be reached every year without any difficulty. If, then, this stream extends still further to the north—which is probable according to the soundings taken by the Swedes—it is reasonable to expect that higher latitudes may be reached on this than on any other route.

3. It is remarkable, that the seas between Spitzbergen and Novaya Zemlya were utterly unknown to science. No expedition had ever been sent thither, though many things seemed to invite and favour the venture, and Dr. Petermann had long endeavoured to organize a powerful and well-equipped expedition to explore higher latitudes on this route. At length Lieutenant Weyprecht and I undertook a voyage of reconnaissance to those waters, in order to ascertain whether the climate and the state of the ice were as favourable in reality, as they seemed to be in theory. No attempt was to be made to reach high latitudes or to make important geographical discoveries. The small means at our command forbade either. Our aims were more limited; they referred to the temperature of the water and the air, to the currents, to the state of the ice, to the probability of success in the following year (1872), and lastly, to opportunities for extended sledge journeys. We were to sail from Tromsoe about the middle of June, and return thither by the middle of September.

4. In order to diminish expenses, we chartered at Tromsoe a small sailing ship. A steamer would, indeed, have been more serviceable, but the cost would have been quadrupled, without any adequate advantage. The Isbjörn (i.e., Ice-bear) was a vessel of fifty tons, cutter-rigged, 55 feet long, 17 feet broad, with a draught of 6 feet. Her bows were protected with sheet-iron, two feet above, and two feet under, water. She was new and strong, and made with us her first voyage. We had also two small boats, and a so-called “Fang-boot”—whale-boat. She was commanded by Captain Kjelsen, and had as a crew a harpooner, four sailors, a carpenter, and a cook—all Norwegians. We were provided with the requisite instruments by the Imperial Geographical Institute, and were provisioned for four or five months. The Austrian Consul Aagaard aided us to the utmost of his ability in the equipment of the vessel. It must be observed, that we had no direct command or control over the vessel and its crew; the responsibility for the ship, and the immediate command over its crew, belonged to the skipper Kjelsen. Weyprecht was, however, the real commander.

5. The information we gathered concerning the state of the ice in the region of our projected exploration, was exceedingly contradictory. While, for example, Dr. Bessels, in the steamer Albert, of Rosendal, discovered a branch of the Gulf Stream with a temperature of 41° F. at the ice-barrier on the south of Gillis’ Land, Dr. Petermann sent us a letter of Lamont, in which he said: “Every year the ice appears to me more formidable.” The whalers of Tromsoe, who knew the ice of that region only from hearsay, and could give no positive information as to its limits, uttered many unfavourable prognostications as to the possibility of penetrating that frozen sea, or of approaching Gillis’ Land from the south. The region was utterly unknown, even to many skippers who sailed from Spitzbergen to Novaya Zemlya. The few attempts to penetrate to that land, first seen in 1707, and regarded by the Swedes as a continent, had been unsuccessful. So also their efforts to reach it from the south-west in 1864 and 1868. Captain Koldewey’s attempt also, which was made from the “Thousand Isles” three months before the last-named voyage, had been attended with the same want of success. None of these expeditions had passed beyond the ice-barrier, and their failures contributed greatly to strengthen the opinion, that the Novaya Zemlya seas were unnavigable.

6. All our inquiries were met also with the prediction of an exceedingly unfavourable year for the ice. The spring of 1871 had been unusually severe, and even to the middle of June the northern parts of Norway were covered with a mantle of snow reaching down to the sea. It was inferred, therefore, that there would be an excessive accumulation of ice in the seas further north. We heard even, that there was ice at the distance of about twenty (Norwegian) miles from North Cape. And it was certainly true, that the north winds, which prevailed for some weeks, kept a number of Norwegian fishing and seal-hunting vessels weatherbound off the “Scheeren.” All this notwithstanding, we determined to keep to our plan of sailing to Hope Island, and of following from thence the ice-barrier towards the east, our progress, of course, being dependent on favourable conditions of the ice, and perhaps on the influences of the Gulf Stream. As it was within the verge of possibility to make Gillis’ Land during the season of our operations, we considered it advisable not to pass beyond 40° E. Long. while we penetrated northward.

7. On the 20th of June we left Tromsoe during a drizzling snow-storm, and while we were sailing up the “Qualsund” without a pilot, we touched the ground—a danger we incurred from the desire of our married sailors to put their wives ashore, after leave-taking, as near the land as possible. At Rysoe we fell in with the fleet of the Tromsoe fishing-boats at anchor, waiting for a change of weather, and with them some vessels which, we thought, would have been by this time in the ice, having left Tromsoe four weeks before.

THE FIRST ICE

8. The rocky islands off the coast of Finnmark are surrounded by bleak cliffs, rising to the height of 2,500 feet, and upwards. Trees cease to grow there; occasionally the birch appears, but never in sufficient numbers to form a wood. The numerous islands of a gneiss formation show the same landscape which characterizes Norway—indescribably bleak table-lands, deep secluded valleys and gorges, interspersed with lonely mountain lakes. The bold, picturesque outlines of these islands are exceedingly striking, though their fertility is meagre in the extreme. The solitary rocky shores are inhabited by poor families, secluded from the world, and having little intercourse with each other. They live for the most part on the fish which they catch. The remains of fish round these settlements render their approach exceedingly disagreeable; on the Loffoden Islands a guano manufactory has been established, which turns this refuse to good account. Tromsoe or Hammerfest appears in their eyes as the glory and pride of the world. We were detained two days—June 24 and 25—by contrary winds, at Sandoe, an island covered with sea-sand full of small mussel shells, to the height of 600 feet. Ascending an elevated peak of this island, 2,000 feet high, we saw a panorama of countless cliffs of all sizes stretching down to Andeness, and opposite to us, the gloomy, rugged wastes of Norway, which show iron-bound walls, waterfalls, and bleak headlands, without woods, meadows, or habitations. For many hours we were mocked by an eagle, which, now soaring high, now darting down with rapid flight, gave his unwieldy pursuers a stiff and exhausting climb. We at last put to sea on the 26th of June, and passed the enormous rocky pile of Fugloe, down the precipitous face of which the inhabitants descend by means of ropes to get the down of the Eider-geese. Next day we were out of sight of land. The breeze freshened, and, as we sailed further to the north, we saw many whales. On the 28th of June we came on the first ice—a sight which reminds the Polar navigator that he has reached his home! Driven down by the north wind, its fragments lay thickly on the misty horizon like gleaming points. We were now south-east of Bear Island in 73° 40′ N. Lat. and 21° E. Long., and found the ice so broken up that we did not hesitate to penetrate it, in order to find out the latitude in which its closed masses would appear. We passed through forty miles of this loose drift-ice, and then came on the pack in 74° 30′ N. Lat. and 23° E. Long. Already, on the 30th of June, we had experienced the powerlessness of a small sailing vessel in such circumstances. The calms which had set in rendered it impossible to steer the ship, just when the ice was drifting in wild confusion. In spite of all our efforts to warp, the ship was inclosed by ice—in fact, beset. During our captivity of ten days, there was an alternation of fogs and gales with heavy sea-swells. The neighbourhood of floes sometimes small, sometimes large, which constantly shifted their places, kept us in a state of continual watchfulness. The Isbjörn, on some of these days, sustained such severe pressures from the ice, that her safety was imperilled. On the 4th of July we had heavy storms from the south-east, which packed the ice still closer, and, though the sea is generally quite calm within the ice, it was otherwise on this occasion. In the afternoon we heard through the dense fog the thunder of the ocean breaking on the outer edge of the ice, and the roar increased as the sea rose. Our attempts to haul further into the ice and still-water were fruitless; the ship was pressed too firmly, and was not to be moved from its place. Our position became more and more critical as the sea continued to rise. During the whole night the waves roared and boiled around us. The rudder groaned under the pressure of the floes, and had to be made fast to prevent its being broken off. A mass of ice grazing past the davits utterly destroyed one of our boats. The critical nature of such a situation is simply the uncertainty as to the amount of pressure which a ship can sustain. Towards evening the fog lifted and rolled away, presenting a spectacle of fearful grandeur. All round us lay the open sea dashing against the ice, which was itself in wild motion. Floes and icebergs were driven about by the waves, and their fragments strewed in all directions. At midnight our little ship sustained shock after shock, and her timbers strained and creaked. The “brash” of the crushed ice, which had gathered round the ship, prevented her destruction. As the storm abated, the larger masses of ice moved off to the edge of the horizon, so that in the morning we could not see open water from the deck. The day broke: what a change in the ice! The sea was calm, and a long swell died out on its outer edge. Piles of ice all round us,—a weird and deathlike calm! The heavens were cloudless; the countless blocks and masses of ice stood out against the sky in blue neutral shadow, and the more level fields between them sparkled like silver as they shone in the sun. The movement of the sea beyond the ice abated, “leads” within the floes, hitherto scarcely perceptible, widened out. But again the sky was overcast, the sea assumed the colour of lead, though it continued quite calm and the “ice-blink” appeared on the northern horizon.

9. On the 10th of July the ship under full sail forced her way through the floes, which were still somewhat close, and reached open water. The masses of ice through which we pressed were of considerable size. We now continued our course, which had been interrupted in the manner described, along the ice-barrier in a north-easterly direction. After leaving the Norwegian coast, the depth of the sea decreased considerably. We were now on the bank of Bear Island, and we found bottom at 90 metres (49·213 fathoms). Our course was impeded by calms, currents and winds from the east, and even in the middle of July by severe storms. We were sometimes in drift-ice and sometimes outside of it. We soon discovered that the ice of these seas was not to be compared with the vast masses of the Greenland seas. The floes we saw were not more than one year old. As we sailed eastward, the icebergs were neither so numerous nor so large, and disappeared almost entirely at 40° E. Long., which we reached on the 21st of July, after we had followed the ice-barriers from 74° to 75° 30′ N. Lat. Here we penetrated within them. Though drift-ice lay on every side, a steamer would have found nothing to arrest her progress. But the prevalence sometimes of east winds, sometimes of calms, the constant occurrence of fogs, the defects of our vessel, the little authority we had over the crew when extraordinary labour was demanded, the great extent of the region to be explored,—all these difficulties prevented our pressing on in this direction. We therefore turned, July 22, in a westerly direction, in order to explore another opening in the ice, into which we advanced for about fifteen miles, and found floes not more than a year old lying so loosely together, that our ship under full sail seemed to pass over them, much in the same fashion as a sledge glides over a snow-covered plain. But again our course had to be altered, and Weyprecht steered the vessel in a south-westerly direction to the ice-barrier. In 76° 30′ N. Lat. and 29° E. Long. we came on high and close masses of ice, and escaped with much difficulty (July 29) the danger of being again “beset.”

10. We had meantime been convinced that, though the state of the ice was on the whole so favourable, we could not, with the means at our command and with a crew not trained to habits of obedience, do more than carry out our original intention. We could not make up for the defects of our sailing craft by any special exertion on the part of the crew. Could we have done this, we might have penetrated further in a northerly direction; though at this late period of the summer we could not calculate on being able to return, and by the end of October our provisions would have been exhausted. We could only, therefore, attempt to reach Gillis’ Land, and ascertain whether it possessed the importance attributed to it by the Swedes. A safe harbour had therefore to be sought, in which the ship might be left, while a party in a boat should make for the mysterious land. Such a harbour we expected to find at Cape Leigh-Smith. We therefore held to the westward, towards the Stor-Fiord. It is an extremely hazardous thing, demanding incessant attention, to tack and cruise at the ice-barrier during the continuance of fogs and with heavy seas and unfavourable winds. Not unfrequently, the ice-blink is seen all round the horizon, and we discover that we have come into a great “ice-hole,” or a calm makes it impossible to steer the ship, just when a strong current is bearing her into the thickest of the ice-masses. We had our share of these and other risks till we suddenly beheld, while sailing in a fog among icebergs a hundred feet high, the long stretching plateau of Hope Island. According to Weyprecht’s observations, there is an error of 40′ in latitude in the position of this island on the Swedish maps. The real position of the south-west cape of Hope Island is 76° 29′ N. Lat., and 25° E. Long. Seduced by a great opening in the ice, and deviating from our course for a short time, we advanced in a northerly direction to the east of the island, in the hope of reaching Gillis’ Land from thence. But after sailing in a fog for a whole day among icebergs lying close to the cliffs of the island, we were driven further westward, and coming suddenly on the ice—Lat. 76° 30′—with an exceedingly high sea, escaped being dashed to pieces as by a miracle. To penetrate here was an impossibility. We therefore altered our course again for Walter-Thymen’s Straits. A dense girdle of ice several miles deep, and a strong current setting towards the south-west, frustrated every attempt to land on Hope Island. To the west of this we found the ice-barrier in 76° N. Lat., formed of heavy pack-ice, and small icebergs. Our passage to the South Cape (Cape Look-out) of Spitzbergen (76° 30′ N. Lat.) was comparatively quick. Numerous cliffs and rocks on which the waves were breaking, not marked on any chart, rose in the night of August 4 out of the fog at the distance of a few ships’ lengths from us, and it was with the utmost difficulty that we could tack with the heavy sea and strong north-east wind.

11. The day after, when the heavy storm-clouds lifted from the table-land of Cape Look-out, we made the unpleasant discovery, that we were to the south-west of it. Hitherto we had been sailing in dense fog, but after passing this Cape we had almost unbroken sunshine, which illuminated the whole western side of Spitzbergen up to Prince Charles’s foreland. A current one or two miles wide, which flows southward, turns at Cape Look-out and flows in a northerly direction. At this Cape, which is the apex of the current, besides many rocks on which the waves break, there are twenty islands, some of them of considerable size. This promontory, which has been of great importance to navigators for more than 200 years, is erroneously represented in the charts I have seen. Many ships, therefore, have been wrecked at this place, chiefly those of the Spitzbergen whalers and sealers, who base their sailing on making this headland, though they are ignorant of its exact geographical position. Thrice we tried at the beginning of August to reach the Stor-Fiord from the western side of Cape Look-out, and thrice we were driven back by this current, though the wind was in our favour. This, however, gave us an opportunity we had not expected, of seeing something of the west coast of Spitzbergen with its fiords and glaciers as far as Horn Sound. A fog, as dense as coal smoke, floats almost always over “Hornsundstind” (4,500 ft. high) and the pyramid of Haytand. The slopes, clothed in dull green, running down to the coast, make Spitzbergen seem scarcely an Arctic land when compared with the cold grandeur of Greenland. The rocky shores of the northern parts of Norway are more dreary, and wear more the aspect of Arctic regions than Spitzbergen. Hence General Sabine, comparing Spitzbergen with Greenland, called it “a true paradise.”

12. On the 10th of August the ice began to move out from the Stor-Fiord. It pushed on with great velocity from the north-east, turned round Cape Look-out, and deposited itself along the west coast, covering it with thick layers in sixteen hours. On the 12th of the month, in consequence of the fog and strong current, we found ourselves between the heavy drift-ice and the reefs of Cape Look-out. According to our reckoning we should have been twenty-five miles to the east of it. It was only by boldly charging the drift-ice, with the vessel under full sail, that the Isbjörn escaped the danger of being beset. On the 13th the wind chopped round, and, standing away to the south, we succeeded, after cruising about for ten days, in running into Wyde-Jans Water. Our involuntary detention off Cape Look-out enabled us to land twice. During one of these visits we built a cairn, in which we deposited a notice of the course we had steered. The hasty survey we made enabled us to correct some very gross errors in the maps. On the evening of the 14th we sighted Edge Island, and cruised in the drift-ice, which was becoming gradually more dense in that direction. Here we fell in with two ships from Finland, engaged in the capture of the walrus, and learnt from their skippers some particulars concerning the state of the ice, which induced us to give up the direct course to Cape Leigh-Smith, and to prefer coasting along the west side of the Fiord.

13. The ice was now more packed. The ship, weakened by numerous ice-pressures and countless shocks, and making much water, was in so bad a condition, that part of the bows under the water-line was shattered, and some timbers of the hull were forced in. In order to give some notion of the force of the shocks to which we had been exposed in forcing our course through the ice, let it suffice to say, that the iron plating an inch thick, with which the bows had been strengthened at Tromsoe, had been broken off like so many chips.

14. Tacking up against the north wind we came, in the night of August 16, on broken ice off Whale’s Bay, in 77° 30′ N. Lat. The expected free coast-water was not to be found, and the prevailing winds from the north took away any hope of reaching Cape Leigh-Smith in less than a week. Our plan of a boat expedition, for which three weeks would have been necessary, from Cape Leigh-Smith to explore Gillis’ Land, had now to be renounced; and as the southern extremity of Stor-Fiord is generally blocked up at the end of August by an accumulation of ice brought from the east, we were constrained to leave the fiord at once, and return to the ice-barrier we had left.

15. The geological formation of the western coast of this fiord has never been explored. From a visit to the land and the ascent of a mountain 2,000 feet high, we learnt some interesting facts concerning its Jurassic formation, which appeared to extend far to the south. We found traces, at some distance apart, of the more recent brown coal, and fossil remains (Bivalves in ferruginous chalk-marl); we gathered also some plants still in flower, and brought away some red snow. This excursion enabled us also to examine the beautifully-developed glaciers of Spitzbergen. Hornsundstind (4,500 feet high) is a most imposing mountain, and viewed from the east resembles a sugar-loaf. The other mountains on the coast of the fiord rise to heights varying from 2,000 to 4,000 feet. Noble glaciers slope down both sides of the main ridge, which runs in a southerly direction through the island. Some of these, when they reach the sea, are three or four miles wide, and their terminal fronts are about 80 feet high. The snow-line of those which debouch on the Stor-Fiord is at an altitude of 1,000 feet, and their surface is little broken by crevasses. None of these glaciers are of sufficient size to shed icebergs, properly speaking. The sea close to the coast is shallow, and the detachments from the glaciers are merely larger or smaller blocks of ice.

16. On the evening of August 16, sailing before the wind, we forced our way through the ice of the Stor-Fiord, and two days afterwards arrived at Hope Island, the steep, rocky walls of which rose out of the fog just as we were close under it. We found the icebergs still firmly grounded, precisely as we had observed them three weeks before. As an unusually strong current was running towards the south-west at the rate of two miles an hour, great caution was needed when we landed in the whale-boat amid rocks and cliffs not marked on any chart. The geological formation of the island was identical with that of the mountainous region on the south of Whale’s Bay. We found brown coal, but the shortness of our visit did not permit us to inspect the beds of it. Drift-wood of Siberian larch and pine lay in great quantities on the shore.

17. It was surprising to observe the change which meanwhile had taken place; the ice both to the west and east of us had disappeared. We were eager to find it, and again penetrated as far as possible into it. We tacked about on the 19th, 20th, and 21st of August—the weather being stormy—with little success against the north wind, which had prevailed for some weeks. A current from the north drove us constantly southwards. After leaving the Stor-Fiord the temperature of the water exceeded the temperature of the air. On the 22nd of August, in 76° 45′ N. Lat. and 28° 30′ E. Long. we found very little drift-ice, which standing out but a few inches above the water-level presented no impediment to navigation. Nothing but contrary winds stood in the way of our penetrating in a northerly direction, except, indeed, the doubts and fears raised by our skipper and his crew at our attempting higher latitudes at so late a period of the year. König Karl’s Land lay only forty miles to the north—still invisible on account of the mists. Fresh traces of Polar bears announced the neighbourhood of land. We therefore bore away to the east in 32° E. Long. on the 24th of August—the day on which the sun set for the first time. The number of icebergs constantly increased from this date, while some weeks previously, in the same region, we had scarcely seen one. This, perhaps, is to be explained from the fact, that their appearance is irregular, depending on the varying movement of the glaciers, and also on the time and manner in which the icebergs clear out from the bays and fiords. On the 26th we had stormy weather, rain, and snow. On the 27th, amid a dense fog, and with the sea running high, we came close to an iceberg, against which the sea was dashing itself in foam and spray, just in time to avert a collision. On the 29th of August we perceived that the ship had been carried 1° 30′ eastward in a short time by a current. The further we sailed in this easterly direction, the further northward the ice retreated, and we began to hope that we should come nearer the Pole than any ship ever had in this sea. The southern limit of the ice-barrier in the Novaya Zemlya seas, towards the end of summer, is usually placed at 76° N. Lat., but we had reached 78° N. Lat., with 42° E. Long., without seeing (August 30th) a fragment of ice. The Isbjörn had, therefore, penetrated 100 miles in seas hitherto unknown. There was still a long heavy swell from the north, but the temperature of the water had fallen 4½° within twenty-four hours, and it was no longer of an ultramarine, but of a dirty green colour; so that, notwithstanding the sanguine expectations we had cherished, we expected every moment to come on pack-ice. Already, too, the “ice-blink” was visible here and there on the horizon.

18. Whales, secure from persecution in this remote sea, seemed to abound; we saw many “blowing” and spouting. They came sometimes in pairs close to the ship. Their chase and capture might have been carried on here with every hope of success. On the morning of the 31st of August we saw six Eider-geese, the precursors of near land. A blue shadow on the eastern sky arrested the attention of us all for a long time. We felt as if we were on the brink of great discoveries. But, alas! the supposed land dissolved into mist. The poverty of our equipment prevented us from penetrating further. We might easily have been driven onwards by unknown currents, and the ice closing behind us might have cut off return to Europe. We could not be assured that we had not come upon a bight, or cul-de-sac, stretching far to the north, and which might quickly change its character. On the night of August 31, in 78° N. Lat., the ice lay in some places loose and widely dispersed, in others it was more compact, but nowhere was it in great masses; it scarcely rose above the horizon, and it was entirely without icebergs. There was nothing to prevent a vessel with steam power from penetrating further.

19. Still following the ice-barrier as it retreated northwards, we passed beyond 78° 30′ N. Lat. in the night of August 31. The influence of the high latitudes we had reached, on the duration of light, was unmistakable. For some days, however, the temperature had fallen below 32° F., a coating of snow lay on the deck, and the rigging was covered with ice like glass. The morning of the 1st of September broke; about half-past three o’clock fresh breezes from the north drove off the mist, and revealed one of those pictures peculiar to the high north from its dazzling effects of colour—the beams of the sun in glowing splendour were piercing through heavy masses of clouds, while the moon shone on the opposite side of the heavens. An ice-blink resembling an Aurora lay on the north.

20. We had reached 78° 38′ N. Lat., and yet the ice around us presented no serious impediment—none at least as far as we could see. Should we then venture further with our ship in its weakened condition? We might still follow up an opening within the ice running northward, though, in doing this, we should expend the time needed for the exploration of the eastward-lying Novaya Zemlya seas. We determined therefore to bear away to the east before some currents of loose drift-ice. But fog and a high sea from the north-west caused us to alter our course more and more to the south-east. For the first time in these high latitudes we observed drift-wood, and we found ourselves in a sea, the temperature of which at the surface did not materially exceed the temperature of the air. Whenever, however, the temperature of the air rose, a thaw suddenly set in. The colour of the sea alternated between blue and a dull green. A few days previously we had passed over a sea extraordinarily rich in the ribbed Medusæ (Beroë), and where the Rorqual (whale) abounded.

21. The great question now arose, whether the open water found in these high latitudes were only an accidental bight in the ice or a connected sea. It seemed bold to assume the latter, since 76° 30′ N. Lat. had never before been passed in that region. In order, therefore, to arrive at some positive conclusion on this point, we stood away from the ice at noon of the 1st of September, and ran down in open water to 75° 52′ N. Lat. and 51° 44′ E. Long., intending to return to the north again, in order to explore the state of the ice to the north-east. Overcoming with much difficulty the opposition of our skipper, we returned to the edge of the ice, which we found, September 5th, in 78° 5′ N. Lat. and 56° E. Long. Though there was not much wind, a high sea running on the ice compelled us to leave it. In our course to the south-east we crossed 77° 30′ N. Lat. and 59° E. Long.; here, also, to the south of 78°, there was no ice. To penetrate further to the east formed no part of our plan, and since another attempt to return to the ice would have been objectless, for the reasons above stated, we proposed to run into a bight on the west coast of Novaya Zemlya to take in fuel and water, which we urgently needed. The longer nights now made it almost impossible to manœuvre a ship in the ice when the winds were high, though a good steamer might have persisted for some time longer. The temperature of the sea on the 5th of September was 39° F. in Lat. 77° 30′, and on the 8th of the month, when we were in sight of Cape Nassau, it reached 41° F.

22. Storms compelled us to keep to sea. As a current constantly set us to the north-east, we found it not possible to land on Novaya Zemlya, scarcely even to see it. On the night of September 12th we came into the region where the equatorial and Polar air-currents meet, and had an opportunity of observing the hurricane-like effects of their conjunction. The barometer fell about two inches, and the sea was so broken that the ship could hardly be steered, even with a fresh wind. On September 14th we were off Matoschkin Schar, and could not anchor, a snow-storm from the north-east completely hiding the coast. The change, which meantime had taken place in the sky, was strange and remarkable. Heavy thunder-clouds lay over our heads, just as they do in the region of the trade-winds, and every moment threatened to discharge themselves. On the 13th of September we saw the first Aurora, in the shape of an arch, passing through, our zenith. The want of fuel and water, from which we began to suffer, and the end of the season for navigation, compelled us to avail ourselves of the favourable wind which had set in, and begin our voyage home, without landing on Novaya Zemlya. On this same day three of our crew of seven men fell ill, one of them with scurvy. A heavy storm from the north-east compelling us to heave to, we lay close under the coast of Lapland for a whole day. On the 20th of September we ran into Tana Fiord on the east of North Cape, the most northerly point of Europe, and took in water. The gloomy cliffs of Tanahorn and the rocky iron-bound coasts were not at all behind the lands we had left in their terrible desolation. On the 24th of August the Isbjörn passed North Cape; on the 4th of October she anchored in Tromsoe. Weyprecht had remained on board while, with a Lapland sailor who could speak Norwegian, I left the ship in Tana Fiord and went on to Tromsoe through Lapland, sometimes by means of a small boat on the shallow rivers and sometimes by means of reindeer sledges.

23. It had formed no part of our plan, either to make discoveries, or to reach high latitudes. Our object was to investigate whether the Novaya Zemlya seas offered greater facilities, either from the influence of the Gulf Stream, or from any other causes, for penetrating the unexplored Polar regions. Many arguments, derived from the scientific results of our voyage, would seem to favour this idea, and in contradiction to the discouraging views of our predecessors, whose failures are explained by their defective equipment and the choice of the most unfavourable season for navigation, we ventured to draw the following inferences:

(1.) The Novaya Zemlya Sea is not filled with impenetrable ice, rendering navigation impossible; on the contrary, it is open every year, probably up to 78° of N. Lat., and is connected with the Sea of Kara, which is also free from ice in autumn, and even, it may be, with the “Polynjii,” in the North of Asia. If this inference should not be admitted, the following remarks of Lieutenant Weyprecht, in anticipation of objections, are put forward as worthy of consideration:—“In all probability the open condition of the ice in 1871 will be ascribed to chance, or to an especially favourable ice-year. With respect to the latter alternative, the accounts given by the walrus-hunters of Spitzbergen and Novaya Zemlya should convince us, that the year 1871 was not only not a favourable, but a most unfavourable year in the ice. It was almost impossible to navigate Wyde-Jans Water, and the Sea of Kara could only be reached through the most southerly straits—the Jugorsky Straits. There remains, therefore, only the other objection, that the accident of favourable winds was the cause of our penetrating so far. But our meteorological journal shows North, or at any rate Northerly winds, and often, too, blowing freshly, from August 4th to September 5th, with the exception of twelve watches, i.e. two days. But in no case could these winds have driven the ice to the north. With respect to the loose character of the ice we encountered, it might be said, that we saw only the outer ice. But, in the first place, we were often so far within the barrier that it would be inadmissible to speak of it as the outer ice; and, in the second place, the ice-barrier shows the state of the ice behind it. Whenever the wind lies against the ice, there the ice is always the most dense and packed, and we find open places only when we have worked our way through the outer ice.”

(2.) The time most favourable for navigation in this sea falls at the end of August, and lasts—though rendered hazardous by storms, the formation of young ice, and the darkness which supervenes at that season—till the end of September, and during this period the ice may be said to be at its minimum.

(3.) The Novaya Zemlya Sea is a shallow sea—a connection and continuation of the great plains of Siberia. In the extreme north, its depth was 600 feet, and south-east of Gillis’ Land about 300 feet.

(4.) Gillis’ Land is not a continent, but either an island or a group of islands. Whereas, from the circumstance that in the highest latitudes—in 79° N. Lat.—we found drift-wood covered with mud, sea-weed, creatures which live only near the land, decreasing depths of the sea, sweet-water ice and icebergs laden with dirt, it may be inferred, with great probability, that there exist masses of land to the north-east of Gillis’ Land.

(5.) The appearance of Siberian drift-wood, only in the most northern seas reached in our voyage, seems to point to an easterly current there.

(6.) The Russian expeditions in the past and present centuries, which attempted to penetrate by the north-west coast of Novaya Zemlya, miscarried, because they sailed before the favourable season for navigation, and also because they had not the advantage of steam.

(7.) How far the Gulf Stream has any share or influence in the favourable conditions for the navigation of the Eastern Polar Sea which have been described, cannot as yet be positively determined. The state of the ice, the observations which were made on the temperature of the sea, its colour and the animal life found in it, seem to speak in favour of the action of this current in that region. It is possible that the Gulf Stream may exercise its culminating influence on the west coast of Novaya Zemlya only at the beginning of September; for while the temperature of the sea in the months of July and August gradually fell from 45° F. to 36° F. in Lat. 75° N., and to zero and below it, still more to the north, we observed 39° F., September 6, in Lat. 78°, and 41° F., September 10, in Lat. 75° 30′. The temperature of the air was in all these cases considerably less than that of the water. If the unusually favourable state of the ice on the east of Spitzbergen should be ascribed to warm southerly currents of air, it may be replied that our observations specify the almost uninterrupted occurrence of north winds. It is also possible, that at the beginning and middle of summer the Gulf Stream may move slowly in a northerly direction along the coasts of Novaya Zemlya, and that towards autumn it spreads itself more and more to the west. Our observations proved the existence, in the eastern Novaya Zemlya seas, of a band of warm water, from thirty-six to forty feet deep, beneath which lies, without gradation, a colder stratum. It is evident that the unequal density of these strata prevents their mingling. This band of warmer water near North Cape is about 150 feet deep, with a temperature of nearly 45° F., but diminishes as it flows northward. The frequency of fogs and mists in the Novaya Zemlya Sea, and the squalls unknown to other Arctic regions, which are characteristic of a more southerly region, indicate also a current of warm water. How this warm current gradually cools towards the north, and becomes shallower, and how distinctly it divides into those strata of water of equal temperature, so characteristic of the Gulf Stream, is shown by three series of observations taken by Weyprecht at different latitudes, with the maximum and minimum thermometer of Casella:—

24. These inferences rendered the despatch of a well-equipped expedition to the Novaya Zemlya seas very desirable, either to penetrate towards the north, or to pursue the direction of the north-east passage. To this idea a most gracious reception was given by the Emperor of Austria. Hence arose the Austro-Hungarian expedition of 1872. The promoters of this undertaking assumed neither the existence of an open Polar Sea, nor the possibility of reaching the Pole by sledge or boat expeditions. Their object, simply and broadly stated, was the exploration of the still unknown Arctic regions, and it was their belief, that a vessel could penetrate further into this region by the route between Novaya Zemlya and Spitzbergen, where the Isbjörn in her pioneer voyage found the ice more loose and navigable than had been imagined possible. But in addition to the causes already specified, the influence of the warm currents, produced by the great rivers of Siberia discharging themselves into a shallow sea, was also supposed to co-operate in producing this phenomenon. Of these rivers, the Obi and Jenisej alone discharge into that shallow sea a body of water as great as the waters of the Mediterranean or the waters of the Mississippi. The course of the current produced by these mighty rivers is as yet unknown; but it was natural to suppose, that old and heavy pack-ice could not be formed on a coast submitted to such an influence. This is confirmed by the observations of the Russians, who in the coldest period of the year always find open water in the Siberian seas. Middendorf, August 26, 1844, found the Gulf of Taimyr quite free from ice; our own observations, made in 60° E. Long., and those of the Norwegian Mack, who advanced to 81° E. Long. (75° 45′ N. Lat.), support the supposition of a still navigable sea. Of the region between Cape Tscheljuskin and the ice-free spaces asserted to exist by Wrangel, and others, we know but little; but it is probable that the character of the ice in those seas does not greatly differ from the character of the ice in contiguous seas. Of the seas between Novaya Zemlya and Behring’s Straits, at the distance of a few miles from the Asiatic coast, nothing is known. No ship has ever navigated this enormous Eastern Polar Sea.

25. It was the plan of the Austro-Hungarian expedition to penetrate in an E.N.E. direction, in the latter half of August, when the north coast of Novaya Zemlya is generally free from ice. The places at which the expedition was to winter were left undetermined; these might, possibly, be Cape Tscheljuskin, the new Siberian islands, or any lands which might be discovered. A return to Europe through Behring’s Straits, however improbable it might be, lay among the possibilities of the venture. Minor details were left to circumstances. In the event of the loss of the ship, the expedition was to endeavour to reach the coast of Siberia by boats, and, on one of the gigantic water-courses of Northern Asia, penetrate into more southern regions. The depôt of provisions and coals which it was Graf Wilczek’s intention to deposit on the north coast of Novaya Zemlya, was to be the nearest refuge for the crew in the event of disaster to the ship. Stone cairns were to be erected on all prominent localities, and in these were to be laid accounts of the course of the expedition. Till its return at the end of the autumn of 1874, its members were to be cut off from all intercourse with Europe. The motives of an undertaking so long and so laborious cannot be found in the mere love of distinction or of adventure. Next to the wish to serve the interests of science by going beyond the footsteps of our predecessors, we were influenced by the duty of confirming and fulfilling the hopes which we ourselves had excited.

VOYAGE OF THE “TEGETTHOFF.”

JUNE, 1872-SEPTEMBER, 1874.

I.

FROM BREMERHAVEN TO KAISER FRANZ-JOSEF LAND.

CHAPTER I.
FROM BREMERHAVEN TO TROMSOE.

1. He who seeks to penetrate the recesses of the Polar world chooses a path beset with toils and dangers. The explorer of that region has to devote every energy of mind and body to extort a slender fragment of knowledge from the silence and mystery of the realm of ice. He must be prepared to confront disappointments and disasters with inexhaustible patience, and pursue devotedly his object, even when he himself becomes the sport of accident. That object must not be the admiration of men, but the extension of the domain of knowledge. He spends long years in the most dreadful of all banishments, far from his friends, from all the enjoyments of life, surrounded by manifold perils, and bearing the burden of utter loneliness. The grandeur therefore of his object can alone support him,—for otherwise the dreary void of things without can only be an image of the void within. How many are the preconceptions with which the novice begins the voyage to the rugged, inclement north! Books can tell him little of the stern life to which he dooms himself, as soon as he crosses the threshold of the ice, thinking perhaps to measure the evils that await him by the physical miseries of cold instead of by the moral deprivations in store for him.

2. In the year 1868, while employed on the survey of the Orteler Alps, a newspaper with an account of Koldewey’s first expedition one day found its way into my tent on the mountain side. In the evening I held forth on the North Pole to the herdsmen and Jägers of my party as we sat round the fire, no one more filled with astonishment than myself, that there should be men endued with such capacity to endure cold and darkness. No presentiment had I then that the very next year I should myself have joined an expedition to the North Pole; and as little could Haller, one of my Jägers at that time, foresee that he would accompany me on my third expedition. And much the same was it with the three-and-twenty men who early in the morning of June 13, 1872, came on board the vessel in Bremerhaven, to cast in their lot with the ship Tegetthoff, whatever that lot might be; for we had all bound ourselves by a formal deed, renouncing every claim to an expedition for our rescue, in case we should be unable to return. Our ideal aim was the north-east passage, our immediate and definite object was the exploration of the seas and lands on the north-east of Novaya Zemlya.

3. A bright day rose with us, and no augur’s voice could have heightened the glad hopes which animated every one of us. Friends from Austria and Germany had come to bid us a last farewell; but, as every venture should be, so our departure that morning was, quiet and without pretension. About six o’clock in the morning the Tegetthoff lifted her anchor and dropped down the Schleusen and the Weser, towed by a steamer. Down the broad stream we calmly glided, full of satisfaction at the fulfilment of long-cherished plans. There lay the same pastures, the same trees and meadows which had so delighted us on our return from Greenland. Yet unmoved we saw all the charms of nature grow young under the morning sun and then fade away in the evening twilight—as the land gradually disappeared behind us, and the coasts of Germany were lost to view. With the feeling that we were leaving them for so long a time, our thoughts turned to our new life in the narrow limits of a ship, and the resolve to live and labour in harmony animated each breast. How often we should be liable to casualties which no eye could foresee, we were soon to find out, when in almost dead calm and without steam we came on the shallow waters of Heligoland. What would have become of the expedition, had we not discovered in time, that we had only a few feet of water under the keel!

4. The vessel, 220 tons burden, was fitted out for two years and a half, but was over-freighted by about thirty tons, so that our available space was much curtailed. Yet the cabin, which Weyprecht, Brosch, Orel, Kepes, Krisch, and I occupied, was far more commodious than the miserable hole in which eight of us had been crowded together on our Greenland expedition. Our supply of coals, 130 tons, was large in proportion to the size of the ship, being calculated not only for our daily wants, but to enable us to keep up steam for about sixty days. But to economise this store we used our sails, as much as possible, even in the ice. Both ship and engine—of 100 horse power—tested in the trial trip of June 8, sustained their character during the expedition, and did great credit to the Tecklenborg firm.

5. The wind being unfavourable, it took us some time to cross the North Sea and reach the coast of Norway. My journal describes this part of our voyage. “Light winds from the south carried the Tegetthoff on her lonely course over the North Sea. In undimmed brightness the blue sky stretched overhead, the air was balmy and mild. In the grey distance frowns the iron rampart of countless cliffs encircling the barren wastes of Norway. Occasionally a sea-gull comes near us, or some bird rests on the mast-head; now and then a sail is seen on the horizon,—but save this, no life—no event. Every one feels, though no one utters it, that a grave future lies before him; each may hope what he wishes, for over the future there is drawn an impenetrable veil. All, however, are animated with the consciousness, that while serving science, we are also serving our Fatherland, and that all our doings will be watched at home with the liveliest sympathy.

6. “On board the Tegetthoff are heard all the languages of our country, German, Italian, Slavonic, and Hungarian; Italian, however, is the language in which all orders are given. The crew is lighthearted and merry: in the evening a gentle breeze carries the lively songs of the Italians over the blue sea, glowing under the midnight sun, or the monotonous cadence of the Ludro of the Dalmatians recalls the sunny home which they are so soon to exchange for its very opposite, which remains a sort of mystery to all their powers of fancy. Thus begins so peacefully our long voyage into the frozen ocean of the north. In a few weeks the ice will grate on the bows of the Tegetthoff, the crystal icebergs will surround her, and with many a strain will the good ship force her way through the icy wastes, sometimes inclosed on every side, sometimes free in coast-water, or threatened by the ‘ice-blink’ foreboding danger.”

7. The officers and crew of the Tegetthoff amounted in all to twenty-four souls.

• Lieutenant Carl Weyprecht, }
• Lieutenant Julius Payer, } Commanders of the Expedition.
• Lieutenant Gustav Brosch,[14] }
• Midshipman Edward Orel, } Officers of the Ship.
• Dr. Julius Kepes, Physician to the Expedition.
• Otto Krisch, Engineer.
• Pietro Lusina,[15] Boatswain.
• Antonio Vecerina, Carpenter.
• Josef Pospischill, Stoker.
• Johann Orasch, Cook.
• Johann Haller, }
• Alexander Klotz, } Jägers, from Tyrol.
• Antonio Zaninovich, Seaman.
• Antonio Catarinich, ditto.
• Antonio Scarpa, ditto.
• Antonio Lukinovich, ditto.
• Giuseppe Latkovich, ditto.
• Pietro Fallesich, ditto.
• George Stiglich, ditto.
• Vincenzo Palmich, ditto.
• Lorenzo Marola, ditto.
• Francesco Lettis, ditto.
• Giacomo Sussich, ditto.
• Captain Olaf Carlsen, Icemaster and Harpooner.
• We had eight dogs on board; two we got in Lapland, the rest were brought from Vienna.

8. Stormy weather detained us for some time among the Loffoden Isles, so that we made Tromsoe only on July 3. Here we were received most courteously by the Austro-Hungarian Consul, Aagaard, who invited us to a banquet. We remained here a week, in order to complete our equipment. The ship, which had leaked considerably ever since we left Bremerhaven, was thoroughly examined by divers, the stores were landed, the ship repaired and reladen. Our supply of coals was replenished, a Norwegian whale-boat added to our equipment, and, lastly, the harpooner, Captain Olaf Carlsen, was taken on board. On July 6 we received our last news from Austria, letters and newspapers. The Ukase granted by the Russian Government also arrived, drawn up both for Weyprecht and myself in case of our being separated, a document of great importance, if the ship should be lost and we had to return through Siberia; an issue only too probable when the vast length and enormous difficulties of the north-east passage were considered. While Lieutenant Weyprecht was engaged in stopping the leak of the ship, some of us ascended—a Lapp of the name of Dilkoa being our guide—a pinnacle of rock, 4,000 feet high, towering over Tromsoe’s labyrinth of fiords, in order to compare our aneroid and mercurial barometers. From the summit we beheld an enormous dark column of smoke rising perpendicularly to the height of about 1,500 feet in the still air—the northern extremity of Tromsoe was in flames. Most gladly would we have learned something of the state of the ice this year; but as yet this was impracticable, for none of the walrus hunters had returned from their grounds in the north.

9. On the morning of Saturday, July 13, officers and crew heard mass from a French priest, and bidding adieu to our Tromsoe friends, we left the quiet little city, the most northerly of Europe, early on Sunday morning. The passengers of the Hamburg mail steamer, entering the harbour as we left it, greeted us with loud and long cheers, and steaming through the narrow Grötsound, close under the cliffs of Sandoe and Rysoe we came into the open sea, Captain Carlsen acting as our pilot. As we issued from the Scheeren, a mist arose which covered and obscured the huge rock of Fingloe. Here the engine fires were put out and the sails set, and the first and last voyage, which the Tegetthoff was destined to make, began. On July 15 we steered towards the north, the Norwegian coast with its many glaciers in full view, and on the 16th we sighted the North Cape in the blue distance.

CHAPTER II.
ON THE FROZEN OCEAN.

1. Unfavourable winds had hindered our progress for some days; we now encountered heavy seas. On July 23 a sudden fall of the temperature and dirty rainy weather told us that we were close to the ice, which we expected to find later and much more to the northward, and on the evening of July 25, lat. 74° 0′ 15″ N., we actually sighted it, the thermometer marking 32·5° F., and 34·5° F. in the sea. The northerly winds, which had prevailed for some time had broken up the ice, and it lay before us in long loose lines. Its outer boundary was consequently the very opposite of those solid walls of ice which we met with in Greenland in 1869, and two years afterwards on the east of Spitzbergen. Though surprised at finding the ice so far to the south, we never imagined that this was anything but a collection of floes, which had drifted out perhaps from the Sea of Kara through the Straits of Matotschkin. But only too soon the conviction was forced upon us that we were already within the Frozen Ocean, and that navigation in the year 1872 was to differ widely from that of the preceding year. Lieutenant Weyprecht had the day before fastened “the crow’s nest” to the mainmast of the Tegetthoff, and henceforth it became the abode of the officer of the watch. On July 26, while steering in a north-easterly direction, the ice became closer, though it was still navigable; but we nowhere saw the heavy fields which had astonished us on the east coast of Greenland, and which Lütke found to be so dangerous to navigation. The temperature of the air and the sea fell rapidly, and during the two following weeks it remained below the freezing point almost uniformly, and without any essential difference between day and night.

STILL LIFE IN THE FROZEN OCEAN.

2. The frozen sea of Novaya Zemlya is characterized by that inconstancy of weather which in our lower latitudes we attribute to the month of April; the same variability is met with, though in lesser degree, in the Greenland seas during the summer months. Snowstorms now alternated with the most glorious blue skies. The black-bulbed thermometer showed 113° F. in the sun, with 39° F. in the shade. The hunting season began, and the kitchen was well provided with auks and seals. Our Dalmatians soon learnt to like the dark flesh of the latter.

3. The ice gradually became closer; July 29 (74° 44′ N. Lat., 52° 8′ E. Long.) we were able to continue our course only under steam, and heavy shocks were henceforward inevitable; in many cases the vessel could not force a passage except by charging the ice. In the night a vast, apparently impenetrable barrier stopped our progress; but the tactics of charging under steam again cleared a passage, and we penetrated into a larger “ice-hole.” We now glided along over the shining surface of its waters, as if we were navigating an inland lake, save that no copsewood clothed the shores, but pale blocks of ice, which the mist, that now fell and enveloped us, transformed into the most fantastic shapes, and at last into mere shapelessness itself. In all that surrounded us neither form nor colour was discernible; faint shadows floated within the veil of mist, and our path seemed to lead no whither. A few hours before the glowing fire of the noonday sun had lain on the mountain wastes of Novaya Zemlya, while refraction raised its long coast high above the icy horizon. Nowhere does a sudden change in Nature exercise so immediate an effect on the mind as in the Frozen Ocean, where, too, all that brings delight proceeds from the sun.

4. For some days we had entered into a world utterly strange to most of us on board the Tegetthoff. Dense mists frequently enveloped us, and from out of the mantle of snow of the distant land the rocks, like decayed battlements, frowned on us inhospitably. There is no more melancholy sound than that which accompanies the decay and waste of the ice, as it is constantly acted on by the sea and thaw, and no picture more sad and solemn than the continuous procession of icebergs floating like huge white biers towards the south. Ever and anon there rises the noise of the ocean swell breaking amongst the excavations of the ice-floes, while the water oozing out from their icy walls falls with monotonous sound into the sea; or perhaps a mass of snow, deprived of its support, drops into the waves, to disappear in them with a hissing sound as of a flame. Never for a moment ceases the crackling and snapping sound produced by the bursting of the external portions of the ice. Magnificent cascades of thaw-water precipitate themselves down the sides of the icebergs, which sometimes rend with a noise as of thunder as the beams of the sun play on them. The fall of the titanic mass raises huge volumes of foam, and the sea-birds, which had rested on its summit in peaceful confidence, rise with terrified screams, soon to gather again on another ice-colossus.

5. But what a change, when the sun, surrounded by glowing cirrus clouds, breaks through the mist, and the blue of the heavens gradually widens out! The masses of vapour, as they well up, recede to the horizon, and the cold ice-floes become in the sunlight dark borders to the “leads” which gleam between them, on the trembling surface of which the midnight sun is mirrored. Where the rays of the sun do not directly fall on it, the ice is suffused with a faint rosy haze, which deepens more and more as the source of light nears the horizon. Then the sunbeams fall drowsily and softly, as through a veil of orange gauze, all forms lose at a little distance their definition, the shadows become fainter and fainter, and all nature assumes a dreamy aspect. In calm nights the air is so mild that we forget we are in the home of ice and snow. A deep ultramarine sky stretches over all, and the outlines of the ice and the land tremble on the glassy surface of the water. If we pull in a boat over the unmoved mirror of the “ice-holes,” close beside us a whale may emerge from its depths, like a black shining mountain; if a ship penetrates into the waste, it looks as weird as the “Flying Dutchman,” and the dense columns of smoke, which rise in eddies from her funnel, remain fixed for hours until they gradually melt away. When the sun sinks at midnight to the edge of the horizon, then all life becomes dumb, and the icebergs, the rocks, the glaciers of the land glow in a rosy, effulgence, so that we are hardly conscious of the desolation. The sun has reached its lowest point,—after a pause it begins to rise, and gradually its paler beams are transformed into a dazzling brightness. Its softly warming light dissolves the ban under which congelation has placed nature, the icy streams, which had ceased to run, pour down their crystal walls. The animal creation only still enjoys its rest; the polar-bear continues to repose behind some wall of ice, and flocks of sea-gulls and divers sit round the edge of a floe, calmly sleeping, with their heads under their wings. Not a sound is to be heard, save, perhaps, the measured flapping of the sails of the ship in the dying breeze. At length the head of a seal rises stealthily for some moments from out the smooth waters; lines of auks, with the short quick beat of their wings, whiz over the islands of ice. The mighty whale again emerges from the depths, far and wide is heard his snorting and blowing, which sounds like the murmurs of a waterfall when it is distant, and like a torrent when it is near. Day reigns once more with its brilliant light, and the dreamy character of the spectacle is dissolved.

6. We had sailed over one “ice-hole,” and again a dense barrier of ice frowned on us; as we forced our way into it, the ice closed in all round us—we were “beset.” The ship was made fast to a floe, the steam blown off, its hot breath rushing with a loud noise through the cold mist; every open mesh in the net of water-ways was closed by the ice, which soon lay in such thick masses around us, that any one provided with a plank might have wandered for miles in any direction he liked. July 30, the Tegetthoff remained fast in her prison; no current of water, nor any movement among the floes lying close to us was discernible; a dead calm prevailed, and mist hung on every side. On the following day we made vain efforts to break through a floe which lay on our bows. The calm still prevailed, Aug. 1 (74° 39′ N. L. 53° E. L.), and no change was to be seen in the ice. Aug. 2, the crew began with hearty good-will the toilsome work of warping, but with no success, the smallness of the floes hardly admitting of this manœuvre. In the evening of the same day it seemed as if a fresh breeze would set us free; but after we had gone on for a few cable-lengths, a great floe once more barred the route, while at the same time the wind fell. At length, when the ice became somewhat looser, we got up the engine fires, and in the following night broke through, under steam, a broad barrier of ice, which separated us from the open coast-water of Novaya Zemlya. In the morning of Aug. 3, we forced our way into coast-water, twenty miles broad, to the north of Matotschkin Schar, and steered due north, the mountainous coasts still in sight. A belt of ice 105 miles broad lay behind us. The country greatly resembled Spitzbergen, and we observed with pleasure its picturesque glaciers and mountains rising to the height of nearly 3,000 feet, though inconsiderable compared with the mountains of Greenland. Far and wide not a fragment of ice was to be seen; there was a heavy swell on, the air was unusually warm (41° F.), in the evening rain fell, and on Aug. 4 we had dense mists and driving snow-storms, which forced us to keep to the west of Admiralty Peninsula. During the night of Aug. 6, the snow-storms were heavier than before, and the deck was quite covered. Towards the north and west very close ice was seen, and since the temperature of the air, even with the winds in the south-west, remained constantly below zero, it was evident that the ice must stretch far in that direction also. Aug. 7, we ran on the white barriers to the west of Admiralty Peninsula, and far to the north, beyond a broad field of ice, refraction indicated open water and showed the forms of “Tschorny Nos” floating in the air. In the afternoon of Aug. 8 the ice in 75° 22′ N. L. became so thick around us that we were compelled to have recourse to steam-power; but the Tegetthoff, even with this auxiliary was unable against a head-wind to penetrate a broad strip of close ice, and banking up our fires, we determined to wait its breaking up. Close under the coast open water was again observed, and in it—a Schooner! Every one now hastened to write letters to his friends and relations, but the schooner, to which we meant to give our letters and despatches, by running into the heart of Gwosdarew Bay escaped the duty we had in store for it. About half-past ten P.M. the wind had fallen and the ice began to open out, and we were able to continue our voyage under steam in a north-westerly direction. The sun lay before us, the clear mirror of distant “leads” glowed with a glorious carmine, the barriers of ice which lay between these “leads” appeared as stripes of violet, and only our immediate neighbourhood was pale and cold. The Tegetthoff laboured through the dense accumulation of floes and about midnight reached open water, and the steam was again blown off. Aug. 9, we sailed in coast-water perfectly free from ice, excepting the icebergs we encountered, some about forty feet high. These, generally, were so numerous and so small in size, that they were at once seen to be offshoots from the small glaciers of Novaya Zemlya as they plunge into the sea. Their surface was frequently covered with débris. Loose drift-ice showed itself, Aug. 10, but the ship continued to steer between the floes towards the north. In the forenoon of that day we were again nearly “beset,” but happily escaped that fate after four hours’ warping. Aug. 11, our course was continued without impediment in a northerly direction through the loose drift-ice. The land, from which we had hitherto remained distant about eight or twelve nautical miles, now declined in height from three thousand to fifteen hundred or a thousand feet, and quickly lost its picturesque character. On the noon of August 12, on account of a thick mist, we made fast to a great floe, and were able to commence on it the training of the dogs to drag the sledges.

GWOSDAREW INLET.

7. In the neighbourhood of the Pankratjew Islands, a ship suddenly and unexpectedly appeared on the horizon, and endeavoured to gain our attention by discharges from a mortar, and by the hoisting of flags. How great was our astonishment and our joy when we beheld the Austro-Hungarian flag at the peak of the Isbjörn, and were able to greet Count Wilczek, Commodore Baron Sterneck, Dr. Höfer, and Mr. Burger half an hour afterwards on board the Tegetthoff. Coming from Spitzbergen in the Isbjörn (the ship of our precursory expedition of 1871) they had sighted us two days before. That in a sailing vessel, and without any sufficient equipment, they had succeeded in following and overtaking the Tegetthoff, which had penetrated so far with difficulty and by the aid of steam was a proof both of skill and resolution. Their object was to establish a depôt of provisions at Cape Nassau, at whatever personal risk to themselves. About two o’clock in the morning our guests returned to the Isbjörn, and both ships now sailed in company, and without meeting any hindrance in the ice-free coast-water, in a northerly direction. In the forenoon of Aug. 13, in 76° 18′ N. Lat. and 61° 17′ E. Long., we came upon closer ice, amid mist and stormy weather, and the two ships anchored to some firm land-ice two cable-lengths from each other, about a mile from the land. Close to the south of us lay the Barentz Isles with their singularly formed hills, which the walrus-hunters call by the somewhat gloomy name of “The Three Coffins.” On our north an enormous iceberg rose in dazzling whiteness above a faintly glimmering field of ice, a harbinger of new countries—for its size forbade us to think that it owed its origin to the glaciers of Novaya Zemlya. Continuous winds from the W.S.W., close ice, mist, downfalls of snow, the necessity of determining the geographical position of the depôt of provisions which we had established, compelled us to lie for eight days before the Barentz Islands. The opportunity we thus had of putting our feet once more on the land was exceedingly agreeable. We made repeated visits to the shore with two dog-sledges, in company with Professor Höfer; and as his observations on the phenomena of the country are those of a distinguished geologist, I here insert those he has kindly placed at my disposal.

8. “The Barentz Isles are flat, girt with cliffs, and separated by narrow straits from the coast, which rises up terrace on terrace. Its rocks consist of a black, very friable slate, frequently alternating with strata of mountain limestone of the carboniferous period, varying in breadth from one to ten metres. These strata are filled with a countless number of fossilized inhabitants of the sea, trilobites, mussels, brachiopodes, crinoides, corals, &c., which are utterly foreign to the Frozen Ocean as it now is, and whose cognates live only in warm seas.

9. “The animal world, therefore, buried in the limestone of these islands, is an indisputable proof that there was once, in these high latitudes, a warm sea, which could not possibly co-exist with such great glaciers as those which now immerse themselves in the seas of Novaya Zemlya. That portion of the earth, now completely dead and buried in ice, once knew a period of luxuriant life. In its sea there revelled a world of life, manifold and beautiful in its forms, while the land, as the discoveries on Bear Island and Spitzbergen prove, was crowded with gigantic palm-like ferns. This age of the earth’s history is called the carboniferous period; it was the rich and fertile youth of the high north, which lived out its time more rapidly than the southern zones, now in all their vigour and variety. If we compare the Fauna buried in the chalk formations of the Barentz Isles, with the contemporaneous Fauna which we know from the carboniferous formation of Russia, specially that of the Ural, we find a very remarkable agreement, not only in their general character, but also in particular organisms. Many of the fossils of the carboniferous limestone of these high degrees of latitude (76°-77°) are found in analogous strata of the Ural, and are proved by the researches of Russian geologists to exist there as far as the fiftieth degree of latitude. Without stopping to insist on the great similarity between the stratification of Novaya Zemlya and the Ural—the former being the real continuation of the latter—we dwell here on the fact that in the carboniferous period there was a sea which stretched from the fiftieth to the seventy-seventh degree of north latitude, i.e. twenty-seven degrees, or 405 geographical miles, which was animated by the same Fauna, and which consequently must have presented the same relations, especially a like warm temperature. From these signs it would appear that the zones of climate now so decisively marked on the surface of the earth did not exist at the carboniferous period. The horizontal surface of the land leads us at the first to infer horizontal stratification; but we find the contrary to be the case; the marine deposits once horizontal, have been so raised at a later period that they are now vertical. Since the friable slate degrades rapidly, and the limestone layers very gradually, it may be assumed that the former wasting away leaves the limestone layers standing like walls between them—a thing which, in a small scale, may often be elsewhere observed. If a glance at these buried fossils awakens in us an image, as in a dream, of a creation rich in organic forms, a glance at the present state of the Barentz Isles impresses us with the gloomiest feelings.

10. “Before us lies this small greyish brown fragment of the earth. The cold, level ground is covered with sharp-edged pieces of rock, which appear to be as it were macadamised, so closely are they rammed together. Here and there, about a fathom’s length from each other, lie brownish green masses like mole-hills. When we examine them more closely, each mass resolves itself into a vast number of small plants of the same species (Saxifraga oppositifolia), whose little stalks are covered with dark green leaves, which are alive, and also with brown leaves, which have been dead for years and years, but wither in the cold much more gradually than with us. From this small heap, tender rosy blooms raise their little heads, bidding defiance to the bitter snowy weather which sweeps over the miserable plain. Another species of saxifrage (Saxifraga cœspitosa), with shorter stalks and yellowish-white flowers, growing in thick clumps, forms, together with the first-named variety and the more rarely appearing Saxifraga rivularis, the hardiest representatives of this family of plants so frequently found in the Polar regions. If to these we add Draba arctica with its little yellow flowers, forming in valleys large patches of sward, the yellow flowering poppy (Papaver nudicaule), and a rare willow (Salix polaris), which with some few leaves peeps forth from the soil, we have described the whole Flora of that desolate waste, in which a mere passing glance would scarce detect the existence of vegetable life among the débris of rocks and the heaps of snow. Mosses are found here and there in the moister fissures of rocks, and especially on the coast, where old drift-wood, or the bones of whales or other animals, afford the nourishment they need, and in some places the mosses spread themselves out into small carpets. Lichens love to shelter under the clusters of the different kinds of saxifrage, though sometimes they are found by themselves. Of this class we will mention merely the so-called Iceland moss (Cetraria islandica), and a reindeer lichen (Cladonia pyxidata); the few other forms are nearly related to those mentioned, and belong to the so-called creeping lichens. One peculiarity of the Flora of the far north, which we have already mentioned, is their growth in clumps. Only thus can these tender organisms maintain their existence against the stern elements; and this indeed is a characteristic of all Arctic creation, which is seen in the animal world also, when its means of nourishment are hard to find. We will point only to the herds of reindeer, of lemmings, of walruses, of seals, &c., lastly to the vast flocks of birds; all of which illustrate the principle: common danger begets common defence.”

11. Our involuntary leisure at the Barentz Isles enabled us to make some precautionary preparations for our future contests with the ice; for a ship may be crushed by the ice and sink in a few minutes, as had happened some days previously, not far from us, to the yachts Valborg and Iceland. Provisions and ammunition for four weeks were got ready, and each man was entrusted with a special service, if it should ever come to this extremity. To guard against the dreaded pressures of the ice, heavy beams were hung round the hull of the vessel, so that the pressure on the ship might be distributed over a larger surface, and the vessel itself be raised instead of crushed. Our space on deck, somewhat limited at first, had been considerably enlarged, although our numerous sledges, our stock of drift-wood, and the rudder which had been unshipped, formed inconvenient obstacles, while the chained-up dogs occasioned some unpleasant surprises to those who had not succeeded in gaining their affections. These poor animals, without protection, suffered much from the cold rough weather which now prevailed, though subsequently some provision was made for their comfort. Sumbu and Pekel, the two Lapland dogs, were the most hardy, and slept without stirring, even when they were completely covered with snow. It was only after a long and stout resistance that the dogs became accustomed to the flesh of seals; at first they growled at every one who offered it to them.

FORMATION OF THE DEPÔT AT “THE THREE COFFINS.”

12. Aug. 14, we were threatened by the advance of an enormous line of pack-ice, which inclosed us in the little “docks” of the land-ice, and caused the Isbjörn to heel over. In the evening a bear came near this vessel, which was shot by Professor Höfer and Captain Kjelsen. On the following day, with the help of the dogs and sledges, we removed over the land-ice to “The Three Coffins” the provisions which were to form the depôt: 2,000 lbs. of rye-bread in casks, 1,000 lbs. of pease-sausages in tin cases. These were deposited in the crevice of a rock and secured against the depredations of bears. We felt assured of the conscientiousness of Russian or Norwegian fishermen, that they would make use of these provisions only under the pressure of urgent necessity. This depôt was intended to be the first place of refuge, in the event of the ship being lost.

THE “TEGETTHOFF” AND “ISBJÖRN” SEPARATE.

13. Both ships were dressed with flags, and round one common table we celebrated the birthday, Aug. 18, of the Emperor and King, Francis Joseph I. On Aug. 19 we fetched some drift-wood from the land, and saw from a height an “ice-hole” stretching to the north at no great distance from the coast. As we returned to the ship we came across a bear, which, being assailed by so many hunters at once, took to flight. Aug. 20, some changes in the ice seemed to make navigation possible, and we forthwith went on board the Isbjörn to bid adieu to our friends. It was no common farewell. A separation to those who are themselves separated from the world moves the heart to its depths. But besides this, in bidding adieu to Count Wilczek, we felt how much we were indebted to him, as the man who had fostered the work we were about to undertake, who dreaded no danger while providing for our safety in the event of a catastrophe to the expedition. Our high-minded friend was at this moment the embodiment of our country, which, honouring us with its confidence and trust, demanded that we should devote all our energies to the high objects of the expedition. Often afterwards did this adieu return to our memories. With a fresh wind from the north-east we passed the Isbjörn as we steamed towards the north, while this vessel, veiled in mist, soon disappeared from our eyes.

THE “TEGETTHOFF” FINALLY BESET.

14. Our prospects, so far as the object of our expedition was concerned, had meantime not improved. To cross the Frozen Sea to Cape Tscheljuskin in the present year was not to be dreamt of, and yet the thought of wintering in the north of Novaya Zemlya was positively intolerable. The navigable water was becoming narrower every day, and the ice seemed to increase in solidity, especially in the neighbourhood of the coast. In the afternoon of this day we ran into an “ice-hole,” but in the night barriers of ice stopped our further progress. As usual, the ship was made fast to a floe, the steam blown off, and we awaited the parting asunder of the ice.[16] Five walruses who had been watching us from a rock as we entered that ill-starred “ice-hole,” sprang into the water and disappeared.

15. Ominous were the events of that day, for immediately after we had made fast the Tegetthoff to that floe, the ice closed in upon us from all sides and we became close prisoners in its grasp. No water was to be seen around us, and never again were we destined to see our vessel in water. Happy is it for men that inextinguishable hope enables them to endure all the vicissitudes of fate, which are to test their powers of endurance, and that they can never see, as at a glance, the long series of disappointments in store for them! We must have been filled with despair, had we known that evening that we were henceforward doomed to obey the caprices of the ice, that the ship would never again float on the waters of the sea, that all the expectations with which our friends, but a few hours before, saw the Tegetthoff steam away to the north, were now crushed; that we were in fact no longer discoverers, but passengers against our will on the ice. From day to day we hoped for the hour of our deliverance! At first we expected it hourly, then daily, then from week to week; then at the seasons of the year and changes of the weather, then in the chances of new years! But that hour never came, yet the light of hope, which supports man in all his sufferings, and raises him above them all, never forsook us, amid all the depressing influence of expectations cherished only to be disappointed.

CHAPTER III.
DRIFTING IN THE NOVAYA ZEMLYA SEAS.

1. At the end of August the temperature in the Frozen Ocean is generally at the freezing point of the Centigrade thermometer, but this year (1872) it was constantly six degrees below it. A cold bleak air enveloped us, there was abundance of snow, the sun showed himself rarely, and for some days he had sunk, at midnight, under the horizon. The ship and her rigging were stiff with ice, and everything indicated that for us winter had begun. As the masses of ice which inclosed us consisted only of small floes, we were led to hope that the strong east winds would soon disperse them. But the very contrary really happened, for the low temperatures, the calms, and falls of snow, bound the floes of ice only the more closely together, and within a few days congealed them into one single field, in the midst of which the ship remained fast and immovable. Our surroundings were monotonous beyond description,—one vast unattractive white surface, and even the high-lands of Novaya Zemlya were covered with freshly fallen snow.

2. To reach the coast of Siberia under these circumstances had become an impossibility, and even in the event of our being liberated, the search for a winter harbour in Novaya Zemlya would be a matter of peril and difficulty. Yet we calculated confidently on this contingency and employed our enforced inactivity in completing our preparations for sledge journeys during the autumn, although we could not but feel, that their importance must be of secondary interest and value in a country so well known as Novaya Zemlya. Meantime we drifted slowly along the coast in a northerly direction and apparently under the influence of a current, which has been often observed on the northern coasts of Novaya Zemlya. But the gloom of our situation, as we became conscious of our captivity, was more distinctly and painfully felt. On the 1st of September the temperature sank nine degrees below zero (12° F.), and the few and limited spaces of open water round our floe disappeared. The sun now remained six hours below the horizon, and the formation of young ice in a single night often reached such a thickness, that we soon perceived that our last hope for this year lay in the setting-in of heavy equinoctial storms to break up the ice-fields.

ATTEMPTS TO GET FREE IN SEPTEMBER.

3. On the 2nd of September a fissure running through our floe reached the after-part of the Tegetthoff and opened into a “lead,” and even our floe partially broke up; but this availed us nothing, for the ship itself remained fast on a huge fragment. During the night of Sept. 3, the after-part of the Tegetthoff was gently raised for the first time by the pressure and driving from beneath of the ice; yet of the formidable nature of such pressure we had as yet no presentiment. Though our situation seemed desperate, it was not attended by immediate danger, and, condemned as we were to inactivity, we found the amusement and occupation we needed in skating on the young ice, which covered many of the newly-formed ice-holes between the ice-floes. Besides the duty of making and recording meteorological observations, the training of the dogs, the bringing ice to the kitchen to be transformed into water, the manufacture of oil, expeditions on foot to explore the country, were the only forms in which our energies could be exerted. Absolute loneliness surrounded us; even the Arctic sea-gull (Larus glaucus) and the grey stormy petrel (Procellaria glacialis, L.) of the polar regions, were but rarely seen, and a bear, which, Sept. 5, came within forty paces of the ship, was driven away by the awkwardness of our hunters. The cold became more and more intense and the weather more gloomy. Sept. 2, the cabin lamp had to be lit for the first time about half-past nine o’clock, and on the 3rd we began to heat the interior parts of the ship, the temperature of which had been for some time at zero; and on the 11th, the first fiery belts of the Aurora flamed in the northern heavens. On the 9th and 10th, there was a very heavy storm from the north-east, which drove us back for a short time towards the west, and partially broke up our floe, but all the efforts of the next week to destroy the connection of what remained by sawing and blasting proved unsuccessful. Blasting with powder, whether above or below the surface-ice, proved ineffectual. Even old fissures in the ice appeared to defy further disruption, segments which had been laboriously made by sawing, froze again almost immediately, and even the application of steam was powerless to set our floe in motion and force the breaking-up of the parts which had been sawn through. It was of no avail that, up to Oct. 7, we kept open a trench round the ship, by destroying in the day the ice which had been formed during the night: the expected disruption of our ice-field never happened. Dark streaks in the heavens still proclaimed that we were in the neighbourhood of open water, and though they seemed only to indicate “leads” of no great breadth or extent, they helped to sustain our hopes. But these were soon doomed to be disappointed, for even these “leads” closed up, and at the same time the temperature fell to an unusually low degree. On the 15th of September we had 15 degrees of cold, and on the 19th the temperature fell 18·6 degrees below zero (C.). To add to this, there were frequent falls of drifting snow. As long as fissures remained we had opportunities of seal-hunting, but by the end of the month the “ice-holes” were overspread with spongy ice, which hindered the movements of our boats within them. The alternate openings and closings of the water-ways around us seemed in our monotonous life a harmless spectacle, for the lofty walls of piled-up ice had not as yet for us the language of imminent and threatening dangers.

SEAL-HUNTING—SEPTEMBER 1872.

4. Sept. 22, there was a fissure in the ice about thirty paces from the ship, and we quickly put on board all the materials which were lying on the floe, believing that the moment of our deliverance had come. But no such moment came, nor did the equinoctial storms which we expected set in; we continued to drift still further to the north; and on Oct. 2, we had passed the seventy-seventh degree of north latitude. In the beginning of this month a storm, which lasted but a short time, opened up a large “ice-hole” near the after-part of the ship, and forthwith we set to work to open a passage through our floe in order to reach it, but two days afterwards this “ice-hole” also closed up. Yet amid all our mishaps we forgot not on October the 4th—the name-day of his Majesty the Emperor Francis Joseph I.—the homage which was due to our noble and gracious Sovereign. The ship was gaily dressed with flags, and a rifle-match, in which watches and pipes were the prizes, scared away for a short afternoon the sad impressions of the moment.

SHOOTING AT A TARGET, OCTOBER 1872.

5. Encounters with polar bears afforded us much excitement. On the 6th of October our first bear was killed and divided among the dogs, for as yet we had not learnt to regard the flesh of these animals as the most precious part of our provisions. A fox also, the first seen during this expedition, showed himself during the previous night. He had evidently come from Novaya Zemlya, and his curiosity had led him close to the ship, from whence he was driven by the dogs. It now became indispensable for everyone who left the immediate neighbourhood of the ship to carry arms with him, and the neglect of this precaution had sometimes rather ludicrous, at other times somewhat serious, consequences. On the 11th of October I left the ship unarmed, and with no other companion than our Lapland dog, Pekel, to employ myself in the harmless occupation of piling up a tower of ice. Working as I was in a stooping position, I was unconscious of what was immediately around me, when on a sudden the loud barking of Pekel caused me to raise myself, and I saw a bear quite close before me. Shaking his head and making a snuffling noise, he came on towards me. In the expectation that some of the people engaged on deck would see my critical position, I contented myself with shaking my fist at him, unwilling to reveal any weakness to my enemy. As this, however, seemed to produce no effect, I cried out repeatedly, “A bear!” At last I saw Klotz, who was on deck, go to the stand of arms, but with such stoical composure, that I ceased to trust to others, and left to the bear, who had now advanced to a distance of about fifteen paces from me, the glory of forcing his enemy to take to flight.

6. In the first days of October the temperature rose considerably, the thermometer standing a little below zero (C.). This was due to south-west winds, and to the temporary extension of the “ice-holes” in our immediate neighbourhood. The days now became shorter, the sun surrounded with red masses of clouds set behind barriers of blackish-blue ice, and an ever-deepening twilight followed his disappearance. Sept. 29, a “snowfinch” flew from the coast of Novaya Zemlya to the ship, hopped about the deck for a little time, and after delighting us all by his little song, again left us. Some few sea-gulls still wended their flight to the spaces of water in our neighbourhood. Skimming over the top of the mast, they seemed to gaze down upon us, and then with a shrill cry darted away like arrows towards the south. There was something melancholy in this departure of the birds; it seemed as if all creatures were retiring from the long reign of night which was before us. In order to divert our attention from the dreadful monotony of our captivity by some occupation in the open air, we fell on the plan of building houses of ice round the ship. The activity of a building-yard reigned on our ice-floe; heavy ice-tables were broken or sawed through, the dogs in the sledges carried the fragments to their appointed places, and with these blocks we raised crystal walls and towers. Snow, mixed with sea-water, furnished an inexhaustible source of the most excellent mortar; and while we worked laboriously at these meaningless erections, we earned at least by our labour the reward of sleep free from care.

PARHELIA ON THE COAST OF NOVAYA ZEMLYA.

7. As we drifted helplessly northward, the coasts of Novaya Zemlya receded gradually from our gaze. Hitherto we had lain close to the land, which with its rounded mountains and valleys filled with glaciers seemed a miniature of Alpine scenery. Daily almost the gigantic luminous arcs of parhelia stood above it, the usual precursors of stormy weather or heavy falls of snow. Towards the north and north-east the country becomes flatter, and runs into glacier-wastes little raised above the level of the sea. The topography of the northern parts of Novaya Zemlya is complete confusion. The only survey which exists—that of Lütke—extends no further than Cape Nassau. The maps of the Barentz Isles are frequently in contradiction with fact, and their correction is extremely desirable. Though this land was of no value for our object, yet it was still land, and it seemed also to us, drifting as we did, the symbol of the stable and immovable. But now it was gradually disappearing from our eyes. During September we had moved slowly, but with October we drifted at a greater rate, so that by the 12th of this month we saw nothing but a line of heights some thirty miles off, towards the south. At last every trace of land disappeared from our gaze; a hopeless waste received us, in which no man could tell how long we should be, or how far we should penetrate.

CHAPTER IV.
THE “TEGETTHOFF” FAST BESET IN THE ICE.