Helen S. Wright

“ 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, 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 ”

“ The shadows of night came upon them rapidly, and the tempestuous roaring, grinding, and tossing of the ice was all that could be seen or heard.
A most uncomfortable night followed their unlucky adventure. Their boat was the only available shelter, and this served for a covering under which one man at a time took an hour’s uncomfortable rest, while the others exercised to keep their bodies from freezing. The next morning at dawn, upon mounting the cliffs once more, their alarm was increased by the melancholy fact that the ship had completely disappeared from view. ”

“ At this juncture it seemed as if the hand of Providence intervened, for a huge wave lifted them across a sand bar, between a narrow opening of high rocks, and they found themselves in calm water, where the next day they made a successful landing. The land proved a barren and treeless island, fortunately well supplied with game, but there was no hut or shelter of any kind, showing it to be uninhabited. Such of the crew as were able made shelters under projecting sand-banks, using sail-cloth to keep out the wind and cold, and there they brought their sick and dying comrades. ”

“ With the breaking up of the ice in the spring, preparations were made for returning home.
In Hudson’s own bay, in the cold embrace of the shores he had explored, Henry Hudson divided the last remnants of food equally among his men. They were a famished, despairing crew, maddened with suffering. The cry for bread was in their vitals, and there was no bread. Hunger and misery made their brains reel, robbed them of their godliness, and reduced them to wild animals at bay. ”

“ Back once more—step by step—over hummock, crevasse, and floe, over thin and treacherous ice, across the big lead whose thin, undulating surface, some two miles in width, barely supported the weight of a man, in his frantic race with death.
Back once more to the south, baffled once more in his schemes, but sterner than ever in the purpose to die or win “because the thing he has set himself to do is a part of his being.” Peary returned to the United States, the plans of his eighth and final journey already maturing in his mind. ”

“ The Pole at last! For ages the northern lights have beckoned the adventurous spirits to fathom the phenomena of the great unknown, have lured man into harbours fantastic with the frozen ice of centuries, have inspired him to cross the Greenland ice cap—or make his lonely trail through the “barrens” of North America or the desolate “tundra” of Siberia, his dauntless courage unquenched by previous records of privation, starvation, and death itself. ”

“ These men were shelterless, with but a small food supply, with impassable barriers of ice north and south. “Some hunted on land, others on ice; some put up stone huts, others searched for cairns and records.” The Arctic night had settled upon them before their huts were barely finished, these huts of heavy granite stones, dug from the snow and ice, lifted with swollen and bleeding hands, put in place with back-breaking efforts, by enfeebled, weary men, and into them they crawled with torn clothing, hand and footgear in holes, covering shivering, aching bodies. ”

“ Kane’s fearful experiences in the Arctic night, with insufficient food for dogs and men, suffering from the ravages of scurvy, compares his own condition in the comfortable warm quarters on board the Fram. No ageing or depressing effects had been felt by any member of his party. The quiet, regular life seemed to agree with them, and with good food, in profusion and variety, a warm shelter, plenty of exercise in the open air, and cheerful diversions in the shape of instructive books and amusing games, the men kept up a cheerful balance of good health and spirits. ”

“ Lieutenant Bellot and his two men then hauled the boat on to the sledge and ran it up to the windward side of the ice, intending to launch it at once and make for the shore. Before this could be accomplished, the ice had rapidly increased its motion and drifted so far from the shore as to make it impossible for them to reach it. Madden and Harvey, with indescribable feelings of alarm, hastened to an eminence, and for two long hours watched their comrades drifting out to sea in the teeth of a bitter breeze—amid the turbulent icebergs. ”

“ Another time during the same sledge journey we heard from the tent in which we rested the cook, who was employed outside, cry out, ‘A bear! a great bear! No! a reindeer, a very little reindeer!’ The same instant a well-directed shot was fired, and the bear-reindeer was found to be a very small fox, which thus paid with its life for the honour of having for some moments played the part of a big animal. From these accounts it may be seen how difficult navigation among drift-ice must be in unknown waters. ”

“ I would have ordered another shot, but no discipline could have controlled the men. With a wild yell, each vociferating according to his own impulse, they urged their boats upon the floes. A crowd of hands seized the seal, and bore him up to safer ice. The men seemed half crazy. I had not realized how much we were reduced by absolute famine. They ran over the floe, crying and laughing, and brandishing their knives. It was not five minutes before every man was sucking his bloody fingers, or mouthing long strips of raw blubber. Not an ounce of this seal was lost. ”

“ No century has produced a more daring or renowned mariner than Henry Hudson, or one whose melancholy fate has provoked more pity. Down through the decades the story of his adventures has been told and retold at the fireside of the old to the eager ears and quickening imagination of the young.
Talented, indefatigable, fearless, his achievements, in the infancy of Arctic exploration, handicapped by the lack of all that invention and science has secured to modern explorers, place him in the first rank, with the greatest navigators the world has known. ”

“ In an endeavour to answer signals from De Long, Melville shouted down the wind that he must run or swamp—De Long waved back, motioning him onward. Melville hoisted sail, shook out one reef, and the whale-boat shot forward like an arrow. De Long then signalled Chipp; for an instant the second cutter was seen in the dim twilight to rise on the crest of a wave, then sink out of sight; once more she appeared; a tremendous sea broke over her; a man was seen striving to free the sail ”

“ There Barentz, there Behring,—there Henry Hudson and old Baffin. Three hearty cheers for Von Wrangell, Ross and Parry and brave old Sir John Franklin! Crozier and his men line at attention and salute!
Ah! Elisha Kane, the beauty of a noble soul lies written in a gentle face. Francis Hall, thou dreamer, stand forth and welcome the arriving guest. German, Austrian, Norwegian and Italian, stand thou behind the board, lift high the diamond chalice and quaff the limpid draft in honour of the hero, for he comes.
In one voice, down the ages goes the cry, “All praise to him who conquers!” ”

“ For four days Parry, accompanied by a party of six, made a laborious and fatiguing advance over the uneven hummocks of ice that confronted them. At times open water made the journey still more perilous. Their exertions were at last repaid when they came in view of a bold cape, where they found the strait at its narrowest part about two miles across. To the westward the land receded until it became invisible, and Captain Parry beheld the great Polar Sea, into which he had long hoped to force his way. Naming this the Fury and Hecla Strait, he made ready for the return to the ships. ”

“ The night was black and stormy, and in a few moments the floe and its precious freight could no longer be seen through the drifting snow. Before the separation, it had been noticed that the floe was much broken on its edge; that the provisions and stores were separated from each other by rapidly widening cracks; that the men also were on different pieces of ice; that active efforts were being made to launch boats in order to bring the scattered people together. Several men were seen rushing toward the ship as she was leaving, but they failed to reach her. ”

“ On the 23d of August, a barrier of ice across Lancaster Sound obliged Captain Young to retrace his steps. Snow, sleet, and wind prevailed as they scudded onward, an ice blink frequently ahead; then the inevitable floe in streams and loose pieces, with the sea dashing over them as they flew between. ”

“ Weary days dragged along without novelty or change. “So far as I know,” writes De Long in January, 1881, “never has an Arctic expedition been so unprofitable as this. People beset in the pack before have always drifted somewhere to some land, but we are drifting about like modern Flying Dutchmen, never getting anywhere, but always restless and on the move. Coals are burning up, food being consumed, the pumps are still going, and thirty-three people are wearing out their hearts and souls like men doomed to imprisonment for life. ”

“ Between the lines of their simple language describing stern facts or desperate realities, one reads the character and temperament of the adventurer; one gathers lessons of patience, self-sacrifice, and endurance unsurpassed in the history of mankind, and perhaps appreciates, for the first time, the splendid fibre of which he is made. Stripped of the conventions and luxuries of civilized life, he plunges into the great unknown to fight a relentless war against the greatest foes to his existence,—Cold, Starvation, and Death. ”

“ DEATH FROM STARVATION
As the gaunt and ghostly form of Death laid its fatal touch upon the weakest one by one, a strong man stole food from comrades, and stole again, and justly forfeited his right to live. Then one by one they died, the Eskimo, Christiansen, from exhaustion, and Lynn. “He asked for water just before dying; and we had none to give.”
Then Rice sacrificed his life for others, dying in the arms of his comrade, Frederick, near Baird Inlet, where he had gone in search of a hundred pounds of English beef abandoned in November, that Elison might be brought to camp alive. ”

“ In January, according to the record of Willoughby’s journal, all were living. In the spring Russian sailors, venturing in these high latitudes, were surprised to see two ships frozen in the ice. The relentless grip of the Arctic winter still held them fast; the hand of death in its most gruesome shape had reaped its harvest. Not a man survived. How brief the details, yet the imagination shudders at the agonies of their last days,—the cold, intense, congealing ”

“ A wonderful Providence arrested the fall of the sledge; at a depth of about thirty feet it stuck fast between the sides of the crevasse, just as I was being dragged to the edge of the abyss by its weight. The sledge having jammed itself in, I lay on my stomach close to the awful brink, the rope which attached me to the sledge tightly strained, and cutting deep into the snow. The situation was all the more dreadful as I, the only person present accustomed to the [293] dangers of glaciers, lay there unable to stir. ”

“ Though he may fall by the wayside a victim to the Cause, or crawl home on hands and knees over the rough fastnesses of the frozen wilderness, famishing,—perhaps dying,—the record of his work lives on; the fundamental principles of great character do not perish, but stand through the centuries, a star of hope to the weary [vi] traveller on his pilgrimage along the well-trodden pathway of everyday life, and stirs the layman to a better endurance of the burdens and perplexities of the common lot. ”

“ Poor Bellot—too brave—too young to die—beloved by comrades, mourned by the simple Eskimos he had befriended—cherished in tender memory by the nation that gave him birth and by Great Britain for whom he gave his life,—his honoured name is linked in immortality with those brave heroes of the Arctic, whose sepulchre is the frozen deep, whose monuments are the eternal snows of the Great White North. ”

“ I feel to-night that I am getting rapidly to the end of my rope. Each day strengthens the conviction, not only that we can never reach Grinnell Land, with provisions for a journey up the coast to the Polar Sea, but that it cannot be done at all. ”

“ The thrilling adventures in the American wilderness told by Franklin, Richardson, Back, and others, foretold that this sledge journey proposed by M’Clure would be long and hazardous in the extreme. The weaker ones were to undertake it, thirty of the healthiest men being retained to stand by the ships with the captain.
The curse of scurvy had long since stricken many of the crew; these could not hope to brave another Arctic winter, and their only chance was to penetrate the wilderness to civilization, however difficult and dangerous the undertaking. ”

“ Notwithstanding this sure token of the impossibility of proceeding much further, we continued to go due north for about nine versts, when we arrived at the edge of an immense break in the ice, extending east and west further than the eye could reach, and which at the narrowest part was more than a hundred fathoms across.... We climbed one of the loftiest ice hills, where we obtained an extensive view towards the north, and whence we beheld the wide, immeasurable ocean spread before our gaze. ”