W. J. Gordon

“ At one moment the sea was bursting upon the ice blocks and burying them deep beneath its wave, and the next, as the buoyancy brought them up again, the water was pouring in foaming cataracts over their edges, the masses rocking and labouring in their bed, grinding and striving with each other until one was either split with the shock or lifted on to the top of its neighbour. ”

“ The rays reach almost to the horizon; the whole sky is in flames. Nature displays before us such an exhibition of fireworks as transcends the powers of imagination to conceive. Involuntarily we listen; such a spectacle must, we think, be accompanied with sound. But unbroken stillness prevails, not the least sound strikes on the ear. Once more it becomes clear over the ice, 68and the whole phenomenon has disappeared with the same inconceivable rapidity with which it came, and gloomy night has again stretched her dark veil over everything. ”

“ For a short time it remains stationary, then suddenly springs to life. The waves of light drive violently from east to west; the edges assume a deep red and green colour and dance up and down. The rays shoot up more rapidly; they become shorter; all rise together and approach nearer and nearer to the magnetic Pole. It looks as if there were a race among the rays, and that each aspired to reach the Pole first. And now the point is reached, and they shoot out on every side, to the north and the south, to the east and the west. ”

“ The advance was then resumed along the west coast of Crown Prince Rudolf Land round the imposing headland they named Cape Auk—the rocky cliffs being covered with little auks and other seabirds, enormous flocks flying up and filling the air, the whole region seeming to be alive with their incessant whirring—and following the line of Teplitz Bay, Payer mounted one 70of the bergs detached from a glacier and saw open water with ice bounding it on the horizon. ”

“ REINDEER
113The tundra has no more characteristic animal than the reindeer. Over the mossy hillocks and the matted tops of the dwarf birches he runs, or through the rivers and lakes he swims, with his broad-hoofed, spade-like feet never at a loss to find a footing. In the long winter he is protected by his thick skin against the influence of the cold, and is seldom at starvation point, as he digs for food in the deepest snow, and is by no means particular what he eats; and in the short summer he is in luxurious ease, for the tundra, as we have seen, is not always as bad as it is painted. ”

“ On that farthest to the north, which is almost touched by the water of the channel, we plant the staff from which our flag waves. The air is very clear; between the north-east and the north-west there stand out distinctly, some sharply pointed, others rounded, dark or blue and white, often with strange shapes, the innumerable pinnacles of the great blocks of ice raised up by the pressure. Farther away again on the bright horizon in a chain from east to west is a great azure wall which from afar seems insurmountable." The latitude was 86° 34 ́. ”

“ The cold, too, proved singularly searching and severe. During the course of the day the damp exhalations of the body little by little became condensed in their outer garments, which became transformed into suits of ice-armour, so hard that if they could have been got off they could have stood by themselves, and they crackled audibly at every movement. The clothes were so stiff that the sleeve of Nansen's coat rubbed deep sores in his wrist, one of which got frost-bitten, the wound growing deeper and deeper and nearly reaching the bone. ”

“ The throng of thousands of swimming reindeer, the sound produced by the striking together of their antlers, the swift canoes dashing in amongst them, the terror of the frightened animals, the danger of the hunters, the shouts of warning advice or applause from their friends, the blood-stained water, and all the accompanying circumstances, form a whole which no one can picture to himself without having witnessed the scene. ”

“ Through a chain of disasters caused by storms 99and fogs and snow and the state of the ice, they threaded their way, sometimes by sledge, sometimes by kayak, through mazes of open channels, leaping from floe to floe and ferrying back to get their baggage over, hundreds of yards on mere brash, dragging the sledges after them in constant fear of their capsizing into the water. Then the ice gave out and, taking to their kayaks, they sailed and paddled to what is now known as Frederick Jackson Island in the north of the Franz Josef Archipelago. ”

“ Robert Brown, who worked out this remarkable chain, "the diatom staining the broad frozen sea, again supporting myriads of living beings which crowd there to feed on it, and these again supporting the huge whale. Thus it is no stretch of the imagination to say 266that the greatest animal depends for its existence on a being so minute that it takes thousands to be massed together before they are visible to the naked eye." ”

“ The day on which this snow was found, the 30th of August, was so warm that the party were glad to pull off their coats and waistcoats. "The valleys were fertile in grasses and moss; and the fineness of the weather had drawn forth a number of butterflies, spiders, and other insects, which would, by their gay colours and active motions, have almost deceived us into an idea that we were not in the Arctic regions, had not the Frozen Strait, filled with huge masses of moving ice, reminded us but too forcibly, that we were in the most dangerous of them." ”

“ There is, indeed, a kind of majesty, not to be conveyed in words, in these extraordinary accumulations of snow and ice in the valleys, and in the rocks above rocks and peaks above peaks, in the mountain groups, seen rising above the ordinary elevation of the clouds, and terminating occasionally in crests of snow, especially when you approach the shore under the shelter of the impenetrable density of a summer fog ”

“ In the north was the ever-present barrier of ice, more distant some years than others, but always there to come south and hold the islands in its grip when the fishery was over, and those who came early and those who stayed late saw enough of the wintry landscape to make them doubt if life were possible under such conditions. ”

“ Arriving at Pet Strait they found it so blocked with ice that no passage was possible, and Barents, in search of information, went ashore on the mainland south of the strait and made friends—in a way—with the Samoyeds, whose appearance, as described by Gerrit de Veer, was "like that of wild men," dressed as they were in deerskins from head to foot, those of importance wearing caps of coloured cloth lined with fur; for the most part short of stature, with broad flat faces, small eyes, and bow legs; their hair worn long, plaited, and hanging down their backs. ”

“ Further, the Greenland flora includes a series of Siberian plants apparently from seeds drifted there by some current. Not only do trees and seeds travel by water from Asia westward to America; at Godthaab, for instance, on the western coast of Greenland, there was found a throwing-stick of a shape and ornamentation used only by the Alaskan Eskimos; and three years after the foundering of the Jeannette to the north of the New Siberian Islands there were found on the south-west coast of Greenland a number of articles in the drift-ice that must have come from the sunken vessel. ”

“ In exposed places near the coast it is little else than gravel beds interspersed with patches of peat and clay, with scarcely a rush or a sedge to break the monotony, but by far the greater part of it is a gently undulating plain, broken up by lakes, rivers, swamps, and bogs; the lakes with patches of green water-plants, the rivers flowing between sedges and rushes, the swamps the breeding haunts of ruffs and phalaropes, the bogs dotted with the white fluffy seeds of the cotton-grass. ”

“ The amount of credit due to a man who starts to find one thing and lights upon another has always been a contentious matter, and this expedition afforded an extreme case for such speculations. The plan was to go east-north-east, the wintering places being undetermined, though they might be Cape Chelyuskin, the New Siberian Islands, or any land that might be discovered; and a return to Europe through Bering Strait lay among the possibilities of the venture, as an endeavour was to be made to reach the coast of Siberia in boats and penetrate south down one of the large rivers of 65Northern Asia. ”

“ Kennedy wintered at Batty Bay in North Somerset, and during a remarkable sledge journey, in which he made the circuit of the island, he and Bellot reached Brentford Bay, and, on the 21st of April, 1852, discovered the strait named after the gallant Frenchman. But he found no traces of the expedition through turning to the north and crossing to Prince of Wales Island, instead of going to the south at the western mouth of the strait. He had, however, discovered the termination of Boothia, the north point of the American continent which men had been seeking for three centuries. ”

“ For the boundaries of the frozen north are not dependent on a line of latitude, and have never been the same from period to period, or even from year to year. In some cases they have changed considerably within the 2Christian era, and it is evident that the ice is not eternal. The fossils declare that the climate round the North Pole has varied greatly, and must in comparatively recent ages have been comfortably warm, so genial indeed that some people would have us believe that men came from there in their last distribution. ”

“ It is inhabited by people who have the same aspect as the Chukche, but are quite a different nation, and speak their own language, though they are not numerous. It is half a day's voyage with boats from the Noss to the island. There are no sables on the island, and no other animals but foxes, wolves, and reindeer. Beyond the island is a large continent that can be scarcely discerned from it, and that only on clear days; in calm weather one may row over the sea from the island to the continent, which is inhabited by a people who in every particular resemble the Chukches. ”

“ From our position of comparative security the danger we had so narrowly escaped was strikingly apparent as we gazed with wonder and awe at the power exerted by the ice driven past us to the eastward with irresistible force by the wind and flood-tide at the rate of about a mile an hour. The projecting 251points of each passing floe which grounded near the shore in about ten fathoms of water would be at once wrenched off from its still moving parent mass ”

“ After wintering at York Factory, Rae reached Repulse Bay with two boats, the Magnet and North Pole, on the 25th of July, 1846, and in his usual style started immediately across the chain of lakes and portages which make up the isthmus that now bears his name, launching his boats in the tidal water of Committee Bay on the 1st of August. Stopped by ice on the west side and then on the east he returned to Repulse Bay, where he built Fort Hope of stones and roofed it with sails, and lived in it through the winter on what he could shoot and catch, for many weeks venturing on only one meal a day. ”

“ Greenland, like the eastern coast of the continent, was duly colonised, its two chief settlements being one just round Cape Farewell, the other further north on the same coast. In those days the island, or chain of islands beneath an ice-cap, as many think it is, would appear to have had a milder climate than it has now. The colonies throve, their population becoming numerous enough to require a series of seventeen bishops, the last one dying about 1540, to superintend their spiritual welfare. ”

“ The one conspicuous triumph of the expedition was the journey of James Ross to the site of the Magnetic North Pole, which he found on the western coast of Boothia on the 1st of June, 1831. In the younger Ross's own words, "the land at this place is very low near the coast, but it rises into ridges of fifty or sixty feet high about a mile inland. We could have wished that a place so important had possessed more of mark or note. It was scarcely censurable to regret that there was not a mountain to indicate a spot to which so much of interest must ever be attached ”

“ When a few fathoms from the ice those on board searched with anxiety for an opening in the pack, but saw nothing but an unbroken line of furious breakers with huge masses heaving and plunging with the waves and dashing together with a violence that nothing but a solid body seemed likely to withstand ”

“ The incitement of prices proportionate to the latitude attracted hundreds of annual settlers, who throve on the sale of brandy, wine, tobacco, and sundries to the whale-fishers in shops of all varieties, including bakehouses, where the blowing of a horn let the sailors know that the bread had just 25been drawn hot from the oven. In fact, hot rolls and every delicacy could be had in Smeerenberg, which the Dutch averred was as flourishing as Batavia, founded by them a few years before. And when winter was just about due every man—and woman—went back to Holland. ”

“ Already had the fertility of the soil and the immeasurable extent and richness in grass of the pastures drawn forth from one of our walrus-hunters, a middle-aged man who is owner of a little patch of ground among the fells of Northern Norway, a cry of envy at the splendid land our Lord had given the Russian, and of astonishment that no creature pastured, no scythe mowed, the grass. ”