Arctic hare

“ A welcome addition to the meagre fare of the Arctic navigator is furnished by the Arctic Hare (Lepus glacialis) , which, like the reindeer, collects in herds or troops as winter approaches. As many as two hundred have been seen at a time; and at one of their favourite haunts—Cape Dundas, Melville Island—might be seen a complete highway, three yards broad, which the tread of their numbers had beaten through the snow. In winter they seek their food and burrow for protection under the snow-crust. ”

“ The Arctic zone is part of a circumpolar area, which is very much the same in North America, Asia and Europe; and in any of these continents the fauna differs much more from that of the contiguous zone to the south than from the Arctic fauna of another continent. There are some local differences, but the characteristic mammals of this Arctic zone are the Polar Bear, Arctic Fox, Musk Ox, Barren-ground Caribou, Lemming, Arctic Hare, and a marmot. Most, if not all, of these forms are of Old World origin.
[149]
Fig. ”

“ But if so, why should this Hare at present live and [Pg 159] thrive in Ireland, which has a particularly mild climate in winter, and be absent from so many continental stations where the temperature more resembles that of its native home? If we suppose that the European Hare migrated to Europe from the east, after the Arctic Hare had become established in Western Europe, and drove the latter into the mountains or northward whenever the two came into contact, we should have, it seems to me, a better explanation of the range presented by the two species. ”

“ In the range of the Altaï, and extending even into Kamtschatka, we meet with the Alpine Hare (Lagomys Alpinus) ; a small rodent, scarcely exceeding a guinea-pig in size, and measuring in length nine inches only: it has a long head, with short, broad, and rounded ears. Its favourite places of sojourn are among the rocks and cataracts of wild wooded regions, where it forms burrows beneath the rocks, or inhabits their fissures. When the sky is bright, and the sunshine genial, they seldom leave their holes in the daytime ”

“ The manner in which animal life adapts itself to its environment is beautifully illustrated by the arctic hares of north Greenland and Ellesmere Land. There the conditions are rigorously arctic and continuous winter night extends through a period of several months. In all this region the scanty and dwarfed vegetation is covered with snow and ice the larger part of the year. The hares living there are, with little question, a geographic race of those living farther south, but have developed into larger and stronger animals, with heavier fur, to meet the sterner conditions of life. ”

“ Both, indeed, are Arctic animals, though they migrate to southern latitudes when the severer cold and depth of snow prevents them from obtaining the moss and lichens on which they feed. The little Polar hare ranges round the Arctic Circle; but there is one animal, the musk-ox, which, being truly an Arctic quadruped, is unknown either in Asia or Europe, and therefore belongs exclusively to America.
Of the feathered tribes, the larger number of individuals, as might be supposed, are common to the northern portions of the three continents. ”

“ Some notes on the general results obtained by the expedition in zoology, botany, and geology, have appeared in the Academy. The two naturalists under whose care these departments [334] were placed,—Captain Feilden, in the Alert, and Mr. Hart, in the Discovery,—worked with unflagging energy and no small success.
Of mammals, the species found farthest north were the Arctic fox, the wolf, the ermine, the Polar hare, the lemming, and the musk-ox,—all of which were seen on the shores of the great Polar Basin or Palæocrystic Sea. No cetaceans were sighted north of Payer Harbour, near Cape Sabine ”

“ In the region between the areas in which the summer coat remains wholly white and where it is completely changed to grayish, there is a gradual transition, with the lessening severity of the climate, through every intermediate degree between the two. As in the case of the snowshoe rabbit, the large hind feet and long spreading toes of its big northern relative are so heavily covered with hair that they form broad fluffy pads, which enable the hares to travel lightly over the arctic snowfields.
The distribution of arctic hares is confined to the barrens or tundras beyond the limit of trees. ”

“ During the first week of my stay in Assistance Harbour, immense flights of wild fowl were to be seen amongst the loose ice in Barrow's Strait; but when the pack had dispersed, and left nothing but an open sea, the birds appeared to have gone elsewhere for food. Indeed, I always observed that at the edge of ice more birds were invariably to be found in the Arctic regions, than in large or open water,—a rule equally applicable to the whale, seal, and bear, all of which are to be found at the floe-edge, or in loosely-packed ice. ”

“ An air insect would be, in this dreary waste of cold, an impossibility greater than the diamond in the snow-drift. Save a seal and a fox, nothing sharing our principle of vitality has greeted us for months. The teeming myriads of life which characterized the Arctic summer have gone. The anatidæ are clamoring in the great bays and water-courses of the middle south. The gulls have sought the regions of open water. ”

“ The sun sinks below the horizon, and it is not seen again for months together; darkness is around him, and one dreary mass of snow covers the face of nature. The intense cold prevents him often from venturing beyond the shelter with which he has surrounded his vessel; or if he is tempted to do so, frost-bites may attack his hands and his feet, and deprive him of their use. Sometimes the Arctic explorer has had to journey for weeks together across the barren waste of ice or snow-covered ground, dragging his sledge after him, and sleeping night after night under the thin roof of a canvas tent ”

“ Their strident clamour, the ceaseless washing of the surface, the moaning of the wind, the steely rush of the drift, the piteous wail of the dogs, and all the strange noises and voices of the storm, added to the gloom and awful melancholy of that moonless night.
We need not wonder that the Eskimos of the Arctic wilderness are as fearful of a tempest as are the Bedouins of the African desert. It overwhelms the one with a cloud of snow, and it buries the other in a cloud of sand; and each demands and receives its quota of victims. ”

“ There must be no delay in taking off our sealskins; they are already moist with condensation, and a cold steam streams from them to the floor. Little lumps of ice on the eyelashes and brows soon melt, but a solid mass cementing beard and moustache together resists even warm water for a time. Hair about the mouth is a nuisance in the Arctic regions, and everyone keeps close cropped. ”

“ Two hundred more, including our shot and bullet-bags, were at the Cape Hatherton station; and Metek’s load was probably by this time lying on the ice opposite M’Gary Island. Like Robinson Crusoe with his powder, the reflection came over me:—“Good God! what will become of us if all this is destroyed?”
Only by men experienced in the rapid changes of Arctic ice can the full force of this reflection be appreciated. A single gale might convert the precarious platform, over which we were travelling, into a tumultuous ice-pack. ”

“ THE VOYAGE OF THE “TEGETTHOFF” Many routes to the North Pole had now been tried and found wanting. Expeditions had started out by Behring Strait, through Smith Sound, up the eastern coast of Greenland and from Spitzbergen, but they had one and all been frustrated by those great Arctic currents, which, rushing down from the Polar basin, carried with them such quantities of ice that real progress towards the Pole was practically impossible. There still remained one route, however, which had scarcely been tried at all, namely that which lay round the north-east shores of Nova Zembla. ”

“ WE BREAK INTO SOCIETY THE formation of new ice on the surface of Etah Fiord grimly brought home to us the dread reality that the relentless Arctic winter was now all but upon us. To flee before this dire warning was our only recourse, and the Commander ruefully gave the word to pack up and make all speed for home. The elements had barred our way to the great unknown area of the Polar Sea, but we had at least carried the outer ramparts through our new and untried means of attack by air. Now the time for temporizing had passed, and we must fly before young ice, snowstorms and September winds. ”

“ Countless streams issuing from the snow would force these spots to put on the livery of summer, and rapid torrents would precipitate themselves down gorges of snow and rock; but at present all was stiff and stark, save that stunted green herbage seemed to show that we were in the fancied paradise of Franz-Josef Land, though when compared even with other Arctic lands it was but a scene of desolation. Closer to the shore above the level of the sea, in a belt of yellow sandstone, we found much lignite firmly frozen in the ground, resembling drift-wood a century old. ”

“ In addition, nearly all the Esquimaux dogs used for drawing the sleighs had died from some unaccountable reason, and the explorers were compelled to shelter in snow huts at a spot nearly forty-five miles inland from Desolation Inlet.
Already the crew had donned their Arctic clothing, for the temperature was falling rapidly as the vessel reached the high latitudes.
Drifting bergs, some several hundred feet in height, were constantly being met, proving the Norwegian whaler's statement that the ice was breaking up earlier than usual. There was no longer any night. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Two or three days later the expedition arrived at a settlement named Proven, where it was joined by the Eskimo dog-driver, Hans Christian, the attendant of Kane, Hayes, and Hall, in their several expeditions. At Proven the adventurers received and answered their last letters from “home.”
Striking northward through Baffin Bay, they reached Cape York on the 25th of July, and met with a company of the misnamed Arctic Highlanders, who traversed the ice-floes in their dog-sledges, and soon fraternized with the seamen. ”

“ 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 [82] gradually melt away. ”

“ There were many drifts and patches along the shore that were not easily crossed except on snow-shoes. With these, travelling over smooth snow was easy, and a man could even pull along another seated on a small sledge, faster than a third could wade beside them. No Arctic expedition had hitherto used snow-shoes, though the Germans three hundred miles south of us on the east coast of Greenland had found it necessary to extemporise rough substitutes during the winter. ”

“ Weaving in and out among the bergs, always vigilant, always tense, we continued on into the Arctic wastes. During this anxious period I was on lookout, and my every minute was occupied in watching for the bergs and directing the helmsman how to avoid them. Out of the white background of the fog these sinister mountains of ice would emerge, first as a thin black line on the sea’s surface; then taking shape until high above they towered, grey and lustreless. On all sides they appeared, until the sea was like a boulder-strewn plain through which we threaded our mazy way. ”

“ Abundance of woollen under-garments and light furs best answer this purpose. The woollen under-garments should not fit too closely, so as to hinder the circulation of the blood; and the fur coat should be wide, and reach half-way down the leg. It would be a great mistake to take the clothing of the northern nomad as our pattern. Our powers of enduring the severities of Arctic climate are inferior to theirs, so that we cannot attempt to imitate their hardihood; but our own industries enable us to surpass all their resources. ”

“ They had only provisions for a fortnight or three weeks, and little prospect of adding to their supplies, while, to make matters worse, they had no warm clothing with them. It is to be feared that the latest victims claimed by the Arctic regions must have suffered severely before death brought them release from their troubles and robbed the world of two of its ablest and most enthusiastic men of science.
So ends the story of Arctic exploration up to the present time. ”

“ T HE port of Pröven is securely sheltered by its monster hills. But they can not be said to smile a welcome upon the navigator. A smiling country, like a smiling face, needs some provision of fleshly integuments; and no earthly covering masks the grinning rocks of Pröven. They look as if the process of crumbling, and wrinkling, and splitting, and splintering had been at work on them since the first Arctic frost succeeded the last metamorphic fire; and even now great ledges are wedged off from the hillsides by the ice, and roll clattering down the slopes into the very midst of the settlement. ”