XXIXA. D. 1905THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE
Onceupon a time the Foul Fiend wanted a death-trap that would pick out all the bravest men and destroy them, so he invented the Northwest Passage.
So when Europe needed a short route to China round the north end of the Americas our seamen set out to find a channel, and even when they knew that any route must lie through the high Arctic, still they were not going to be beaten. Our white men rule the world because we refuse to be beaten.
The seamen died of scurvy, and it was two hundred years before they found out how to stay alive on salted food, by drinking lime juice. Safe from scurvy, they reached the gate of the passage at Lancaster Sound, but there the winter caught them, so that their ships were squashed in driving ice, and the men died of cold and hunger. Then the explorers got ships too strong to be crushed; they copied the dress of the Eskimo to keep them warm; and they carried food enough to last for years. Deeper and deeper they forced their way into the Arctic, but now they neared the magnetic pole where the compass is useless,in belts of drifting fog darker than midnight. Still they dared to go on, but the inner channels of the Arctic were found to be frozen until the autumn gales broke up the ice-fields, leaving barely six weeks for navigation before the winter frosts. At that rate the three-thousand-mile passage would take three years. Besides, the ship must carry a deck load of sledge dogs with their food, so that the men might escape overland in case they were cast away. Only a big ship could carry the supplies, but once again the seamen dared to try. And now came the last test to break men’s hearts—the sea lane proved to be so foul with shoals and rocks that no large vessel could possibly squeeze through. At last, after three hundred years, the British seamen had to own defeat. Our explorers had mapped the entire route, but no ship could make the passage because it was impossible to raise money for the venture.
Why should we want to get through this useless channel? Because it was the test for perfect manhood free from all care for money, utterly unselfish, of the highest intellect, patience, endurance and the last possible extremity of valor.
And where the English failed a Norseman, Nordenskjöld made the Northeast passage round the coast of Asia. Still nobody dared to broach the Northwest passage round America, until a young Norse seaman solved the riddle. Where no ship could cross the shoals it might be possible with a fishing boat drawing only six feet of water. But she could not carry five years’ supplies for men and dogs. Science came to the rescue with foods that would pack into a tenth part of their proper bulk, and as to the dog food,one might risk a deck load big as a haystack, to be thrown off if the weather got too heavy. Still, how could a fishing boat carry twenty men for the different expert jobs? Seven men might be discovered each an expert in three or four different trades; the captain serving as the astronomer and doctor, the cook as a naturalist and seaman. So Roald Amundsen got Doctor Nansen’s help, and that great explorer was backed by the king. Help came from all parts of Scandinavia, and a little from Great Britain.
TheGjöawas a forty-seven ton herring boat with a thirteen horse-power motor for ship’s pet, loaded with five years’ stores for a crew of seven men, who off duty were comrades as in a yachting cruise. In 1903 she sailed from Christiania and spent July climbing the north current in full view of the Greenland coast, the Arctic wonderland. At Godhaven she picked up stores, bidding farewell to civilization, passed Upernivik the last village, and Tassinssak, the last house on earth, then entered Melville Bay with its three-hundred-mile frontage of glacier, the most dangerous place in the Arctic. Beyond, near Cape York, she found a deck load of stores left for her by one of the Dundee whalers. There the people met the last white men, three Danish explorers whose leader, Mylius Erichsen, was making his way to death on the north coast of Greenland. So, like a barge with a hayrick, the overloadJoycrossed from the Greenland coast to Lancaster Sound, the gate of the Northwest passage, whose gatepost is Beechey Island, sacred to the memory of Sir John Franklin, and the dead of the Franklin search. TheJoyfound some sole leather better than her own, a heap of usefulcoal and an anvil, among the litter of old expeditions; made the graves tidy; left a message at Franklin’s monument, and went on. For three hundred years the channels ahead were known to have been blocked; only by a miracle of good fortune could they be free from ice; and this miracle happened, for the way was clear.
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“I was sitting,” writes Amundsen on August thirty-first, “entering the day’s events in my journal, when I heard a shriek—a terrific shriek, which thrilled me to the very marrow. It takes something to make a Norseman shriek, but a mighty flame with thick suffocating smoke was leaping up from the engine room skylight. There the tanks held two thousand two hundred gallons of petroleum, and close beside them a pile of soaked cotton waste had burst with a loud explosion. If the tanks got heated the ship would be blown into chips, but after a hard fight the fire was got under. All hands owed their lives to their fine discipline.”
A few days later theJoygrounded in a labyrinth of shoals, and was caught aground by a storm which lifted and bumped her until the false keel was torn off. The whole of the deck load had to be thrown overboard. The only hope was to sail over the rocks, and with all her canvas set she charged, smashing from rock to rock until she reached the farther edge of the reef which was nearly dry. “The spray and sleet were washing over the vessel, the mast trembled, and theGjöaseemed to pull herself together for a last final leap. She was lifted up and flung bodily on the bare rocks, bump, bump, with terrificforce.... In my distress I sent up (I honestly confess it) an ardent prayer to the Almighty. Yet another bump worse than ever, then one more, and we slid off.”
The shock had lifted the rudder so that it rested with the pintles on the mountings, and she would not steer; then somehow the pins dropped back into their sockets, the steersmen regained control and theJoywas saved, after a journey across dry rocks which ought to have smashed any ship afloat. She did not even leak.
Near the south end of King William’s Land a pocket harbor was found, and named Joy Haven. There the stores were landed, cabins were built, the ship turned into a winter house, and the crew became men of science. For two years they were hard at work studying the magnetism of the earth beside the Magnetic Pole. They collected fossils and natural history specimens, surveyed the district, studied the heavens and the weather, hunted reindeer for their meat and clothing, fished, and made friends with the scented, brave and merry Eskimos. During the first winter the thermometer dropped to seventy-nine degrees below zero, which is pretty near the world record for cold, but as long as one is well fed, with bowels in working order, and has Eskimo clothes to wear, the temperature feels much the same after forty below zero. Below that point the wind fails to a breathless calm, the keen dry air is refreshing as champagne, and one can keep up a dog-trot for miles without being winded. It is not the winter night that people dread, but the summer day with its horrible torment of mosquitoes. Then there is in spring and autumn,a hot misty glare upon the snow-fields which causes blindness with a deal of pain. The Arctic has its drawbacks, but one remembers afterward the fields of flowers, the unearthly beauty of the northern lights, the teeming game, and those long summer nights when the sun is low, filling the whole sky with sunset colors.
The greatest event of the first year was the finding of an Eskimo hunter to carry letters, who came back in the second summer, having found in Hudson’s Bay an exploring vessel of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police of Canada. Major Moody, also the captain of the Arctic, and the Master of an American whaler, sent their greetings, news of the outer world, some useful charts, and a present of husky dogs.
The second summer was over. The weather had begun to turn cold before a northerly gale smashed the ice, and sea lanes opened along the Northwest passage. On August thirteenth theJoyleft her anchorage, under sail and steam, to pick her way without compass through blinding fog, charging and butting through fields of ice, dodging zigzag through shoals, or squeezing between ice-fields and the shore. There was no sleep for anybody during the first three nights, but racking anxiety and tearing overstrain until they reached known waters, a channel charted by the old explorers. They met an American whaler, and afterward had clear open water as far as the mouths of the Mackenzie River. A few miles beyond that the ice closed in from the north and piled up-shore so that the passage was blocked and once more theJoywent into winter quarters. But not alone. Ladies must have corsets ribbed with whalebone fromthe bowhead whale. Each whale head is worth two thousand pounds, so a fleet of American whalers goes hunting in the Arctic. Their only port of refuge is Herschel Island off the Canadian coast, so there is an outpost of the Northwest Mounted Police, a mission station and a village of Eskimos.
TheJoycame to anchor thirty-six miles to the east of Herschel Island, beside a stranded ship in charge of her Norse mate, and daily came passengers to and fro on the Fort Macpherson trail. From that post runs a dog-train service of mails connecting the forts of the Hudson’s Bay Company all the way up the Mackenzie Valley to Edmonton on the railway within two thousand miles. The crew of theJoyhad company news, letters from home, and Captain Amundsen went by dog-train to the mining camps on the Yukon where at Eagle City he sent telegrams.
At last in the summer of 1906 theJoysailed on the final run of her great voyage, but her crew of seven was now reduced to six, and at parting she dipped her colors to the cross on a lone grave. The ice barred her passage, but she charged, smashing her engines, and charged again, losing her peak which left the mainsail useless. So she won past Cape Prince of Wales, completing the Northwest passage, and entering Bering Sea called at Cape Nome for repairs. There a thousand American gold miners welcomed the sons of the vikings with an uproarious triumph, and greeted Captain Amundsen with the Norse national anthem.