SOUNDING IN THE FROZEN OCEAN.
SOUNDING IN THE FROZEN OCEAN.
10. During the summer Orel took soundings of the depth of the sea, which he was prevented from continuing in the winter by the frost. These show its shallowness on the north of Novaya Zemlya, especially towards Franz-Josef Land. A bank, over which we drifted in the summer of 1873, and which we explored with a drag-net, was the principal source of the collection of marine fauna, which we shall speak of in a later chapter. These soundings also enabled Orel to prove the small increase of the temperature of the sea at any considerable depth. He used in his experiments the maximum and minimum thermometer of Casella. The specimens we collectedshowed, that the bottom of the sea consists of layers of mud and shells. The soundings are exhibited in the following table:—
1. We Spent the latter half of August in seal-hunting, for it was only by the use of fresh meat that we were able to contend with, if not prevent, cases of scurvy. Day after day lines of hunters lay in wait before the fissures at the edge of our floe, and in the evening our dogs generally had to drag in the sledges several seals to the ship. Many of these creatures which we wounded sank and disappeared. All these seals belonged to the class Phoca Grœnlandica. Walruses were never to be seen, and once only in an “ice-hole” we came across a shoal of white whales, which however seemed to be moving on. In the capture of seals we sometimes used a light boat, made of water-proof sailcloth, which two men could easily drag out of the water. Some of our people too had learnt the use of the harpoon. By the end of September we had killed in one way or another some forty seals, and as we shot many of the birds which flew round us, and on an average one bear a week, we were seldom without fresh meat. With the exception of Krisch, the engineer, who suffered from lung disease, and of the carpenter, who had become lame from a scorbutic contraction of the joints, all on the sick list recovered under the influence of work in the open air and of the improved diet.
2. The covering of deep soft snow, which had been so troublesome, almost disappeared at the beginning of autumn, and the surface of the ice had been transformed by evaporation into a firm mass like the congealed snow of a glacier, so that we were able to walk on its hard surface without sinking;only the numerous small ice-lakes, on the floes, impeded our excursions. In all these signs, we were reminded of the near approach of winter, and it seemed that, drifting as we were constantly towards the north, we should spend it nearer to the Pole than any other expedition had ever done. On the 25th the sun set at midnight. The period intervening between this and the time when the sun ceases to reappear may be regarded as the autumn of the Arctic region. For some time the light had so diminished, that our quarters again became dark at night, and from the 19th of July we were obliged to use a light in order to read at midnight. On the 29th of August, after falls of rain and snow succeeded by north winds, the ship was stiffened in a coating of ice. The rigging was covered with an incrustation of ice of an inch thick, and pieces of ice of a pound weight sometimes fell on the deck, rendering walking on it neither comfortable nor safe. After a succession of frosts and thaws, complete congelation at last set in, and when the moon was up, the masts and rigging shone like burnished silver.
3. The second summer was gone. It had come in with the hope and promise of liberation, and patiently had we awaited this result. With sad resignation we now looked forward to another winter. But once more it was to be seen, in our case, how great is the power of men to endure dangers and hardships, when these come upon them not suddenly but gradually. A few months ago, the thought that we should be prisoners on the ice, bound to our floe, for a second winter, would have been unendurable. But now that the intolerable thought had become a stern fact, we accepted and endured it. But often as we went on deck and cast our eyes over the wastes, from which there was no escape, the despairing thought recurred, that next year we should have to return home—without having achieved anything, or at most with a narrative of a long drift on the ice. Not a man among us believed in the possibility of discoveries, though discoveries beyond our utmost hopes lay immediately before us.
4. A memorable day was the 30th August 1873, in 79° 43′ Lat. and 59° 33′ E. Long. That day brought a surprise, such as only the awakening to a new life can produce. About midday, as we were leaning on the bulwarks of the ship andscanning the gliding mists, through which the rays of the sun broke ever and anon, a wall of mist, lifting itself up suddenly, revealed to us, afar off in the north-west, the outlines of bold rocks, which in a few minutes seemed to grow into a radiant Alpine land! At first we all stood transfixed and hardly believing what we saw. Then, carried away by the reality of our good fortune, we burst forth into shouts of joy—“Land, Land, Land at last!” There was now not a sick man on board theTegetthoff. The news of the discovery spread in an instant. Every one rushed on deck, to convince himself with his own eyes, that the expedition was not after all a failure—there before us lay the prize that could not be snatched from us. Yet not by our own action, but through the happy caprice of our floe and as in a dream had we won it, but when we thought of the floe, drifting without intermission, we felt with redoubled pain, that we were at the mercy of its movements. As yet we had secured no winter harbour, from which the exploration of the strange land could be successfully undertaken. For the present, too, it was not within the verge of possibility to reach and visit it. If we had left our floe, we should have been cut off and lost. It was only under the influence of the first excitement that we made a rush over our ice-field, although we knew that numberless fissures made it impossible to reach the land. But, difficulties notwithstanding, when we ran to the edge of our floe, we beheld from a ridge of ice the mountains and glaciers of the mysterious land. Its valleys seemed to our fond imagination clothed with green pastures, over which herds of reindeer roamed in undisturbed enjoyment of their liberty, and far from all foes.
5. For thousands of years this land had lain buried from the knowledge of men, and now its discovery had fallen into the lap of a small band, themselves almost lost to the world, who far from their home remembered the homage due to their sovereign, and gave to the newly-discovered territory the name
KAISER FRANZ-JOSEF’S LAND.
With loud hurrahs we drank to the health of our Emperor in grog hastily made on deck in an iron coffee-pot, and thendressed theTegetthoffwith flags. All cares, for the present at least, disappeared, and with them the passive monotony of our lives. There was not a day, there was hardly an hour, in which this mysterious land did not henceforth occupy our thoughts and attention. We discussed whether this or that elevation in the grey and misty distance were a mountain, or an island, or a glacier. All our attempts to solve the question of the extent of the land lying before us were of course still more fruitless. From the headland which we had first seen (Cape Tegetthoff), to its hazy outline, in the north-east, it seemed to extend nearly a degree; but as even its southernmost parts were at a great distance from us, it was impossible to arrive at anything more definite than a mere approximation to its configuration. The size and number of the icebergs which we had recently fallen in with were now amply explained,—they were indisputable witnesses of its great extent and its vast glaciation.
6. At the end of August and the beginning of September north winds drove us somewhat towards the south, so that the outlines of the land were still more faintly defined. But at the end of September we were again driven towards the north-west and reached 79° 58′, the highest degree of latitude to which theTegetthoffand its floe drifted. We now saw an island at some distance off—afterwards called Hochstetter island—lying before us. Its rocky outlines were distinctly visible, and the opportunity ofreaching the land by a forced marchseemed more favourable than any which had been presented. It might also be the last chance offered to us, for our fears lest we might drift out of sight of this land were well founded. Six of her crew now left theTegetthoffand committed themselves to the destiny which the movement of the ice had in store for them. The east winds, which had prevailed during the last days, had forced the ice landward, and the pressures had crushed in the edges of our floe, and greatly diminished its size. We rushed over the grinding, groaning, broken walls of drifting ice, and so great was our ardour, that we took no notice when some one or other of the party tripped and fell. Each panted to reach the land. We had already gone half way, the ship having long disappeared from our eyes, when there arose a mist which enveloped everything,so that the masses of ice looked like high mountains through the hazy atmosphere. Of the land itself we could see nothing, and no choice was left to us but to return to the ship through the mist. The compass was little help, and within the barriers of recently broken ice the traces of our steps were lost. We took at last a wrong direction and were following it up, in spite of Jubinal’s loud barks to divert us. As he ran backwards and forwards, magnified in the mist he ran many risks of being mistaken for a bear. What the sagacity of six men could not do, this the instinct of the animal effected. Exhausted by our own exertions, we yielded ourselves to his guidance, and he actually brought us into the right track—and back to the ship.
1. The autumn was unusually mild, though stormy and gloomy. The thermometer up to the 20th of September fell daily some degrees below zero (C.), and occasionally we had rain. At the end of the month the minimum temperature ranged from 14° to 5° F., and the mean temperature of the month was as low as 24·5° F. The mildness of the season was, perhaps, connected with the unusual recession of the ice-barrier in the south; though it might have been a consequence of the open water which had been formed under the land during the drifting of the floes. The land itself was but seldom visible, and heavy masses of dark-blue clouds, which are peculiar to southern latitudes, generally hung over it. Frequent falls of snow again covered everything around us. Parhelia were sometimes visible, and these were generally the precursors of driving snow, which reared deep drifts round the ship. The numerous little lakes on the ice-floes were frozen over in the night even in the earlier part of August, and at the end of the month these bore us during the day. The clear mirror of their surface cracked whenever the temperature fell suddenly some degrees, while the effect of contraction in the ship was followed by the noises which we called “Schüsse.” The “ice-holes” were overspread with a viscous ropy ice, which was strong enough to bear us at their edges. The ship now stood out from the ice; her hull was about fourteen feet above the surrounding surface of snow. To facilitate egress and ingress, we constructed steps of ice on each side of the vessel. After the 7th of September our efforts to free the ship were given up. The little basin atthe fore-part of the ship—the result of the toil of many months—was completely frozen over, and afforded us the recreation of skating as a reward for our labours.
2. The experience of the past greatly strengthened all the grounds and motives which so readily presented themselves to abandon our helpless vessel in the following summer and attempt the return to Europe by means of sledges and boats. If there had been no other reason for this resolution, regard for our health would have dictated the step. Our supply of lemon-juice was so reduced, as to leave scarcely a doubt as to the necessity of attempting to return. But amid these prudential considerations, we were filled with fear lest we should be unable to explore the mysterious land we had discovered.
3. The daylight now began to fail. On the 9th of September the sun set at 8.30 and the stars were visible at night. About the middle of the month lamps were kept burning all the night through in our quarters below, and our environment, never very animated, again wore the aspect of the dark realm of ice. The visits of birds became rarer, although they did not quite leave us as long as there was any open water near. The divers and auks had already disappeared. They flew in long lines southward, and as they whizzed past us through the rigging of the ship, we acknowledged the superiority of these little creatures to us and to our ship, which was never to hoist its sails again. The ice-birds, and the robber-gulls still remained with us. We once shot a rose-coloured gull (Ross’s gull), said to belong only to North America and Iceland. On the 28th we saw the last snow-bunting. The first aurora was seen on the 22nd, and during the winter its light fell not merely on the Frozen Ocean but on the distant Franz-Josef’s Land, showing us that we were not drifting away from it. By the end of the month we had drifted to the eightieth degree of latitude, nearly; and every cliff of the land, even the most insignificant, emerging at a distance from the ice, had charms enough to call us all on deck.
4. In the second half of October, winds from the north and north-east had driven us towards the south and south-west, and as we neared the land we saw that the ice-fields were broken up by their contact with its immovable barrier. Ourown floe had been greatly diminished from the general pressure of the ice. On the 1st of October we were driven so near the land that we found ourselves in the midst of the destruction going on in the ice. Our ice-floe was shattered and broken, and so rapidly had it diminished in size, that the distance of the ship from the edge of the floe, which was 1,300 paces on the 1st, amounted to only 875 two days afterwards. On the 6th it had diminished to 200 paces, so that it was reduced to a mere fragment of its former size. The shocks it now received caused the ship to quiver and shake, and we heard the cracking and straining in its timbers, which kept us on the tenter-hook of expectation lest the ice should suddenly break up. It seemed as if we were doomed to a repetition of the trials and dangers of the preceding winter. The bags of necessaries to be taken with us if we should be forced to leave the ship, were kept in readiness for immediate use. As we watched the advancing wall of ice, and heard the too well known howl it sent forth, and saw how fissures were formed at the edge of the floe, the days of the ice-pressures were painfully recalled, and the thought constantly returned—what will be the end of all this? The Land we had so longed to visit lay indeed before us, but the very sight of it had become a torment; it seemed to be as unattainable as before; and, if our ship should reach it, it appeared too likely that it would be as a wreck on its inhospitable shore. Many were the plans we formed and debated, but all were alike impracticable, and all owed their existence to the wish to escape from the destruction that stared us in the face. Such were our out-looks when on the 31st of October we were driven close to a headland of no great height, about three miles distant from the ship, and found ourselves in the midst of icebergs, several of which were of considerable magnitude. Towards this, the bergs, or we ourselves, or both, were rapidly drifting, as the soundings showed. If the icebergs drifted they would of course crush all the ice-fields which stood in their way. We were now in 79° 51′ N. Lat. and 58° 56′E. Long. Here exactly in the longitude of Admiralty peninsula of Novaya Zemlya, and with the ship lying north and south, we were to pass the winter—but harbourless.
5. On the forenoon of the 1st of November, the land lay to the north-west of us in the twilight. The lines of rocks were so clearly and distinctly seen, that we were convinced that it could be reached without endangering our return to the ship. There was no room for hesitation; full of energy and wild excitement, we clambered over the ice-walls lying to the northward, which consisted of barriers, fifty feet high, of huge pieces of ice recently forced up amid the pressure. These passed, we came on a broad surface of young ice, which showed that there had been open water there a short time before. Over the surface of this young ice we now ran towards the land. We crossed the ice-foot and actually stepped on it. Snow and rocks and broken ice surrounded us on every side; a land more desolate could not be found on earth than the island we walked on; all this we saw not. To us it was a paradise; and this paradise we called Wilczek Island.
6. So great was our joy at having reached the Land at last, that we bestowed on all we saw an attention which, in itself it in no way merited. We looked into every rent in the rocks, we touched every block, we were ravished with the varied forms and outlines which each crevice presented. We talked in grand style of the frozen slopes of its hollows as glaciers! Nothing was of greater moment in these first hours than the question of its geological character, and great was our surprise to find here the same rocks, with which we had become acquainted at the Pendulum Islands during the second German North Polar Expedition. The columnar conformation of these Dolerite rocks singularly resembled those of Griper Roads and Shannon Island. The vegetation was indescribably meagre and miserable, consisting merely of a few lichens. The drift-wood we expected to find was no where to be seen. We looked for traces of the reindeer and the fox, but our search was utterly fruitless. The land appeared to be without a single living creature. We then ascended a rocky height on the southern margin of the island, whence we had a view of the frozen ocean extending some miles beyond the ship. There was something sublime to the imagination in the utter loneliness of a land never before visited; felt all the more from the extraordinary character ofour position. We had become exceedingly sensitive to new impressions, and a golden mist which rose on the southern horizon of an invisible ice-hole, and which spread itself, like an undulating curtain, before the glow of the noontide heavens, had to us the charm of a landscape in Ceylon.
7. How vexatious was it to feel, that if we had reached this Land some weeks earlier, we might have explored it without the risk of being cut off from the ship. For some days the sun had sunk below the horizon, and the twilight of noon admitted of only a few short excursions from the ship, quite insufficient to satisfy our earnest desire to learn more of its structure and configuration; and we much feared lest the constant north winds should cause us to drift out of sight of it. Southwards stretched a flat surface of bluish-grey ice, and beyond the distant ship, a large “ice-hole” from whose yellow mirror there arose undulating mists. Beyond this again stretched dark lines of floes running parallel to the horizon, over which, in the south, hung the sky in deep carmine. We scrambled over a rugged slope covered with ice as smooth as glass, which ran into the interior of the little island, in order to get a clear view northward; but we were compelled to return without achieving our purpose, for we feared to absent ourselves longer from the ship. We accordingly went back, but returned next day to explore. But these barren days and small events made a profound impression on our minds, and even Carlsen, the old and tried navigator of the frozen deep, wore on his breast, beneath his fur coat, the star of the order of St. Olaf, to do due honour to the dignity of discovery. We built a pyramid of stones six feet high on the island, and fixed in it one of our flags attached to a pole.
8. On the 3rd of November a party of us started about eight o’clock in the morning, when it was quite dark, to attempt to reach a glacier which we had seen, on the north of the island and on the other side of a frozen inlet of the sea. We took with us a small sledge drawn by three dogs, and, in constant fear of being cut off from the ship, we pressed on over a level surface of snow towards some objects suffused with a dim rosy light, which seemed to float over them. As we neared them we found them to be icebergs, which sparkledlike jewels, and which we took to be the terminal precipice of the glacier we were in search of. It was only, however, after some hours that we came actually in sight of it; the ship having meanwhile disappeared from our view. Suddenly there emerged before us, in the east, a white band, which proved to be the terminal front of the glacier, which, as we approached it, we were surprised to find had an inclination of only two or three degrees. Its highest point, therefore, must have been at a very great distance. On its left side there was a moraine of great depth. When we began our return to the ship, the rosy evening light had disappeared from the higher clouds, while it became clearer behind the gigantic mass of the glacier, so that its dark outline stood out strongly marked on the heavens. It was quite dark when we again drew near the ship, but the brave Carlsen, armed with rifle and walrus-lance for any emergency, came out to meet us.
APPROACHING THE LAND BY MOONLIGHT.
APPROACHING THE LAND BY MOONLIGHT.
9. In an excursion on the 6th of November we reached a point on the north-west of Wilczek Island—passing for the first time during this expedition beyond the eightieth degree of north latitude—whence we could see the mainland of the new country stretching before us under the silver light of themoon. An indescribable loneliness lay on its snowy mountains, faintly illuminated by the span of twilight in the south and by the light of the moon. If the ice on the shore, as it was moved by the ebb and flow of the tide, had not sent forth shrill notes, and had not the wind sighed as it passed over the edges of the rocks, the stillness of death would have lain on the pale and spectral landscape. We hear of the solemn silence of the forest or of the desert, or of a city buried in sleep during the night; but what is this silence to the silence of a land with its cold glacier mountains losing themselves in snows and mists which can never be explored, and the very existence of which had remained unknown from creation till this moment?
10. On the 7th another short expedition towards the south-west of Wilczek Island was carried out; but notwithstanding all our exertions we were unable to determine its configuration, even of the parts immediately contiguous to us. Until the spring of the following year, the whole island, except perhaps a portion of its southern side, remained a mystery to us.
1. The Land had meantime been thickly enveloped in its pure white mantle, and wreaths of snow-drifts lay over the rocks scattered over its surface. The light became fainter. Sometimes the precipitous faces of the glaciers seemed to glow in subdued rose-colour through the leaden grey of the atmosphere. When new “ice-holes” appeared, a frosty vapour rose and spread over the surface of the ice; the ship and surrounding objects were covered as if with down; even the dogs were frosted white. We used to stand on deck and gaze on the sun as it sank, surrounded by the evening clouds, behind the jagged edges of the hummocks. Raised by refraction, he appeared for the last time on the 22nd of October with half his disc above the horizon, and the whole southern sky was for a time like a sea of fire over the cold, stiff forms and lines of ice. At length the disc disappeared, and masses of dark clouds moved up and obscured the light still lingering in the sky. The long reign of night began, and the wastes around us relapsed into the stern sway of winter. A pale twilight still lingered for some time, but its faint arc became smaller and feebler. No shadows accompanied the forms of those who strayed over the ice. The wind moaned in the frozen desert. The darkness and the cold continually increased, till the dome of night vaulted the lonely spot which had become our home.
2. But the hope and expectation of successes to be achieved, and the feeling that our safety was not immediately threatened, rendered this second winter a happy contrast to the preceding one. We had now leisure and calmness for intellectual occupations,which were, indeed, the only means of relieving the monotony of the long period of darkness. We lived like hermits in our little cabins in the after-part of the ship, and learned that mental activity without any other joy suffices to make men happy and contented. The oppressive feeling of having to return ingloriously home, which had always been disagreeably present to our minds during the first winter, was no longer felt. We had now a hope, the charms of which grew day by day, that in the spring we should be able to leave the ship and start on expeditions to explore the land we had discovered. Happy in this expectation, we could enjoy the indescribable pleasures of good books, all the more that we were far from the busy haunts of men, and that the presence of danger clears and sharpens the understanding. Nowhere can a book be so valued as in such an isolated position as ours was. Great, therefore, was the advantage we possessed in a good library, consisting of books of science, and of the classics of literature. In fact, freed from the constantly recurring perils, which had been our portion in the first long Arctic night, this second winter was, to all who actively employed their minds, comparatively a state of happiness, undisturbed by cares. With regard to the crew, they were kept in good humour by the increase of their comforts. As we had not the prospect of a third winter in the ice—which would have rendered a greater economy of our provisions imperative—we were enabled to provide them with a more generous diet.
3. In the last three weeks of November we had complete darkness, the sky clouded over and the weather bad. So dark was it, that our environment, though it was overspread with countless hummocks and ice-cliffs, looked like one black unbroken level. On the 31st of October most of the stars were visible about 3 o’clock in the afternoon; by 4 o’clock actual night prevailed. On the 16th of November large print was barely legible even at noon. On the 18th of the month we were able to read the larger letters on the title-page of Vogt’sGeologyat the distance of a foot. At noon, on the 13th of December, not a letter of this same title-page was legible, even in clear weather. On the 5th of November there was a total eclipse of the moon, which then sank below the horizon and did not return till the 29th of that month. Its beams then fell on a large ice-hole, which had formed itself twenty miles to the south of the ship, which made us apprehensive lest our floe should be driven by the north winds in a southerly direction. On the 4th of December the moon reached its highest declination, but, as it waned, it was constantly obscured by bad weather. I had reckoned on the return of moonlight to make an excursion of some days to the mainland. But the fickleness of the weather at the beginning of December compelled me to confine my wanderings to Wilczek Island, which I frequently visited, although with a thermometer at -35° F. I was exposed to frost-bites in the face and hands, whenever I attempted to draw by the light of a lamp, and with only the protection of light woollen gloves.[22]
DEPARTURE OF THE SUN IN THE SECOND WINTER.
DEPARTURE OF THE SUN IN THE SECOND WINTER.
4. We observed during this winter, that, on the clearest nights, snow of the finest texture continued to fall, so that we saw the heavenly bodies, as it were, through a veil of fine gauze. In the moonlight this fine snow sparkled faintly, and its presence could only be discovered by a prickling on the skin. The constancy of these downfalls added of course to the depth of the snow under which theTegetthoffwas almost buried; indeed at the beginning of the spring she no longer stood out from the covering of snow, although her fore-part was eleven-and-three-quarter feet, and her after-part four-and-a-half feet, above the ice on which she rested. The air was also often filled with an indescribable quantity of driving snow; and when the wind dropped and permitted it to fall, we were struck with the profound stillness of our environment. The cold constantly increased and penetrated all the parts of the interior of the ship which were not artificially heated,[23]and almost all the fluids, which were not specially protected, were frozen. The various kinds of spirits on board were exposed on the 23rd of November to the cold at -26° F.; at the end of an hour-and-a-half they still remained fluid. When the temperature fell to -31° F., hollands, common gin and maraschino were congealed in two-hours-and-a-half, but rum and brandy remained unchanged. On another occasion a mixture of two parts of pure alcohol to one part of water froze at -47° F., cognac at -53° F. This low temperature had so increased the thickness of the ice, that the basin of open water, which had been sawed through in the previous summer, was covered on the 3rd of January with ice three-and-a-half, and on the 20th with ice six-and-a-half feet thick.