CHAPTER II
1608
HUDSON’S SECOND VOYAGE
HenceforthHudson was an obsessed man. First,hepossessed the Idea. Now theIdeapossessed him. It was to lead him on a course no man would willingly have followed. Yet he followed it. Everything, life or death, love or hate, gain or loss, was to be subservient to that Idea.
That current drifting across the Pole haunted him as it was to haunt Nansen at a later date. By attempting too much, had he missed all? He had gone to Spitzbergen in the Eighties. If he had kept down to Nova Zembla Islands in the Seventies, would he have found less ice? The man possessed by a single idea may be a trial to his associates. To himself, he is a torment. Once he becomes baffled, he is beset by doubts, by questions, by fears. If his faith leaves him, his life goes to pieces like a rope of sand. Hudson must have been beset by such doubts now. It is the place where the adventurer leaves the milestonesof all known paths and has not yet found firm footing for his own feet. Hundreds, thousands, have struck out from the beaten Trail. Few, indeed, have blazed a new path. The bones of the dead bleach on the shores of the realm ruled by the Goddess of the Unknown. It is the place where the beginner sets out to be a great artist, or a great scientist, or a great discoverer. Thousands have set out on the same quest who should have rested content at their own ingle-nook, happy at the plow; not good plowmen spoiled. The beginner balances the chances—a thousand to one against him! Is his vision a fool’s quest, a will-o’-the-wisp? Is the call the tickling of his own restless vanity; or the voice of a great truth? He can learn only by going forward, and the going forward may take him over a precipice—may prove him a fool. This was the place Hudson was at now. It is a place that has been passed by all the world’s great.
Nine Dutch boats had at different times passed between Nova Zembla and the main coast of Russia. To be sure, they had been blocked by the ice beyond, but might not Hudson by some lucky chance follow that Polar Current through open water? The chances were a thousand to one against him. Who but a fool would take the chance? Nansen’s daring plan to utilize the ice-driftto lifthis ship above theice-crush—did not occur to Hudson. Except for that difference, the two explorers—the greatest of the early Arctic navigators and the greatest of the modern—planned very much the same course.
This time, the Muscovy Company commissioned Hudson to look out for ivory hunting as well as the short passage to Asia. Three men only of the old crew enlisted. Hudson might enjoy risking his life for glory. Most mortals prefer safety. Of the three who re-enlisted one was his son.
Keeping close to the cloud-capped, mountainous shores of Norway, the boat sighted Cape North on June 3, 1608. Clouds wreathed the mountains in belts and plumes of mist. Snow-fields of far summits shone gold in sudden bursts of sunshine through the cloud-wrack. Fjords like holes in the wall nestled at the foot of the mountains, the hamlets of the fisher folk like tiny match boxes against the mighty hills. To the restless tide rocked and heaved the fishing smacks—emblems of man’s spirit at endless wrestle with the elements. As Hudson’s ship climbed the waves, the fishermen stood up in their little boats to wave a God-speed to these adventurers bound for earth’s ends. Sails swelling to the wind, Hudson’s vessel rode the roll of green waters, then dipped behind a cataract of waves, and dropped over the edge of the known world.
Driftwood again on that Polar Current up at Seventy-five, driftwood and the endless sweep of moving ice, which compelled Hudson “to loose from one floe” and “bear room from another” and anchor on the lee of one berg to prevent ramming by another; “divers pieces driving past the ship,” says Hudson—just as it drove past Nansen’sFramon the same course.
To men satiated of modern life, the North is still a wonder-world. There are the white silences primeval as the morn when God first created Time. There is “the sun sailing round in a fiery ring”—as one old Viking described it—instead of sinking below the horizon; nightless days in summer and dayless nights in winter. There is the desolation of earth’s places where man may never have dominion and Death must always veil herself unseen. Polar bears floundered over the ice hunting seals. Walrus roared from the rocks in herds till the surf shook—ivory for the Muscovy Company; and whales floated about the ship in schools that threatened to keel the craft over—more profit for the Muscovy traders.
What wonder that Hudson’s ignorant sailors began to feel the marvel of the strange ice-world, and to see fabulous things in the light of the midnight sun? One morning a face was seen following the ship, staring up from the sea. There was no doubt of it.Two sailors saw it. Was it one of the monsters of Saga myth, that haunted this region? The watch called a comrade. Both witnessed the hideous apparition of a human face with black hair streaming behind on the waves. The body was like a woman’s and the seamen’s terror had conjured up the ill omen of a mermaid when wave-wash overturned its body, exhibiting the fins and tail of a porpoise—“skin very white”—mermaid without a doubt, portent of evil, though the hair may have been floating seaweed.
Sure enough, within a week, ice locked round the ship in a vise. The floes were no brashy ice-cakes that could be plowed through by a ship’s prow with a strong, stern wind. They were huge fields of ice, five, ten, twenty and thirty feet deep interspread with hummocks and hillocks that were miniature bergs in themselves. Across these rolling meadows of crystal, the wind blew with the nip of midwinter; but when the sun became partly hidden in fiery cloud-banks, the scene was a fairy land, sea and sky shading off in deepest tinges to all the tints of the rainbow. Where the ocean showed through ice depths, there was a blue reflection deep as indigo. Where the clear water was only a surface pool on top of submerged ice, the sky shone above with a light green delicate as apple bloom. Where the ice was a broken mass of an adjacent glacier sliding downto the sea through the eternal snows of some mountain gorge, a curious phenomenon could sometimes be observed. The edge of the ice was in layers—each layer representing one year’s snowfall congealed by the summer thaw, so that the observer could count back perhaps a century from the ice layers. Other men tread on snow that fell but yesterday. Hudson’s crew were treading on the snowfall of a hundred years as though this were God’s workshop in the making and a hundred years were but as a day.
Beyond the floating ice fields, the heights of Nova Zembla were sighted, awesome and lonely in the white night, gruesome to these men from memory of the fate that befell the Dutch crews here fifteen years previously. Rowing and punting through the ice-brash, two men went ashore to explore. They saw abundance of game for the Muscovy gentlemen; and at one place among driftwood came on the cold ashes of an old fire. It was like the first print of man’s footstep found by Robinson Crusoe. Startled by signs of human presence, they scanned the surrounding landscape. On the shore, a solitary cross had been erected of driftwood. Then the men recalled the fate of the Dutch crew, that had perished wandering over these islands in 1597. What fearful battles had the white silences witnessed betweenpuny men explorers and the stony Goddess of Death? What had become of the last man, of the man who had erected the cross? Did his body lie somewhere along the shores of Nova Zembla, or had he manned his little craft like the Vikings of old and sailed out lashed to the spars to meet death in tempest? The horror of the North seemed to touch the men as with the hands of the dead whom she had slain.
HUDSON’S VOYAGES of 1607-1608To Pass across the Pole from EUROPE to ASIA.
HUDSON’S VOYAGES of 1607-1608
To Pass across the Pole from EUROPE to ASIA.
The report that the two men carried back to Hudson’s boat did not raise the spirits of the crew. One night the entire ship’s company but Hudson and his son had gone ashore to hunt walrus. Such illimitable fields of ice lay north that Hudson knew his only chance must be between the south end of Nova Zembla (he did not know there were several islands in the group) and the main coast of Asia. It was three o’clock in the morning. The ice began to drive landward with the fury of a whirlpool. Two anchors were thrown out against the tide. Fenders were lowered to protect the ship’s sides. Captain and boy stood with iron-shod poles in hand to push the ice from the ship, or the ship from the ice. The men from the hunt saw the coming danger and rushed over the churning icepans to the rescue. Some on the ice, some on the ship, with poles and oars and crowbars, they pushed and heaved away the icepans, and ramming their crowbars downcrevices wrenched the ice to splinters or swerved it off the sides of the ship. Sometimes an icepan would tilt, teeter, rise on end and turn a somerset, plunging the sailors in ice water to their arm pits. The jam seemed to be coming on the ship from both directions at once, for the simple reason the ship offered the line of least resistance. Twelve hours the battle lasted, the heaving ice-crush threatening to crush the ship’s ribs like slats till at last a channel of open water appeared just outside the ship’s prison. But the air was a dead calm. Springing from icepan to icepan, the men towed their ship out of danger.
Rain began to drizzle. The next day a cold wind came whistling through the rigging. The ship lay in a land-locked cove of Nova Zembla. Hudson again sent his men ashore to hunt, probably also to pluck up courage. Then he climbed the lookout to scan the sea. It was really to scan his own fate. It was the old story of the glory-seeker’s quest—a harder battle than human power could wage; a struggle that at the last only led to a hopelessimpasse. The scent on the Trail and the eagerness in the hound leading only to a blind alley of baffled effort and ruin! Every great benefactor of humanity has come to thiscul de sacof hope. It is as if a man’s highest aim were only in the end a sort of trap whither some impish will-o’-the-wisp has impelledhim. The thing itself—a passage across the Pole—didn’t exist any more than the elixir of life which laid the foundations of chemistry. The question is how, when the great men of humanity come to this blind wall, did they ever have courage to go on? For the thing they pursued was a phantom never to be realized; but strangely enough, in the providence of God, the phantom pursuit led to greater benefits for the race than their highest hopes dared to dream.
No elixir of life, you dreamer; but your mad-brained search for the elixir gave us the secrets of chemistry by which man prolongs life if he doesn’t preserve eternal youth! No fate written on the scroll of the heavens, you star-gazer; but your fool-astrology has given us astronomy, by which man may predict the movements of the stars for a thousand years though he cannot forsee his own fate for a day! No North-West Passage to Asia, you fevered adventurers of the trackless sea; but your search for a short way to China has given us a New World worth a thousand Chinas! Go on with your dreams, you mad-souled visionaries! If it is a will-o’-the wisp you chase, your will-o’-the-wisp is a lantern to the rest of humanity!
Climbing the rigging to the topmast yardarm, Hudson scanned the sea. His heart sank. Hishopes seemed to congeal like the eternal ice of this ice-world. The springs of life seemed to grow both heavy and cold. Far as eye could reach was ice—only ice, while outside the cove there raged a tempest as if all the demons of the North were blowing their trumpets.
“There is no passage this way,” said Hudson to his son. Then as if hope only dies that it may send forth fresh growth like the seed, he added, “But we must try Greenland again, on the west side this time.” It was ten o’clock at night when the men returned laden with game; but they, too, had taken counsel among themselves whether to go forward; and the memory of that dead crew’s cross turned the scales against Hudson. It was only the 5th of July, but they would not hear of attempting Greenland this season. From midnight of the 5th to nine o’clock of the 6th, Hudson pondered. No gap opened through the white wall ahead. The Frost Giants, whose gambols may be heard on the long winter nights when the icecracks whoop and romp, had won against Man. “Being void of hope,” Hudson records, “the wind stormy and against us, much ice driving, we weighed and set sail westward.” Home-bound, the ship anchored on the Thames, August 26.