This etext was produced by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk,
from the 1892 Cassell & Co. edition.
VOYAGES IN SEARCH OF THE NORTH-WEST PASSAGE
by Richard Hakluyt
INTRODUCTION.
Thirty-five years ago I made a voyage to the Arctic Seas in what
Chaucer calls
A little bote
No bigger than a manne's thought;
it was a Phantom Ship that made some voyages to different parts of
the world which were recorded in early numbers of Charles Dickens's
"Household Words." As preface to Richard Hakluyt's records of the
first endeavour of our bold Elizabethan mariners to find North-West
Passage to the East, let me repeat here that old voyage of mine from
No. 55 of "Household Words," dated the 12th of April, 1851: The
Phantom is fitted out for Arctic exploration, with instructions to
find her way, by the north-west, to Behring Straits, and take the
South Pole on her passage home. Just now we steer due north, and
yonder is the coast of Norway. From that coast parted Hugh
Willoughby, three hundred years ago; the first of our countrymen who
wrought an ice-bound highway to Cathay. Two years afterwards his
ships were found, in the haven of Arzina, in Lapland, by some
Russian fishermen; near and about them Willoughby and his
companions - seventy dead men. The ships were freighted with their
frozen crews, and sailed for England; but, "being unstaunch, as it
is supposed, by their two years' wintering in Lapland, sunk, by the
way, with their dead, and them also that brought them."
Ice floats about us now, and here is a whale blowing; a whale, too,
very near Spitzbergen. When first Spitzbergen was discovered, in
the good old times, there were whales here in abundance; then a
hundred Dutch ships, in a crowd, might go to work, and boats might
jostle with each other, and the only thing deficient would be
stowage room for all the produce of the fishery. Now one ship may
have the whole field to itself, and travel home with an imperfect
cargo. It was fine fun in the good old times; there was no need to
cruise. Coppers and boilers were fitted on the island, and little
colonies about them, in the fishing season, had nothing to do but
tow the whales in, with a boat, as fast as they were wanted by the
copper. No wonder that so enviable a Tom Tidler's ground was
claimed by all who had a love for gold and silver. The English
called it theirs, for they first fished; the Dutch said, nay, but
the island was of their discovery; Danes, Hamburghers, Bisayans,
Spaniards, and French put in their claims; and at length it was
agreed to make partitions. The numerous bays and harbours which
indent the coast were divided among the rival nations; and, to this
day, many of them bear, accordingly, such names as English Bay,
Danes Bay, and so forth. One bay there is, with graves in it, named
Sorrow. For it seemed to the fishers most desirable, if possible,
to plant upon this island permanent establishments, and condemned
convicts were offered, by the Russians, life and pardon, if they
would winter in Spitzbergen. They agreed; but, when they saw the
icy mountains and the stormy sea, repented, and went back, to meet a
death exempt from torture. The Dutch tempted free men, by high
rewards, to try the dangerous experiment. One of their victims left
a journal, which describes his suffering and that of his companions.
Their mouths, he says, became so sore that, if they had food, they
could not eat; their limbs were swollen and disabled with
excruciating pain; they died of scurvy. Those who died first were
coffined by their dying friends; a row of coffins was found, in the
spring, each with a man in it; two men uncoffined, side by side,
were dead upon the floor. The journal told how once the traces of a
bear excited their hope of fresh meat and amended health; how, with
a lantern, two or three had limped upon the track, until the light
became extinguished, and they came back in despair to die. We might
speak, also, of eight English sailors, left, by accident, upon
Spitzbergen, who lived to return and tell their winter's tale; but a
long journey is before us and we must not linger on the way. As for
our whalers, it need scarcely be related that the multitude of
whales diminished as the slaughtering went on, until it was no
longer possible to keep the coppers full. The whales had to be
searched for by the vessels, and thereafter it was not worth while
to take the blubber to Spitzbergen to be boiled; and the different
nations, having carried home their coppers, left the apparatus of
those fishing stations to decay.
Take heed. There is a noise like thunder, and a mountain snaps in
two. The upper half comes, crashing, grinding, down into the sea,
and loosened streams of water follow it. The sea is displaced
before the mighty heap; it boils and scatters up a cloud of spray;
it rushes back, and violently beats upon the shore. The mountain
rises from its bath, sways to and fro, while water pours along its
mighty sides; now it is tolerably quiet, letting crackers off as air
escapes out of its cavities. That is an iceberg, and in that way
are all icebergs formed. Mountains of ice formed by rain and snow -
grand Arctic glaciers, undermined by the sea or by accumulation
over-balanced - topple down upon the slightest provocation (moved by
a shout, perhaps), and where they float, as this black-looking
fellow does, they need deep water. This berg in height is about
ninety feet, and a due balance requires that a mass nine times as
large as the part visible should be submerged. Icebergs are seen
about us now which rise two hundred feet above the water's level.
There are above head plenty of aquatic birds; ashore, or on the ice,
are bears, foxes, reindeer; and in the sea there are innumerable
animals. We shall not see so much life near the North Pole, that is
certain. It would be worth while to go ashore upon an islet there,
near Vogel Sang, to pay a visit to the eider-ducks. Their nests are
so abundant that one cannot avoid treading on them. When the duck
is driven by a hungry fox to leave her eggs, she covers them with
down, in order that they may not cool during her absence, and,
moreover, glues the down into a case with a secretion supplied to
her by Nature for that purpose. The deserted eggs are safe, for
that secretion has an odour very disagreeable to the intruder's
nose.
We still sail northward, among sheets of ice, whose boundaries are
not beyond our vision from the masthead - these are "floes;" between
them we find easy way, it is fair "sailing ice." In the clear sky
to the north a streak of lucid white light is the reflection from an
icy surface; that is, "ice-blink," in the language of these seas.
The glare from snow is yellow, while open water gives a dark
reflection.
Northward still; but now we are in fog the ice is troublesome; a
gale is rising. Now, if our ship had timbers they would crack, and
if she had a bell it would be tolling; if we were shouting to each
other we should not hear, the sea is in a fury. With wild force its
breakers dash against a heaped-up wall of broken ice, that grinds
and strains and battles fiercely with the water. This is "the
pack," the edge of a great ice-field broken by the swell. It is a
perilous and an exciting thing to push through pack ice in a gale.
Now there is ice as far as eye can see, that is "an ice-field."
Masses are forced up like colossal tombstones on all sides; our
sailors call them "hummocks;" here and there the broken ice displays
large "holes of water." Shall we go on? Upon this field, in 1827,
Parry adventured with his men to reach the North Pole, if that
should be possible. With sledges and portable boats they laboured
on through snow and over hummocks, launching their boats over the
larger holes of water. With stout hearts, undaunted by toil or
danger, they went boldly on, though by degrees it became clear to
the leaders of the expedition that they were almost like mice upon a
treadmill cage, making a great expenditure of leg for little gain.
The ice was floating to the south with them, as they were walking to
the north; still they went on. Sleeping by day to avoid the glare,
and to get greater warmth during the time of rest, and travelling by
night - watch-makers' days and nights, for it was all one polar day -
the men soon were unable to distinguish noon from midnight. The
great event of one day on this dreary waste was the discovery of two
flies upon an ice hummock; these, says Parry, became at once a topic
of ridiculous importance. Presently, after twenty-three miles'
walking, they had only gone one mile forward, the ice having
industriously floated twenty-two miles in the opposite direction;
and then, after walking forward eleven miles, they found themselves
to be three miles behind the place from which they started. The
party accordingly returned, not having reached the Pole, not having
reached the eighty-third parallel, for the attainment of which there
was a reward of a thousand pounds held out by government. They
reached the parallel of eighty-two degrees forty-five minutes, which
was the most northerly point trodden by the foot of man.
From that point they returned. In those high latitudes they met
with a phenomenon, common in alpine regions, as well as at the Pole,
red snow; the red colour being caused by the abundance of a minute
plant, of low development, the last dweller on the borders of the
vegetable kingdom. More interesting to the sailors was a fat she
bear which they killed and devoured with a zeal to be repented of;
for on reaching navigable sea, and pushing in their boats to Table
Island, where some stones were left, they found that the bears had
eaten all their bread, whereon the men agreed that "Bruin was now
square with them." An islet next to Table Island - they are both
mere rocks - is the most northern land discovered. Therefore, Parry
applied to it the name of lieutenant - afterwards Sir James - Ross.
This compliment Sir James Ross acknowledged in the most emphatic
manner, by discovering on his part, at the other Pole, the most
southern land yet seen, and giving to it the name of Parry: "Parry
Mountains."
It very probably would not be difficult, under such circumstances as
Sir W. Parry has since recommended, to reach the North Pole along
this route. Then (especially if it be true, as many believe, that
there is a region of open sea about the Pole itself) we might find
it as easy to reach Behring Straits by travelling in a straight line
over the North Pole, as by threading the straits and bays north of
America.
We turn our course until we have in sight a portion of the ice-
barred eastern coast of Greenland, Shannon Island. Somewhere about
this spot in the seventy-fifth parallel is the most northern part of
that coast known to us. Colonel - then Captain - Sabine in the Griper
was landed there to make magnetic, and other observations; for the
same purpose he had previously visited Sierra Leone. That is where
we differ from our forefathers. They commissioned hardy seamen to
encounter peril for the search of gold ore, or for a near road to
Cathay; but our peril is encountered for the gain of knowledge, for
the highest kind of service that can now be rendered to the human
race.
Before we leave the Northern Sea, we must not omit to mention the
voyage by Spitzbergen northward, in 1818, of Captain Buchan in the
Dorothea, accompanied by Lieutenant Franklin, in the Trent. It was
Sir John Franklin's first voyage to the Arctic regions. This trip
forms the subject of a delightful book by Captain Beechey.
On our way to the south point of Greenland we pass near Cape North,
a point of Iceland. Iceland, we know, is the centre of a volcanic
region, whereof Norway and Greenland are at opposite points of the
circumference. In connection with this district there is a
remarkable fact; that by the agency of subterranean forces, a large
portion of Norway and Sweden is being slowly upheaved. While
Greenland, on the west coast, as gradually sinks into the sea,
Norway rises at the rate of about four feet in a century. In
Greenland, the sinking is so well known that the natives never build
close to the water's edge, and the Moravian missionaries more than
once have had to move farther inland the poles on which their boats
are rested.
Our Phantom Ship stands fairly now along the western coast of
Greenland into Davis Straits. We observe that upon this western
coast there is, by a great deal, less ice than on the eastern. That
is a rule generally. Not only the configuration of the straits and
bays, but also the earth's rotation from west to east, causes the
currents here to set towards the west, and wash the western coasts,
while they act very little on the eastern. We steer across Davis
Strait, among "an infinite number of great countreys and islands of
yce;" there, near the entrance, we find Hudson Strait, which does
not now concern us. Islands probably separate this well-known
channel from Frobisher Strait to the north of it, yet unexplored.
Here let us recall to mind the fleet of fifteen sail, under Sir
Martin Frobisher, in 1578, tossing about and parting company among
the ice. Let us remember how the crew of the Anne Frances, in that
expedition, built a pinnace when their vessel struck upon a rock,
stock, although they wanted main timber and nails. How they made a
mimic forge, and "for the easier making of nails, were forced to
break their tongs, gridiron, and fire-shovel, in pieces." How
Master Captain Best, in this frail bark, with its imperfect timbers
held together by the metamorphosed gridiron and fire-shovel,
continued in his duty, and did depart up the straights as before was
pretended." How a terrific storm arose, and the fleet parted and
the intrepid captain was towed "in his small pinnesse, at the stern
of the Michael, thorow the raging seas; for the bark was not able to
receive, or relieve half his company." The "tongs, gridyron, and
fire-shovell," performed their work only for as many minutes as were
absolutely necessary, for the pinnesse came no sooner aboard the
ship, and the men entred, but she presently shivered and fell in
pieces, and sunke at the ship's stern with all the poor men's
furniture."
Now, too, as we sail up the strait, explored a few years after these
events by Master John Davis, how proudly we remember him as a right
worthy forerunner of those countrymen of his and ours who since have
sailed over his track. Nor ought we to pass on without calling to
mind the melancholy fate, in 1606, of Master John Knight, driven, in
the Hopewell, among huge masses of ice with a tremendous surf, his
rudder knocked away, his ship half full of water, at the entrance to
these straits. Hoping to find a harbour, he set forth to explore a
large island, and landed, leaving two men to watch the boat, while
he, with three men and the mate, set forth and disappeared over a
hill. For thirteen hours the watchers kept their post; one had his
trumpet with him, for he was a trumpeter, the other had a gun. They
trumpeted often and loudly; they fired, but no answer came. They
watched ashore all night for the return of their captain and his
party, "but they came not at all."
The season is advanced. As we sail on, the sea steams like a line-
kiln, "frost-smoke" covers it. The water, cooled less rapidly, is
warmer now than the surrounding air, and yields this vapour in
consequence. By the time our vessel has reached Baffin's Bay, still
coasting along Greenland, in addition to old floes and bergs, the
water is beset with "pancake ice." That is the young ice when it
first begins to cake upon the surface. Innocent enough it seems,
but it is sadly clogging to the ships. It sticks about their sides
like treacle on a fly's wing; collecting unequally, it destroys all
equilibrium, and impedes the efforts of the steersman. Rocks split
on the Greenland coast with loud explosions, and more icebergs fall.
Icebergs we soon shall take our leave of; they are only found where
there is a coast on which glaciers can form; they are good for
nothing but to yield fresh water to the vessels; it will be all
field, pack, and saltwater ice presently.
Now we are in Baffin's Bay, explored in the voyages of Bylot and
Baffin, 1615-16. When, in 1817, a great movement in the Greenland
ice caused many to believe that the northern passages would be found
comparatively clear; and when, in consequence of this impression,
Sir John Barrow succeeded in setting afoot that course of modern
Arctic exploration which has been continued to the present day, Sir
John Ross was the first man sent to find the North-West Passage.
Buchan and Parry were commissioned at the same the to attempt the
North Sea route. Sir John Ross did little more on that occasion
than effect a survey of Baffin's Bay, and prove the accuracy of the
ancient pilot. In the extreme north of the bay there is an inlet or
a channel, called by Baffin Smith's Sound; this Sir John saw, but
did not enter. It never yet has been explored. It may be an inlet
only; but it is also very possible that by this channel ships might
get into the Polar Sea and sail by the north shore of Greenland to
Spitzbergen. Turning that corner, and descending along the western
coast of Baffin's Bay, there is another inlet called Jones' Sound by
Baffin, also unexplored. These two inlets, with their very British
titles, Smith and Jones, are of exceeding interest. Jones' Sound
may lead by a back way to Melville Island. South of Jones' Sound
there is a wide break in the shore, a great sound, named by Baffin,
Lancaster's, which Sir John Ross, in that first expedition, failed
also to explore. Like our transatlantic friends at the South Pole,
he laid down a range of clouds as mountains, and considered the way
impervious; so he came home. Parry went out next year, as a
lieutenant, in command of his first and most successful expedition.
He sailed up Lancaster Sound, which was in that year (1819)
unusually clear of ice; and he is the discoverer whose track we now
follow in our Phantom Ship. The whole ground being new, he had to
name the points of country right and left of him. The way was broad
and open, due west, a most prosperous beginning for a North-West
Passage. If this continued, he would soon reach Behring Strait. A
broad channel to the right, directed, that is to say, southward, he
entered on the Prince of Wales's birthday, and so called it the
"Prince Regent's Inlet." After exploring this for some miles, he
turned back to resume his western course, for still there was a
broad strait leading westward. This second part of Lancaster Sound
he called after the Secretary of the Admiralty who had so
indefatigably laboured to promote the expeditions, Barrow's Strait.
Then he came to a channel, turning to the right or northward, and he
named that Wellington Channel. Then he had on his right hand ice,
islands large and small, and intervening channels; on the left, ice,
and a cape visible, Cape Walker. At an island, named after the
First Lord of the Admiralty Melville Island, the great frozen
wilderness barred farther progress. There he wintered. On the
coast of Melville Island they had passed the latitude of one hundred
and ten degrees, and the men had become entitled to a royal bounty
of five thousand pounds. This group of islands Parry called North
Georgian, but they are usually called by his own name, Parry
Islands. This was the first European winter party in the Arctic
circle. Its details are familiar enough. How the men cut in three
days, through ice seven inches thick, a canal two miles and a half
long, and so brought the ships into safe harbour. How the genius of
Parry equalled the occasion; how there was established a theatre and
a North Georgian Gazette, to cheer the tediousness of a night which
continued for two thousand hours. The dreary, dazzling waste in
which there was that little patch of life, the stars, the fog, the
moonlight, the glittering wonder of the northern lights, in which,
as Greenlanders believe, souls of the wicked dance tormented, are
familiar to us. The she-bear stays at home; but the he-bear
hungers, and looks in vain for a stray seal or walrus - woe to the
unarmed man who meets him in his hungry mood! Wolves are abroad,
and pretty white arctic foxes. The reindeer have sought other
pasture-ground. The thermometer runs down to more than sixty
degrees below freezing, a temperature tolerable in calm weather, but
distressing in a wind. The eye-piece of the telescope must be
protected now with leather, for the skin is destroyed that comes in
contact with cold metal. The voice at a mile's distance can be
heard distinctly. Happy the day when first the sun is seen to graze
the edge of the horizon; but summer must come, and the heat of a
constant day must accumulate, and summer wane, before the ice is
melted. Then the ice cracks, like cannons over-charged, and moves
with a loud grinding noise. But not yet is escape to be made with
safety. After a detention of ten months, Parry got free; but, in
escaping, narrowly missed the destruction of both ships, by their
being "nipped" between the mighty mass and the unyielding shore.
What animals are found on Melville Island we may judge from the
results of sport during ten months' detention. The island exceeds
five thousand miles square, and yielded to the gun, three musk oxen,
twenty-four deer, sixty-eight hares, fifty-three geese, fifty-nine
ducks, and one hundred and forty-four ptarmigans, weighing together
three thousand seven hundred and sixty-six pounds - not quite two
ounces of meat per day to every man. Lichens, stunted grass,
saxifrage, and a feeble willow, are the plants of Melville Island,
but in sheltered nooks there are found sorrel, poppy, and a yellow
buttercup. Halos and double suns are very common consequences of
refraction in this quarter of the world. Franklin returned from his
first and most famous voyage with his men all safe and sound, except
the loss of a few fingers, frost-bitten. We sail back only as far
as Regent's Inlet, being bound for Behring Strait.
The reputation of Sir John Ross being clouded by discontent
expressed against his first expedition, Felix Booth, a rich
distiller, provided seventeen thousand pounds to enable his friend
to redeem his credit. Sir John accordingly, in 1829, went out in
the Victory, provided with steam-machinery that did not answer well.
He was accompanied by Sir James Ross, his nephew. He it was who, on
this occasion, first surveyed Regent's Inlet, down which we are now
sailing with our Phantom Ship. The coast on our right hand,
westward, which Parry saw, is called North Somerset, but farther
south, where the inlet widens, the land is named Boothia Felix.
Five years before this, Parry, in his third voyage, had attempted to
pass down Regent's Inlet, where among ice and storm, one of his
ships, the Hecla, had been driven violently ashore, and of necessity
abandoned. The stores had been removed, and Sir John was able now
to replenish his own vessel from them. Rounding a point at the
bottom of Prince Regent's Inlet, we find Felix Harbour, where Sir
John Ross wintered. His nephew made from this point scientific
explorations; discovered a strait, called after him the Strait of
James Ross, and on the northern shore of this strait, on the main
land of Boothia, planted the British flag on the Northern Magnetic
Pole. The ice broke up, so did the Victory; after a hairbreadth
escape, the party found a searching vessel and arrived home after an
absence of four years and five months, Sir John Ross having lost his
ship, and won his reputation, The friend in need was made a baronet
for his munificence; Sir John was reimbursed for all his losses, and
the crew liberally taken care of. Sir James Ross had a rod and flag
signifying "Magnetic Pole," given to him for a new crest, by the
Heralds' College, for which he was no doubt greatly the better.
We have sailed northward to get into Hudson Strait, the high road
into Hudson Bay. Along the shore are Esquimaux in boats, extremely
active, but these filthy creatures we pass by; the Esquimaux in
Hudson Strait are like the negroes of the coast, demoralised by
intercourse with European traders. These are not true pictures of
the loving children of the north. Our "Phantom" floats on the wide
waters of Hudson Bay - the grave of its discoverer. Familiar as the
story is of Henry Hudson's fate, for John King's sake how gladly we
repeat it. While sailing on the waters he discovered, in 1611, his
men mutinied; the mutiny was aided by Henry Green, a prodigal, whom
Hudson had generously shielded from ruin. Hudson, the master, and
his son, with six sick or disabled members of the crew, were driven
from their cabins, forced into a little shallop, and committed
helpless to the water and the ice. But there was one stout man,
John King, the carpenter, who stepped into the boat, abjuring his
companions, and chose rather to die than even passively be partaker
in so foul a crime. John King, we who live after will remember you.
Here on aim island, Charlton Island, near our entrance to the bay,
in 1631, wintered poor Captain James with his wrecked crew. This is
a point outside the Arctic circle, but quite cold enough. Of
nights, with a good fire in the house they built, hoar frost covered
their beds, and the cook's water in a metal pan before the fire was
warm on one side and froze on the other. Here "it snowed and froze
extremely, at which time we, looking from the shore towards the
ship, she appeared a piece of ice in the fashion of a ship, or a
ship resembling a piece of ice." Here the gunner, who hand lost his
leg, besought that, "for the little the he had to live, he might
drink sack altogether." He died and was buried in the ice far from
the vessel, but when afterwards two more were dead of scurvy, and
the others, in a miserable state, were working with faint hope about
their shattered vessel, the gunner was found to have returned home
to the old vessel; his leg had penetrated through a port-hole. They
"digged him clear out, and he was as free from noisomeness," the
record says, "as when we first committed him to the sea. This
alteration had the ice, and water, and time, only wrought on him,
that his flesh would slip up and down upon his bones, like a glove
on a man's hand. In the evening we buried him by the others."
These worthy souls, laid up with the agonies of scurvy, knew that in
action was their only hope; they forced their limbs to labour, among
ice and water, every day. They set about the building of a boat,
but the hard frozen wood had broken their axes, so they made shift
with the pieces. To fell a tree, it was first requisite to light in
fire around it, and the carpenter could only labour with his wood
over a fire, or else it was like stone under his tools. Before the
boat was made they buried the carpenter. The captain exhorted them
to put their trust in God; "His will be done. If it be our fortune
to end our days here, we are as near Heaven as in England. They all
protested to work to the utmost of their strength, and that they
would refuse nothing that I should order them to do to the utmost
hazard of their lives. I thanked them all." Truly the North Pole
has its triumphs. If we took no account of the fields of trade
opened by our Arctic explorers, if we thought nothing of the wants
of science in comparison with the lives lost in supplying them, is
not the loss of life a gain, which proves and tests the fortitude of
noble hearts, and teaches us respect for human nature? All the
lives that have been lost among these Polar regions are less in
number than the dead upon a battle-field. The battle-field
inflicted shame upon our race - is it with shame that our hearts
throb in following these Arctic heroes? March 31st, says Captain
James, "was very cold, with snow and hail, which pinched our sick
men more than any time this year. This evening, being May eve, we
returned late from our work to our house, and made a good fire, and
chose ladies, and ceremoniously wore their names in our caps,
endeavouring to revive ourselves by any means. On the 15th, I
manured a little patch of ground that was bare of snow, and sowed it
with pease, hoping to have some shortly to eat, for as yet we could
see no green thing to comfort us." Those pease saved the party; as
they came up the young shoots were boiled and eaten, so their health
began to mend, and they recovered from their scurvy. Eventually,
after other perils, they succeeded in making their escape.
A strait, called Sir Thomas Rowe's Welcome, leads due north out of
Hudson Bay, being parted by Southampton Island from the strait
through which we entered. Its name is quaint, for so was its
discoverer, Luke Fox, a worthy man, addicted much to euphuism. Fox
sailed from London in the same year in which James sailed from
Bristol. They were rivals. Meeting in Davis Straits, Fox dined on
board his friendly rival's vessel, which was very unfit for the
service upon which it went. The sea washed over them and came into
the cabin, so says Fox, "sauce would not have been wanted if there
had been roast mutton." Luke Fox, being ice-bound and in peril,
writes, "God thinks upon our imprisonment within a supersedeas;" but
he was a good and honourable man as wall as euphuist. His "Sir
Thomas Rowe's Welcome" leads into Fox Channel: our "Phantom Ship"
is pushing through the welcome passes on the left-hand Repulse Bay.
This portion of the Arctic regions, with Fox Channel, is extremely
perilous. Here Captain Lyon, in the Griper, was thrown anchorless
upon the mercy of a stormy sea, ice crashing around him. One island
in Fox Channel is called Mill Island, from the incessant grinding of
great masses of ice collected there. In the northern part of Fox
Channel, on the western shore, is Melville Peninsula, where Parry
wintered on his second voyage. Here let us go ashore and see a
little colony of Esquimaux.
Their limits are built of blocks of snow, and arched, having an ice
pane for a window. They construct their arched entrance and their
hemispherical roof on the true principles of architecture. Those
wise men, the Egyptians, made their arch by hewing the stones out of
shape; the Esquimaux have the true secret. Here they are, with
little food in winter and great appetites; devouring a whole walrus
when they get it, and taking the chance of hunger for the next eight
days - hungry or full, for ever happy in their lot - here are the
Esquimaux. They are warmly clothed, each in a double suit of skins
sewn neatly together. Some are singing, with good voices too.
Please them, and they straightway dance; activity is good in a cold
climate: Play to them on the flute, or if you can sing well, sing,
or turn a barrel-organ, they are mute, eager with wonder and
delight; their love of music is intense. Give them a pencil, and,
like children, they will draw. Teach them and they will learn,
oblige them and they will be grateful. "Gentle and loving savages,"
one of our old worthies called them, and the Portuguese were so much
impressed with their teachable and gentle conduct, that a Venetian
ambassador writes, "His serene majesty contemplates deriving great
advantage from the country, not only on account of the timber of
which he has occasion, but of the inhabitants, who are admirably
calculated for labour, and are the best I have ever seen." The
Esquimaux, of course, will learn vice, and in the region visited by
whale ships, vice enough has certainly been taught him. Here are
the dogs, who will eat old coats, or anything; and, near the
dwellings, here is a snow-bunting - robin redbreast of the Arctic
lands. A party of our sailors once, on landing, took some sticks
from a large heap, and uncovered the nest of a snow-bunting with
young, the bird flew to a little distance, but seeing that the men
sat down, and harmed her not, continued to seek food and supply her
little ones, with full faith in the good intentions of the party.
Captain Lyon found a child's grave partly uncovered, and a snow-
bunting had built its nest upon the infant's bosom.
Sailing round Melville Peninsula, we come into the Gulf of Akkolee,
through Fury and Hecla Straits, discovered by Parry. So we get back
to the bottom of Regent's Inlet, which we quitted a short time ago,
and sailing in the neighbourhood of the magnetic pole, we reach the
estuary of Back's River, on the north-east coast of America. We
pass then through a strait, discovered in 1839 by Dean and Simpson,
still coasting along the northern shore of America, on the great
Stinking Lake, as Indians call this ocean. Boats, ice permitting,
and our "Phantom Ship," of course, can coast all the way to Behring
Strait. The whole coast has been explored by Sir John Franklin, Sir
John Richardson, and Sir George Back, who have earned their
knighthoods through great peril. As we pass Coronation Gulf - the
scene of Franklin, Richardson, and Back's first exploration from the
Coppermine River - we revert to the romantic story of their journey
back, over a land of snow and frost, subsisting upon lichens, with
companions starved to death, where they plucked wild leaves for tea,
and ate their shoes for supper; the tragedy by the river; the murder
of poor Hood, with a book of prayers in his hand; Franklin at Fort
Enterprise, with two companions at the point of death, himself
gaunt, hollow-eyed, feeding on pounded bones, raked from the
dunghill; the arrival of Dr. Richardson and the brave sailor; their
awful story of the cannibal Michel; - we revert to these things with
a shudder. But we must continue on our route. The current still
flows westward, bearing now large quantities of driftwood out of the
Mackenzie River. At the name of Sir Alexander Mackenzie, also, we
might pause, and talk over the bold achievements of another Arctic
hero; but we pass on, by a rugged and inhospitable coast, unfit for
vessels of large draught - pass the broad mouth of the Youcon, pass
Point Barrow, Icy Cape, and are in Behring Strait. Had we passed
on, we should have found the Russian Arctic coast line, traced out
by a series of Russian explorers; of whom the most illustrious -
Baron Von Wrangell - states, that beyond a certain distance to the
northward there is always found what he calls the Polynja (open
water). This is the fact adduced by those who adhere to the old
fancy that there is a sea about the Pole itself quite free from ice.
We pass through Behring Straits. Behring, a Dane by birth, but in
the Russian service, died here in 1741, upon the scene of his
discovery. He and his crew, victims of scurvy, were unable to
manage their vessel in a storm; and it was at length wrecked on a
barren island, there, where "want, nakedness, cold, sickness,
impatience, and despair, were their daily guests," Behring, his
lieutenant, and the master died.
Now we must put a girdle round the world, and do it with the speed
of Ariel. Here we are already in the heats of the equator. We can
do no more than remark, that if air and water are heated at the
equator, and frozen at the poles, there will be equilibrium
destroyed, and constant currents caused. And so it happens, so we
get the prevailing winds, and all the currents of the ocean. Of
these, some of the uses, but by no means all, are obvious. We urge
our "Phantom" fleetly to the southern pole. Here, over the other
hemisphere of the earth, there shines another hemisphere of heaven.
The stars are changed; the southern cross, the Magellanic clouds,
the "coal-sack" in the milky way, attract our notice. Now we are in
the southern latitude that corresponds to England in the north; nay,
at a greater distance from the Pole, we find Kerguelen's Land,
emphatically called "The Isle of Desolation." Icebergs float much
further into the warm sea on this side of the equator before they
dissolve. The South Pole is evidently a more thorough refrigerator
than the North. Why is this? We shall soon see. We push through
pack-ice, and through floes and fields, by lofty bergs, by an island
or two covered with penguins, until there lies before us a long
range of mountains, nine or ten thousand feet in height, and all
clad in eternal snow. That is a portion of the Southern Continent.
Lieutenant Wilkes, in the American exploring expedition, first
discovered this, and mapped out some part of the coast, putting a
few clouds in likewise - a mistake easily made by those who omit to
verify every foot of land. Sir James Ross, in his most successful
South Pole Expedition, during the years 1839-43, sailed over some of
this land, and confirmed the rest. The Antarctic, as well as the
Arctic honours he secured for England, by turning a corner of the
land, and sailing far southward, along an impenetrable icy barrier,
to the latitude of seventy-eight degrees, nine minutes. It is an
elevated continent, with many lofty ranges. On the extreme southern
point reached by the ships, a magnificent volcano was seen spouting
fire and smoke out of the everlasting snow. This volcano, twelve
thousand four hundred feet high, was named Mount Erebus; for the
Erebus and Terror long sought anxiously among the bays, and sounds,
and creeks of the North Pole, then coasted by the solid ice walls of
the south.
H. M.
A DISCOURSE WRITTEN BY SIR HUMPHREY GILBERT, KNIGHT.
To prove a Passage by the North-West to Cathay and the East Indies.
CHAPTER I. - TO PROVE BY AUTHORITY A PASSAGE TO BE ON THE NORTH SIDE
OF AMERICA, TO GO TO CATHAY AND THE EAST INDIES.
When I gave myself to the study of geography, after I had perused
and diligently scanned the descriptions of Europe, Asia, and Africa,
and conferred them with the maps and globes both antique and modern,
I came in fine to the fourth part of the world, commonly called
America, which by all descriptions I found to be an island environed
round about with the sea, having on the south side of it the Strait
of Magellan, on the west side the Mare de Sur, which sea runneth
towards the north, separating it from the east parts of Asia, where
the dominions of the Cathaians are. On the east part our west
ocean, and on the north side the sea that severeth it from
Greenland, through which northern seas the passage lieth, which I
take now in hand to discover.
Plato in his Timaeus and in the dialogue called Critias, discourses
of an incomparable great island then called Atlantis, being greater
than all Africa and Asia, which lay westward from the Straits of
Gibraltar, navigable round about: affirming, also, that the princes
of Atlantis did as well enjoy the governance of all Africa and the
most part of Europe as of Atlantis itself.
Also to prove Plato's opinion of this island, and the inhabiting of
it in ancient time by them of Europe, to be of the more credit:
Marinaeus Siculus, in his Chronicle of Spain, reporteth that there
hath been found by the Spaniards in the gold mines of America
certain pieces of money, engraved with the image of Augustus Caesar;
which pieces were sent to the Pope for a testimony of the matter by
John Rufus, Archbishop of Constantinum.
Moreover, this was not only thought of Plato, but by Marsilius