Arctic exploration

After the return of Sir Edward Belcher’s expedition in 1854 the British Government was content to rest on its laurels, so far as Arctic research was concerned, and to leave the field entirely to Germans, Austrians, Americans, and to such private individuals as cared to undertake the very heavy cost of equipping an expedition for the Polar regions. In the year 1874, however, it once again awoke to a sense of its responsibilities. There was still about the Pole a tract of some two and a half million square miles which had never been trodden by the foot of a civilised man, and it was felt by men of science that no satisfactory data concerning the cause and the track of storms, together with the thousand and one other things concerning the sea which commercial nations wish to know, could be obtained unless the Polar seas became rather less of a sealed book.

No time was lost in setting about the preparations, and in April of the following year two ships were commissioned for the great expedition of 1875-76, and the command was entrusted to Captain George S. Nares. The ships in question were the Alert, a steam sloop of 751 tons and 100 horse-power, and the Discovery, a steamer of 556 tons and 96 horse-power, which, under the name of the Bloodhound had already seen service as a whaler. They were fitted with all the most modern appliances, and were provisioned for three years, while among the officers of the expedition were Albert H. Markham, commander of the Alert, Pelham Aldrich, who served as a lieutenant on the same ship, and Henry F. Stevenson, who was appointed captain of the Discovery.

Accompanied by the store ship Valorous, from which they were to take additional supplies at Godhaven, the two ships set sail from Portsmouth on May 29, 1875. The passage across the Atlantic was long and boisterous, but they eventually arrived at Godhaven on July 6, where they parted company with the Valorous after taking on board everything in the way of provisions that they needed as well as twenty-four Greenland dogs. At Ritenbenk they shipped more dogs, together with two drivers, Petersen, the Dane who had served under Hayes, and Frederick, an Eskimo. At Proven they touched again, to pick up our old friend Hans Christian, whose family, undeterred by their previous experiences on the ice-floe, once more insisted on accompanying him. They reached Port Foulke on July 28, and had the good fortune to find the entrance to Smith Sound entirely free from ice. They were net, indeed, delayed until they reached Payer Harbour, a little south of Cape Sabine, where they were beset in the ice for several days, during which time Stevenson occupied himself with exploring Foulke Fiord, while Nares visited Littleton Island and Life Boat Cove and examined the cache left behind by the Polaris.

The journey northward was pursued with very varying fortunes. The ice was exceedingly bad, and when the ships were not actually beset in it, they were occupied in charging their way through it. Little by little, however, they made their way up the channel, caching large stores of provisions as they went, among the chief being a depot of 3600 rations on the Carey Islands, another depot of the same size at Cape Hawks, and one of 1000 rations at Cape Lincoln.

But ice was not the only difficulty with which Nares had to contend, for Hayes’ chart was a source of perpetual annoyance to him, and a great part of his time was spent in correcting its errors. Cape Frazer was placed eight miles and Scoresby Bay twenty miles too far north, and the rest of the western coast was so badly delineated that Nares pathetically remarked that it was often difficult to know exactly where he was.

Hugging the western shore and taking advantage of every channel that opened near the ship, he succeeded in reaching Lady Franklin Bay, on the other side of which he found a land-locked inlet; this he named Discovery Harbour, and in it he decided to leave his companion ship while he himself pushed on in the Alert.

As he ascended the strait he observed that the character of the ice changed rapidly. Off Cape Sabine the biggest floes were only eight or ten feet thick; off Cape Fraser their thickness increased to twenty feet, and the ice was obviously older, “but,” he says, “up to the present time, when the main pack consisted entirely of heavy ice, I had failed to observe that, instead of approaching a region favoured with open water and a warm climate, we were gradually nearing a sea where the ice was of a totally different formation to what we had ever before experienced, that few Arctic navigators had met, and only one battled with successfully; that in reality we must be approaching the same sea which gives birth to the heavy ice met with off the coast of America by Collinson and M’Clure, and which the latter in 1851 succeeded in navigating through in a sailing vessel for upwards of 100 miles, ... which Sir Edward Parry met with in the same channel in 1820, ... which, passing onwards to the eastward from Melville Strait down M’Clintock Channel, beset, and never afterwards released, the Erebus and Terror under Sir John Franklin and Captain Crozier; and which, intermixed with light Spitzbergen ice, is constantly streaming to the southward along the eastern shore of Greenland, and there destroyed the Hansa of the last German Arctic expedition.” In other words, Nares was in the middle of the ice formed in the Polar Sea, now known as Palæocrystic, and was the first man really to understand its character.

With some difficulty, the Alert succeeded in making her way as far as Floeberg Reach, in lat. 82° 25´ N., long. 62° W., the highest point yet attained by a ship. Here Nares determined to spend the winter, for, though the situation seemed at first sight to be rather exposed, it was well protected by a fringe of heavy floes which were grounded in eight to twelve fathoms of water. No land was to be seen to the northward, and Nares was forced to come to the conclusion that, though he had reached the shores of the Arctic Ocean, it was the very reverse of that open Polar sea which he had hoped to find.

On September 16 the ship was effectually frozen in for the winter, and ten days later Captain Markham, Lieutenant Parr, and Lieutenant May set off on a sledging expedition with the object of establishing depots of provisions as far north as they could. They accomplished their work well, but at terrible cost, for seven men and one officer returned to the ship badly frost-bitten, and in three cases amputations were necessary. At the same time Pelham Aldrich went out on an exploring trip in which he succeeded in reaching Parry’s latitude of 82° 48′ N.

The winter was fairly fine, but bitterly cold—the coldest, in fact, on record. The Alert experienced a mean temperature for five days and nine hours of 66.29° below zero, while for two separate periods of fifteen days each the mercury remained frozen. In the middle of March Lieutenants Egerton and Rawson attempted to open up communications with the Discovery, but the attempt ended with disaster, for Petersen, who accompanied them, was taken ill on the journey, and the whole party had to return. The two officers made the most heroic exertions to bring him back to health, depriving themselves of their own warm clothing and suffering severely in consequence. Their efforts were, however, of no avail, for Petersen was found to be so badly frost-bitten that both his feet had to be amputated, and three months later he died of exhaustion. Setting out again, Rawson and Egerton, accompanied by two sailors, reached the Discovery, and found that her crew had passed a comfortable winter, though one man was down with scurvy.

As soon as April came round Nares began the serious work of the spring by sending out two great sledge parties, one of which, under Commander Markham, was to push as far north as possible, while the other, under Lieutenant Aldrich, was to explore the northern shores of Grinnell Land.

Having been accompanied by a supporting party as far as Cape Henry, Markham set out over the Polar Sea on April 10, 1876. Fearing that they might chance upon an open sea, the party took with it two boats, which added greatly to their labours, making it necessary for them to cover every mile of their journey four times. Their way, moreover, lay in peculiarly unpleasant places, for the ice-field over which they had to travel was like a frozen ocean, the depressions between the waves being filled with snow and broken pack-ice. One of the boats was soon abandoned, but the men dragged the other as far as lat. 83° 20´, the highest point attained up to that time.

The homeward journey was even more trying, for scurvy had broken out among the men, five out of the seventeen had to be placed on the sledges, and many of the others could barely drag themselves over the ice. It soon became obvious that they could not reach the ship without assistance, so Lieutenant Parr gallantly volunteered to set out by himself, and performed the truly astonishing feat of covering the thirty miles which lay between his starting-point and the ship in twenty-four hours. The help that he brought back was only just in time, for one man died on the way, while eleven of the others had to be dragged to the ship on sledges.

In many ways Markham’s journey was one of the most extraordinary on record. Instead of advancing at a steady walk, more than half of each day was spent by the whole party facing the sledge and dragging it forward a few feet at a time. The maximum rate of advance was 2¾ miles a day, the mean rate being 1¼, while, though the distance from the ship to their farthest point was only 73 miles, on the outward and homeward journeys they actually covered no less than 521 miles.

Aldrich’s expedition also suffered severely from scurvy, but succeeded, nevertheless, in doing excellent work, by exploring the northern shores of Grinnell Land for 220 miles, that is to say, as far as lat. 82° 16′ N., 86° W. Fortunately Nares, becoming anxious about Aldrich’s safety, sent out Lieutenant May and two sailors to relieve him. It was as well that he did so, for he found that only Aldrich and one man were in a fit condition to haul, and the whole party would probably have perished if it had not been for his timely aid.

Lieutenant Beaumont’s expedition from the Discovery also very nearly ended in disaster from the same cause. He was especially detailed to explore the coast of Greenland to the north, and so well did he fulfil his mission that he far outdistanced all his predecessors, and succeeded in reaching lat. 82° 20′ N., 51° W. The homeward journey was a long and stern fight against disease, which seemed likely to end in disaster when, on reaching Robeson Channel, he found the ice too rotten to permit them to cross to the Alert. Fortunately Rawson and Dr Coppinger arrived just in time to save all of the party but two.

There were now no fewer than thirty-six cases of scurvy on the Alert alone, and Nares decided to return as soon as he could break out of winter quarters. He was released at the end of July, and in October both ships reached England in safety, after a remarkably successful voyage, in which great tracts of entirely new country had been opened up.