THE SECOND GRINNELL EXPEDITION—THE ADVANCE IN WINTER QUARTERS—TOTAL DARKNESS—SLEDGE-PARTIES—ADVENTURES—THE FIRST DEATH—TENNYSON'S MONUMENT—HUMBOLDT GLACIER—THE OPEN POLAR SEA—SECOND WINTER—ABANDONMENT OF THE BRIG—THE WATER AGAIN—UPERNAVIK—RESCUE BY CAPTAIN HARTSTENE—DEATH AND SERVICES OF DR. KANE—ATTEMPT TO LAY THE ATLANTIC CABLE—CONCLUSION.

The Government of the United States forwarded to Dr. Kane, in the month of December, 1852, an order "to conduct an expedition to the Arctic Seas in search of Sir John Franklin." The brig Advance was again placed at his disposal by Mr. Grinnell, and manned by eighteen picked men. Dr. Kane's plan was to enter Smith's Sound at the top of Baffin's Bay,—into which, alone of the Arctic explorers, Captain Inglefield had penetrated in August, 1852, in the Isabel,—to reach, if possible, the supposed northerly open sea, where he hoped to find traces of the missing navigators. He sailed from New York on the 30th of May, 1853, touched at Fiskernaes, in Greenland, on the 1st of July, where he engaged the services of Hans Cristian, a native Esquimaux of nineteen years. Through ice and fog the vessel forced her way, and on the 7th of August doubled Cape Alexander, a promontory opposite another named Cape Isabella,—the two being the headlands of Smith's Strait, and styled by Dr. Kane the Arctic Pillars of Hercules.

The vessel closed with the ice again the next day, and was forced into a land-locked cove. Every effort to force her through the floes was tried, without success, and, after undergoing the most appalling treatment from the wind, waves, and ice combined, the brig was warped into winter quarters, in Rensselaer Bay, on the 22d of August, and was frozen in on September 10. There she lies to this hour,—"to her a long resting-place indeed," writes Kane; "for the same ice is around her still." This was in latitude 78° 37' N.,—the most northerly winter quarters ever taken by Christians, except in Spitzbergen, which has the advantage of an insular climate. An observatory was erected, a thermal register kept hourly, and magnetic observations recorded. Parties were sent out to establish provision-depÔts to the north, to facilitate researches in the spring. Three depÔts or "caches" were made, the most distant being in latitude 79° 12': in this they deposited six hundred and seventy pounds of pemmican and forty of meat-biscuit. These operations were arrested by darkness in November, and the crew prepared to spend one hundred and forty days without the light of the sun. The first number of the Arctic newspaper, "The Ice-Blink," appeared on the 21st. The thermometer fell to 67° below zero. Chloroform froze, and chloric ether became solid. The air had a perceptible pungency upon inspiration: all inhaled it guardedly and with compressed lips. The 22d of December brought with it the midnight of the year: the fingers could not be counted a foot from the eyes. Nothing remained to indicate that the Arctic world had a sun. The men during this their first winter kept up their spirits wonderfully; but most of the dogs died of diseases of the brain brought on by the depressing influences of the darkness.

The first traces of returning light were observed on the 21st of January, when the southern horizon had a distinct orange tint. Towards the close of February the sun silvered the tall icebergs between the headlands of the bay: his rays reached the deck on the 28th, and perpetual day returned with the month of March. The men found their faces badly mottled by scurvy-spots, and they were nearly all disabled for active work. But six dogs remained out of forty-four. "No language can describe," says Kane, "the chaos at the base of the rock on which the storehouse had been built. Fragments of ice had been tossed into every possible confusion, rearing up in fantastic equilibrium, surging in long inclined planes, dipping into dark valleys, and piling in contorted hills." A sledge-party was sent out on the 19th to deposit a relief cargo of provisions; on the 31st, three of its members returned, swollen, haggard, and almost dumb. They had left four of their number in a tent, disabled and frozen. Dr. Kane at once started with a rescue of nine men, and, after an unbroken march of twenty-one hours, came in sight of a small American flag floating upon a hummock. They were received with an explosion of welcome. The return with the sledge laden with the weight of eleven hundred pounds was effected at the expense of tremendous efforts of energy and endurance.

While still nine miles from their half-way tent, they felt the peculiar lethargic sensation of extreme cold,—symptoms which Kane compares to the diffused paralysis of the electro-galvanic shock. Bonsall and Morton asked permission to go to sleep, at the same time denying that they were cold. Hans lay down under a drift, and in a few moments was stiff. An immediate halt was necessary. The tent was pitched, but no one had the strength to light a fire. They could neither eat nor drink. The whiskey froze at the men's feet. Kane gave orders to them to take four hours' rest and then follow him to the half-way tent, where he would have ready a fire and some thawed pemmican. He then pushed on with William Godfrey. They were both in a state of stupor, and kept themselves awake by a continued articulation of incoherent words. Kane describes these hours as the most wretched he ever went through. On arriving at the tent, they found that a bear had overturned it, tossing the pemmican into the snow. They crawled into their reindeer sleeping-bags and slept for three hours in a dreamy but intense slumber. On awaking, they melted snow-water and cooked some soup; and on the arrival of the rest of the party they all took the refreshment and pushed on towards the brig. Their strength soon failed them again, and they began to lose their self-control. Kane tried the experiment of a three minutes' sleep, and, finding that it refreshed him, timed the men in their turns. Doses of brandy, and, finally, the distant sight of the brig, revived and encouraged them. The last mile was accomplished by instinct, as none of the men remembered it afterwards: they staggered into the cabin delirious and muttering with agony.

Death now entered the devoted camp: Jefferson Baker died of lockjaw on the 7th of April. A meeting with a party of Esquimaux now enabled Kane to reinforce his dog-team, and encouraged him to start, late in April, upon his grand sledge-excursion to the north. It failed, however, completely. Kane became delirious on the 5th of May, and fainted every time he was taken from the tent to the sledge. He was conveyed back to the brig, and from the 14th to the 20th lay hovering between life and death. Short as the expedition was, however, several remarkable discoveries were made. "Tennyson's Monument" was the name given to a solitary column of greenstone, four hundred and eighty feet high, rising from a pedestal two hundred and eighty feet high,—both as sharply finished as if they had been cast for the Place VendÔme. But the most wonderful feature was the Great Glacier of Humboldt,—an ice-ocean of boundless dimensions, in which a complete substitution had been effected of ice for water. "Imagine," Kane writes, "the centre of the continent of Greenland occupied through nearly its whole extent by a deep unbroken sea of ice that gathers perennial increase from the water-shed of vast snow-covered mountains and all the precipitations of the atmosphere upon its own surface. Imagine this moving onward like a great glacial river, seeking outlets at every fiord and valley, rolling icy cataracts into the Atlantic and Greenland seas, and, having at last reached the northern limit of the land that has borne it up, pouring out a mighty frozen torrent into unknown Arctic space.... Here was a plastic, moving, semi-solid mass, obliterating life, swallowing rocks and islands, and ploughing its way with irresistible march through the crust of an investing sea."

Other sledge-parties were from time to time sent out. One of six men left the brig on the 3d of June, keeping to the north and reaching Humboldt Glacier on the 15th. Four returned to the ship on the 27th, one of them entirely blind. Hans Christian and William Morton kept on, and finally, in north latitude 81° 22', sighted open water,—an open Polar sea. To the cape at which the land terminated Morton gave the name of Cape Constitution. A lofty peak on the opposite side of the channel, but a little farther to the north, and the most remote northern land known upon our globe, was named Mount Edward Parry, from the great pioneer of Arctic travel.

A second winter now stared the explorers in the face. "It is horrible," says Kane, "to look forward to another year of disease and darkness, without fresh food or fuel." Still, preparations were made for the direful extremity. Willow-stems and sorrel were collected as antiscorbutics. Lumps of turf, frozen solid, were quarried with crowbars, and with them the ship's sides were embanked. During the early months a communication was kept up with the nearest Esquimaux station, seventy-five miles distant, and thus scanty supplies of fox, walrus, seal, and bear meat were occasionally obtained. These failed, however, during the months of total darkness. Early in February, Kane wrote in his journal:—"We are contending at odds with angry forces close around us, without one agent or influence within eighteen hundred miles whose sympathy is on our side." On the 4th of March, the last fragment of fresh meat was served, and the whole crew would have perished miserably of starvation, had it not been for the successful issue of a forlorn-hope excursion to the Etah Esquimaux station undertaken by Hans and two dogs. Dr. Kane ate rats, and thereby escaped the scurvy. The bunks were warmed by oil-lamps, after the Esquimaux fashion: the beds and the men's faces became in consequence black and greasy with soot. The sufferings endured by the party were perhaps the most dreadful to which Arctic adventurers have ever been subjected.

The abandonment of the brig had been resolved upon before the setting in of winter, and the misery of the hours of darkness had been in some measure alleviated by the progress of the preparations for that event,—in making clothing, canvas moccasins, seal-hide boots, and in cutting water-tight shoes from the gutta-percha speaking-tube. Provision-bags were made of sail-cloth rendered impervious by coats of tar. Into these the bread was pressed by beating it to powder with a capstan-bar. Pork-fat and tallow were melted down and poured into other bags to freeze. The three boats—none of them sea-worthy—were strengthened, housed, and mounted on sledges rigged with shoulder-belts to drag by: one of them they expected to burn for fuel on reaching water. The powder and shot, upon which their lives depended, were distributed in canisters: Kane took the percussion-caps into his own possession, as more precious than gold. The 17th of May was fixed upon for the departure.

The farewell to the brig was made with due solemnity. The day was Sunday, and prayers and a chapter of the Bible were read. Kane then stated in an address the necessities under which the ship was abandoned and the dangers that still awaited them. He believed, however, that the thirteen hundred miles of ice and water which lay between them and North Greenland could be traversed with safety for most and hope for all. A brief memorial of the reasons compelling the desertion of the vessel was fastened to a stanchion near the gangway, to serve as their vindication in case they were lost and the brig was ever visited. The flags were hoisted and hauled down again, and the men scrambled off over the ice to the boats, no one thinking of the mockery of cheers.

We have not space to detail the perils, adventures, and narrow escapes from starvation of this hardy party in their romantically dangerous escape to the south. On the 16th of June, the boats and sledges approached the open water. "We see its deep-indigo horizon," writes Kane, "and hear its roar against the icy beach. Its scent is in our nostrils and our hearts." The boats, which were split with frost and warped by sunshine, had to be calked and swelled before they were fit for use. The embarkation was effected on the 19th: the Red Eric, the smallest of the three boats, swamped the first day. They spent their first night in an inlet in the ice. Sometimes they would sail through creeks of water for many successive hours: then would follow days of weary tracking through alternate ice and water. During a violent storm, they dragged the boats upon a narrow shelf of ice, and found themselves within a cave which myriads of eider had made their breeding-ground. They remained three days in this crystal retreat, and gathered three thousand eggs. They doubled Cape Dudley Digges on the 11th of June, and spent a week at Providence Halt, luxuriating on a dish composed of birds sweeter and juicier than canvas-backs and a salad made of raw eggs and cochlearia. The coast now trended to the east; the wide expanse of Melville Bay lay between them and Upernavik,—that Danish outpost of civilization. The party was at one moment in the actual agonies of starvation, when a lucky shot at a sleeping seal saved them from the dreaded extremity. They soon saw a kayak—a native boat—in which one Paul Zacharias was seeking eider-down among the islands. Not long after, the single mast of a small shallop—the Upernavik oil-boat—loomed up through the fog. They landed the next day in the midst of a crowd of children, and drank coffee that night before hospitable Danish firesides.

A Danish vessel—the Mariane—was to return to Denmark on the 4th of September, and at that date Kane and his party embarked on board of her, the captain engaging to drop them at the Shetland Islands. On the 11th they arrived at Godhavn, and there, at the very moment of their final departure, Captain Hartstene's relief-squadron was sighted in the offing. With the rescue of the adventurers closes our record of Arctic peril and discovery.

Dr. Kane fell a victim to his zeal in the arduous paths of science. He died, on the 16th of February, 1857, at Havana, where he was seeking to recuperate his debilitated system beneath a tropical sun. His loss was sincerely lamented by the whole country. No commander was ever better fitted by nature for the task confided to him; and no historian ever chronicled the results of his own labors in language more enthralling or in a style more commanding and picturesque.[A]

In the summer of 1857, an attempt to unite the two hemispheres by means of a submerged electric cable was made under the auspices of the New York, Newfoundland, and London Telegraph Company, assisted by vessels furnished by the Governments of Great Britain and the United States. Of this undertaking—unsuccessful as it was, and fresh as it is in the minds of all—our account will properly be brief. The idea was first conceived in the year 1853, in America, and was earnestly pursued in defiance of all obstacles,—Cyrus H. Field, Esq., Vice-President of the Company, being one of its most zealous and indefatigable champions. Surveys and deep-sea explorations, made by Captain Berryman, U.S.N., in the Dolphin and Arctic, in 1853 and 1856, resulted in the discovery of a submarine ledge or prairie, at a depth varying from two to two and a half miles, extending from Cape Race, in Newfoundland, to Cape Clear, in Ireland. This tract received the name of the Telegraphic Plateau. Lieutenant Maury, of the National Observatory, inferred, from observations made in the Atlantic during a long series of years, that both sea and air would be in the most favorable condition for laying the wire between the 20th of July and the 10th of August. The telegraphic fleet consisted of the U.S. steam-frigate Niagara, Captain Hudson, to lay the first half of the cable from Valentia Bay, in Ireland, of H.B.M. steamer Agamemnon, to lay the second half of the cable, and of six other auxiliary steamers of both nations.

The Niagara commenced shipping the cable from the factory at Birkenhead, near Liverpool, late in June, and completed the work in somewhat less than a month. The share of each of the two vessels was twelve hundred and fifty miles of wire,—the wire itself being an elaborate combination of fine copper strands and gutta-percha coatings. The whole fleet was assembled in Valentia Bay on the 4th of August. The Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland was already upon the ground, the guest of the Knight of Kerry. The next evening, the shore-end of the cable was hauled from the stern of the Niagara to shallow water by an attendant tug named the Willing Mind, and from thence taken ashore, in the midst of the cheers of the spectators, by a boat's crew of American sailors. The expedition set sail on Thursday, the 6th. It was understood that the first message was to be the following, from Queen Victoria to President Buchanan:—"Glory be to God on high, and on earth peace and good-will towards men."

All went on favorably for several days: a constant communication was kept up between the Niagara and the shore. At four o'clock on the following Tuesday, the signals suddenly ceased. The return of the squadron confirmed the fears entertained: the cable had broken in deep water. Three hundred and thirty-five nautical miles had been laid, and the last half of it in water over two miles in depth. The Niagara was making at the time four miles an hour, and the cable running out at a greater speed,—from five to six miles an hour. This was more than could be afforded, and the retard strain upon the brakes was increased to three thousand pounds. The cable bore the augmented pressure for a time, but finally parted, to the dismay of the whole fleet. The vessels returned to England; and the enterprise was abandoned for another year. Though thus postponed, little or no doubt existed upon its ultimate success. The exhilarating triumph which eventually attended the efforts of the Company will form the subject of the next chapter.