A NEW EXPLORATION—RETURN OF SPRING.

The month of April was about to close, and the short season available for Arctic search was upon us. The condition of things on board the brig was not such as I could have wished for; but there was nothing to exact my presence, and it seemed to me clear that the time had come for pressing on the work of the expedition. The arrangements for our renewed exploration had not been intermitted, and were soon complete. I leave to my journal its own story.

“April 25.—A journey on the carpet, and the crew busy with the little details of their outfit: the officers the same.

“April 26.—These Esquimaux must be watched carefully; at the same time they are to be dealt with kindly, though with a strict enforcement of our police regulations, and some caution as to the freedom with which they may come on board. No punishments must be permitted, either of them or in their presence, and no resort to fire-arms unless to repel a serious attack. I have given orders however, that if the contingency does occur, there shall be no firing over head. The prestige of the gun with a savage is in his notion of its infallibility. You may spare blood-shed by killing a dog, or even wounding him; but in no event should you throw away your ball it is neither politic nor humane.

“Our stowage precautions are all arranged, to meet the chance of the ice breaking up while I am away; and a boat is placed ashore with stores, as the brig may be forced from her moorings.

“The worst thought I have now in setting out is, that of the entire crew I can leave but two behind in able condition, and the doctor and Bonsall are the only two officers who can help Ohlsen. This is our force, four able-bodied, and six disabled, to keep the brig; the commander and seven men, scarcely better upon the average, out upon the ice. Eighteen souls, thank God! certainly not eighteen bodies!

“I am going this time to follow the ice-belt to the Great Glacier of Humboldt, and there load up with pemmican from our cache of last October. From this point I expect to stretch along the face of the glacier inclining to the west of north, and make an attempt to cross the ice to the American side. Once on smooth ice, near this shore, I may pass to the west, and enter the large indentation whose existence I can infer with nearly positive certainty. In this I may find an outlet, and determine the state of things beyond the ice-clogged area of this bay.

“I take with me pemmican, bread, and tea, a canvas tent, five feet by six, and two sleeping bags of reindeer-skin. The sledge has been built on board by Mr Ohlsen. It is very light, of hickory, and but nine feet long. Our kitchen is a soup-kettle for melting snow and making tea, arranged so as to boil with either lard or spirits.

“M’Gary has taken the Faith. He carries few stores, intending to replenish at the cache of Bonsall Point, and to lay in pemmican at M’Gary Island. Most of his cargo consists of bread, which we find it hard to dispense with in eating cooked food. It has a good effect in absorbing the fat of the pemmican, which is apt to disagree with the stomach.”

Godfrey and myself followed on the 27th, as I had intended. The journey was an arduous one to be undertaken, even under the most favouring circumstances, and by unbroken men. It was to be the crowning expedition of the campaign, to attain the Ultima Thule of the Greenland shore, measure the waste that lay between it and the unknown West, and seek round the furthest circle of the ice for an outlet to the mysterious channels beyond. The scheme could not be carried out in its details; yet it was prosecuted far enough to indicate what must be our future fields of labour, and to determine many points of geographical interest. Our observations were in general confirmatory of those which had been made by Mr Bonsall; and they accorded so well with our subsequent surveys as to trace for us the outline of the coast with great certainty.

“It is now the 20th of May, and for the first time I am able, propped up by pillows and surrounded by sick messmates, to note the fact that we have failed again to force the passage to the north.

“Godfrey and myself overtook the advance party under M’Gary two days after leaving the brig. Our dogs were in fair travelling condition, and, except snow-blindness, there seemed to be no drawback to our efficiency. In crossing Marshall Bay we found the snow so accumulated in drifts that, with all our efforts to pick out a track, we became involved; we could not force our sledges through. We were forced to unload, and carry forward the cargo on our backs, beating a path for the dogs to follow in. In this way we plodded on to the opposite headland, Cape William Wood, where the waters of Mary Minturn River, which had delayed the freezing of the ice, gave us a long reach of level travel. We then made a better rate; and our days’ marches were such as to carry us by the 4th of May nearly to the glacier.

“This progress, however, was dearly earned. As early as the 3d of May the winter’s scurvy re-appeared painfully among our party. As we struggled through the snow along the Greenland coast we sank up to our middle; and the dogs, floundering about, were so buried as to preclude any attempts at hauling. Here three of the party were taken with snow-blindness, and George Stephenson had to be condemned as unfit for travel altogether, on account of chest-symptoms accompanying his scorbutic troubles. On the 4th Thomas Hickey also gave in, although not quite disabled for labour at the track-lines.

“Perhaps we would still have got on; but, to crown all, we found that the bears had effected an entrance into our pemmican casks, and destroyed our chances of reinforcing our provisions at the several caches. This great calamity was certainly inevitable; for it is simple justice to the officers under whose charge the provision depÔts were constructed, to say that no means in their power could have prevented the result. The pemmican was covered with blocks of stone, which it had required the labour of three men to adjust; but the extraordinary strength of the bear had enabled him to force aside the heaviest rocks, and his pawing had broken the iron casks which held our pemmican literally into chips. Our alcohol cask, which it had cost me a separate and special journey in the late fall to deposit, was so completely destroyed that we could not find a stave of it.

“Off Cape James Kent, about eight miles from ‘Sunny Gorge,’ while taking an observation for latitude, I was myself seized with a sudden pain, and fainted. My limbs became rigid, and certain obscure tetanoid symptoms of our late winter’s enemy disclosed themselves. In this condition I was unable to make more than nine miles a day. I was strapped upon the sledge, and the march continued as usual; but my powers diminished so rapidly that I could not resist even the otherwise comfortable temperament of 5° below zero. My left foot becoming frozen, caused a vexatious delay; and the same night it became evident that the immovability of my limbs was due to dropsical effusion.

“On the 5th, becoming delirious, and fainting every time that I was taken from the tent to the sledge, I succumbed entirely.

“The scurvy had already broken out among the men, with symptoms like my own; and Morton, our strongest man, was beginning to give way. It is the reverse of comfort to me that they shared my weakness. All that I should remember with pleasurable feeling is, that to five brave men,—Morton, Riley, Hickey, Stephenson, and Hans, themselves scarcely able to travel,—I owe my preservation. They carried me back by forced marches, and I was taken into the brig on the 14th. Since then, fluctuating between life and death, I have by the blessing of God reached the present date, and see feebly in prospect my recovery. Dr Hayes regards my attack as one of scurvy, complicated by typhoid fever. George Stephenson is similarly affected. Our worst symptoms are dropsical effusion and night-sweats.

“May 22.—Let me, if I can, make up my record for the time I have been away, or on my back.

“Poor Schubert is gone. Our gallant, merry-hearted companion left us some ten days ago, for, I trust, a more genial world. It is sad, in this dreary little homestead of ours, to miss his contented face and the joyous troll of his ballads.

“The health of the rest has, if anything, improved. Their complexions show the influence of sunlight, and I think several have a firmer and more elastic step. Stephenson and Thomas are the only two beside myself who are likely to suffer permanently from the effects of our breakdown. Bad scurvy both: symptoms still serious.

“I left Hans as hunter. I gave him a regular exemption from all other labour, and a promised present to his lady-love on reaching Fiskernaes. He signalised his promotion by shooting two deer, Tukkuk, the first yet shot. We have now on hand one hundred and forty-five pounds of venison, a very gift of grace to our diseased crew. But, indeed, we are not likely to want for wholesome food, now that the night is gone, which made our need of it so pressing. On the first of May those charming little migrants, the snow-birds, ultima cÆlicolum, which only left us on the 4th of November, returned to our ice-crusted rocks, whence they seem to ‘fill the sea and air with their sweet jargoning.’ Seal literally abound, too. I have learned to prefer this flesh to the reindeer’s, at least that of the female seal, which has not the fetor of her mate’s.

“By the 12th, the sides of the Advance were free from snow, and her rigging clean and dry. The floe is rapidly undergoing its wonderful processes of decay, and the level ice measures but six feet in thickness. To-day they report a burgomaster-gull seen, one of the earliest but surest indications of returning open water. It is not strange, ice-leaguered exiles as we are, that we observe and exult in these things. They are the pledges of renewed life, the olive-branch of this dreary waste: we feel the spring in all our pulses.

“The first thing I did after my return was to send M’Gary to the Life-boat Cove, to see that our boat and its buried provisions were secure. He made the journey by dog-sledge in four days, and has returned reporting that all is safe—an important help for us, should this heavy ice of our more northern prison refuse to release us.

“But the pleasantest feature of his journey was the disclosure of open water, extending up in a sort of tongue, with a trend of north by east to within two miles of Refuge Harbour, and there widening as it expanded to the south and west.

“As soon as I had recovered enough to be aware of my failure, I began to devise means for remedying it. But I found the resources of the party shattered. Pierre had died but a week before, and his death exerted an unfavourable influence. There were only three men able to do duty. Of the officers, Wilson, Brooks, Sontag, and Petersen, were knocked up. There was no one except Sontag, Hayes, or myself who was qualified to conduct a survey; and, of us three, Dr Hayes was the only one on his feet.

“The quarter to which our remaining observations were to be directed lay to the north and east of the Cape Sabine of Captain Inglefield. The interruption our progress along the coast of Greenland had met from the Great Glacier, and destruction of our provision-caches by the bears, left a blank for us of the entire northern coast-line. It was necessary to ascertain whether the farthermost expansion of Smith’s Strait did not find an outlet in still more remote channels.

“I determined to trust almost entirely to the dogs for our travel in the future, and to send our parties of exploration, one after the other, as rapidly as the strength and refreshing of our team would permit.

“Dr Hayes was selected for that purpose; and I satisfied myself that, with a little assistance from my comrades, I could be carried round to the cots of the sick, and so avail myself of his services in the field.

“He was a perfectly fresh man, not having yet undertaken a journey. I gave him a team and my best driver, William Godfrey. He is to cross Smith’s Straits above the inlet, and make as near as may be a straight course for Cape Sabine. My opinion is, that by keeping well south he will find the ice less clogged and easier sledging. Our experience proves, I think, that the transit of this broken area must be most impeded as we approach the glacier. The immense discharge of icebergs cannot fail to break it up seriously for travel.

“I gave him the small sledge which was built by Ohlsen. The snow was sufficiently thawed to make it almost unnecessary to use fire as a means of obtaining water; they could therefore dispense with tallow or alcohol, and were able to carry pemmican in larger quantities. Their sleeping-bags were a very neat article of a light reindeer-skin. The dogs were in excellent condition too—no longer foot-sore, but well rested and completely broken, including the four from the Esquimaux, animals of great power and size. Two of these, the stylish leaders of the team, a span of thoroughly wolfish iron-greys, have the most powerful and wild-beast-like bound that I have seen in animals of their kind.

“I made up the orders of the party on the 19th, the first day that I was able to mature a plan; and with commendable zeal they left the brig on the 20th.

“May 23.—They have had superb weather, thank heaven!—a profusion of the most genial sunshine, bringing out the seals in crowds to bask around their breathing-holes. Winter has gone!

“May 26.—I get little done; but I have too much to attend to in my weak state to journalise. Thermometer above freezing-point, without the sun to-day.

“May 27.—Everything showing that the summer-changes have commenced. The ice is rapidly losing its integrity, and a melting snow has fallen for the last two days,—one of those comforting home-snows that we have not seen for so long.

“May 28.—Our day of rest and devotion. It was a fortnight ago last Friday since our poor friend Pierre died. For nearly two months he had been struggling against the enemy with a resolute will and mirthful spirit, that seemed sure of victory; but he sunk in spite of them.

“The last offices were rendered to him with the same careful ceremonial that we observed at Baker’s funeral. There were fewer to walk in the procession; but the body was encased in a decent pine coffin, and carried to Observatory Island, where it was placed side by side with that of his messmate. Neither could yet be buried; but it is hardly necessary to say that the frost has embalmed their remains. Dr Hayes read the chapter from Job which has consigned so many to their last resting-place, and a little snow was sprinkled upon the face of the coffin. Pierre was a volunteer not only of our general expedition, but of the party with which he met his death-blow. He was a gallant man, a universal favourite on board, always singing some BÉranger ballad or other, and so elastic in his merriment, that even in his last sickness he cheered all that were about him.

“May 30.—We are gleaning fresh water from the rocks, and the icebergs begin to show commencing streamlets. The great floe is no longer a Sahara, if still a desert. The floes are wet, and their snow dissolve readily under the warmth of the foot, and the old floe begins to shed fresh water into its hollows. Puddles of salt water collect around the ice-foot. It is now hardly recognisable,—rounded, sunken, broken up with water-pools overflowing its base. Its diminished crusts are so percolated by the saline tides, that neither tables nor broken fragments unite any longer by freezing. It is lessening so rapidly that we do not fear it any longer as an enemy to the brig. The berg indeed vanished long before the sun-thermometers indicated a noon temperature above 32°.

“Seal grow still more numerous on the level floes, lying cautiously in the sun beside their breathing-holes. By means of the Esquimaux stratagem of a white screen pushed forward on a sledge until the concealed hunter comes within range, Hans has shot four of them. We have more fresh meat than we can eat. For the past three weeks we have been living on ptarmigan, rabbits, two reindeer, and seal.

“They are fast curing our scurvy. With all these resources, coming to our relief so suddenly too, how can my thoughts turn despairingly to poor Franklin and his crew?

“Can they have survived? No man can answer with certainty; but no man without presumption can answer in the negative.

“If, four months ago,—surrounded by darkness and bowed down by disease,—I had been asked the question, I would have turned toward the black hills and the frozen sea, and responded in sympathy with them, ‘No.’ But with the return of light a savage people come down upon us, destitute of any but the rudest appliances of the chase, who were fattening on the most wholesome diet of the region, only forty miles from our anchorage, while I was denouncing its scarcity.”