OUR MARCH OVER LAND AND SEA.
We had our boats to prepare now for a long and adventurous navigation. They were so small and heavily laden as hardly to justify much confidence in their buoyancy; but, besides this, they were split with frost and warped by sunshine, and fairly open at the seams. They were to be calked, and swelled, and launched, and stowed, before we could venture to embark in them. A rainy south-wester too, which had met us on our arrival, was now spreading with its black nimbus over the bay, and it looked as if we were to be storm stayed on the precarious ice beach. It ? 206 ? was a time of anxiety, but to me personally of comparative rest. I resumed my journal:—
“July 18.—The Esquimaux are camped by our side,—the whole settlement of Etah congregated around the ‘big caldron’ of Cape Alexander, to bid us good-bye. There are Metek and Nualik his wife, our old acquaintance Mrs Eider-duck, and their five children, commencing with Myouk, my body-guard, and ending with the ventricose little Accomodah. There is Nessark and Anak his wife; and Tellerk the ‘Right Arm,’ and Amaunalik his wife; and Sip-su, and Marsumah and Aningnah—and who not? I can name them every one, and they know us as well. We have found brothers in a strange land.
“Each one has a knife, or a file, or a saw, or some such treasured keepsake; and the children have a lump of soap, the greatest of all great medicines. The merry little urchins break in upon me even now as I am writing—‘Kuyanake, kuyanake, Nalegak-soak!’ ‘Thank you, thank you, big chief!’ while Myouk is crowding fresh presents of raw birds on me as if I could eat for ever, and poor Aningnah is crying beside the tent-curtain, wiping her eyes on a bird skin!
“My heart warms to these poor, dirty, miserable, yet happy beings, so long our neighbours, and of late so staunchly our friends. Theirs is no affectation of regret. There are twenty-two of them around me, all busy in good offices to the Docto Kayens; and there are only two women and the old blind patriarch Kresuk, ‘Drift-wood,’ left behind at the settlement.
“But see! more of them are coming up—boys ten years old pushing forward babies on their sledges. The whole nation is gipsying with us upon the icy meadows.
“We cook for them in our big camp-kettle; they sleep ? 207 ? in the Red Eric: a berg close at hand supplies them with water; and thus, rich in all that they value,—sleep, and food, and drink, and companionship,—with their treasured short-lived summer sun above them, the beau ideal and sum of Esquimaux blessings, they seem supremely happy.
Parting With the Esquimaux
“Whatever may have been the faults of these Esquimaux heretofore, stealing was the only grave one. Treachery they may have conceived; and I have reason to believe that, under superstitious fears of an evil influence from our presence, they would at one time have been glad to destroy us. But the day of all this has passed away. When trouble came to us and to them, and we bent ourselves to their habits,—when we looked to them to procure us fresh meat, and they found at our poor Oomiak-soak shelter and protection during their wild bear-hunts,—then we were so blended in our interests as well as modes of life, that every trace of enmity wore away. God knows that since they professed friendship—albeit the imaginary powers of the angekok-soak and the marvellous six-shooter which attested them may have had their influence—never have friends been more true. Although, since Ohlsen’s death, numberless articles of inestimable value to them have been scattered upon the ice unwatched, they have not stolen a nail. It was only yesterday that Metek, upon my alluding to the manner in which property of all sorts was exposed without pilfering, explained through Petersen, in these two short sentences, the argument of their morality:—
“‘You have done us good. We are not hungry; we will not take (steal).——You have done us good; we want to help you; we are friends.’”
I made my last visit to Etah while we were waiting the issue of the storm. I saw old Kresuk (Drift-wood) the blind man, and listened to his long good-bye talk. I had ? 208 ? passed with the Esquimaux as an angekok, in virtue of some simple exploits of natural magic; and it was one of the regular old-times entertainments of our visitors at the brig, to see my hand terrible with blazing ether, while it lifted nails with the magnet. I tried now to communicate a portion of my wonder-working talent. I made a lens of ice before them, and “drew down the sun,” so as to light the moss under their kolupsut. I did not quite understand old Kresuk, and I was not quite sure he understood himself. But I trusted to the others to explain to him what I had done, and burned the back of his hand for a testimony in the most friendly manner. After all which, with a reputation for wisdom which I dare say will live in their short annals, I wended my way to the brig again.
We renewed our queries about Hans, but could get no further news of him. The last story is, that the poor boy and his better-half were seen leaving Peteravik, “the halting-place,” in company with Shang-hu and one of his big sons. Lover as he was, and nalegak by the all-hail hereafter, joy go with him, for he was a right good fellow.
We had quite a scene distributing our last presents. My amputating knives, the great gift of all, went to Metek and Nessark; but every one had something as his special prize. Our dogs went to the community at large, as tenants in common, except Toodlamick and Whitey, our representative dogs through very many trials; I could not part with them, the leaders of my team.
Farewell!
And now it only remained for us to make our farewell to these desolate and confiding people. I gathered them round me on the ice-beach, and talked to them as brothers for whose kindness I had still a return to make. I told them what I knew of the tribes from which they were separated by the glacier and the sea, of the resources that ? 209 ? abounded in those less ungenial regions not very far off to the south, the greater duration of daylight, the less intensity of the cold, the facilities of the hunt, the frequent drift-wood, the kayack, and the fishing-net. I tried to explain to them how, under bold and cautious guidance, they might reach there in a few seasons of patient march. I gave them drawings of the coast, with its headlands and hunting-grounds, as far as Cape Shackleton, and its best camping-stations from Red Head to the Danish settlements.
They listened with breathless interest, closing their circle round me; and, as Petersen described the big ussuk, the white whale, the bear, and the long open water hunts with the kayack and the rifle, they looked at each other with a significance not to be misunderstood. They would anxiously have had me promise that I would some day return and carry a load of them down to the settlements; and I shall not wonder if—guided perhaps by Hans—they hereafter attempt the journey without other aid.
It was in the soft subdued light of a Sunday evening, June 17, that, after hauling our boats with much hard labour through the hummocks, we stood beside the open sea-way. Before midnight we had launched the Red Eric, and given three cheers for Henry Grinnell and “homeward bound,” unfurling all our flags.
But we were not yet to embark; for the gale which had been long brooding now began to dash a heavy wind-lipper against the floe, and obliged us to retreat before it, hauling our boats back with each fresh breakage of the ice. It rose more fiercely, and we were obliged to give way before it still more. Our goods, which had been stacked upon the ice, had to be carried further inward. We worked our way back thus, step by step, before the breaking ice, for about two hundred yards. At last it became apparent ? 210 ? that the men must sleep and rest, or sink; and, giving up for the present all thoughts of embarking, I hauled the boats at once nearly a mile from the water’s edge, where a large iceberg was frozen tight in the floes.
But here we were still pursued. All the next night it blew fearfully, and at last our berg crashed away through the broken ice, and our asylum was destroyed. Again we fell to hauling back the boats; until, fearing that the continuance of the gale might induce a ground-swell, which would have been fatal to us, I came to a halt near the slope of a low iceberg, on which I felt confident that we could haul up, in case of the entire disruption of the floes. The entire area was already intersected with long cracks, and the surface began to show a perceptible undulation beneath our feet.
It was well for us I had not gratified the men by taking the outside track; we should certainly have been rafted off into the storm, and without an apparent possibility of escape.
I climbed to the summit of the berg; but it was impossible to penetrate the obscurity of mist, and spray, and cloud further than a thousand yards. The sea tore the ice up almost to the very base of the berg, and all around it looked like one vast tumultuous caldron, the ice-tables crashing together in every possible position with deafening clamour.
The gale died away to a calm, and the water became as tranquil as if the gale had never been. All hands were called to prepare for embarking. The boats were stowed, and the cargo divided between them equally; the sledges unlashed and slung outside the gunwales; and on Tuesday the 19th, at 4 P.M., with the bay as smooth as a garden-lake, I put off in the Faith. She was followed by the Red ? 211 ? Eric on our quarter, and the Hope astern. In the Faith I had with me Mr M’Gary, and Petersen, Hickey, Stephenson, and Whipple. Mr Brooks was in the Hope, with Hayes, Sontag, Morton, Goodfellow, and Blake. Bonsall, Riley, and Godfrey made the crew of the Eric.
Boat Disasters
The wind freshened as we doubled the westernmost point of Cape Alexander, and, as we looked out on the expanse of the sound, we saw the kitty-wakes and the ivory-gulls and jagers dipping their wings in the curling waves. They seemed the very same birds we had left two years before screaming and catching fish in the beautiful water. We tried to make our first rest at Sutherland Island; but we found it so barricaded by the precipitous ice-belt that it was impossible to land. I clambered myself from the boat’s mast upon the platform and filled our kettles with snow, and then, after cooking our supper in the boats, we stood away for Hakluyt. It was an ugly crossing: we had a short chopping sea from the south-east; and, after a while, the Red Eric swamped. Riley and Godfrey managed to struggle to the Faith, and Bonsall to the Hope: but it was impossible to remove the cargo of our little comrade; it was as much as we could do to keep her afloat and let her tow behind us. Just at this time, too, the Hope made a signal of distress; and Brooks hailed us to say that she was making water faster than he could free her.
The wind was hauling round to the westward, and we could not take the sea abeam. But, as I made a rapid survey of the area around me, studded already with floating shreds of floe-ice, I saw ahead the low, grey blink of the pack. I remembered well the experience of our Beechy Island trip, and knew that the margin of these large fields is almost always broken by inlets of open water, which gave much the same sort of protection as the creeks and ? 212 ? rivers of an adverse coast. We were fortunate in finding one of these, and fastening ourselves to an old floe, alongside of which our weary men turned in to sleep without hauling up the boats.
When Petersen and myself returned from an unsuccessful hunt upon the ice, we found them still asleep, in spite of a cold and drizzling rain that might have stimulated wakefulness. I did not disturb them till eight o’clock. We then retreated from our breakwater of refuge, generally pulling along by the boat-hooks, but sometimes dragging our boats over the ice; and at last, bending to our oars as the water opened, reached the shore of Hakluyt Island.
In the morning of the 22d we pushed forward for Northumberland Island, and succeeded in reaching it a little to the eastward of my former landing-place.
We crossed Murchison Channel on the 23d, and encamped for the night on the land-floe at the base of Cape Parry; a hard day’s travel, partly by tracking over ice, partly through tortuous and zigzag leads. The next day gave us admirable progress. The ice opened in leads before us, somewhat tortuous, but, on the whole, favouring, and for sixteen hours I never left the helm. We were all of us exhausted when the day’s work came to a close.
The next day’s progress was of course slow and wearisome, pushing through alternate ice and water for the land-belt. We fastened at last to the great floe near the shore, making our harbour in a crack which opened with the changes of tide.
The imperfect diet of the party was showing itself more and more in the decline of their muscular power. They seemed scarcely aware of it themselves, and referred the difficulty they found in dragging and pushing to something uncommon about the ice or sludge, rather than to ? 213 ? their own weakness. But, as we endeavoured to renew our labours through the morning fog, belted in on all sides by ice-fields so distorted and rugged as to defy our efforts to cross them, the truth seemed to burst upon every one. We had lost the feeling of hunger, and were almost satisfied with our pasty broth and the large draughts of tea which accompanied it. I was anxious to send our small boat, the Eric, across to the lumme-hill of Appah, where I knew from the Esquimaux we should find plenty of birds; but the strength of the party was insufficient to drag her.
We were sorely disheartened, and could only wait for the fog to rise, in the hope of some smoother platform than that which was about us, or some lead that might save us the painful labour of tracking. I had climbed an iceberg, and there was nothing in view except Dalrymple Rock, with its red brassy face towering in the unknown distance. But I hardly got back to my boat, before a gale struck us from the north-west, and a floe, taking upon a tongue of ice about a mile to the north of us, began to swing upon it like a pivot, and close slowly in upon our narrow resting-place.
An Ice Nip
At first our own floe also was driven before the wind; but in a little while it encountered the stationary ice at the foot of the very rock itself. On the instant the wildest imaginable ruin rose around us. The men sprang mechanically each one to his station, bearing back the boats and stores; but I g............