Arctic Dreams, page 38
After the first few weeks they saw very few animals, and Parry suggested that the caribou and ptarmigan and other creatures must walk south across the ice to North America for the winter. Only wolves and arctic foxes remained behind. They caught a fox and kept him as a pet, and “Jack” became tame enough to eat from everyone’s hand. The dogs on board made a tentative liaison with the wolves that came around. One, a white setter named Carlo, went off and never returned. Parry’s black Newfoundland, Boatswain, got in a fight with a wolf in which the wolf, as well, came off poorly.
The officers and men lived in reasonable comfort, with bread baked fresh daily and beer freshly brewed (except when it wouldn’t ferment because of the cold). Condensation from cooking and breathing froze to the walls and bulkheads and had to be chipped away regularly. Clothing never seemed to dry; bedding—fumigated weekly with gunpowder and vinegar—was always damp; light, from the single six-inch candle issued each man every six days, became precious. Parry and his officers worried about three things: scurvy, that perennial arctic menace; idleness, which they believed abetted the onset of scurvy and discontent; and their fate. They also expressed concern in their journals about their families, that they might worry too much about them.
The men were regularly inspected for signs of scurvy, and antiscorbutics—three-quarters of an ounce of lemon juice with sugar every morning—were part of every man’s ration. (For the worst cases, the enterprising Parry grew mustard and cress near the stovepipe in this room. Daily exercise on deck or ashore if the weather was good was required, and each man had daily tasks to perform—so many that by midwinter the crew was complaining they had too much to do, which pleased Parry.)
In the evenings the officers gathered to read and listen to music, Parry playing his violin and one of the other officers a flute. Religious services were held on Sundays. In spite of the regularity of their lives and “the public obligation to be cheerful,” they sensed their vulnerability, a “gloomy prospect which would sometimes obtrude itself on the stoutest heart.”
The men amused themselves outside by making mortar barrels out of sea ice and by rendering the blubber of the sea mammals they had killed during the summer for oil, for their winter light. Many of them took long walks, “in a silence far different from that peaceable composure which characterizes the landscape of a cultivated country: it was the death-like stillness of the most dreary isolation, and the total absence of animated existence.” Parry wrote of the pleasure of staring at a stone in the snow, for the relief it gave the eye. And of being able to hear a man singing to himself more than a mile away. And the explosive cracking of timbers as cold took the ships.
The return of the sun was so eagerly anticipated that during the time of day when it might be expected to loom early because of refraction, a continuous watch was kept from the top of the Hecla’s mainmast. On the fated day, February 3, a relay of men watched—ten minutes each—from the crow’s nest. It appeared at 11:40 A.M., Winter Harbor time.
On February 13 two sailors received thirty-six lashes for drunkenness. On the 14th it was –55°F and Mr. Fisher poured water through a colander 40 feet up in the Hecla’s mast to see if it would freeze before it hit the deck. On February 24 at 10:15 A.M., clothing hung too near the stove in Mr. Sabine’s observation hut caught fire and set fire to the building. The blaze was quickly put out, but a man who tried to save the instruments subsequently lost fingers on both hands to frostbite. A young pet glaucous gull died in the fire and was remembered in a dignified eulogy in the next issue of the paper.
March and April came on, but the cold weather did not break; the men suffered the consternation they would have felt had they been in northern England, expecting the return of warmth with the return of the sun, and some signs of spring. On April 9 Parry made his celebrated drawing of the sun’s halos and arcs. On April 16 a brilliant solar corona became visible when a layer of light, fleecy clouds passed under the sun, revealing “the most soft and exquisite tints of lake, bluish green, and yellow about their edges, that can possibly be imagined.” On June 16 a triple rainbow appeared.15
Parry had not planned for such a long stay as this, and he became anxious about the time of their departure, and their chances of reaching Icy Cape before fall. He decided if he was away before the end of June, he would be fine. In May the men started wearing black crepe veils to prevent snowblindness, and they cheered the sight of the first unfrozen water, on the ship’s black paint. On May 24 it rained, but the ice showed no signs of weakening.
On June 1 Parry departed with eleven officers and men to explore to the north and west. The men pulled a cart with 800 pounds of provisions and equipment, on which they rigged a sail to help them over the wet and snowy terrain. Parry named many geographical features for his officers and midshipmen, collected geological samples, examined the remnants of a paleo-Eskimo camp, and constructed several cairns, as was their wont almost everywhere they put ashore. The cairns were roughly 12 feet high and 12 feet across at the base. A tin or copper cylinder, or sometimes one of Messrs. Dankin and Hall’s preserved soup tins from the ship, containing the names of the shore party, the date, a short account of the voyage, and perhaps a penny from an officer’s pocket, or a uniform button, was buried at the base.
The men returned to the ships on June 15. With no sign of breakup, Parry sent hunting parties out for ten days at a time to secure meat (brant, caribou, muskoxen, ptarmigan), and daily sent members of the crew out to collect sorrel.
Finally, on August 1, the two ships sailed out of Winter Harbor and set out again for Icy Cape. They got no farther west than they had the year before. The pack ice in M’Clure Strait was impenetrable, and the floes humbling—one that had ridden up on another was 42 feet thick. On August 7, far to the southwest, they saw a shore, which they named Banks’ Land in honor of Sir Joseph Banks, the proponent of a Northwest Passage whose mantle Barrow had assumed in 1815.
Parry already had his crews on two-thirds rations, in case they were forced to spend a second winter. He tried to get farther south by going back east first. It took him until August 30 to decide that it was hopeless for that year, and he shaped his course for home. On the way out of Lancaster Sound he gave the present Somerset Island the name North Somerset after the homeland of Lieutenant Liddon, the Griper’s captain, and the present Devon Island the name North Devon after his own native country. On the 4th and 5th of September they met whalers from Hull. The following day they met four Eskimo men near Clyde Inlet and spent several days with them before sailing for England.
Parry wrote that he had not reckoned with either the severity of the climate or the shortness of the sailing season. But his success was spectacular. It would be eighty years before anyone discovered so much new land in the Arctic in a single voyage—and no one before him had ever seen so much.
A storm the Hecla ran into on September 14 tore away the ship’s stern boat, broke the foremast off two feet above the forecastle deck, snapped off the main-topmast, and broke away the bowsprit. To get clear of the wreckage they had to cut away their starboard anchor. On the 27th they sighted Foula Island in the Shetlands. On the 29th Parry disembarked at Peterhead and took a coach for London. With him, sealed, were all the journals, drawings, sketches, and notations produced by crew and officers on the expedition, “to be thereafter dispensed of as [the Admiralty] may think proper to determine.”
The following spring Parry sailed again, to search for a southern entrance to Prince Regent Inlet, which he would find—Fury and Hecla Strait.
I thought across the range of these things, walking along the beach at Pingok. The day after a little trouble in the ice it is possible to imagine, if but imperfectly, the sort of reach some of these men made into the unknown, day after day. I think of Brendan asleep on a bed of heather in the bottom of his carraugh, and of the forlorn colonists at Eriks Fiord in the thirteenth century. The exemplary John Davis in his tiny pinnace, the Ellen. I think we can hardly reconstruct the terror of it, the single-minded belief in something beyond the self. Davis wrote of the wild coasts he surveyed that he believed God had made no land that was not amenable, that there were no wastelands.
Walking along the beach, remembering Brendan’s deference and Parry’s and Davis’s voyages, I could only think what exquisite moments these must have been. Inescapable hardship transcended by a desire for spiritual elevation, or the desire to understand, to comprehend what lay in darkness. I thought of some of the men at Winter Harbor with Parry. What dreams there must have been that were never written down, that did not make that journey south with Parry in the coach, but remained in the heart. The kind of dreams that give a whole life its bearing, what a person intends it should be, having seen those coasts.
1 In the writings of Pytheas the term “Thule” refers to a place six days’ sail north of Britain.
2 Most maps located these fabulous islands to the west of Europe, but their association was with visions of the North as well. The discovery of the Azores and Madeira by the Portuguese in the fifteenth century (they may have been known earlier to Phoenician traders) lent support to the notion that there were other isles farther to the west.
3 Most Norse and Danish place names in Greenland are being changed to Greenlandic Eskimo names. To avoid confusion I have used the older, more familiar names. The modern terms appear in the gazetteer.
4 There is a poignant line in the seventeenth-century Annals of the Icelandic Bishop Gisli Oddsson. He writes that the Norse, who had adopted Christianity about A.D. 1000, finally abandoned their morals, their faith, and their superior culture “et ad Americae populos se converterunt”—“and converted to the way of the American people.”
5 The sagas were not written down for another 200 years. The authors of the sagas, with a penchant for making what they heard fit what they believed (i.e., had read), may have invented this last name to signify a land of self-sown wheat and wild grapes suitable for winemaking.
6 Some of the impetus to open a Northeast Passage, across Asia and south through a “Strait of Jezzo,” was a restriction imposed by the emperor of Japan against trade in the Kamchatka region for vessels coming up from the south. Japan took a significant tribute from Kamchatka, from silver mines it was thought. The Dutch were certain such a northern passage existed because Dutch traders wrecked on the Korean coast in those years found a stranded whale with a harpoon in it from the Spitsbergen fishery. The whale could only have gotten there through a strait between Asia and North America.
7 The cause of scurvy, a vitamin-C deficiency disorder that induces capillary hemorrhaging, loosening of the teeth, anemia, and general debilitation, was unknown. Victims showed “a tottering gait, attenuated form, and care-wore expression of countenance.” James Lind, a Scottish naval surgeon, successfully treated scurvy-ridden sailors with oranges and lemons in 1747. A ration of lemon juice became the standard preventative in the British navy by 1795, though it was sometimes inadequate to stave off symptoms on a long cruise.
8 Norse seamen went as far as “Nororsetur,” which may have been in the vicinity of Sullorsuaq Strait (70°12´N), and they likely sailed farther. Norse artifacts have been found in a Thule village on Bache Peninsula on Ellesmere Island (79°N), but it is uncertain how they got there.
9 Between 1769 and 1868, the Hudson’s Bay Company sold at auction in London, among other furs and skins, the following: 891,091 fox, 1,052,051 lynx, 68,694 wolverine, 288,016 bear, 467,549 wolf, 1,507,240 mink, 94,326 swan, 275,032 badger, 4,708,702 beaver, and 1,240,511 marten. During parts of this same period two other companies, the North West Company and the Canada Company, were trading furs in numbers as large.
10 The current, properly speaking, is the West Spitsbergen Current. It is a continuation of the warm Norwegian Current, which is a continuation of the North Atlantic Current, where the Gulf Stream terminates semantically for oceanographers. The warm West Spitsbergen Current rounds the northwest cape of Spitsbergen, where some of it flows beneath the polar ice for another 1500 miles, emerging in the vicinity of the New Siberian Islands—an indication of the enormous volume of Caribbean water involved.
11 The Yearbooks of the Sung dynasty record a much earlier voyage in these waters. In A.D. 458 a Buddhist monk, Hwui Shan, together with four other monks, sailed north past the Kuril Islands and up the coast of the Kamchatka Peninsula, then east through the Aleutian Islands to mainland Alaska.
12 Steller discovered and named many new animals on this trip, including Steller’s jay (a verification of their North American landing) and Steller’s sea cow, which was never seen again by scientists. The sea otter furs brought back by the expedition’s survivors drew Russian free trappers into the region, who subsequently embarked on a bloody suppression of native coastal peoples.
13 A second award of £5000 was also established at this time for the first ship to sail within 1° of the Pole. And a third prize of £5000 was authorized for the first ship to sail past 110°W, since longitude could now be accurately determined. Cook had on board one of John Harrison’s clocks, for precisely fixing longitude west of the Greenwich meridian. He called it “our never-failing guide.” An imperious Admiralty Board gave the chronometer its stamp of approval but made Harrison, a cabinetmaker, wait thirty-seven years for his reward (another £20,000). They couldn’t believe a commoner had actually solved the problem.
14 Parry had named the first tier of islands north of the Parry Channel the North Georgia Islands for King George III, distinguishing them from South Georgia in the Antarctic. They are now called the Parry Islands.
15 While the first and second rainbows occur at an angle of 180° from the sun, the third and fourth occur around the sun and are almost never seen. What Parry took for the third rainbow was in fact the fifth level of refraction.
Nine
A Northern Passage
ALL DID NOT GO as smoothly on Parry’s first expedition as his Journal of a Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific implies. In the pages of The North Georgia Gazette are hints that the officers of the Griper were ostracized. The coarser lot of the sailors is made clear in an expedition surgeon’s report on the death of one William Scott, from alcoholism and acute psychosis. And the Hecla’s assistant surgeon, Alexander Fisher, notes in his journal on February 28, “We had a portion of the Second, Nineteenth, and Twenty-second articles of War read on the quarter-deck today, and after that a long order relating chiefly to some difference between two officers some days ago.”
Such small variation with the pristine image history usually presents of Parry’s voyage might count for nothing but quibbling if the gentle suppression of these images did not foreshadow a pattern. Increasingly, afterward, records of arctic exploration presented to the public were arranged to serve a purpose, to bolster a preconceived vision of the impersonal hostility of the region and mankind’s role in it. The Arctic became an appropriate setting for a life of national service, and nations touted the success of their expeditions. Later, the Arctic became a dramatic setting for the personal quests and heroism of individuals like Robert Peary, Fridtjof Nansen, and Vilhjalmur Stefansson. Competition for geographic accomplishment in the late nineteenth century became as keen as the competition had once been for commercial advantage, and the use of the press to promote these expeditions became increasingly sophisticated.
The Admiralty’s demand to control all the records from Parry’s expedition stemmed from the desire—largely Sir John Barrow’s, one suspects—to preserve a successful, coherent, tidy, and inspiring image of the enterprise. Barrow stressed that these voyages were for disinterested scientific and geographic discovery; any mere commercial advantage that might accrue was far less important. “[W]hatever new discoveries might be made,” he wrote in 1818, with an air of noblesse oblige, were to benefit all other nations, “without [their] having incurred either the expense or the risk” of exploration.
Pressed to defend these lofty ideals, which Parry’s expedition so admirably reflected, he remarked summarily, “Knowledge is power.” An enhancement of her international prestige and the suggestion of an economic hegemony looming in the distance, too, played a role in an England fresh from the Napoleonic Wars. When Russia seemed poised to finish what England had begun in the Arctic, Barrow argued, successfully, to prevent it. He wrote that to have left the Northwest Passage “to be completed by a foreign navy, after the doors of the two extremities of the passage had been thrown open by ships of our own [by James Cook (1778) and William Baffin (1616)] would have been little short of an act of national suicide.”
The efforts of men such as Barrow to influence public emotions in this arena played a strong role, of course, in determining a public conception of the geography of the region. It is imprecise, however, to call this scheming—even when it involves, as it eventually did, individual men in acts of deception for personal gain; or when, today, it involves a discreet request by industry that scientific consultants structure environmental data in a helpful way. What is involved here, geographers such as John L. Allen have suggested, is a yearning to locate precisely what one has set out to find—and to shape what one finds to suit one’s own ends, even if that meets with contradiction.
It is important, I think, not to lose sight of ingenuousness in these episodes. The desire to understand what is unknown is great. And the wish to create some human benefit out of new knowledge, however misconstrued, is one of the graces of Western civilization. Few historians can say precisely where the special interest of a Barrow or a Robert Peary ceased to serve society and served only the man; or where plans for industrialization cross a line and become of greater service to a nation’s economy than the well-being of its people.
