The North Pole Part 7

"We would look to see if there were enough of the animals to make a raid worth while; then, if the prospect was satisfactory, the _Roosevelt_ would steam along to leeward, for if they smelled her smoke they would wake up and we would never see them again.

"Henson, MacMillan, and I used to take turns going after these brutes.

Four or five Eskimos, one sailor, and a whale-boat were a.s.signed to each of us. The boats were painted white to resemble pieces of ice, and the row-locks were m.u.f.fled, that we might steal along as noiselessly as possible.

"As soon as we sighted a herd worthy of our lead, we would sing out to our men, 'Shake her up!' and they would all come on the jump. After a hurried though careful look to see if we had four or five oars, five harpoons, lines, floats, two rifles, and ammunition, we would cry, 'Stand by to lower away'; and as the _Roosevelt_ slackened speed we would slide down the davit ropes, man the oars, and go out to look for trouble--which we usually found.

"We would get as near as possible to the walruses on the ice. If they were sound asleep, we could row to within five yards and harpoon a couple; but generally they would wake up, when we were about twenty yards away, and begin to slide off into the water. We would then shoot, and if they attacked us it was easy to harpoon them; while if they started to leave the country, it might be a Marathon race before we got close enough to make the harpoons fast in their hides.

"A walrus when killed will go to the bottom like a ton of lead, and our business was to get a harpoon into him before that event took place. The harpoon is fastened to the float by a long thong made of sealskin, and a float is made of the entire skin of a seal filled with air for buoyancy.

"A thing we soon learned to look out for was to let this thong, which was neatly coiled up like a la.s.so before it was thrown, have the right of way and all the s.p.a.ce it needed; for if it happened to take a turn around one of our legs when the other end was fast to a walrus, we would be missing that useful member, and be pulled into the water--and possibly drowned.

"Now a crew that goes through a scrimmage with these monsters develops teamplay of a high order in a surprisingly short time. The sailor would steer, four Eskimos would row, and in the bow would be the best harpooner with one of us beside him. The two men forward would enable the men rowing to be spelled, if we had a long chase.

"I shall never forget my first mix-up with a herd. We had sighted about ten walruses two miles away, and MacMillan and I, Dennis Murphy, a sailor, and three Eskimos manned a whale-boat, and off we went. About two hundred yards from the walruses we quit rowing and let Murphy scull us, while Mac and I crouched side by side in the bow, the Eskimos with their harpoons being ready right behind us.

"When we were about twenty yards from the herd, one bull woke up, gave a grunt, poked another, woke him, and then--bang! bang! bang! we opened fire. Mac had a Winchester automatic rifle, and he got off five shots so fast that before the first one left the muzzle the other four were chasing it. He dropped a large bull, which gave a convulsive flop and rolled into the water with a splash. I hit a couple, and with hoa.r.s.e grunts of pain and fury they all wriggled off the ice and dived out of sight. The boat was hurried to within five yards of Mac's bull, and an Eskimo hurled a harpoon, hit the large bull, and threw overboard the sealskin float. At this stage of the game about forty other walruses, that had been feeding below, came up to the surface to see what the noise was about, spitting the clam sh.e.l.ls out of their mouths and snorting. The water was alive with the brutes, and many of them were so close to us that we could hit them with the oars. A harpoon was driven into another by a corking throw; and just then, when my magazine was empty, things began to come our way.

"Suddenly a large bull, followed by two others, all wounded, came to the surface twenty yards off, gave tongue to their battle-cry and charged.

The Eskimos were not pleased at the look of things. They grabbed the oars and began to bang them on the gunwale of the boat, yelling like so many steam sirens, hoping to scare the invaders off; but they might as well have been crooning lullabies.

"Mac, who had never before shot anything larger than a bird, was cool, and his automatic was going off like a pom-pom, when we cut loose on the charging trio. Their numerous companions added to the general din; and the reports of the rifles, the shouts and pounding of the Eskimos, with the bellowing of the infuriated animals, sounded like Vesuvius blowing its head off. We sank one walrus, then disabled another; but the biggest one dived and came up with a snort right alongside of the boat, so that he blew water in our faces. With our guns almost touching his head, we let drive--and he began to sink. With a triumphant cheer, the Eskimos harpooned him.

"Then we signaled to the _Roosevelt_ to come up, and as soon as the friends and neighbors of the deceased smelled the smoke, they made for parts unknown.

"In this hunt, as in all other walrus hunts I was in, I had a hard time in trying not to take a crack at the floats. They were black, and jumped around in the weirdest way, so that they appeared to be alive. I knew that if I shot one, I would never hear the last of it, so took good care.

"Another time we went for a herd of fifty-odd walruses that were sleeping on the ice. The wind was blowing fairly hard, and it is never easy to shoot accurately from a whale-boat which is doing a cake-walk in the arms of a choppy sea. When we got twenty yards from the ice cake, we began to fire. I hit a couple of walruses, but did not kill them, and with fierce grunts the huge brutes wriggled into the sea. They were coming our way, and all hands stood by to show the visitors how we loved to speed the parting guest--our way of showing this being the vocal and instrumental method already described.

"Wesharkoopsi, an Eskimo, who stood right behind me and who had been telling us what an expert he was with the harpoon, was making threatening gestures which boded ill for any walrus that came near us.

"Suddenly, with a loud 'Ook! Ook!' a bull rose like a giant jack-in-the-box right alongside of me, giving us a regular shower bath, and he got both tusks on the gunwale of the boat.

"Wesharkoopsi was not expecting a fight at such close quarters, and he got badly rattled. Instead of throwing his harpoon he dropped it, yelled madly, and began to spit in the monster's face. It is needless to state that we never again took Wesharkoopsi walrus-hunting in a whale-boat.

"The others were shouting, swearing in English and Eskimo at Wesharkoopsi, the walrus, and everything in general; some were trying to hit the brute, others to back water.

"I was not eager just then to test the soundness of one arctic explorer's dictum: 'If a walrus gets his tusks over the side of the boat, you must not hit him, as such a course would induce him to back water and upset you; but gently grasp the two-thousand-pound monster by the tusks and drop him overboard'--or words to that effect. If this one had got his tusks a quarter inch further my way, he would have had them clear over the gunwale; so I held my rifle at port arms, stuck its business end into the visitor's face, and let him have it--which settled his account.

"That walrus had tried to upset us, but almost immediately another one tried a new variation of the game, an almost successful effort to sink us--a regular dive-tackle.

"He was a large bull that an Eskimo had harpooned. He showed what he was made of by promptly attacking the float and putting it out of commission, then he proceeded to make off with the harpoon, float, and all. He happened to come near my end of the boat, and I shot at him; but whether I hit the mark or not I do not know. Anyhow, he dived, and while we were all looking over the side for him to appear, our craft was. .h.i.t a tremendous whack by something under the stern--so hard that it upset the bosun, who was standing there peacefully sculling.

"Our friend was getting a little too strenuous; but he dived before I could shoot again, and came up fifty yards off. Then I hit him with a bullet, and he disappeared. Maybe we were not an anxious crowd in that boat for the next few minutes, as we knew that that submarine earthquake was due for another blow-up at any instant--but when and where! We stared at the surface of the water, to see if possible from what direction the next attack would come.

"One more such scrimmage as the last and we would be all in--both literally and metaphorically; for he had put a big hole through the bottom of the boat, and as she had a double bottom we could not check the leak, and one man had to bale rapidly. We always carried along a lot of old coats to stop holes in the boats, but in this case they might as well have been pocket handkerchiefs.

"Suddenly an Eskimo who was looking over the side yelled: '_Kingeemutt!

Kingeemutt!_' ('Back her! Back her!') But the words were hardly out of his mouth when--smas.h.!.+ rip! bang!--the stern of the boat rose under the shock, the bosun was nearly knocked overboard, an Eskimo catching him on the fly, and a hole I could have put both fists through suddenly appeared within an inch of his foot, just above the water line.

"I looked over the gunwale. There the brute lay on his back, tusks upright under the stern; then with a quick flop he dived. The men did their usual stunts to scare him off. Up he came fifteen yards away, gave his battle-cry, 'Ook! Ook! Ook!' to warn us to look out for trouble, and came tearing along the surface of Whale Sound like a torpedo boat destroyer, or an unm.u.f.fled automobile with a bicycle policeman on its trail.

"I got my rapid-fire gun into the game and sank him; then we made for the nearest cake of ice--and reached it none too soon."

[Ill.u.s.tration: HOISTING A WALRUS TO THE DECK OF THE ROOSEVELT]

To take up the story where Borup leaves it, when the first wounded walrus had been despatched with a bullet, and the floats were all taken in, an oar was erected in the boat for a signal, and the _Roosevelt_ steamed up. The floats and the lines were taken over the rail of the s.h.i.+p, the walrus raised to the surface of the water, a hook inserted, and the winch on deck hoisted the monster on board, to be later skinned and cut up by the expert knives of the Eskimos. While this work was going on, the deck of the s.h.i.+p looked like a slaughterhouse, with the ravenous dogs--at this stage of the journey we had already about one hundred and fifty--waiting, ears erect and eyes sparkling, to catch the refuse thrown them by the Eskimos.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A NARWHAL KILLED OFF CAPE UNION, JULY, 1909. THE MOST NORTHERLY SPECIMEN EVER CAPTURED]

In the Whale Sound region we sometimes obtained narwhal and deer, but there was no narwhal hunting to speak of on the upward journey this last time. Walrus, narwhal, and seal meat are valuable food for dogs, but a white man does not usually enjoy it--unless he is nearly starved. Many times, however, during my twenty-three years of arctic exploration, I have thanked G.o.d for even a bite of raw dog.

CHAPTER X

KNOCKING AT THE GATEWAY TO THE POLE

From Etah to Cape Sheridan! Imagine about three hundred and fifty miles of almost solid ice--ice of all shapes and sizes, mountainous ice, flat ice, ragged and tortured ice, ice that, for every foot of height revealed above the surface of the water, hides seven feet below--a theater of action which for diabolic and t.i.tanic struggle makes Dante's frozen circle of the Inferno seem like a skating pond.

Then imagine a little black s.h.i.+p, solid, st.u.r.dy, compact, strong and resistant as any vessel built by mortal hands can be, yet utterly insignificant in comparison with the white, cold adversary she must fight. And on this little s.h.i.+p are sixty-nine human beings, men, women, and children, whites and Eskimos, who have gone out into the crazy, ice-tortured channel between Baffin Bay and the Polar Sea--gone out to help prove the reality of a dream which has bewitched some of the most daring minds of the world for centuries, a will-o'-the-wisp in the pursuit of which men have frozen, and starved, and died. The music that ever sounded in our ears had for melody the howling of two hundred and forty-six wild dogs, for a ba.s.s accompaniment the deep, low grumbling of the ice, surging around us with the impulse of the tides, and for punctuation the shock and jar of our cras.h.i.+ng a.s.saults upon the floes.

We steamed northward into the fog beyond Etah, Greenland, on the afternoon of August 18, 1908. This was the beginning of the last stage of the _Roosevelt's_ journey. All now on board would, if they lived, be with me until my return the following year. As an ungentle reminder of what was ahead of us, though going at half speed because of the fog, we struck a small berg a little way out from the harbor. Had the _Roosevelt_ been an ordinary s.h.i.+p instead of the st.u.r.dy ice-fighter that she is, my story might have ended right here. As it was, the shock of the impact jarred things considerably. But the berg suffered more than the s.h.i.+p, which only shook herself like a dog coming out of the water, and with the main ma.s.s of the berg swaying heavily on one side from the blow we had given it, and a large fragment we had broken off churning the water on the other side, the _Roosevelt_ sc.r.a.ped between them and went on.

This little incident made a strong impression on the new members of my party, and I did not think it necessary to tell them that it was only a mosquito bite to the crunching and grinding between the jaws of the heavier ice that was in store for us a little farther on. We were working in a northwesterly direction toward the Ellesmere Land side, and headed for Cape Sabine, of terrible memories. As we steamed on, the ice became thicker, and we had to turn south to get out of the way of it, worming our course among the loose floes. The _Roosevelt_ avoided the heavier ice; but the lighter pack she shoved aside without much difficulty. South of Brevoort Island we were fortunate in finding a strip of open water, and steamed northward again, keeping close to the sh.o.r.e.

It must be remembered that from Etah to Cape Sheridan, for the greater part of the course, the sh.o.r.es on either side are clearly visible,--on the east the Greenland coast, on the west the coast of Ellesmere Land and Grant Land. At Cape Beechey, the narrowest and most dangerous part, the channel is only eleven miles wide, and when the air is clear it almost seems as if a rifle bullet might be fired from one side to the other. These waters, save in exceptional seasons, are filled with the heaviest kind of ice, which is constantly floating southward from the Polar Sea toward Baffin Bay.

Whether this channel was carved in the solid land by the force of pre-Adamite glaciers, or whether it is a t.i.tanic cleft formed by the breaking off of Greenland from Grant Land, is a question still undetermined by geologists; but for difficulty and danger there is no place to compare with it in the whole arctic region.

It is hard for a layman to understand the character of the ice through which the _Roosevelt_ fought her way. Most persons imagine that the ice of the arctic regions has been formed by direct freezing of the sea water; but in the summer time very little of the floating ice is of that character. It is composed of huge sheets broken off from the glacial fringe of North Grant Land broken up by contact with other floes and with the land, and driven south under the impetus of the violent flood tides. It is not unusual to see there ice between eighty and one hundred feet thick. As seven-eighths of these heavy floes are under water, one does not realize how thick they are until one sees where a huge ma.s.s, by the pressure of the pack behind it, has been driven upon the sh.o.r.e, and stands there high and dry, eighty or a hundred feet above the water, like a silver castle guarding the sh.o.r.e of this exaggerated and ice-clogged Rhine.

The navigation of the narrow and ice-enc.u.mbered channels between Etah and Cape Sheridan was long considered an utter impossibility, and only four s.h.i.+ps besides the _Roosevelt_ have succeeded in accomplis.h.i.+ng any considerable portion of it. Of these four s.h.i.+ps, one, the _Polaris_, was lost. Three, the _Alert_, the _Discovery_, and the _Proteus_, made the voyage up and back in safety; but one of those, the _Proteus_, was lost in an attempt to repeat the dash. The _Roosevelt_ had on the expedition of 1905-6 made the voyage up and back, though she was badly smashed on the return.

Going north, the _Roosevelt_ of necessity followed the coast a portion of the way, as only close to the sh.o.r.e could any water be found which would enable the s.h.i.+p to advance. With the sh.o.r.e ice on one side, and the moving central pack on the other, the changing tides were almost certain to give us an occasional opportunity to steam ahead.

This channel is the meeting place between the tides coming from Baffin Bay on the south and from Lincoln Sea on the north, the actual point of meeting being about Cape Frazer. South of that point the flood tide runs north, and north of it the flood tide runs south. One may judge of the force of these tides from the fact that on the sh.o.r.es of the Polar Sea the mean rise is only a little over a foot, while in the narrowest part of the channel the tide rises and falls twelve or fourteen feet.

As a rule, looking across the channel, there seems to be no water--nothing but uneven and tortured ice. When the tide is at the ebb, the s.h.i.+p follows the narrow crack of water between the sh.o.r.e and the moving pack of the center, driving ahead with all her force; then, when the flood tide begins to rush violently southward, the s.h.i.+p must hurry to shelter in some niche of the sh.o.r.e ice, or behind some point of rock, to save herself from destruction or being driven south again.

This method of navigation, however, is one of constant hazard, as it keeps the vessel between the immovable rocks and the heavy and rapidly drifting ice, with the ever-present possibility of being crushed between the two. My knowledge of the ice conditions of these channels and their navigation was absolutely my own, gained in former years of traveling along the sh.o.r.es and studying them for this very purpose. On my various expeditions I had walked every foot of the coast line, from Payer Harbor on the south to Cape Joseph Henry on the north, from three to eight times. I knew every indentation of that coast, every possible shelter for a s.h.i.+p, every place where icebergs usually grounded, and the places where the tide ran strongest, as accurately as a tugboat captain in New York harbor knows the piers of the North River water front. When Bartlett was in doubt as to making a risky run, with the chance of not finding shelter for the s.h.i.+p, I could usually say to him:

"At such and such a place, so far from here, is a little niche behind the delta of a stream, where we can drive the _Roosevelt_ in, if necessary"; or:

"Here icebergs are almost invariably grounded, and we can find shelter behind them"; or:

"Here is a place absolutely to be shunned, for the floes pile up here at the slightest provocation, in a way that would destroy any s.h.i.+p afloat."