American Merchant Ships and Sailors by Willis J. Abbot

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In all ages, the minds of men of the exploring and colonizing nations,
have turned toward the tropics as the region of fabulous wealth, the field
for profitable adventure. "The wealth of the Ind," has passed into
proverb. Though exploration has shown that, it is the flinty North that
hides beneath its granite bosom the richest stores of mineral wealth,
almost four centuries of failure and disappointment were needed to rid
men's minds of the notion that the jungles and the tropical forests were
the most abundant hiding-places of gold and precious stones. The wild
beauty of the tropics, the cloudless skies, the tangled thickets, ever
green and rustling with a restless animal life, the content and
amiability of the natives, combined in a picture irresistibly attractive
to the adventurer. Surely where there was so much beauty, so much of
innocent joy in life, there must be the fountain of perpetual youth, there
must be gold, and diamonds, and sapphires--all those gewgaws, the worship
of which shows the lingering taint of barbarism in the civilized man, and
for which the English, Spanish, and Portuguese adventurers of three
centuries ago, were ready to sacrifice home and family, manhood, honor,
and life.

So it happened that in the early days of maritime adventure the course of
the hardy voyagers was toward the tropics, and they made of the Spanish
Main a sea of blood, while Pizzarro and Cortez, and after them the dreaded
buccaneers, sacked towns, betrayed, murdered, and outraged, destroyed an
ancient civilization and fairly blotted out a people, all in the mad
search for gold. Men only could have been guilty of such crimes, for man
along, among animals endowed with life, kills for the mere lust of
slaughter.

And yet, man alone stands ready to risk his life for an idea, to brave the
most direful perils, to endure the most poignant suffering that the
world's store of knowledge may be increased, that science may be advanced,
that just one more fact may be added to the things actually known. If the
record of man in the tropics has been stained by theft, rapine, and
murder, the story of his long struggle with the Arctic ice, offers for his
redemption a series of pictures of self-sacrifice, tenderness, honor,
courage, and piety. No hope of profit drew the seamen of all maritime
nations into the dismal and desolate ice-floes that guard the frozen
North. No lust for gold impelled them to brave the darkness, the cold, and
the terrifying silence of the six-months Arctic night. The men who
have--thus far unsuccessfully--fought with ice-bound nature for access to
the Pole, were impelled only by honorable emulation and scientific zeal.

The earlier Arctic explorers were not, it is true, searchers for the North
Pole. That quest--which has written in its history as many tales of
heroism, self-sacrifice, and patient resignation to adversity, as the
poets have woven about the story of chivalry and the search for the Holy
Grail--was begun only in the middle of the last century, and by an
American. But for three hundred years English, Dutch, and Portuguese
explorers, and the stout-hearted American whalemen, had been pushing
further and further into the frozen deep. The explorers sought the
"Northwest Passage," or a water route around the northern end of North
America, and so on to India and the riches of the East. Sir John Franklin,
in the voyage that proved his last, demonstrated that such a passage could
be made, but not for any practical or useful purpose. After him it was
abandoned, and geographical research, and the struggle to reach the pole,
became the motives that took men into the Arctic.

"But why," many people ask, with some reason, "should there be this
determined search for the North Pole. What good will come to the world
with its discovery? Is it worth while to go on year after year, pouring
out treasure and risking human lives, merely that any hardy explorer may
stand at an imaginary point on the earth's surface which is already fixed
geographically by scientists?"

Let the scientists and the explorers answer, for to most of us the
questions do not seem unreasonable.

Naturally, with the explorers' love for adventure, eagerness to see any
impressive manifestations of nature's powers, and the ambition to attain a
spot for which men have been striving for half a century, are the
animating purposes. So we find Fridjof Nansen, who for a time held the
record of having attained the "Furthest North," writing on this subject to
an enquiring editor: "When man ceases to wish to know and to conquer every
foot of the earth, which was given him to live upon and to rule, then will
the decadence of the race begin. Of itself, that mathematical point which
marks the northern termination of the axis of our earth, is of no more
importance than any other point within the unknown polar area; but it is
of much more importance that this particular point be reached, because
there clings about it in the imagination of all mankind, such fascination
that, till the Pole is discovered, all Arctic research must be affected,
if not overshadowed, by the yearning to attain it."

George W. Melville, chief engineer of the United States Navy, who did such
notable service in the Jeanette expedition of 1879, writes in words that
stir the pulse:

"Is there a better school of heroic endeavor than the Arctic zone? It is
something to stand where the foot of man has never trod. It is something
to do that which has defied the energy of the race for the last twenty
years. It is something to have the consciousness that you are adding your
modicum of knowledge to the world's store. It is worth a year of the life
of a man with a soul larger than a turnip, to see a real iceberg in all
its majesty and grandeur. It is worth some sacrifice to be alone, just
once, amid the awful silence of the Arctic snows, there to communicate
with the God of nature, whom the thoughtful man finds best in solitude and
silence, far from the haunts of men--alone with the Creator."

Thus the explorers. The scientists look less upon the picturesque and
exciting side of Arctic exploration, and more upon its useful phases. "It
helps to solve useful problems in the physics of the world," wrote
Professor Todd of Amherst college. "The meteorology of the United States
to-day; perfection of theories of the earth's magnetism, requisite in
conducting surveys and navigating ships; the origin and development of
terrestrial fauna and flora; secular variation of climate; behavior of
ocean currents--all these are fields of practical investigation in which
the phenomena of the Arctic and Antarctic worlds play a very significant
role."

Lieutenant Maury, whose eminent services in mapping the ocean won him
international honors, writes of the polar regions:

"There icebergs are launched and glaciers formed. There the tides have
their cradle, the whales their nursery. There the winds complete their
circuits, and the currents of the sea their round in the wonderful system
of inter-oceanic circulation. There the aurora borealis is lighted up, and
the trembling needle brought to rest, and there, too, in the mazes of that
mystic circle, terrestrial forces of occult power, and vast influence upon
the well-being of men, are continually at play.... Noble daring has made
Arctic ice and waters classic ground. It is no feverish excitement nor
vain ambition that leads man there. It is a higher feeling, a holier
motive, a desire to look into the works of creation, to comprehend the
economy of our planet, and to grow wiser and better by the knowledge."

Nor can it be said fairly that the polar regions have failed to repay, in
actual financial profit, their persistent invasion by man. It is estimated
by competent statisticians, that in the last two centuries no less than
two thousand million dollars' worth of furs, fish, whale-oil, whalebone,
and minerals, have been taken out of the ice-bound seas.

[Illustration: "THEY FELL DOWN AND DIED AS THEY WALKED"]

The full story--at once sorrowful and stimulating--of Arctic exploration,
can not be told here. That would require volumes rather than a single
chapter. Even the part played in it by Americans can be sketched in
outline only. But it is worth remembering that the systematic attack of
our countrymen upon the Arctic fortress, began with an unselfish and
humane incentive. In 1845 Sir John Franklin, a gallant English seaman, had
set sail with two stout ships and 125 men, to seek the Northwest Passage.
Thereafter no word was heard from him, until, years later, a searching
party found a cairn of stones on a desolate, ice-bound headland, and in it
a faintly written record, which told of the death of Sir John and
twenty-four of his associates. We know now, that all who set out on this
ill-fated expedition, perished. Struggling to the southward after
abandoning their ships, they fell one by one, and their lives ebbed away
on the cruel ice. "They fell down and died as they walked," said an old
Esquimau woman to Lieutenant McClintock, of the British navy, who sought
for tidings of them, and, indeed, her report found sorrowful verification
in the skeletons discovered years afterward, lying face downward in the
snow. To the last man they died. Think of the state of that last
man--alone in the frozen wilderness! An eloquent writer, the correspondent
McGahan, himself no stranger to Arctic pains and perils, has imagined that
pitiful picture thus:

"One sees this man after the death of his last remaining companion, all
alone in that terrible world, gazing round him in mute despair, the sole,
living thing in that dark frozen universe. The sky is somber, the earth
whitened with a glittering whiteness that chills the heart. His clothing
is covered with frozen snow, his face lean and haggard, his beard a
cluster of icicles. The setting sun looks back to see the last victim die.
He meets her sinister gaze with a steady eye, as though bidding her
defiance. For a few minutes they glare at each other, then the curtain is
drawn, and all is dark."

As fears for Franklin's safety deepened into certainty of his loss with
the passage of months and years, a multitude of searching expeditions were
sent out, the earlier ones in the hope of rescuing him; the later ones
with the purpose of discovering the records of his voyage, which all felt
sure must have been cached at some accessible point. Americans took an
active--almost a leading--part in these expeditions, braving in them the
same perils which had overcome the stout English knight. By sea and by
land they sought him. The story of the land expeditions, though full of
interest, is foreign to the purpose of this work, and must be passed over
with the mere note that Charles F. Hall, a Cincinnati journalist, in
1868-69, and Lieutenant Schwatka, and W.H. Gilder in 1878-79 fought their
way northward to the path followed by the English explorer, found many
relics of his expedition, and from the Esquimaux gathered indisputable
evidence of his fate. By sea the United States was represented in the
search for Franklin, by the ships "Advance" and "Rescue." They
accomplished little of importance, but on the latter vessel was a young
navy surgeon, Dr. Elisha Kent Kane, who was destined to make notable
contributions to Arctic knowledge, both as explorer and writer.

One who studies the enormous volume of literature in which the Arctic
story is told, scarcely can fail to be impressed by the pertinacity with
which men, after one experience in the polar regions, return again and
again to the quest for adventure and honors in the ice-bound zone. The
subaltern on the expedition of to-day, has no sooner returned than he sets
about organizing a new expedition, of which he may be commander. The
commander goes into the ice time and again until, perhaps, the time comes
when he does not come out. The leader of a rescue party becomes the leader
of an exploring expedition, which in its turn, usually comes to need
rescue.

So we find Dr. Kane, who was surgeon of an expedition for the rescue of
Franklin, commanding four years later the brig "Advance," and voyaging
northward through Baffin's Bay. Narrowly, indeed, he escaped the fate of
the man in the search for whom he had gained his first Arctic experience.
His ship, beset by ice, and sorely wounded, remained fixed and immovable
for two years. At first the beleaguered men made sledge journeys in every
direction for exploratory purposes, but the second year they sought rather
by determined, though futile dashes across the rugged surface of the
frozen sea, to find some place of refuge, some hope of emancipation from
the thraldom of the ice. The second winter all of the brig except the
hull, which served for shelter, was burned for fuel; two men had died, and
many were sick of scurvy, the sledge dogs were all dead, and the end of
the provisions was in sight. In May, 1855, a retreat in open boats,
covering eighty-five days and over fifty miles of open sea, brought the
survivors to safety.

When men have looked into the jaws of death, it might be thought they
would strenuously avoid such another view. But there is an Arctic fever as
well as an Arctic chill, and, once in the blood, it drags its victim
irresistibly to the frozen North, until perhaps he lays his bones among
the icebergs, cured of all fevers forever. And so, a year or two after the
narrow escape of Dr. Kane, the surgeon of his expedition, Dr. Isaac I.
Hayes, was hard at work fitting out an expedition of which he was to be
commander, to return to Baffin's Bay and Smith sound, and if possible,
fight its way into that open sea, which Dr. Hayes long contended
surrounded the North Pole. No man in the Kane expedition had encountered
greater perils, or withstood more cruel suffering than Dr. Hayes. A boat
trip which he made in search of succor, has passed into Arctic history as
one of the most desperate expedients ever adopted by starving men. But at
the first opportunity he returned again to the scenes of his peril and his
pain. His expedition, though conducted with spirit and determination, was
not of great scientific value, as he was greatly handicapped in his
observations by the death of his astronomer, who slipped through thin ice
into the sea, and froze to death in his water-soaked garments.

[Illustration: "THE TREACHEROUS ICE-PACK"]

A most extraordinary record of daring and suffering in Arctic exploration
was made by Charles F. Hall, to whom I have already referred. Beginning
life as an engraver in Cincinnati, he became engrossed in the study of
Arctic problems, as the result of reading the stories of the early
navigators. Every book bearing on the subject in the library of his
native city, was eagerly read, and his enthusiasm infected some of the
wealthy citizens, who gathered for his use a very considerable collection
of volumes. Mastering all the literature of the Arctic, he determined to
undertake himself the arduous work of the explorer. Taking passage on a
whaler, he spent several years among the Esquimaux, living in their
crowded and fetid _igloos_, devouring the blubber and uncooked fish that
form their staple articles of diet, wearing their garb of furs, learning
to navigate the treacherous kayak in tossing seas, to direct the yelping,
quarreling team of dogs over fields of ice as rugged as the edge of some
monstrous saw, studying the geography so far as known of the Arctic
regions, perfecting himself in all the arts by which man has contested the
supremacy of that land with the ice-king. In 1870, with the assistance of
the American Geographical Society, Hall induced the United States
Government to fit him out an expedition to seek the North Pole--the first
exploring party ever sent out with that definite purpose. The steamer
"Polaris," a converted navy tug, which General Greely says was wholly
unfit for Arctic service, was given him, and a scientific staff supplied
by the Government, for though Hall had by painstaking endeavor qualified
himself to lead an expedition, he had not enjoyed a scientific education.
Neither was he a sailor like DeLong, nor a man trained to the command of
men like Greely. Enthusiasm and natural fitness with him took the place
of systematic training. But with him, as with so many others in this
world, the attainment of the threshold of his ambition proved to be but
opening the door to death. By a sledge journey from his ship he reached
Cape Brevoort, above latitude 82, at that time the farthest north yet
attained, but the exertion proved too much for him, and he had scarcely
regained his ship when he died. His name will live, however, in the annals
of the Arctic, for his contributions to geographical knowledge were many
and precious.

[Illustration: THE SHIP WAS CAUGHT IN THE ICE PACK]

The men who survived him determined to continue his work, and the next
summer two fought their way northward a few miles beyond the point
attained by Hall. But after this achievement the ship was caught in the
ice-pack, and for two months drifted about, helpless in that unrelenting
grasp. Out of this imprisonment the explorers escaped through a disaster,
which for a time put all their lives in the gravest jeopardy, and the
details of which seem almost incredible. In October, when the long
twilight which precedes the polar night, had already set in, there came a
fierce gale, accompanied by a tossing, roaring sea. The pack, racked by
the surges, which now raised it with a mighty force, and then rolling on,
left it to fall unsupported, began to go to pieces. The whistling wind
accelerated its destruction, driving the floes far apart, heaping them up
against the hull of the ship until the grinding and the prodigious
pressure opened her seams and the water rushed in. The cry that the ship
was sinking rung along the decks, and all hands turned with desperate
energy to throwing out on the ice-floe to windward, sledges, provisions,
arms, records--everything that could be saved against the sinking of the
ship, which all thought was at hand. Nineteen of the ship's company were
landed on the floe to carry the material away from its edge to a place of
comparative safety. The peril seemed so imminent that the men in their
panic performed prodigious feats of strength--lifting and handling alone
huge boxes, which at ordinary times, would stagger two men. A driving,
whirling snowstorm added to the gloom, confusion, and terror of the scene,
shutting out almost completely those on the ice from the view of those
still on the ship. In the midst of the work the cry was raised that the
floes were parting, and with incredible rapidity the ice broke away from
the ship on every side, so that communication between those on deck and
those on the floe was instantly cut off by a broad interval of black and
tossing water, while the dark and snow-laden air cut off vision on every
side. The cries of those on the ice mingled with those from the fast
vanishing ship, for each party thought itself in the more desperate case.
The ice was fast going to pieces, and boats were plying in the lanes of
water thus opened, picking up those clinging to smaller cakes of ice and
transporting them to the main floe. On the ship the captain's call had
summoned all hands to muster, and they gazed on each other in dumb despair
as they saw how few of the ship's company remained. All were sent to the
pumps, for the water in the hold was rising with ominous rapidity. The cry
rang out that the steam-pumps must be started if the ship was to be saved,
but long months had passed since any fire had blazed under those boilers,
and to get up steam was a work of hours. With tar-soaked oakum and with
dripping whale blubber the engineer strove to get the fires roaring, the
while the men on deck toiled with desperate energy at the hand-pumps. But
the water gained on them. The ship sunk lower and lower in the black
ocean, until a glance over the side could tell all too plainly that she
was going to her fate. Now the water begins to ooze through the cracks in
the engine-room floor, and break in gentle ripples about the feet of the
firemen. If it rises much higher it will flood the fire-boxes, and then
all will be over, for there is not one boat left on the ship--all were
landed on the now invisible floe. But just as all hope was lost there came
a faint hissing of steam, the pumps began slowly moving, and then settled
down into their monotonous "chug-chug," the sweetest sound, that day,
those desperate mariners had ever heard. They were saved by the narrowest
of chances.

[Illustration: ADRIFT ON AN ICE-FLOE]

We must pass hastily to the sequel of this seemingly irreparable disaster.
The "Polaris" was beached, winter quarters established, and those who had
clung to the ship spent the winter building boats, in which, the following
spring, they made their way southward until picked up by a whaler. Those
on the floe drifted at the mercy of the wind and tide 195 days, making
over 1300 miles to the southward. As the more temperate latitudes were
reached, and the warmer days of spring came on, the floe began going to
pieces, and they were continually confronted with the probability of
being forced to their boat for safety--one boat, built to hold eight, and
now the sole reliance of nineteen people. It is hard to picture through
the imagination the awful strain that day and night rested upon the minds
of these hapless castaways. Never could they drop off to sleep except in
dread that during the night the ice on which they slept, might split, even
under their very pallets, and they be awakened by the deathly plunge into
the icy water. Day and night they were startled and affrighted by the
thunderous rumblings and cracking of the breaking floe--a sound that an
experienced Arctic explorer says is the most terrifying ever heard by man,
having in it something of the hoarse rumble of heavy artillery, the sharp
and murderous crackle of machine guns, and a kind of titanic grinding, for
which there is no counterpart in the world of tumult. Living thus in
constant dread of death, the little company drifted on, seemingly
miraculously preserved. Their floe was at last reduced from a great sheet
of ice, perhaps a mile or more square, to a scant ten yards by
seventy-five, and this rapidly breaking up. In two days four whalers
passed near enough for them to see, yet failed to see them, but finally
their frantic signals attracted attention, and they were picked up--not
only the original nineteen who had begun the drift six months earlier, but
one new and helpless passenger, for one of the Esquimau women had given
birth to a child while on the ice.

The next notable Arctic expedition from the United States had its
beginning in journalistic enterprise. Mr. James Gordon Bennett, owner of
the _New York Herald_, who had already manifested his interest in
geographical work by sending Henry M. Stanley to find Livingston in the
heart of the Dark Continent, fitted out the steam yacht "Pandora," which
had already been used in Arctic service, and placed her at the disposal
of Lieutenant DeLong, U.S.N., for an Arctic voyage. The name of the ship
was changed to "Jeannette," and control of the expedition was vested in
the United States Government, though Mr. Bennett's generosity defrayed all
charges. The vessel was manned from the navy, and Engineer Melville,
destined to bear a name great among Arctic men, together with two navy
lieutenants, were assigned to her. The voyage planned was then unique
among American Arctic expeditions, for instead of following the
conventional route north through Baffin's Bay and Smith Sound, the
"Jeannette" sailed from San Francisco and pushed northward through Bering
Sea. In July, 1879, she weighed anchor. Two years after, no word having
been heard of her meanwhile, the inevitable relief expedition was sent
out--the steamer "Rodgers," which after making a gallant dash to a most
northerly point, was caught in the ice-pack and there burned to the
water's edge, her crew, with greatest difficulty, escaping, and reaching
home without one ray of intelligence of DeLong's fate.

That fate was bitter indeed, a trial by cold, starvation, and death, fit
to stand for awesomeness beside Greely's later sorrowful story. From the
very outset evil fortune had attended the "Jeannette." Planning to winter
on Wrangle Land--then thought to be a continent--DeLong caught in the
ice-pack, was carried past its northern end, thus proving it to be an
island, indeed, but making the discovery at heavy cost. Winter in the pack
was attended with severe hardships and grave perils. Under the influence
of the ocean currents and the tides, the ice was continually breaking up
and shifting, and each time the ship was in imminent danger of being
crushed. In his journal DeLong tries to describe the terrifying clamor of
a shifting pack. "I know of no sound on shore that can be compared with
it," he writes. "A rumble, a shriek, a groan, and the crash of a falling
house all combined, might serve to convey an idea of the noise with which
this motion of the ice-floe is accompanied. Great masses from fifteen to
twenty-five feet in height, when up-ended, are sliding along at various
angles of elevation and jam, and between and among them are large and
confused masses of debris, like a marble yard adrift. Occasionally a
stoppage occurs; some piece has caught against or under our floe; there
follows a groaning and crackling, our floe bends and humps up in places
like domes. Crash! The dome splits, another yard of floe edge breaks off,
the pressure is relieved, and on goes again the flowing mass of rumbles,
shrieks, groans, etc., for another spell."

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