Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 491
The struggle to reach the Pole was the form in which Arctic exploration came to life again after the paralysing effect of the Franklin tragedy. Some of the Franklin relief expeditions had reached very high latitudes, and, shortly after the great tragedy, the exploring ships of Dr Kane and Dr Hayes, and the Polaris under Captain Hall, had all passed the eightieth parallel and been within less than ten degrees of the Pole. The idea grew that there might be an open polar sea, navigable at times to the very apex of the world. In 1875 the Alert and the Discovery, two ships of the British Navy, were sent out with the express purpose of reaching the North Pole. They sailed up the narrow waters that separate Greenland from the large islands lying west of it. The Alert wintered as far north as latitude 82° 24’. A sledge party that was sent out under Captain Markham went as far as latitude 83° 20’, and the expedition returned with the proud distinction of having carried its flag northward beyond all previous explorations. But other nations were not to lag behind. An American expedition (1881) under Lieutenant Greeley, carried on the exploration of the extreme north of Greenland and of the interior of Grinnell Land that lies west of it. Two of Greeley’s men, Lieutenant Lockwood and a companion, followed the Greenland coast northward in a sledge and passed Markham’s latitude, reaching 83° 24’ north, which remained for many years as the highest point attained. Greeley’s expedition became the subject of a tragedy almost comparable to the great Franklin disaster. The vessels sent with supplies failed to reach their destination. For four years Greeley and his men remained in the Arctic regions. Of the twenty-three men in the party only six were found alive when Captain Schley of the United States Navy at last brought relief.
After the Greeley expedition the fight towards the Pole was carried on by a series of gallant explorers, none of whom, strange to narrate, were British. Commander R. E. Peary, of the United States Navy, came prominently before the world as an Arctic navigator in the last decade of the nineteenth century. In 1892 he crossed northern Greenland in the extreme latitude of 81° 37’, a feat of the highest order.
Still more striking was the work of Dr Fridtjof Nansen, which attracted the attention of the whole world. Nansen had devoted profound study to the question of the northern drift of the polar waters. It had often been observed that drift-wood and wreckage seemed, in many places, to float towards the Pole. Trees that fall in the Siberian forests and float down the great rivers to the northern sea are frequently found washed up on the shores of Greenland, having apparently passed over the Pole itself. A strong current flows northward through Bering Strait, and it is a matter of record that an American vessel, the Jeanette, which stuck fast in the ice near Wrangel Land in 1879, drifted slowly northward with the ice for two years, and made its way in this fashion some four hundred miles towards the Pole. Dr Nansen formed the bold design of carrying a ship under steam into one of the currents of the Far North, allowing it to freeze in, and then trusting to the polar drift to do the rest. The adventures of Nansen and his men in this enterprise are so well known as scarcely to need recital. A stout wooden vessel of four hundred tons, the Fram (or the Forwards), was specially constructed to withstand the grip of the polar ice. In 1893 she sailed from Norway and made her way by the Kara Sea to the New Siberian Islands. In October, the Fram froze into the ice and there she remained for three years, drifting slowly forwards in the heart of the vast mass. Her rudder and propeller were unshipped and taken inboard, her engine was taken to pieces and packed away, while on her deck a windmill was erected to generate electric power. In this situation, snugly on board their stout ship, Nansen and his crew settled down into the unbroken night of the Arctic winter. The ice that surrounded them was twelve feet thick, and escape from it, even had they desired it, would have been impossible. They watched eagerly the direction of their drift, worked out by observation of the stars. For the first few weeks, propelled by northern winds, the Fram moved southwards. Then slowly the northern current began to make itself felt, but during the whole of this first winter the Fram only moved a few miles onward towards her goal. All the next summer the ship remained fast frozen and drifted about two hundred miles. With her rate of progress and direction, Nansen reckoned that she would reach, not the Pole, but Spitzbergen, and would take four and a half years more to do it. All through the next winter the Fram moved slowly northwards and westwards. In the spring of 1895 she was still about five hundred miles from the Pole, and her present path would miss it by about three hundred and fifty miles. Nansen resolved upon an enterprise unparalleled in hardihood. He resolved to take with him a single companion, to leave the Fram and to walk over the ice to the Pole, and thence as best he might to make his way, not back to his ship again (for that was impossible), but to the nearest known land. The whole distance to be covered was almost a thousand miles. Dr Nansen and Lieutenant Johansen left the Fram on March 13, 1895, to make this attempt. They failed in their enterprise. To struggle towards the Pole over the pack-ice, at times reared in rough hillocks and at times split with lanes of open water, proved a feat beyond the power of man. Nansen and his companion got as far as latitude 86° 13’, a long way north of all previous records. By sheer pluck and endurance they managed to make their way southward again. They spent the winter on an Arctic island in a hut of stone and snow, and in June of the next year (1896) at last reached Franz Joseph Land, where they fell in with a British expedition. They reached Norway in time to hear the welcome news that the Fram, after a third winter in the ice, had drifted into open sea again and had just come safely into port.
Equally glorious, but profoundly tragic, was the splendid attempt of Professor Andrée to reach the Pole in a balloon, which followed on the heels of Nansen’s enterprise. Andrée, who was a professor in the Technical School at Stockholm, had been for some years interested in the rising science of aerial navigation. He judged that by this means a way might be found to the Pole where all else failed. By the generous aid of the king of Sweden, Baron Dickson and others, he had a balloon constructed in Paris which represented the very latest progress towards the mastery of the air, in the days before the aeroplane and the light-weight motor had opened a new chapter in history. Andrée’s balloon was made of 3360 pieces of silk sewn together with three miles of seams. It contained 158,000 cubic feet of hydrogen; it carried beneath it a huge wicker basket that served as a sort of house for Andrée and his companions, and to the netting of this were lashed provisions, sledges, frame boats, and other appliances to meet the needs of the explorers if their balloon was wrecked on the northern ice. There was no means of propulsion, but three heavy guide ropes, trailing on the ground, afforded a feeble and uncertain control. The whole reliance of Andrée was placed, consciously and with full knowledge of the consequences, on the possibility that a strong and favouring wind might carry him across the Pole. The balloon was taken on shipboard to Spitzbergen and there inflated in a tall shed built for the purpose. Andrée was accompanied by two companions, Strindberg and Fraenkel. On July 11, 1897, the balloon was cast loose, and, with a southerly wind and bright sky, it was seen to vanish towards the north. It is known, from a message sent by a pigeon, that two days later all was well and the balloon still moving towards its goal. Since then no message or token has ever been found to tell us the fate of the three brave men, and the names of Andrée and his companions are added to the long list of those who have given their lives for the advancement of human knowledge.
With the opening of the present century the progress of polar exploration was rapid. Peary continued his explorations towards the north of Greenland, and, in 1906, by reaching latitude 87° 6’, he wrested from Nansen the coveted record of Farthest North. At the same time Captain Sverdrup (the commander of the Fram), the Duke of the Abruzzi and many others were carrying out scientific expeditions in polar waters. The voyage made in 1904 by Captain Roald Amundsen, a Norwegian, later on to be world-famous as the discoverer of the South Pole, is of especial interest, for he succeeded in carrying his little ship from the Atlantic to the Pacific by way of Bering Strait — the only vessel that has ever actually made the North-West Passage. But the great prize fell to Captain Peary. On September 6, 1909, the world thrilled with the announcement that Peary had reached the Pole. His ship, the Roosevelt, had sailed in the summer of 1908. Peary wintered at Etah in the north of Greenland, and in the ensuing year, accompanied by Captain Bartlett with five white men and seventeen Eskimos, he set out to reach the Pole by sledge. By arrangement, Peary’s companions accompanied him a certain distance carrying supplies, and then turned back in successive parties. The final dash for the Pole was made by the commander himself, accompanied only by a negro servant and four Eskimos. On April 6, 1909, they reached the Pole and hoisted there the flag of the United States. To make doubly certain of their discovery, Peary and his men went some ten miles beyond the Pole, and eight miles in a lateral direction. They saw nothing but ice about them, and no indication of the neighbourhood of any land.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
FOR THE EARLIER voyages of the English to the Northern seas the first and principal authority is, of course, the famous collection of contemporary narratives gathered together by Richard Hakluyt under the title, Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of the English Nation. Here the reader will find accounts of the enterprises of Frobisher, Davis, and others as written by members of the expeditions and persons closely connected therewith. An interesting presentation of the exploits of Hudson, as revealed in original documents, is found in Henry Hudson, the Navigator, published by the Hakluyt Society. The journal of Samuel Hearne, together with many maps and much interesting material, is to be found among the publications of the Champlain Society, (Toronto, 1911) ably edited and annotated by the well-known explorer Mr J. B. Tyrrell. Alexander Mackenzie’s own account of his voyages is a classic, and is readily accessible in public libraries. An account of Mackenzie’s career is found in the ‘Makers of Canada’ series. Sir John Franklin left behind him a very graphic description of his first journey to the polar seas, to which reference has already been made in the text. For the story of the loss of Franklin and the search for his missing ships the reader may best consult the works of Sir John Richardson, and others who participated in the events of the period.
See also in this series: The Adventurers of England on Hudson Bay.
The Dawn of Canadian History
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I. BEFORE THE DAWN
CHAPTER II. MAN IN AMERICA
CHAPTER III. THE ABORIGINES OF CANADA
CHAPTER IV. THE LEGEND OF THE NORSEMEN
CHAPTER V. THE BRISTOL VOYAGES
CHAPTER VI. FORERUNNERS OF JACQUES CARTIER
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
CHAPTER I. BEFORE THE DAWN
WE ALWAYS SPEAK of Canada as a new country. In one sense, of course, this is true. The settlement of Europeans on Canadian soil dates back only three hundred years. Civilization in Canada is but a thing of yesterday, and its written history, when placed beside the long millenniums of the recorded annals of European and Eastern peoples, seems but a little span.
But there is another sense in which the Dominion of Canada, or at least part of it, is perhaps the oldest country in the world. According to the Nebular Theory the whole of our planet was once a fiery molten mass gradually cooling and hardening itself into the globe we know. On its surface moved and swayed a liquid sea glowing with such a terrific heat that we can form no real idea of its intensity. As the mass cooled, vast layers of vapour, great beds of cloud, miles and miles in thickness, were formed and hung over the face of the globe, obscuring from its darkened surface the piercing beams of the sun. Slowly the earth cooled, until great masses of solid matter, rock as we call it, still penetrated with intense heat, rose to the surface of the boiling sea. Forces of inconceivable magnitude moved through the mass. The outer surface of the globe as it cooled ripped and shrivelled like a withering orange. Great ridges, the mountain chains of to-day, were furrowed on its skin. Here in the darkness of the prehistoric night there arose as the oldest part of the surface of the earth the great rock bed that lies in a huge crescent round the shores of Hudson Bay, from Labrador to the unknown wilderness of the barren lands of the Coppermine basin touching the Arctic sea. The wanderer who stands to-day in the desolate country of James Bay or Ungava is among the oldest monuments of the world. The rugged rock which here and there breaks through the thin soil of the infertile north has lain on the spot from the very dawn of time. Millions of years have probably elapsed since the cooling of the outer crust of the globe produced the solid basis of our continents.
The ancient formation which thus marks the beginnings of the solid surface of the globe is commonly called by geologists the Archaean rock, and the myriads of uncounted years during which it slowly took shape are called the Archaean age. But the word ‘Archaean’ itself tells us nothing, being merely a Greek term meaning ‘very old.’ This Archaean or original rock must necessarily have extended all over the surface of our sphere as it cooled from its molten form and contracted into the earth on which we live. But in most places this rock lies deep under the waters of the oceans, or buried below the heaped up strata of the formations which the hand of time piled thickly upon it. Only here and there can it still be seen as surface rock or as rock that lies but a little distance below the soil. In Canada, more than anywhere else in the world, is this Archaean formation seen. On a geological map it is marked as extending all round the basin of Hudson Bay, from Labrador to the shores of the Arctic. It covers the whole of the country which we call New Ontario, and also the upper part of the province of Quebec. Outside of this territory there was at the dawn of time no other ‘land’ where North America now is, except a long island of rock that marks the backbone of what are now the Selkirk Mountains and a long ridge that is now the mountain chain of the Alleghanies beside the Atlantic slope.
Books on geology trace out for us the long successive periods during which the earth’s surface was formed. Even in the Archaean age something in the form of life may have appeared. Perhaps vast masses of dank seaweed germinated as the earliest of plants in the steaming oceans. The water warred against the land, tearing and breaking at its rock formation and distributing it in new strata, each buried beneath the next and holding fast within it the fossilized remains that form the record of its history. Huge fern plants spread their giant fronds in the dank sunless atmospheres, to be buried later in vast beds of decaying vegetation that form the coal-fields of to-day.
Animal life began first, like the plants, in the bosom of the ocean. From the slimy depths of the water life crawled hideous to the land. Great reptiles dragged their sluggish length through the tangled vegetation of the jungle of giant ferns.
Through countless thousands of years, perhaps, this gradual process went on. Nature, shifting its huge scenery, depressed the ocean beds and piled up the dry land of the continents. In place of the vast ‘Continental Sea,’ which once filled the interior of North America, there arose the great plateau or elevated plain that now runs from the Mackenzie basin to the Gulf of Mexico. Instead of the rushing waters of the inland sea, these waters have narrowed into great rivers — the Mackenzie, the Saskatchewan, the Mississippi — that swept the face of the plateau and wore down the surface of the rock and mountain slopes to spread their powdered fragments on the broad level soil of the prairies of the west. With each stage in the evolution of the land the forms of life appear to have reached a higher development. In place of the seaweed and the giant ferns of the dawn of time there arose the maples, the beeches, and other waving trees that we now see in the Canadian woods. The huge reptiles in the jungle of the Carboniferous era passed out of existence. In place of them came the birds, the mammals, — the varied types of animal life which we now know. Last in the scale of time and highest in point of evolution, there appeared man.
We must not speak of the continents as having been made once and for all in their present form. No doubt in the countless centuries of geological evolution various parts of the earth were alternately raised and depressed. Great forests grew, and by some convulsion were buried beneath the ocean, covered deep as they lay there with a sediment of earth and rock, and at length raised again as the waters retreated. The coal-beds of Cape Breton are the remains of a forest buried beneath the sea. Below the soil of Alberta is a vast jungle of vegetation, a dense mass of giant fern trees. The Great Lakes were once part of a much vaster body of water, far greater in extent than they now are. The ancient shore-line of Lake Superior may be traced five hundred feet above its present level.
