CHAPTER II

 SHIPWRECKED IN SPITZBERGEN 

    We paused but a few hours in the Danish strait, little thinking that moment that it was to be the scene of so much of our future activity, struggle and disappointment. We found on shore there a good Arctic house which had been built in Norway, taken down and re-erected on the shore of the strait by an English sportsman named Pike, who had passed a winter in it bunting bear and foxes. Before proceeding farther north we established a depot of supplies in this house, to fall back upon in case of disaster, and left a man in charge of it. 

     As a result of this incident I a little later got my first taste of newspaper sensationalism and misrepresentation. The man we left in charge of our depot in Pike's house was a Norwegian scientist, who had asked to be permitted to remain there, as he wished to carry on geological work in the neighborhood. We offered to leave one man with him for comrade, but he objected to that, and preferred to remain alone. There was indeed no reason why he should not remain alone. It was perfectly safe. He had a good house, tons of provisions, a gun and dog, and was not likely to be lonesome, because in a month or so the sealing sloops from his own country would be running in there two or three a week, as was their habit in the middle of the summer. And yet upon returning to Europe in the autumn I was amazed to discover I had been charged in the press of Europe and America with having cruelly abandoned a poor Norwegian scientist to starvation at my depot ! This astounding accusation had, reached the press through a party of English sportsmen who had visited the camp in midsummer, found the Norwegian in good health but a bit lonely, and who on their return had reported it was necessary for them to give him supplies in order to save his life. Right savagely was I denounced for my wickedness by the good journalists of many countries. The facts were, of course, that the poor abandoned man had a house full of the best food money could buy—enough to have kept a score of men a whole year—and the only supplies his English visitors had given him to save him from starvation was a case of Scotch whiskey, not a drop of which was left by the time we were able to get back to the depot. 

     Still favored by ice-free seas, but threatened with shipwreck by a heavy storm, we steamed northeastward along the north coast of Spitzbergen, and soon found ourselves at the Seven Islands, which are the most northerly of the Archipelago, just under the eightyfirst parallel of latitude. But a few miles to the north lay the polar icepack which no ship can penetrate and navigate, and so we prepared to carry out the original plan of the expedition, which was to make headway over the pack toward the north with sledges and our light aluminum boats. 

     We did indeed set out, and at first made fairly good progress along the land ice, looking for a place where the pack was not so rough and so much broken up for launching our little caravan upon the rugged frozen, surface of the polar sea. But in a few days two things happened which seriously interfered with the success of the trip. A storm came out of the northwest, drove the pack-ice down upon the land with terrific force, heaping it mountain high, and, worse still, catching our steamship in a vice and wrecking it. Captain Bottolfsen, an experienced Arctic navigator, was responsible for the safety of the ship. At Walden Island, near where the great Nelson, then a midshipman, had killed a bear while with an English exploring ship years before, Bottolfsen had anchored the Ragnvald Jarl behind a projecting tongue of heavy ice, where it seemed she would be safe. But after we left the ship, and when the storm came down from the northwest, bringing the great ocean pack with it, that tongue had given way, the ship was caught in the jaw, great masses of ice went right through her hull as you would stick the tines of a fork through an egg-shell, and the Ragnvald Jarl was no more. 

     Messengers were sent out and overtook us some miles to the northeast. I hastened back to the ship, and found her a total wreck. She was held up only by the ice that had pierced her ; when this was withdrawn she was sure to sink to the bottom of the sea. I went aboard her, and with great difficulty made my way to what had been my cabin, but which was now a mass of wreckage, and where my trunk was swimming about in the water. Captain Bottolfsen and some of the sailors helped me rescue the trunk, all the time protesting that the ship was likely to go to the bottom at any moment. In that trunk I had my evening clothes, probably the only case on record of a dress suit being wrecked in the ice of the far north. It was here because I had it with me in England and Norway ; had taken my trunk upon the steamer because I wanted the papers and other clothing it contained; and though I had no possible use for evening clothes in the far north had permitted it to remain where it was as the easiest solution of the problem of what to do with it. 

      Upon shore Capt. Bottolfsen and his men had erected a house, half of timbers from the wreck, half of sailcloth, had installed therein the ship's galley, and were not so very uncomfortable. They had saved some of the stores, and were in no immediate danger of famine. Having assured myself they were safe, and after making an arrangement with Capt. Bottolfsen to take a small boat and proceed with a picked party to the south in search of a ship, I returned to my sledging expedition, running on Norwegian ski or snowshoes. 

     We decided to go on with our trip, though forced in prudence to modify the plan in im­portant particulars, because our ship had been destroyed behind us, and there was no certainty of finding another. The same storm which had wrecked our vessel had piled the ice mountain high against all the islands in that part of Spitzbergen, making it impossible to get out upon the normal pack, where travel, though difficult, is still practicable. Advised by my Norwegian comrades that we might find better ice farther east, we traveled in that direction. After sev­eral days of arduous work, pulling our heavy sledges and boats, we found it necessary to abandon our sledge dogs and take to open water in our aluminum boats. These dogs were not a success. I had resolved to experiment with the draft dogs one sees doing such prodigies of labor in the towns of Belgium and Holland, and at Liege in the former country had bought two score of the beasts and shipped them to Norway. They endured quite well the voyage to the Arctic regions, and were strong enough to pull the loads. But they could not get accustomed to their strange surroundings. They were plainly homesick, just as I have seen many men when taken from their customary life and put into the somewhat lonely and trying work of the far north. Worst of all, these dogs suffered frightfully in their feet. The snow and ice worked in between their toes, drew the blood, and our trail for days was marked with streaks of red which hurt me perhaps even more than it hurt the poor beasts who left it there as they ambled along unwillingly with their loads behind them. It was a relief when open water and the need of taking to boats made it necessary to abandon them. Instead of leaving them to starve we mercifully shot every one of them. 

     This was toward the end of May. The temperature was about ten to twelve degrees below freezing. But for some of us it is not easy to give up old habits. I found it so with the habit of bathing. Just before we came to the belt of open water requiring us to take to the boats there chanced to be near us, one day when we stopped for luncheon, sitting upon our sledges, a most inviting natural bath tub. The top layer of ice, about six feet in thickness, had parted and left an opening down to the older ice about eight feet in width and perhaps twenty feet in length. This crystal bath-tub had been partly filled with snow water, melted by the heat of the sun - for freezing in the shade and thawing in the sun is a common occurrence in the summer and late spring of the Arctic regions. This pool of purest water, glistening in the sunlight, proved too fascinating to be resisted; and amid the astonishment of my Norwegians I stripped to the skin and had a five minute dip in the limpid pool. It was cold, and that's the truth; but the most disagreeable thing about it was not the coldness of the water, but the snow squeezing up between my toes as I walked from the sledge to my icy tub and back again. Later on a number of us bathed in the Arctic Sea, diving off the ice, greatly to the astonishment of some seals that were swimming about hard by. 

     We went on as far as the Platen Island, lying off the coast of the Northeast Land of Spitz­bergen. There we made a comfortable camp, finding plenty of driftwood that had come all the way from the rivers of Siberia with the currents of the Arctic Sea. A herd of reindeer walked into camp one day, and obligingly stood stock still till we had killed as many as we thought we should need. Poor innocent beasts. That part of the Arctic region is seldom visited by hunters because of the difficulty and danger of ice-navigation there; and these reindeer ap­parently had never seen men before and knew no fear. 

     There is a tradition that all the reindeer in Spitzbergen have descended from a herd of forty which Baron Nordenshiold of Sweden took to the north coast from Lapland about fifty years ago, thinking to use them instead of dogs to draw sledges over the pack-ice toward the Pole. One stormy night all his deer escaped, and thus his polar expedition was ruined. But I think the evidence is clear that reindeer had always existed in Spitzbergen. Whenever I have been along the coast I have found reindeer horns, some of them apparently hundreds of years old. In that country wood and bone rot very slowly. The skeleton of the Dutchmen we saw in their exposed graves about Smeerenburg point were so well preserved as to indicate but a few years of age, though they had lain there a couple of centuries.