CHAPTER V

 FRANZ JOSEF LAND

      There is an old saying that if a man goes once to the Polar regions, he is sure to go again—that the lure of the north is irresistible. It proved to be so in my case. In 1898-9 I determined to have a real try at the Pole by the ship and sledge method. With great difficulty enough money was raised, the late President McKinley, Vice-President Hobart, J. Pierpont Morgan, William C. Whitney, Cornelius Bliss, Judge Lambert Tree, Levi Z. Leiter, Helen Gould, William K. Vanderbilt, my brother Arthur Wellman, and other friends assisting. By putting in what lit­tle I had—and facing a debt of $6,000, which was paid out of my earnings as a journalist after my return—an expedition was organized and equipped, the ice-steamer Fiithjof chartered, and a small company of Americans and Nor­wegians started from Tromso, Norway, for Franz Josef Land, a considerable archipelago, which lies to the east and north of Spitzbergen and north of Russia, and which then had been only in part explored.

There were three Americans with us—Dr. Ed­ward Hofma, of Michigan; Quirof Harlan, from the Coast and Goedetic Survey, and Evelyn Baldwin, who had been with Peary in one of his expeditions to Greenland. Among my Nor­wegian crew were Paul Bjoervig, of whom I have already written; Emil Ellefsen, who had also been with me in the Spitzbergen trip, his brother Olaf, Daniel Johansen, and Bernt Bent­zen, who had been one of the crew of the famous Fram on the three-year drift voyage through the Polar Sea. 

     June 26, 1908, we sailed from Tromso, in the expedition steamer Frithjof, a staunch ship specially built for hard work in heavy ice. At Archangel, Russia, we took on board eighty-three draught dogs, which Alexander Tron­theim, of Tobolsk, had procured for us in sub-Arctic Siberia, among the Ostiaks, who live near the mouth of the River Ob. A two thousand mile journey across mountains, tundras, steppes, and rivers had the faithful Trontheim brought his pack, assisted by others, and a caravan of reindeer.       

     Leaving Archangel, July 4th, we steamed northward through the White Sea to the Arctic Ocean, and in a week met the pack-ice at the 77th parallel of latitude. Very discouraging was our first onslaught upon the frigid bulwarks with which the well-nigh impregnable Pole is surrounded. We found it impossible to break way through the pack, but did soon discover that our bunkers were running low of coal, and so we went back to Norway for reinforcements. Then north again, and soon we were once more struggling with the pack-ice. A week of ramming, shoving, crowding, shivering through leads and openings, forcing them often where they did not exist, varied by frequent fogs in which it was necessary to lie to because we could not see a ship's length ahead, brought us at last near the shores of Franz Josef Land. 

     Happy indeed were we all when, on July 27th, we first beheld the glacier-capped mountains of this remote region. To our imaginations it presented itself as a paradise of opportunity. Next day, with anxious hearts, we anchored at Cape Flora, which for three years had been the head­quarters of the Jackson-Harmsworth (English) Expedition. Here it was that Nansen and Jackson had had their dramatic meeting two years before—a chance encounter which doubtless saved the lives of Nansen and his faithful comrade, Lieutenant Johansen. Here, too, we had hoped to find another intrepid traveler. When last heard from, Andree's balloon was drifting in this direction from Spitzbergen, and as he knew of the existence at this point of a good house amply stocked with provisions, it was not impossible he had been able to make his way hither the previous autumn. Great was our disappointment when we saw the doors and windows of Jackson's house all boarded and barred, for we realized that thus ended all reasonable expectation that the brave Swedes were to be seen again among the living. 

     We vainly endeavored to push our ship north­ward through a strait, and later tried to steam round the southeastern islands where the Austro-Hungarian ship Tegetthoff was lost in 1874, and thus to the north. But finding the way everywhere blocked with heavy ice, we finally decided to establish our headquarters at Cape Tegetthoff, Hall Island, latitude 80:05; and there we set up our little hut and landed our stores, equipment and dogs.  

     In three days the ship sailed for Norway, and we were left alone for at least a year in the wilderness of ice. We were the only human inhabitants of that vast region, and our nearest neighbors were Russians and Samoyedes in Nova Zembla, five hundred mites to the southward. A month or two of working weather remained before the winter should come down upon us and we lost no time in setting our column in motion. 

     Two days after the ship left us, a party under the command of the meteorologist, Mr. E. B. Baldwin, of the United States Weather Bureau, set out to establish an outpost farther north, the farther the better. They started with sledges, two small boats, dogs and provisions, traversing a solid sheet of comparatively smooth ice upon bay and strait. The outlook was promising. But conditions often change with surprising rapidity in the Arctics, and in less than forty-eight hours this party found the apparently sound and safe ice breaking up under their feet and drifting rapidly out to sea in strong off-shore winds. They had to leap from one floating floe to another, now and then hurriedly launching one of their small boats, only to pull them up again as quickly as possible to save them from being crushed in the ice. Nothing but desperate, even heroic work enabled them to escape with their lives and outfit and leap to solid land. Along the shore, over rough stones and precipitous glacier-debris, now moving a part of their loads short distances by boat in open water, again taking to the ice-covered mountain side for a hazardous journey over fissures and crevasses, they struggled for fully a month. Then the on­coming winter and the broken, drifting ice which filled the channel before them compelled a halt for good. 

     They stopped upon a rocky point called Cape Heller, a little south of the eighty-first parallel of latitude. Only once had human feet trod these shores, and that was a quarter of a century before, when Payer, the discoverer of Franz Josef Land, passed nearby on a sledge trip. A few miles to the westward, on the other side of the sound, Nansen and Johansen had spent the winter of 1895-6 in a little hut or cave. Our men at once set to work to establish a post. 

     The first thing was to build a hut. For this work they had better tools than Nansen and his comrade, but no better materials—only such as the country afforded. They gathered rocks and piled up the rough walls of a house. Two pieces of drift-wood, brought from Siberian rivers by current and tide, formed the ridge-pole. The dried skins of walrus which were killed in a bay served for a roof. A chimney was built at one side and upon a hearth of flat rocks small blocks of dried driftwood and hunks of walrus blubber were burned, not for purposes of heating, but to boil the coffee and soup and fry the savory steaks of polar bear. 

     Tons of walrus meat were cut in small squares out of the huge carcasses of fifteen of the sea-horses and stored away in an ice house (good refrigerator) for the sustenance of the forty dogs during the long winter. A ton of condensed food for human use was accumulated here, most of it designed for the sledging parties the next spring. With blocks of snow and ice, the men built huge walls around the hut to afford some protection from the winter's storms, making the camp look very much indeed like a fort; and so they named it Fort McKinley. 

     Our men had some lively adventures hunting walrus in the bay near Fort McKinley. As a rule the walrus is a harmless brute. His attentions to the human beings who invade his realm are usually confined to swimming about the boat for half an hour or longer, alternately diving and coming to the surface again. Whenever his ugly head appears above the water, curiosity and good nature are seen bulging from his little round eyes. He acts as if this visitation of human beings, with their boats and oars and things, was a sort of circus got up for his special amusement; but wound a cow or calf, and you may have a different story to tell. 

     That is what our men did one day. They shot a mother walrus that had a calf under her flippers, and they were trying their best to secure the two carcasses before they should sink in the hay. Suddenly they were surrounded by five or six big bulls, roaring and snorting in their anger at this murderous attack upon their tribe. One bull walrus, with his weight of from 1200 to 1500 pounds, which he is able to throw half out of water, and with his huge tusks a foot and a half in length, which may rip the boat and capsize it, is a dangerous foe when you are out in a boat only fifteen feet long. But here were half a dozen, all ferociously angry, and all making for the one small boat in which our three men sat. The lives of those men depended upon the manner in which they met the onslaught. Fortunately they were experienced walrus-hunters, and not a man of them lost his nerve. Bernt Bentzen, he of the mighty shoulders, gave a few strokes with the oars, and sent the boat flying so that the enemy might not all be able to board at the same instant. Paul Bjoervig, who knows walrus as well as he knows his own children, told Mr. Baldwin, who had the one gun in the party, when and where to shoot, that not an instant or a bullet might be wasted, and he, good shot, quick as a cat, emptied the chamber of his Winchester with telling effect. 

     Bull after bull retreated with a ball in his eye, the only spot worth hitting in a walrus, for his skin is an armor-plate of gristle and blubber, four inches in thickness. The bay was red with blood, the waters were lashed into foam and the bellowing of the bulls filled the air with a horrid din. They came finally faster than Mr. Baldwin could take care of them.

Then Bernt and Paul rose up, each with an oar in his hands and beat the beasts over the head. Every time one of the ugly snoots rose by the side of the boat, with the wicked tusks gleaming white, there was an oar to meet it, or perchance a leaden ball. For fully a quarter of an hour the battle raged, and then, to the great relief of our weary men, the enemy suddenly withdrew one by one, leaving two of their number floating lifeless upon the bay. 

     Late in October, pursuant to his instructions, Mr. Baldwin prepared to return to Harmsworth House, our headquarters at Cape Tegetthof. He called for two volunteers to remain at the out­post during the winter to care for the dogs and guard the stores and equipment. All the men offered themselves. Paul Bjoervig and Bernt Bentzen were chosen, whereat Emil and Olaf El­lefsen and Daniel Johansen were grievously disappointed. As for Bjoervig and Bentzen, they were delighted. Neighbors and comrades at home, adventurous spirits both, this chance of spending an Arctic winter together in a snug little hut, with plenty to eat and smoke, was to them the realization of a dream. Little did they know what the fates had in store for them.