My Attainment of the Pole Part 24

Here there is but one day and but one night in each year, but the night of six months is relieved by about one hundred days of continuous twilight. Geographically, there was here but one direction. It was south on every line of the dial of longitude--north, east and west had vanished. We had reached a point where true direction became a paradox and a puzzle. It was south before us, south behind us, and south on every side. But the compa.s.s, pointing to the magnetic Pole along the ninety-seventh meridian, was as useful as ever. (To avoid statements easily misunderstood, all our directions about the Pole will be given as taken from the compa.s.s, and without reference to the geographer's anomaly of its being south in every direction.)

=My first noon observations= gave the following result, which is copied from the original paper, as it was written at the Pole and reproduced photographically on another page. April 21, 1908: Long., 97-W.; Bar., 29-83; Temp., -37.7; Clouds Alt., St., 1; Wind, 1; Mag., S.; Iceblink E.; Water Sky W.

Noon Alt. 0 23--33--25 --- +2 +-------------- 2 23--35--25 +-------------- 11--47--42 5 +15--56 --------------- 50 12-- 3--38 6 --9 ----------- --------------- 25 11--54--38 300 90 +---------- --------------- 60 325 78-- 5--22 +---------- 11--54--23 5--25 --------------- 11--48--58 89--59--45 ---------- 11--54--23

Shadows 28 ft. (of 6 ft. pole).

Taking advantage of our brief stay, the boys set up the ice-axe and drying sticks, and hung upon them their perspiration-wetted and frosted furs to dry. Hanging out wet clothes and an American flag at the North Pole seemed an amusing incongruity.

The puzzled standpoint of my Eskimos was amusing. They tried hard to appreciate the advantages of finding this suppositious "_tigi shu_" (big nail), but actually here, they could not, even from a sense of deference to me and my judgment, entirely hide their feeling of disappointment.

On the advance I had told them that an actual "big nail" would not be found--only the point where it ought to be. But I think they really hoped that if it had actually disappeared they should find that it had come back into place after all!

In building our igloo the boys frequently looked about expectantly.

Often they ceased cutting snow-blocks and rose to a hummock to search the horizon for something which, to their idea, must mark this important spot, for which we had struggled against hope and all the dictates of personal comforts. At each breathing spell their eager eyes picked some sky sign which to them meant land or water, or the play of some G.o.d of land or sea. The naive and sincere interest which the Eskimos on occasions feel in the mystery of the spirit-world gives them an imaginative appreciation of nature often in excess of that of the more material and skeptical Caucasian.

Arriving at the mysterious place where, they felt, something should happen, their imagination now forced an expression of disappointment. In a high-keyed condition, all their superst.i.tions recurred to them with startling reality.

In one place the rising vapor proved to be the breath of the great submarine G.o.d--the "_Ko-Koyah_." In another place, a motionless little cloud marked the land in which dwelt the "_Turnah-huch-suak_," the great Land G.o.d, and the air spirits were represented by the different winds, with s.e.x relations.

Ah-we-lah and E-tuk-i-shook, with the astuteness of the aborigine, who reads Nature as a book, were sharp enough to note that the high air currents did not correspond to surface currents; for, although the wind was blowing homeward, and changed its force and direction, a few high clouds moved persistently in a different direction.

This, to them, indicated a warfare among the air spirits. The ice and snow were also animated. To them the whole world presented a rivalry of conflicting spirits which offered never-ending topics of conversation.

As the foot pressed the snow, its softness, its rebound, or its metallic ring indicated sentiments of friendliness or hostility. The ice, by its color, movement or noise, spoke the humor of its animation, or that of the supposed life of the restless sea beneath it. In interpreting these spirit signs, the two expressed considerable difference of opinion.

Ah-we-lah saw dramatic situations and became almost hysterical with excitement; E-tuk-i-shook saw only a monotone of the normal play of life. Such was the trend of interest and conversation as the building of the igloos was completed.

Contrary to our usual custom, the dogs had been allowed to rest in their traces attached to the sleds. Their usual malicious inquisitiveness exhausted, they were too tired to examine the sleds to steal food. But now, as the house was completed, holes were chipped with a knife in ice-shoulders, through which part of a trace was pa.s.sed, and each team was thus securely fastened to a ring cut in ice-blocks. Then each dog was given a double ration of pemmican. Their pleasure was expressed by an extra twist of the friendly tails and an extra note of gladness from long-contracted stomachs. Finishing their meal, they curled up and warmed the snow, from which they took an occasional bite to furnish liquid for their gastric economy. Almost two days of rest followed, and this was the canine celebration of the Polar attainment.

We withdrew to the inside of the dome of snow-blocks, pulled in a block to close the doors, spread out our bags as beds on the platform of leveled snow, pulled off boots and trousers, and slipped half-length into the bristling reindeer furs. We then discussed, with chummy congratulations, the success of our long drive to the world's end.

While thus engaged, the little Juel stove piped the cheer of the pleasure of ice-water, soon to quench our chronic thirst. In the meantime, Ah-we-lah and E-tuk-i-shook pressed farther and farther into their bags, pulled over the hoods, and closed their eyes to an overpowering fatigue. But my lids did not easily close. I watched the fire. More ice went into the kettle. With the satisfaction of an ambition fulfilled, I peeped out occasionally through the pole-punched port, and noted the horizon glittering with gold and purple.

Quivers of self-satisfying joy ran up my spine and relieved the frosty mental bleach of the long-delayed Polar antic.i.p.ation.

In due time we drank, with grateful satisfaction, large quant.i.ties of ice-water, which was more delicious than any wine. A pemmican soup, flavored with musk ox tenderloins, steaming with heat--a luxury seldom enjoyed in our camps--next went down with warming, satisfying gulps.

This was followed by a few strips of frozen fresh meat, then by a block of pemmican. Later, a few squares of musk ox suet gave the taste of sweets to round up our meal. Last of all, three cups of tea spread the chronic stomach-folds, after which we reveled in the sense of fulness of the best meal of many weeks.

With full stomachs and the satisfaction of a worthy task well performed, we rested.

We had reached the zenith of man's Ultima Thule, which had been sought for more than three centuries. In comfortable berths of snow we tried to sleep, turning with the earth on its northern axis.

But sleep for me was impossible. At six o'clock, or six hours after our arrival at local noon, I arose, went out of the igloo, and took a double set of observations. Returning, I did some figuring, lay down on my bag, and at ten o'clock, or four hours later, leaving Ah-we-lah to guard the camp and dogs, E-tuk-i-shook joined me to make a tent camp about four miles to the magnetic south. My object was to have a slightly different position for subsequent observations.

Placing our tent, bags and camp equipment on a sled, we pushed it over the ice field, crossed a narrow lead sheeted with young ice, and moved on to another field which seemed to have much greater dimensions. We erected the tent not quite two hours later, in time for a midnight observation. These s.e.xtant readings of the sun's alt.i.tude were continued for the next twenty-four hours.

In the idle times between observations, I went over to a new break between the field on which we were camped and that on which Ah-we-lah guarded the dogs. Here the newly-formed sheets of ice slid over each other as the great, ponderous fields stirred to and fro. A peculiar noise, like that of a crying child, arose. It came seemingly from everywhere, intermittently, in successive crying spells. Lying down, and putting my fur-cushioned ear to the edge of the old ice, I heard a distant thundering noise, the reverberations of the moving, grinding pack, which, by its wind-driven sweep, was drifting over the unseen seas of mystery. In an effort to locate the cry, I searched diligently along the lead. I came to a spot where two tiny pieces of ice served as a mouthpiece. About every fifteen seconds there were two or three sharp, successive cries. With the ice-axe I detached one. The cries stopped; but other cries were heard further along the line.

The time for observations was at hand, and I returned to take up the s.e.xtant. Returning later to the lead, to watch the seas breathe, the cry seemed stilled. The thin ice-sheets were cemented together, and in an open s.p.a.ce nearby I had an opportunity to study the making and breaking of the polar ice.

That tiny film of ice which voiced the baby cries spreads the world's most irresistible power. In its making we have the nucleus for the origin of the polar pack, that great moving crust of the earth which crunches ships, grinds rocks, and sweeps mountains into the sea.

Beginning as a mere microscopic crystal, successive crystals, by their affinity for each other, unite to make a disc. These discs, by the same law of cohesion, a.s.semble and unite. Now the thin sheet, the first sea ice, is complete, and either rests to make the great field of ice, or spreads from floe to floe and from field to field, thus spreading, bridging and mending the great moving ma.s.ses which cover the mid-polar basin.

Another law of nature was solved by a similar insignificant incident. In spreading our things out to air and dry (for things will dry in wind and sun, even at a very low temperature), two pieces of canvas were thrown on a hummock. It was a white canvas sled-cover and a black strip of canvas, in which the boat fittings were wrapped. When these strips of canvas were lifted it was found that under the part of the black canvas, resting on a slope at right angles to the sun, the snow had melted and recongealed. Under the white canvas the snow had not changed. The temperature was -41; we had felt no heat, but this black canvas had absorbed enough heat from a feeble sun to melt the snow beneath it. This little lesson in physics began to interest me, and on the return many similar experiments were made. As the long, tedious marches were made, I asked myself the questions: Why is snow white? Why is the sky blue? And why does black burn snow when white does not?

Little by little, in the long drive of monotony, satisfactory answers came to these questions. Thus, in seeking abstract knowledge, the law of radiation was thoroughly examined. In doing this, there came to me slowly the solution of various problems of animal life, and eventually there was uncovered what to me proved a startling revelation in the incidents that led up to animal coloring in the Arctic. For here I found that the creatures' fur and feathers were colored in accord with their needs of absorbing external heat or of conserving internal heat. The facts here indicated will be presented later, when we deal with the snow-fitted creatures at close range.

One of the impressions which I carried with me of this night march was that the sun seemed low--lower, indeed, than that of midday, which, in reality, was not true, for the observations placed it nine minutes higher. This was an indication of the force of habit. In the northward march we had noted a considerable relative difference in the height of the night sun and that of the day. Although this difference had vanished now, the mind at times refused to grasp the remarkable change.[16]

At the Pole I was impressed by a peculiar uniformity in the temperature of the atmosphere throughout the twenty-four hours, and also by a strange monotone in color and light of sea and sky. I had begun to observe this as I approached the boreal center. The strange equability of light and color, of humidity and of air temperatures extended an area one hundred miles about the Pole. This was noted both on my coming and going over this district.

Approaching the Pole, and as the night sun gradually lifted, an increasing equalization of the temperature of night and day followed.

Three hundred miles from the Pole the thermometer at night had been from 10 to 20 lower than during the day. There the shivering chill of midnight made a strong contrast to the burning, heatless glitter of midday. At the Pole the thermometer did not rise or fall appreciably for certain fixed hours of the day or night, but remained almost uniform during the entire twenty-four hours.

This, to a less notable extent, was true also of the barometer. Farther south there had been a difference in the day and night range of the barometer. Here, although the night winds continued more actively than those of the day, the barometer was less variable than at any time on my journey.

At the Pole the tendency of change in force and direction of air currents, observed farther south, for morning and evening periods, was no longer noted. But when strong winds brushed the pack, a good deal of the Polar equalization gave place to a radical difference, giving a period for high and low temperatures; which period, however, did not correspond to the usual hours of day or night. The winds, therefore, seemed to carry to us the sub-Polar inequality of atmospheric variation in temperature and pressure. Many of the facts bearing upon this problem were not learned until later. Subsequently, I learned, also, that strong winds often disturb the Polar atmospheric sameness; but all is given here because of the striking impression which it made upon me at this time.

In the region about the Pole I observed that, although there were remarkable and beauteous color blendings in the sky, the intense contrasts and the spectacular display of cloud effects, seen in more southern regions, were absent.

A color suffusion is common throughout the entire Arctic zone. Light, pouring from the low-lying sun, is reflected from the ice in an indescribable blaze. From millions of ice slopes, with millions and millions of tiny reflecting surfaces, each one a mirror, some large, some smaller than specks of diamond dust, this light is sent back in different directions in burning waves to the sky. A liquid light seems forced back from the sky into every tiny crevice of this bejeweled wonderland. One color invariably predominates at a time. Sometimes the ice and air and sky are suffused with a hue of rose, again of orange, again of a light alloyed yellow, again blue; and, as we get farther north, more dominantly purple. Farther south, in our journey northward, we had viewed color effects in reality incomparably more beautiful than those in the regions about the Pole. The sun, farther south, in rising and setting, and with limitless changes of polarized and refracted light, pa.s.sing through strata of atmosphere of varying depths of different density, produces kaleidoscopic changes of burning color.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIRST CAMP AT THE POLE, APRIL 21, 1908]

[Ill.u.s.tration: AT THE POLE--"WE WERE THE ONLY PULSATING CREATURES IN A DEAD WORLD OF ICE"]

At the Pole there were sunbursts, but because of the slight change in the sun's dip to the horizon, the prevailing light was invariably in shades running to purple. At first my imagination evoked a more glowing wonder than in reality existed; as the hours wore on, and as the wants of my body a.s.serted themselves, I began to see the vacant s.p.a.ces with a disillusionizing eye.

The set of observations given here, taken every six hours, from noon on April 21 to midnight on April 22, 1908, fixed our position with reasonable certainty.

These figures do not give the exact position for the normal spiral ascent of the sun, which is about fifty seconds for each hour, or five minutes for each six hours; but the uncertainties of error by refraction and ice-drift do not permit such accuracy of observations. These figures are submitted, therefore, not to establish the pin-point accuracy of our position, but to show that we had approximately reached a spot where the sun, throughout the twenty-four hours, circled the heavens in a line nearly parallel to the horizon.

THE SUN'S TRUE CENTRAL ALt.i.tUDE AT THE POLE.

April 21 and 22, 1908.

Seven successive observations, taken every six hours.

Each observation is reduced for an instrumental error of +2'.

For semi-diameter and also for refraction and parallax, -9'.

The seven reductions are each calculated from two s.e.xtant readings, generally of an upper and lower limb.

(TAKEN FROM MY FIELD NOTES.)

April 21, 1908, 97th meridian local time--12 o'clock noon--11--54'--40''