With the World's Great Travellers Volume I Part 14

It was at this crisis of our fortunes that we saw a large seal floating--as is the custom of these animals--on a small patch of ice, and seemingly asleep. It was an ussuk, and so large that I at first mistook it for a walrus. Signal was made for the "Hope" to follow astern, and, trembling with anxiety, we prepared to crawl down upon him.

Petersen, with the large English rifle, was stationed in the bow, and stockings were drawn over the oars as m.u.f.flers. As we neared the animal our excitement became so intense that the men could hardly keep stroke.

I had a set of signals for such occasions which spared us the noise of the voice; and when about three hundred yards off the oars were taken in, and we moved in deep silence with a single scull astern.

He was not asleep, for he reared his head when we were almost within rifle-shot; and to this day I can remember the hard, careworn, almost despairing expression of the men's thin faces as they saw him move; their lives depended on his capture.

I depressed my hand nervously, as a signal for Petersen to fire. McGary hung upon his oar, and the boat, slowly but noiselessly sagging ahead, seemed to me within certain range. Looking at Petersen, I saw that the poor fellow was paralyzed by his anxiety, trying vainly to obtain a rest for his gun against the cut-water of the boat. The seal rose on his fore-flippers, gazed at us for a moment with frightened curiosity, and coiled himself for a plunge. At that instant, simultaneously with the crack of our rifle, he relaxed his long length on the ice, and, at the very brink of the water, his head fell helpless to one side.

I would have ordered another shot, but no discipline could have controlled the men. With a wild yell, each vociferating according to his own impulse, they urged both boats upon the floes. A crowd of hands seized the seal and bore him up to safer ice. The men seemed half crazy; I had not realized how much we were reduced by absolute famine. They ran over the floe crying and laughing and brandishing their knives. It was not five minutes before every man was sucking his b.l.o.o.d.y fingers or mouthing long strips of raw blubber.

Not an ounce of this seal was lost. The intestines found their way into the soup-kettles without any observances of the preliminary home processes. The cartilaginous parts of the fore-flippers were cut off in the _melee_ and pa.s.sed round to be chewed upon; and even the liver, warm and raw as it was, bade fair to be eaten before it had seen the pot.

That night, on the large halting floe, to which, in contempt of the dangers of drifting, we happy men had hauled our boats, two entire planks of the "Red Eric" were devoted to a grand cooking-fire, and we enjoyed a rare and savage feast.

This was our last experience of the disagreeable effects of hunger. In the words of George Stephenson, "The charm was broken, and the dogs were safe." The dogs I have said little about, for none of us liked to think of them. The poor creatures Toodla and Whitey had been taken with us as last resources against starvation. They were, as McGary worded it, "meat on the hoof," and "able to carry their own fat over the floes." Once, near Weary Man's Rest, I had been on the point of killing them; but they had been the leaders of our winter's team, and we could not bear the sacrifice.

I need not detail our journey any farther. Within a day or two we shot another seal, and from that time forward had a full supply of food....

Two days after this, a mist had settled down upon the islands which embayed us, and when it lifted we found ourselves rowing, in lazy time, under the shadow of Karkamoot. Just then a familiar sound came to us over the water. We had often listened to the screeching of the gulls or the bark of the fox and mistaken it for the "Huk" of the Esquimaux, but this had about it an inflection not to be mistaken, for it died away in the familiar cadence of an "halloo."

"Listen, Petersen! Oars, men!" "What is it?" and he listened quietly at first, and then, trembling, said in a half-whisper, "Dannemarkers!"

I remember this, the first tone of Christian voice which had greeted our return to the world. How we all stood up and peered into the distant nooks; and how the cry came to us again, just as, having seen nothing, we were doubting whether the whole was not a dream; and then how, with long sweeps, the white ash cracking under the spring of the rowers, we stood for the cape that the sound proceeded from, and how nervously we scanned the green spots which our experience, grown now into instinct, told us would be the likely camping-ground of wayfarers.

By and by--for we must have been pulling a good half-hour--the single mast of a small shallop showed itself; and Petersen, who had been very quiet and grave, burst into an incoherent fit of crying, only relieved by broken exclamations of mingled Danish and English. "'Tis the Upernavik oil-boat! The 'Fraulein Flaischer!' Carlie Mossyn, the a.s.sistant cooper, must be on his road to Kingatok for blubber. The 'Mariane' (the one annual ship) has come, and Carlie Mossyn----" and here he did it all over again, gulping down his words and wringing his hands.

It was Carlie Mossyn, sure enough. The quiet routine of a Danish settlement is the same year after year, and Petersen had hit upon the exact state of things. The "Mariane" was at Proven, and Carlie Mossyn had come up in the "Fraulein Flaischer" to get the year's supply of blubber from Kingatok.

RESCUED FROM DEATH.

W. S. SCHLEY.

[In the whole history of Arctic exploration there is no story more replete with the elements of tragedy than that of Lieutenant A. W. Greely and his brave companions. Sailing to the far north in 1881 on a scientific expedition, misfortune overtook the party, largely due to the failure of the relief expeditions of 1882 and 1883 to reach them. The imperilled navigators left their vessel and made their way down the coast, suffering terribly from cold and hunger, and were in the throes of starvation when finally rescued by the relief expedition of 1884. Many of them had already died, and but a perishing remnant was left when they were at length discovered in their final place of refuge. The story of their discovery and rescue, as told by Commander W. S. Schley and Professor J. R. Soley, in their "Rescue of Greely," is tragically dramatic, and we make it the subject of our present selection. The relief vessels, the "Thetis" and the "Bear," examining the coast in the vicinity of Cape York, found that there was no trace of the sufferers at Littleton Island. Thence they made their way to Brevoort Island, near Cape Sabine, and from there sent out four parties to examine the coast in different directions.]

It was intended that, as soon as a satisfactory examination had been made and a depot landed, the ships should advance without delay into Kane Sea. There was no expectation of finding that any one had been at the cape, or that the cairns or caches had been disturbed, as it was clear that if Greely had arrived he would have been short of provisions, and would therefore have sought to obtain those at Littleton Island; and n.o.body could have imagined for a moment that with prospective starvation on one side of the strait, and a provision depot (although a small one) twenty-three miles off on the other, a party supplied with a boat and oars would have preferred the former alternative. In fact, at the time the cutter started, the crew of the "Bear" were getting provisions on deck, to be in readiness for the sledge journey that was to be made northward, after the ships were stopped by the fast ice. As the cutter left the ship, Colwell picked up a can of hard-tack and two one-pound cans of pemmican, as he thought that his party might be out all night, and a little of something to eat would not go amiss.

Within half an hour after the first parties had left the ship cheers were heard above the roaring of the wind. At first it was impossible to tell from what quarter the sound proceeded, but soon the cheering was heard a second time more distinctly, in the direction of Brevoort Island. Almost immediately after, Ensign Harlow was observed signalling from Stalknecht Island. His message read, "Have found Greely's record; send five men."

Before this request could be carried out, Yewell was seen running over the ice towards the ships, and a few minutes later he came on board, almost out of breath, with the information that Lieutenant Taunt had found a message from Greely in the cairn on Brevoort Island. Yewell brought the papers with him, and called out, as he gave them to the officer of the deck, that Greely's party were at Cape Sabine, all well.

The excitement of the moment was intense, and it spread with the rapidity of lightning through both the ships. It was decided instantly to go on to the Cape, and a general recall was sounded by three long blasts from the steam-whistle of the "Thetis."

The first thing to be done before taking definite action was to go carefully over the papers that Taunt had found. All the officers who had remained behind in the two ships gathered around the wardroom table of the "Thetis," and the records were hurriedly read aloud. As one paper after another was quickly turned over, until the last was reached, it was discovered with horror that the latest date borne by any of them was October 21, 1883, and that but forty days' complete rations were left to live upon. Eight months had elapsed since then, and the belief was almost irresistible that the whole party must have perished during this terrible period of waiting and watching for relief....

It was a wonderful story. It told how the expedition, during its two years at Lady Franklin Bay, had marked out the interior of Grinnell Land, and how Lockwood had followed the northern sh.o.r.e of Greenland, and had reclaimed for America the honor of "the farthest north." But there was no time now to think of what the expedition had accomplished; that was already a matter of history. The pressing question was, Where was Greely's party now? and to that question it was too probable that there was but one answer.

The records had named the wreck-cache as the site of Greely's camp, and preparations were made at once to go there. The cutter, with Colwell and his party on board, had not yet got away, having been stopped by the cries from the sh.o.r.e, and she now steamed back under the stern of the "Thetis." Colwell was directed to go to the site of the cache and look for the explorers; and if any were alive,--of which the record gave little hope,--to tell them that relief was close at hand. As he was about to leave, he called out for a boat-flag, and one was thrown to him from the ship. This was bent on a boat-hook and set up in the stern of the boat.

Before the cutter had disappeared to the northward the commander of the expedition had gone on board the "Bear," and the ship was under way, following the track of the cutter around the cape. The detachment under Harlow, which had found Greely's scientific records and instruments on Stalknecht Island, and the other party under Melville, some of whom had not yet returned, were to come after in the "Thetis," which was left behind to pick them up. The pa.s.sage which the ships and the cutter were to make was about six miles, although from Payer Harbor to the wreck-cache, in a straight line, across the rugged neck of intervening land, it was less than half that distance. Fortunately, the southerly gale had set the ice off sh.o.r.e into Kane Sea, leaving a clear pa.s.sage around for the vessels.

It was half-past eight o'clock in the evening as the cutter steamed around the rocky bluff of Cape Sabine and made her way to the cove, four miles farther on, which Colwell remembered so well from his hurried landing with the stores on the terrible night following the wreck of the "Proteus." The storm, which had been raging with only slight intervals since early the day before, still kept up, and the wind was driving in bitter gusts through the openings in the ridge that followed the coast to the westward. Although the sky was overcast, it was broad daylight,--the daylight of a dull winter afternoon,--and as the cutter pa.s.sed along, Colwell could recognize the familiar landmarks of the year before; the long sweep of the rocky coast, with its ice-foot spanning every cove, the snow gathered in the crevices, the projecting headlands, and the line of the ice-pack which had ground up the "Proteus," dimly seen in the mists to the north, across the tossing waters of Kane Sea.

At last the boat arrived at the site of the wreck-cache, and the sh.o.r.e was eagerly scanned, but nothing could be seen. Rounding the next point, the cutter opened out the cove beyond. There, on the top of a little ridge, fifty or sixty yards above the ice-foot, was plainly outlined the figure of a man. Instantly the c.o.xswain caught up the boat-hook and waved his flag. The man on the ridge had seen them, for he stooped, picked up a signal-flag from the rock, and waved it in reply. Then he was seen coming slowly and cautiously down the steep rocky slope. Twice he fell down before he reached the foot. As he approached, still walking feebly and with difficulty, Colwell hailed him from the bow of the boat.

"Who all are there left?"

"Seven left."

As the cutter struck the ice, Colwell jumped off and went up to him. He was a ghastly sight. His cheeks were hollow, his eyes wild, his hair and beard long and matted. His army blouse, covering several thicknesses of shirts and jackets, was ragged and dirty. He wore a little fur cap and rough moccasins of untanned leather tied around the leg. As he spoke, his utterance was thick and mumbling, and in his agitation his jaws worked in convulsive twitches. As the two met, the man, with a sudden impulse, took off his glove and shook Colwell's hand.

"Where are they?" asked Colwell, briefly.

"In the tent," said the man, pointing over his shoulder; "over the hill; the tent is down."

"Is Mr. Greely alive?"

"Yes, Greely's alive."

"Any other officers?"

"No." Then he repeated, absently, "The tent is down."

"Who are you?"

"Long."

Before this colloquy was over Lowe and Norman had started up the hill.

Hastily filling his pockets with bread, and taking the two cans of pemmican, Colwell told the c.o.xswain to take Long into the cutter, and started after the others with Ash. Reaching the crest of the ridge, and looking southward, they saw spread out before them a desolate expanse of rocky ground, sloping gradually from a ridge on the east to the ice-covered sh.o.r.e, which at the west made in and formed a cove. Back of the level s.p.a.ce was a range of hills rising up eight hundred feet, with a precipitous face, broken in two by a gorge, through which the wind was blowing furiously. On a little elevation directly in front was the tent.

Hurrying on across the intervening hollow, Colwell came up with Lowe and Norman just as they were greeting a soldierly-looking man who had come out from the tent.

As Colwell approached, Norman was saying to the man,--

"There is the lieutenant."

And he added to Colwell,--

"This is Sergeant Brainard."

Brainard immediately drew himself up to the position of the soldier, and was about to salute when Colwell took his hand.

At this moment there was a confused murmur within the tent, and a voice said,--

"Who's there?"

Norman answered, "It's Norman,--Norman who was in the 'Proteus.'"

This was followed by cries of "Oh, it's Norman!" and a sound like a feeble cheer.