Читать книгу New lands within the Arctic circle - Julius Payer - Страница 6

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1. Around the lonely apex of the Pole stand cairns of stone which serve to mark the points to which the restless spirit of human enterprise and discovery has penetrated. In its zenith wheels the sea-gull in its flight, and the harpoon-persecuted seal finds on its ice-floes an unapproachable asylum; but the Pole itself remains the goal which no human effort has yet reached.

2. As all knowledge is perfected slowly and gradually, so man’s knowledge of the earth and its configuration forms no exception to this general rule. Of the few attempts of early antiquity to enlarge the domain of geographical knowledge, tradition tells us only of the Argonautic expedition of the Greeks, of the voyage of the Phœnicians to Ophir, and their bolder circumnavigation of Africa. With the conception of the spherical form of the earth the still vague notion of climatal zones makes its appearance, and to this, four centuries before Christ, Pytheas of Marseilles gave the first scientific elucidation and the first approximation to modern theories by his doctrine of the Polar Circle. Almost contemporaneously Alexander’s expedition to the wonder-land of India created a paradise for commerce and navigation, to secure which a shortened route, the route through the ice—the most perverse notion that ever entered into the mind of man to conceive—was one thousand eight hundred years afterwards eagerly and passionately sought.

3. Rome had extended her knowledge to Scandinavia, and Seneca’s prophetical mind foresaw the discovery of new worlds. But the deluge of religious strifes, the migrations of nations in the earlier part of the Middle Ages, the holy zeal for destruction in the apostles to the heathen, proved formidable barriers to the extension of geographical knowledge, which were broken through only by the piratical hordes of Normans so renowned in story. While the Romans boasted that Britain had never been circumnavigated, the Normans, throwing the deeds of the Phœnicians into the shade, discovered Greenland, and became the first Polar Navigators.

4. Travels by land were the principal means by which the geographical knowledge of the world was enriched; but during the Middle Ages the information which travellers communicated, uncertain and superficial even for Europe, served only to supply food for the fancies of map-makers, as far as the distant parts of the world were concerned.

5. But the grand moment at length arrived in the history of mankind when the civilization of the West, looking beyond the narrow horizon of the Old World, and awaking from the geographical dreams of centuries, burst the fetters of tradition, and within three hundred years perfected the knowledge of our planet up to the Pole.

6. When by his famous line of partition, Pope Alexander VI. granted to Spain and Portugal the new countries discovered in the East and West, the brigantines of these nations spread themselves over all seas in search of new lands and fresh glory. To the other maritime nations, to the English and the Dutch, nothing remained, if they meant to acquire gold-yielding lands, but to drive the Spaniards and Portuguese from their conquests, or to seek new Eldorados—yea, by the discovery of sea routes on the north of Asia and America, to aspire to India itself. This was the conception first entertained by both the English and the Dutch, and Geography at any rate profited by their delusions. These nations were not to blame if those routes, known afterwards as the North-West and North-East passages, degenerated into chimeras, if passages had to be sought in higher and still higher latitudes—ultimately in the ice itself, although the Dutch geographer, Plancius, struck out the consoling theory of the open Polar Sea.

7. But who in those days could presuppose that the continents of Asia and America, just where those passages were attempted, symmetrically developed the most enormous longitudinal dimensions? Even the actual discovery of the vast extent of Siberia exerted but little influence on the question of the North-East passage, for the achievements of individuals were not then so quickly disseminated as at present. A succession of men in vessels poorly equipped now struggled against the supremacy of the ice, avoiding at first the dreaded wintering, while they attempted sometimes the North-East, sometimes the North-West, sometimes the passage over the Pole itself. In these attempts many lost their lives; many returned, despairing of but still hoping for the solution of the problems—but no one reached the goal.

8. The amazing simplicity of the first adventurers is seen in Frobisher’s project to erect forts, duly provided with cannons and men, on the commanding points of the passage, in the letters of recommendation given by kings of England to the leaders of the expedition for the small Saracenic states which were supposed to exist beyond the river Obi; but these old navigators carried no letter of recommendation to the great potentate—the ice. Gold, too, they hoped to find in the North, because the book of Job speaks of gold coming from thence, and the North-East passage was considered as free from danger, because Pliny mentions some Indians who had been driven towards Norway!

9. When another century and a half had elapsed, a series of unsuccessful attempts to force the North-East passage put a decisive check to material interests in Polar expeditions. The North-East passage belonged henceforward to the history of the past. The English and Dutch withdrew from the Novaya Zemlya seas; and after Wood’s retreat no scientific expedition entered those seas for two hundred years, until the days of the Austrian Expeditions.

10. Among the maritime nations of Europe, it was England, and especially her merchants, who had hitherto largely invested in the costs and risks of these Argonautic expeditions “for the glory of God and the good of the country.” The Dutch soon contented themselves, after Barentz’s death, with the capture of whales in the Arctic seas; France remained an unconcerned spectator, while the sylphs of Versailles consumed the whalebone of whole fleets of whalers; and Spain and Portugal early withdrew from seas in which, instead of ingots of gold, ice-floes only were to be found. But even for England the days of the prophets had now passed away—the days of a Cabot, a Mercator,[10] a Wolstenholme, and a Walsingham. Men of weight raised their voices against the chimeras of Arctic commercial routes, and Chillingworth contemptuously compared an expedition for the discovery of the North-East passage to the study of the Fathers.

11. It may be asked why nations struggled with dauntless ambition for the lost cause of the barren North-West and North-East passages, while for a century they stretched forth timid hands after the rich treasures of lands lying in the more favoured zones? The mighty stimulus of the love of the marvellous explains this series of efforts taken up by generation after generation. Frobisher, Davis, Baffin, and the Novaya Zemlya adventurers, told on their return of gold-lands far within the domains of the icy Hydra. Their tales of single combats with spear or matchlock against polar bears, of the dreadful snow-storms and fearful cold of the Arctic winter, were heard with grim delight by listeners on whom no hardships were imposed. Or they spoke of a darkness that continued for months, of the flaming arches of the northern lights, of the sun remaining visible for many weeks in the heavens, of a race of dwarfs, of unheard-of animals, of fish as big as ships of war, of monsters with long teeth which precisely resembled the Sphinxes of the plains of the Pyramids, of white and blue foxes, of floating mountains of dazzling crystal, of ships seen upside down in the air—when had ever the mind of man more food to nourish the love of the marvellous or greater incentives to stimulate the love of distinction? But besides these appeals to the imagination, every generation desires new confirmations of its convictions; and hence geographical questions, after being shelved for a time, come again to the front as by an inward necessity.

12. If the earlier Polar expeditions pursued exclusively material ends, a decided change appears in those of the present century—the Polar world itself became an object of scientific investigation. With Sir John Ross (1818) began a series of expeditions, at first subservient to the idea of a North-West passage, but which ultimately derived all their importance from their attempt—ineffectual as it proved—to rescue the lives of 139 men, who had fallen far from the fields and scenes where earthly fame is commonly achieved. It was these expeditions, still fresh in the memory of this generation, which, summoning to their aid the modern power of steam against the ice, succeeded in drawing on our Arctic maps a circle whose mean distance was 200 (German) miles from the Pole. Parry on the frozen sea of Spitzbergen had approached it within 100 miles (German); Kane, Hayes and Hall on the coast of the Kennedy Channel, the former to within 116, and the two latter to within 108 miles, and the Austro-Hungarian expedition to within 109 miles.

13. M’Clintock, who returned with the relics of the Franklin expedition, succeeded in perfecting a mode of discovery independent of the ship—that by means of sledging—admirably adapted for future Arctic expeditions. But the North-West passage for which six generations had toiled, though discovered, was shown to be utterly worthless for all material purposes—a dreary web of coast lines.