Читать книгу New lands within the Arctic circle - Julius Payer - Страница 7

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1. The Arctic Sea, in some of its features, forcibly impresses us with its resemblance to the glaciers of the Alps. In both cases, the ice presses from a region, colder and less favoured by climate, towards one warmer and more favoured. In the Alpine glaciers, the movement is from above downwards; in the Frozen Ocean, the movement is from a higher to a lower geographical latitude. In both cases, the tongues and spurs of the masses of ice formed by the configuration of the land or by currents of the sea, terminate, whenever they reach an isothermal curve of altitude or latitude, the mean temperature of which suffices to dissolve them or prevent their formation. Moraines also have their equivalent in the Arctic Sea; for it is an established fact that icebergs and ice-fields laden with the débris and rubbish of Arctic lands, deposit these burdens round the outer edge of the Frozen Ocean, and to this process, partially at least, the origin of the Newfoundland Banks is ascribed. If this comparison between the phenomena of high latitudes and great altitudes be just, then we should have as much reason to believe in the existence of the so-called open Polar Sea, as we should have to maintain, that in our glacier ranges ice ceases to be formed above a certain altitude.

2. The belief of past times[11] in such a sea shows how unsatisfactory is the simple to man’s mind, and how old is his tendency to clothe the remote and the uncommon with a garment of the marvellous. What was the open Polar Sea but the “Harz Sea” of the North, or the legendary zone of the ever-sunny Eden of the Hyperboreans, far beyond the land of the Anthropophagi over which was spread an atmosphere veiled in snow, and through which no light could penetrate! Who has ever seen this open Polar Sea? Do the accounts of navigators confirm its existence? Nay—their accounts are rather a series of counter-statements: Hudson, Baffin, Phipps, Tschitschagoff, Buchan, Franklin, Parry, Collinson, Scoresby, M’Clintock, Koldewey, Torell, Nordenskjöld, have all expressed their disbelief in its existence. If some have pretended that they have seen it, how strange it is that they never sailed on it! It has recently been attempted to make the great champion of the Polar question, Dr. Petermann, a supporter of this conception; but in the “Mittheilungen” of this highly meritorious geographer, there are many passages which most emphatically protest against it. His views extend only to an inner Polar Sea navigable under certain circumstances, and every one acquainted with those regions may adopt his point of view, though he refuses to admit the existence of the open Polar Sea.

3. In those centuries when the Natural Sciences were little cultivated, when the theories of the Trade Winds, of Equatorial and Polar sea-currents, were still unknown, and when as yet the processes in the Frozen Ocean had not been submitted to scientific investigation, we cannot be surprised at the preconceptions which were formed concerning its phenomena. In those times all beyond Norway was a chaos of ice-filled darkness; the necessity of a scientific investigation of those wastes was not felt; and down to the time of Sir John Ross, Polar navigators on their return home brought with them no kind of scientific knowledge of Nature in the Arctic regions. To reach India was the main if not the only end they had in view. The instructions which Willoughby, the first Polar navigator, received, give us an insight into the delusions of earlier times. These, for example, warned adventurers against men-eaters who swam naked in the sea, and in the rivers. It was the period of fables long since forgotten. Maldonado, de Fuca, Bernarda, Yelmer, Andrejew, Martinière, and the whale-fishers, brought home tales of passages to India discovered, of new continents, of the ascertained connexion of Novaya Zemlya with the northernmost point of Siberia (Yelmerland) or even with Greenland. Two centuries ago the failure of all attempts at a North-East passage was attributed to Russia’s commercial policy, inasmuch as it had been proved to the satisfaction of all, that the heat was greater in the north, that the seas there ceased to freeze, and that the country was covered with a luxuriant green!

4. There was, indeed, a certain logical consequence in the belief of an inner Polar Sea, as long as it was unknown that ice is formed on the open sea as well as on the coasts. There was also one argument, which made the existence of such a sea not altogether improbable. It might be assumed, that the formation of ice renewed every year in the Arctic regions, would necessarily produce eternal bulwarks of congelation and destroy all organic life, unless sea-currents modified these extremes of climate. The ice which is formed round the Pole—it was argued—is not of an unlimited but of a definite quantity. Since, then, this quantity of ice must be brought with tolerable uniformity from the innermost Polar region to lower latitudes by the action of sea-currents, there are at least one or two months of the summer when the ice is at a minimum, when no new formation takes place, and when a sea relatively ice-free may appear in the place of the sea which had been covered with ice. This sea would be the more open and navigable, just in proportion as less land might be found at the Pole. But in this assumption it is implied, that the ice moves with perfect regularity and in radial lines from a given point without any disturbance from winds, or counter-currents, or land, consequently with a quiet simplicity of hydrography, for which Nature, neither there nor elsewhere, shows any predilection. Dove makes the mean annual temperature of the North Pole, 2·5° F.; but it is probably still less. What, then, is the probability of an open Polar Sea, if this annual mean only be considered? All the accounts too of animal life increasing in exuberance as we advance northwards—from which a more favourable climate within the innermost Polar region and an open Polar Sea have been inferred—must be received with caution, for the appearance of numerous flocks of birds proves only that they remain where open water prevails for a time and that they change their abode with its change of place.

5. In more recent times great influence has been attributed to the Gulf Stream as a power influencing all the seas, known and unknown, of the whole Arctic region. Dr. Petermann, however, in a lately published work, endeavours to show that its effects are discernible only on the northern seas of Spitzbergen and Novaya Zemlya. Its action on the coasts of Spitzbergen has been indisputably established by the Swedes, who discovered there certain tropical plants (Entada gigalobium); but the penetration of the warmer waters of this current to the northern coasts of Novaya Zemlya has not been so positively ascertained. In the Austrian Expedition of 1873–4, we discovered no proofs of its existence. We found neither the constant current, nor the water of a higher temperature, which characterizes that renowned stream.

6. For a long time the “ice-holes,” seen by Wrangel and Morton, were regarded as indications of an ice-free Polar Sea. With regard to those seen by Morton in 81° 22′, Richardson very justly remarks: “The open water of the Kennedy Channel is not of greater extent in the month of June than the open spaces which have occasionally been seen in summer on the north of Spitzbergen by whale-fishers.” Wrangel, when he describes the “Polynjii,” which he saw on the east of the New Siberian Islands, accounts for them by the action of a local coast-wind; and yet Wrangel would have been the first to favour the notion of an inner Polar Sea, for he still thought, in opposition to Scoresby, that ice could not be formed on the open sea, because of the absence of land as a support for the ice in its formation.

7. The first practical application of the theory of an open Polar Sea was long ago devised by Plancius; the discovery, namely, of a route in high latitudes to China. But the expeditions to the North Pole, properly so termed, sprang also from this theory, which was held with the greatest pertinacity. The evidence of unsuccessful undertakings was always met and outweighed by the counter-experience of one favourable year in the ice. Thus Barentz, in the exceedingly propitious summer of 1594, advanced without difficulty one degree of latitude beyond the northern extremity of Novaya Zemlya, while his successors frequently encountered insurmountable difficulties at Cape Nassau, and he himself in the following year, 1595, found the state of the ice changed much for the worse. In the years 1871, 1874, Mack, Carlsen, and the two Austro-Hungarian expeditions came upon an open sea in the very places where very few, if any, water-ways were to be seen in 1872 and 1873. In the summers of 1816, 1817, the mighty stream of ice on the coast of East Greenland had decreased to such an extent that Scoresby met with little ice between 74° and 80° N.L., but since then whalers have constantly seen the heaviest ice there, heavier than anywhere else. In 1753 and 1754, the Sea of Kara and the Novaya Zemlya Sea were free from ice. But in subsequent years the whale-fishers knocked in vain at their ice-barred entrances. In 1823 Lütke from a point on the west coast of the Sea of Kara saw that sea without ice; but, in the middle of August, 1833, Pachtussow found the western side of that sea open, while in the previous year he himself could not pass the Karian Gates. Again in 1743 and 1773, the North Spitzbergen Sea held out promises the most inviting, which might possibly have permitted the reaching of a still higher degree of latitude than that which Nordenskjöld and Koldewey attained in 1868. Sir John Ross, in the first year of his second voyage, found all things most favourable for navigation; but in the following year the very reverse; and Sir James C. Ross experienced the same alternation of circumstances in the Southern Polar Sea. In 1850, Penny found the Wellington Channel free from ice, but in 1852, Belcher, although he penetrated far further than Penny, was confronted in the same channel by pack- and drift-ice. Scoresby the younger, to whose profound faculty of observation we owe the most significant hints on the nature of the Polar Sea, although he had navigated the Greenland ice-ocean for twenty years, landed only once on its coast. The Swedish expedition (1861) could approach the north-east of Spitzbergen only in boats; Smith sailed over the sea there (1871) as far as Cape Smith. The walrus-hunter, Matilas, sailed round (1864) the north-east island completely, and Carlsen, an ice navigator, as successful as he was skilful, in 1863 circumnavigated Spitzbergen, and in 1871 Novaya Zemlya, and discovered there the relics of Barentz’s winter quarters. In 1872, King Karl Land was circumnavigated, although both Koldewey and Nordenskjöld (1868) as well as the first Austrian expedition (1871) had in vain attempted to approach it. How greatly also, in the same year, the state of the ice varies in different places, is proved by the fact, that Franklin learnt from the whalers that they never saw the ice so thick and so strong in Davis Straits as at the end of July 1819, while Parry, more to the north by some degrees of latitude, pursued his path of discovery even to Melville Island, and in the following year returned to England without meeting any special obstacles. These examples, to which many more might be added, show how variable are the chances of ice-navigation from one year to another. But however variable the conditions of the ice may be, the impediments, even under the most favourable circumstances, are so very great, that we have never been able to penetrate the innermost Polar regions—penetrate, that is, to where, according to the views of an earlier time, the open Polar Sea should be found.

8. Those propitious ice-years amount therefore to nothing more than a greater recession of the outer ice-barrier—trifling when compared with the mighty whole—or to an increased navigability of certain coast-waters, or to a local loosening of the inner Polar ice-net. In reality the whole Arctic Sea, with its countless ice-fields and floes, and its web of fine interlacing water-ways, is nothing but a net constantly in motion from local, terrestrial, or cosmical causes. All the changes and phenomena of this mighty network lead us to infer the existence of frozen seas up to the Pole itself; and according to my own experience, gained in three expeditions, I consider that the states of the ice between 82° and 90° N.L. will not essentially differ from those which have been observed south of latitude 82°; I incline rather to the belief that they will be found worse instead of better.

9. If this view be correct, it will remain an insuperable difficulty to reach the Pole with a ship. The penetrating to 82° or 83° exhausts, according to all past experience, the disposable time for navigation, and presupposes moreover the most favourable conditions for the attaining of such high latitudes. A ship which reaches 82° N.L. by the beginning of autumn must risk nothing more, should only navigate really open water, and the expediency of securing a winter harbour should then outweigh every other consideration.

10. He who expects with a ship of the present construction to reach the Pole in a single summer, necessarily believes in an ocean at the Pole. But even if an expedition should penetrate to 84° in Smith’s Sound, or should reach Cape Tcheljuskin on the north-east route, it would not follow that such an ocean exists, but only that the Polar Sea presents at different times and in different places open water-ways, which may enable a ship to advance beyond a point hitherto reached; but it is improbable that the circumstances which favoured this will be repeated the next summer, so as to permit the ships to penetrate still further—or to return. The last American expedition returned without being able to speak decisively as to the possibility of navigating Lincoln Sea, and since this has not yet been verified by fact, we must suspend our judgment on the matter. To the English expedition, which has taken this route to the Pole, is reserved the great work of throwing light on the region of Upper Smith’s Sound, and the whole civilized world will hail with joy any successes which a nation, so long conspicuous for its perseverance in the cause of discovery, may happily achieve.