Читать книгу New lands within the Arctic circle - Julius Payer - Страница 8

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1. The eagerness of human nature for gain and material prosperity is so great, that we are wont to estimate the value of all undertakings by the standard of utility; and too often it is forgotten, that each generation is destined to fulfil the task of acquiring and collecting the knowledge which is to benefit only a later generation. If, then, the Polar question be valueless for our material interests, is it therefore valueless for science? and assuming that it is for the present worthless as far as gain and wealth are concerned, must it continue so for all time? Not that we are entitled, even from this narrower point of view, to deny the usefulness of Polar exploration, as Cook seems to have done when he said, “Never from those regions will any advantage accrue to our race;” but rather bear in mind what Sir James Ross tells us: “The profit which accrued to England, in each year after the voyage (1818) of my uncle (Sir John Ross) in North Baffin’s Bay, from those rediscovered parts of the Arctic seas, was more than enough to defray all the expenses of the voyages of discovery undertaken from 1818 to 1838.” Scoresby with his single ship made a million thalers by the capture of whales, and the Americans had for many years a clear profit of eight million dollars from the fisheries of the frozen seas of Behring’s Straits. There were also, it is true, very considerable losses; for, in 1830, nineteen English ships engaged in the whale fishery were “beset” in the ice of Melville Bay, and nearly all destroyed; in 1871, twenty-six American ships were crushed to pieces in Behring’s Straits, and as many as seventy-three Dutch vessels sank in one year in the seventeenth century from the pressure of the ice.

2. We do not, however, mean to assert, that the progress of Polar discovery is always followed by a corresponding increase in the capture of fish in the Arctic seas. On the contrary, the take of oil-yielding animals is steadily decreasing, and even if an open sea should be discovered in 82° N.L., in which whales should be found in as great abundance as ice-floes unhappily are, the whaler with his poor equipment would never be able to follow them thither. The fur countries, once as productive as the mines of Peru, are incapable of further extension; even the treasures of mammoths’ tusks have become rare, and in order to bring thirty tons of lignite from the north-east of Greenland, a ship must expend seventy tons of sound coal in the transit, besides passing the winter there. That the teas of China, the silks of Japan, the spices of the Moluccas will never descend to us from the ice-fields has long been settled. No one at the present day thinks any longer of the commercial value of the North-West and North-East passages. Modes of escape from the perils and caprices of the ice have grown out of the endeavour to discover routes of commerce, which lay beyond the reach of the cannon of the Spaniards at the time when they aspired to the monopoly of the trade of the world. The reward of 25,000 gulden, offered by the Dutch government for the discovery of a North-East passage, and that of £20,000 by the English parliament for the North-West passage, have never been paid, because never claimed, nor are they, in the least degree, likely to be claimed.[12]

3. Yet, quite independent of material results, Polar exploration presents no unworthy object for scientific investigation—a region of the globe 120,000 square miles in extent never yet entered by man. The Polar question, as a problem of science, aims at determining the limits of land and water, at the perfecting of that network of lines with which comparative science seeks to surround our planet, even to its Poles. The completion of this labour will serve to discover those physical laws which regulate climates, the currents of the atmosphere and sea, and the analogies of geology with the earth as we see it.

4. But how is this to be attained? At first it would appear as if the methods of ice-navigation had been followed by such success, that their continued application guaranteed still greater results. The gradual advance by means of ships, from the Polar Circle to 73°, 75°, 79°, or even to 82° N.L., has been the result and is the reward of the labours of three centuries. But to reach higher degrees, from 82° to 90°, depends on other conditions than mere time. That increased experience and boldness have removed many of the inconveniences and dangers attendant on Arctic navigation is undoubtedly true, but it is also as true, that, upon the whole, the safely and convenience of ice-navigation have more steadily increased than its successes. Hudson, Baffin, and especially Scoresby, and even some whalers of the seventeenth century, reached latitudes which have scarcely been exceeded since, and in many cases this progress was due, not to greater boldness and experience, but rather to chance and the caprices of the ice, which “to the whaler often permitted glances into its interior, which were denied to the scientific explorer.”

5. The greater perfection of our means enables us to conduct Polar expeditions with greater facility. Instead of dissipating our strength by sending out several ships, even small fleets, amounting sometimes to fifteen ships (often not larger than the boats of a modern Polar ship), since the days of Sir John Ross, we equip one or two ships only, strongly built for their “special purpose, provided with steam-power, and with all that is desirable or requisite; and instead of despatching them for short summer cruises, we provision them, send them out for several years, and, by appropriate nourishment and the aid of medical science, protect the crews from the scourge of scurvy. In those days, when even the wealthy lived during the winter on salt beef, and English squires were obliged at the beginning of winter, on account of the scarcity of food for the cattle, to kill and salt a portion of their herd, preserved and antiscorbutic victuals were an impossibility to a Hudson, a James, a Fox, in their winters amid the ice. Those introduced by Ross—then called “Donkin’s meat”—have been greatly improved since, and through them the scurvy, which used to carry off whole crews of ships, has lost its former terrors.

6. In this power to extend our expeditions without danger, and especially in sledge journeys during the autumn and spring, which are possible only to expeditions prepared to winter in the ice, are the grounds why we have not halted at the barriers “of the bulwarks built for eternity;” in the Rennselaer harbour, in the Lancaster-Barrow route, or at the Pendulum islands. It is only sledge expeditions, as Middendorf says, which have been able to effect results of any magnitude on the inaccessible coasts of the extreme north; and the great extent to which the Russians had used sledge expeditions evidently served as an example both to the English and to Kane.

7. In Polar expeditions, therefore, we have probably reached, so far as the exploration of the highest latitudes by means of ships is concerned, the limits of possibility. The extraordinary success which fell to the lot of Hall’s expedition teaches us only the possibility of encroaching but a little beyond that limit, even under the most favourable circumstances.

8. In all cases where the attempt shall be made to reach the highest latitudes with a ship, I would again recommend the route through Smith’s Sound, because, in the first place, I believe that any considerable advance is only to be expected in coast-water; and in the second place, because the Grant Coast offers facilities for sledge expeditions on a large scale. East Greenland in the higher latitudes, 73°-75°, may be regarded as inaccessible; and the attempt to penetrate northwards in its coast-water was a delusion of the second German North-Pole expedition. In the north of Spitzbergen, and in Behring’s Straits, fifty expeditions and countless whalers have heard from the ice an imperious ne plus ultra; and the same prohibition has been uttered to as many expeditions on the North-East passage. In both these routes the cause of failure was the disproportion between what could be reached in one or two summers, and the vast extent of sea blocked by impenetrable ice. In like manner, the probability of reaching the Pole itself with our present resources is so small, and the attempt to do it is so utterly disproportionate to the sacrifices exacted and the results achieved, that it would be advisable to exclude it from Arctic exploration, until, instead of the impotent vessels of the sea, we can send thither those of the air.