Chapter IX: Kings Bay to Horn Sound

On boarding the _Kvik_ we were again in contact with the outside world. There was much to hear and something to tell, so that time passed quickly. Baron Bornemisza, returning from a week’s cruise in Wijde Bay and along the north coast, was full of information about the condition of the ice in that direction. It was not so open as at the same time in the preceding year. Hinloopen Strait was blocked about halfway down; the _Kvik_ had been unable to reach the Seven Islands. At Advent Bay we found the more boldly navigated _Expres_, with our friend Herr Meissenbach on board, in a happy and triumphant state of mind. He had had the best kind of time, and enjoyed himself vastly, spending three weeks in the neighbourhood of the Seven Islands, and pushing as far east as Cape Platen. Two bears had fallen to the rifles of the party, and I know not how many seals; now he was on his way home.

That was a busy day at Advent Point, and a blustery withal, for the autumnal bad weather was setting in. All our baggage had to be packed for transfer to the _Lofoten_, in which we were to sail for Horn Sound that evening. At the inn were two Swiss artists and Professor Wiesner of Vienna, come to take observations on the intensity of the light. Presently a tourist steamer arrived and carried the artists away. People were coming and going all the time; it was the culmination of the tourist season.

I have read in the London press that Spitsbergen, nowadays, is “overrun” with tourists. This is far from being the case. A considerable number come up with the _Lofoten_ and other tourist ships, and pay a brief visit to the west coast, but few of them ever land except for an hour or two at Advent Point. Apart from Herr Andrée’s party, the only visitors who spent any time in Spitsbergen this year were Baron Bornamisza and a few people who made trips on the _Kvik_, the German party who hired the _Expres_, and ourselves. Besides Garwood and me, only Baron Bornamisza and the artists made any attempt to go into the interior. The Baron spent two or three days with one of our tents in the Sassendal, shooting reindeer; whilst the artists dragged a little sledge a day’s journey into the hills west of Advent Bay, and camped there for a couple of nights. So much for the overrunning of Spitsbergen. The simple fact is that to spend any time in the interior of the island is no easier now than it was fifty years ago, nor is there much probability that it will become easier in the immediate future. All of Spitsbergen that the ordinary tourist needs to see is visible from the deck of a ship, whence it can be beheld without either labour or discomfort. To penetrate the heart of Spitsbergen glaciers now involves just the same kind of work that the crossing of North-East Land demanded of Nordenskiöld in 1873.

When the hour came for the _Lofoten_ to sail, such was the boisterousness of the embarkation that some intending passengers preferred to stay behind for a week rather than be soused. The disturbing wind was only a local draught, such as often blows down the boggy valleys of Spitsbergen, and especially down the Advent Vale. When we were out in the midst of Ice Fjord the gale diminished to an ordinary breeze, by which we were well rolled all night long off the west coast. It was past noon (August 14) when the _Lofoten_ turned into Horn Sound; she steamed straight up the bay and finally came to off the mouth of a small bay in the south coast, the Goose Haven of the old whalers. Our whaleboat was hoisted overboard, and such goods as we needed for a week lowered into it. Svensen, who was to be left on board, eagerly helping, and joyous to see the last of the hated sledges. He said good-bye to us with monstrous enthusiasm, mixed in apologies for not having enjoyed our company more keenly. If we would come to his home and go a-fishing with him he assured us that we should find no more active or willing companion.

The exchange from the warmth and solidity of the steamer to the rawness of the foggy day and the unrest of the tumbling sea was, to say the least, undesirable. Our friends on board watched our departure without envy, and it must be confessed that we rowed away with little eagerness. Clouds hung low and heavy upon the hills, and no scene could have been more desolate. In half an hour we landed on the stony beach of the east shore of Goose Haven; the _Lofoten_ was then small in the distance and just rounding out of sight. There was no novelty of the unknown now ahead of us. We had come to make the ascent of Mount Hedgehog or Horn Sunds Tind, which Garwood had almost succeeded in accomplishing just twelve months before in company with Trevor-Battye and a seaman. The object of this repetition was to see the view from the top, a hope little likely to be fulfilled in such weather as was prevailing. Garwood also desired to investigate certain rocks, which he thought might prove interestingly fossiliferous. Save for these rocks I do not think we should have come to Horn Sound again. They proved to be a fraud, but that was not Garwood’s fault. My own wish had been to spend our last week in Ekman and Dickson bays for the purpose of completing and joining my two maps; but I could hardly expect Garwood to be eager for such an arrangement, seeing that the area contained no geological novelties for him. My alternative proposition was that we should hire the _Kvik_ and make a run for Wiches Land--the islands approached by us the preceding year, but never as yet landed on by any geologist. Unfortunately, we could learn nothing of the condition of the ice east of Spitsbergen, so hesitated to incur a considerable expense for a very problematical advantage. If only we had known! It was the one year of all recorded years in which the sea to the eastward was most free of ice, and, during these very days, Mr. Arnold Pike was steaming round and round and landing on the islands in question, where he shot fifty-seven bears.

For better or worse, we had decided on Horn Sound, and here we were by the resounding shore of Goose Haven. There was no good landing-place or protected creek for the boat. We had to land on the open beach. The baggage was pitched ashore and the boat completely emptied. Nevertheless, our reduced strength did not avail to haul it out of the water. We began to regret the loss of Svensen sooner than we expected. Camp having been pitched just above high-water line, there was nothing for us to do on the dreary shore, so we rowed across to the far point of the bay--Hofer Point--a convenient position for my survey. Garwood, knowing the way about, steered the boat into a tiny cove, whither we thought of transferring camp. The change was not made, fortunately, as will hereafter appear. At the head of the cove are ruins of a Russian settlement, on an exposed mound as usual, whilst on neighbouring knolls are two groups of graves. There remains also a bench in a protected corner. When the miserable life lived in these remote and solitary huts by most of the exiles is considered, these poor benches, of which I have now seen several examples, are peculiarly pathetic. Many a sad hour must successive, lonely, fur-clad watchmen have passed while seated upon them, marking the slow passage of miserable days. The sentiment of the melancholy landscape is strangely enhanced by a human interest of this kind, however remote. The savage regions of the earth are always impressive to a spectator’s imagination, but they become infinitely more impressive when they can be regarded as a theatre of human suffering or endurance.

The others returned to camp by boat, whilst I pursued my task and wandered home round the bay’s head, at first over sea-eaten rocks, afterwards, when the hills receded, over boggy land between the shelving beach and the iceflat at the foot of the great moraine of the glacier filling the bay’s valley--the Goose Glacier, as we afterwards called it. On a mound of the bog are ruins of a considerable whalers’ settlement, with quantities of great bones lying about, and the inevitable group of graves not far away. In the seventeenth century the Horn Sound whalers were English; in fact, this was one of the largest English settlements. The beach seems to have risen considerably since that time, for the whales used to be flensed between high and low water marks, whereas the bones now lie far beyond reach of the highest tides. It rained heavily as I walked on round the shore and waded the streams that flow out from the glacier. The clouds descended lower than ever, and the gloom, if possible, increased, so that the dreariness, by its very intensity becoming almost novel, became also indued with the pleasantness of novelty.

During our explorations of the previous year in the belt of boggy interior between Advent Bay and the east coast, every glacier we came across had an iceflat below its snout, formed by the freezing of the winter snow when impregnated by water drained out of the glacier. This year we had met with no examples of such iceflats before this one in Goose Haven. It was of great extent and evidently destined to survive the rapidly departing summer, for it still averaged about six feet in thickness. The glacier streams had cut deep channels through it, which the first heavy snowfall would easily block, again compelling the water to soak into the new bed of snow and prepare it in its turn to be frozen solid later on. The intermittent thaws of spring may be more effective in forming the snow-bog, which is the needful preliminary condition of an ice-foot, than is the autumn drainage held back by the autumnal snowfall. As to this we possess no information. Between the two the phenomenon is produced. As a rule the summer thaw must suffice to melt the ice-foot away, for, if it did not, there would be a continual increase in the thickness of the ice, and a kind of glacier would be formed. Of such glaciers, however, we have seen no examples. Though we found several cases of ice-foot apparently destined to survive the summer, they probably owed their survival either to the fact that they were produced by exceptionally heavy local falls of snow, or to the summer’s thaw being below the average in total amount. One year with another, the balance of formation and thaw appears to be equalised. At all events, we have no evidence yet of any glacial ice-foot that steadily increases. If, however, such an increasing ice-foot were to arise, it would tend to bury the terminal moraine and unite itself to the snout of the glacier, but before the process had advanced very far the surface of the ice-foot would begin to acquire a slope, on which a snow-bog could hardly be formed. The glacial water would be drained quickly away and the conditions for further increase of the ice-foot would no longer exist.

Considering such questions, I dawdled about on the beach and the ice, to the great disgust of some glaucous gulls, who kept swooping down close to my head with horrid cries. Rain falling heavily did not add perceptibly to the discomforts of the cold and blustery day. Near camp was another ruined whalers’ settlement or cookery, surrounded by quantities of bleached and rotting bones, and with the inevitable grave-mound close by. The ruins in this case were better preserved, so that their character was recognisable. A whalers’ cookery consisted essentially of two parts, a “tent” and a cauldron. The tent was a building of four low stone walls roofed with sailcloth passed over a ridge-pole and held down by rocks round the edges. The walls of the tent are still standing on a mound. Close by are the wrecks of the brickwork belonging to two cauldrons for boiling down blubber. Quantities of coal-slag showed the nature of the fuel employed. All about the ruins and amongst the bones, moss was growing with the peculiar rankness already mentioned as characteristic of the sites of human habitation in Spitsbergen.

Rain fell steadily all night long. The tide rising higher than before, banged our boat about, for all we could do was to drag it as high as the waves would carry it at high tide, and stand by to prevent accidents till the waters had retreated again. Obviously, we must seek some better haven. Accordingly Garwood and I set forth along the shore northward to the point, and then eastward. Expecting no worse trouble than rivers to cross, I wore only rubber waders, and hands in pockets instead of carrying an ice-axe. This was all right so long as the beach lasted, but where cliffs took the place of beach, difficulties arose. The slope above the cliffs proved to be furrowed by couloirs filled with ice. Garwood being somewhere aloft, stone-breaking, I had to cross the gullies without assistance. This was accomplished by a new system. Having selected a couple of sharp-pointed stones, like palæolithic celts, I lay down and scrambled across, digging the stones in and using them as handhold. Fortunately the slope was not steep. In case of a slip I should have shot down the couloir fast enough, and been tossed out at the foot of it over the cliff into the sea. The point of the bay was reached beyond the fourth of these couloirs. The view over the head of Horn Sound was tolerably good, though the strong cold wind made its investigation anything but pleasant. The mountain-tops were hidden. It is their remarkably bold forms that make fair-weather views of the sound so beautiful. All the glaciers, however, were clear of fog. The end of the sound is filled by a very big one; two others, descending from Horn Sunds Tind, jutted out the cliffs of their splintered sea-fronts between the end glacier and our point, whilst a whole series of minor glaciers descend to, or almost to, the sea, along the north shore, the principal one debouching into a fine bay almost opposite to us.

After taking observations at the point, I went eastward along the south shore, where, above a low rock wall, is a belt of fairly level ground intervening between the sound and a grand precipice that reached up into leaden clouds. A group of graves was passed, near the little rock-bound cove to which we afterwards moved camp. Half a mile on came a remarkable assemblage of great fallen rocks, looking from the distance like some ancient megalithic monument. The individual rocks were as big as houses; ages ago they all fell together in a mighty avalanche from the top of the neighbouring precipice. Almost all of them have been cloven in half by atmospheric denudation and frost, and the clefts afford delightful scrambles. In the midst of the ruin are mossy lawns, springs of clear water, a few pools, and accumulations of winter snow lingering in shady places. Here I came up with Garwood enjoying shelter from the wind in a quiet nook. The views from the tops of these rocks, and from various places among them, were most striking, especially when some glacier-front could be caught within a framing foreground of the splintered crags. We paid several visits to these Stonehenge rocks, as we named them. Garwood, I believe, climbed them all. Half a dozen contented me. Their quaintness grew upon us. We were always finding new resemblances in their queer forms. Some had almost dissolved away, leaving mere pillars to represent what had been mighty cubes. One such pillar looked to me like an ancient Arabian bethel, but Garwood called it “a ripping tombstone”!

Some distance farther on came the first side glacier (Kittiwake Glacier), emerging, past the end of the precipice, out of a gap in the hills. Just at the angle is the resting-place of innumerable kittiwakes, whose cries mingled with the noise of the wind. The glacier was gained above its crevassed end, after a toilsome scramble up moraine. It proved to be snow-covered and full of hidden crevasses. Never, I suppose, was a glacier party less well provided than were we two men to face such conditions. My boots had slippery rubber soles; in each of Garwood’s were just two nails. We had neither rope nor stick, our single implement being a small geological hammer. It may be imagined, therefore, that our further progress was made slowly and with much precaution. Ultimately we gained the middle of the glacier, and saw up it to the rocks of what afterwards proved to be Horn Sunds Tind disappearing into cloud. A few days later (19th) we returned better equipped, but in weather no wise improved. That time we crossed Kittiwake Glacier to its right bank, where are the red rocks which Garwood once hoped would prove to be Devonian. They were an utter disappointment, and he turned from them in disgust. Beyond came a slope of screes, and then the next and smaller glacier, which likewise has a splintered sea-front, almost joining that of the great Horn Glacier at the head of the sound. We climbed on to a commanding hummock and gazed inland. Horn Glacier is wide and of gentle slope, with hills of small elevation immediately north of it as far as we could see. From the south it receives two or three considerable tributaries, divided from one another by mountain ranges of decided form, whose bases alone were disclosed. The island is here only about sixteen miles wide. My idea was to make a dash across and locate the position and direction of the watershed, which is probably near the east coast, but in such weather nothing could have been seen. A few miles inland fog rested on the snow.

The inner part of the sound and the north bay were dotted over with quantities of floating ice-blocks, fallen from various glacier-fronts, and steadily drifting out to sea with the tide. It was near midnight, and the sky was tinted with sunset tones just visible through thin places in the roof of cloud, as we returned to camp. Only hunger reconciled us to the sight of the tents, for the sea was rising with the tide, and at high water we must get afloat and move away to one of the more sheltered places round to the east beyond the point. Everything was duly packed, the boat loaded, and all was ready, but we could not get her afloat. Work as we might she would turn broadside to the waves, and nothing would keep her straight. Two oars were broken in the attempt. Then we unloaded her again and tried to get her off empty, but that was no easier. The weather was continually worsening, and our struggles became desperate; it was all wasted labour. A bigger wave than usual at last broke into and filled the boat, rendering her utterly unmanageable. There was nothing for it but to unpack everything and pitch camp again. The tide presently going down, the boat was once more left high and dry, so that at six in the morning we were able to turn in.

During the night Garwood was inspired with a new plan for hauling up the boat. To me it did not seem promising, but, as a matter of fact, it worked. Acting under his instructions, the three of us set our backs under the bows and shoved them transversely a few inches uphill, then under the stern and did the same. The double process moved her about one inch. It was repeated again and again. After two hours’ work we had the satisfaction of seeing the boat well above high-water mark. But long before the time for high tide the waves, now grown large and thunderous, were almost up to her, and we had to go at her again as before and gain another few yards.

The weather was miserable. Clouds lay almost upon the water. When the tide turned we went for a walk inland to the foot of Goose Glacier and up its right bank, following the route by which in the previous year Garwood had approached the foot of Mount Hedgehog in exactly similar weather. We kept on up the glacier for some way, and the clouds became a little more broken as the distance from the sea increased. There even came a momentary hole in them, at the end of which a point of rock appeared with a stone man upon it. “There is the rock on which we camped last year,” cried Garwood, “and there’s the cairn we built.” I only had time to identify it before the fog embraced and hid it once more. After that there was nothing to be seen. Rain fell, wind blew, and we turned homeward.

When the bay came in sight we perceived that conditions were not improved. There was no wind in Goose Haven itself, but a heavy swell was coming in from the open sea, breaking right over the rocks that make the little cove where we landed on Hofer Point, and tossing towers of spray into the air. I measured one of them by comparison with the cliff beside it, and found it to be fifty feet in height. A little anxious about our camp and boat, we hurried down and found them threatened by the inroading waves, already at half-tide reaching above the previous high-tide mark. The tents were quickly moved twenty yards farther inland. All the baggage was carried after them, and then came another turn at the boat, which was finally brought to a position of safety. Long before that was accomplished the place where the tents had been pitched was deeply covered by the boiling surf. Drenched with rain and generally disgusted, we turned in about the middle of the morning of the 17th.