Chapter VIII: Return to Kings Bay

All appearances were convincing that the weather had finally broken up, but a charm seemed to lie upon King James Land this year, for next morning (August 7) was fine as ever, with skies brilliantly clear. The white fog still covered the bay and the glacier’s foot, but retreated before us as we advanced on the downward journey, for which the time had now come. Instead of going far out on to the glacier, as in our ascent, we kept a more direct course, for crevasses that are too wide to drag sledges over when going uphill are passable on the way down. The sledges had to make many a downward jump, and were greatly strained, but we reckoned they would hold out to the coast, and so let them take their luck. It was none of the best. A certain broad crevasse opposed to our advance its yawning chasm, whose higher side was much above the lower. The first sledge took the jump safely, but the second landed heavily on its nose, and one runner snapped in half. We tied it up with string, but the jagged edge greatly increased the friction during the remainder of the journey. Near the Pretender we re-entered the circuit of the nesting birds, and found their feathers at every step of the way. A solitary fulmar sitting on the ice only stirred when we approached him within two yards. Then he flapped his wings and ran, gradually rising into the air and helping himself up by beating the ground with his feet, the action used by fulmars when they rise from water. He did not fly far, for he was obviously ill. Doubtless a glaucous gull presently put an end to his existence.

Having kept along the left side of the glacier, we came, at the foot of the Pretender, as we knew we must, to a steep ice staircase, a slope of about 200 feet, broken by a series of large crevasses. A longitudinal fold in the ice, caused by the narrowing of the glacier at this point, added a more complex irregularity to the step-like descent. This was the worst place we had to convey sledges over on the glaciers of Spitsbergen; nor shall I attempt to describe our labours. The sledges were slung across some crevasses, let down over others, gingerly conducted along ridges of ice narrower than themselves, with profound chasms on each side, hauled round the flanks of seracs, and otherwise forced forward as circumstances decreed. Once only did a misfortune occur, and then the fault was mine. The slope was very steep, and there was a crevasse in the way. Nielsen got on to its lower lip and began lifting the bow of the sledge forward by means of the drag-rope. I was hanging on behind with the pick-end of the ice-axe hitched into the stern. Just at the critical moment something gave way. The ice-axe slipped out; I fell backwards; the sledge lumbered down. That it would go right into the crevasse and be utterly lost seemed certain. But no! it merely turned a somersault and wedged itself in between two projecting noses of ice, which held it firmly, till, with the assistance of the others, we brought it safe to land. Shortly afterward the site of Pretender Camp was reached, and our little heap of stores found undisturbed by foxes or birds.

We knew that the most tiresome part of the day’s journey was yet to come; the lunch-halt was consequently prolonged. To the foot of Pretender Pass the way was easy enough, but beyond that point difficulties were bound to accumulate, for the glacier became so crevassed as to be impassable even for men without sledges, whilst, instead of snow-slopes along the left bank, there was a widening lateral moraine. Fortunately we found an irregular belt of snow between the ridge of this moraine and the _débris_-slope behind it; along that belt we were able to make intermittent advance, though the snow was freely strewn with blocks of stone, over and around which, up and down and in and out, the sledges had to be lifted and dragged. We were thankful even for this small mercy, seeing that, if the snow had not been there, we must have raised the sledges bodily and carried them more than a mile over the nastiest kind of moraine. As it was, we had to carry them for several short spells. How easy it looks on paper! Four men, one at each corner of the sledge; they lift her, and along she goes. But in practice, when the ground to be traversed consists of loose rocks, each about the size of a man’s head, with ice below them, sloping this way and that, uphill two yards, downhill three yards, now tilted to the right, now to the left, some one is always stumbling. They jog one another from side to side. The weight gets bandied about and heaved in all directions, so that each wastes most of his work in counter-balancing the unintentional irregularities of his fellows’ efforts. A halt had to be made halfway along, but we vowed to finish this horrible part of the route before camping. The stove was lit and cocoa brewed to put heart into the men; then on again, plunging, tripping, twisting ankles, barking shins, till at last there came a practicable though lumpy stretch of ice alongside the moraine, and we could launch the sledges on it and haul them forward with less toil. We were close to the angle where Kings and Highway glaciers join, and the lateral moraines of both, uniting at the promontory of the dividing mountain, flow out as a medial moraine, and are carried on by the glacier and ultimately dumped over the ice-cliff into Kings Bay. We crossed this medial moraine at the earliest convenient place, then followed along beside it till near midnight, when somebody, turning round to survey the view, found it beautiful, and proposed that camp should be pitched straightway.

The air was crisp and cold. The sun shone golden in the north, just tinged with the first promise of its winter setting. The mellow light flooded with unusual glory of colour the many-tinted rocks of the Crowns and Pretender, grouped together in fine assemblage between the two great glaciers, now both at once beheld back to their highest snowfields. Such purples as the autumnal midnight sun pours out on the so-called Liefde-Bay sandstones of Spitzbergen had no rival even in the richest product of Tyrian skill. All night long the glacier worked and cracked beneath us in its onward flow, squeezing its slow way down through the narrowing channel. Loud reports disturbed our slumbers, and at an early hour brought us back to consciousness of the beauty of the world and the continuing loveliness of the weather.

The sky remained clear, and the white fog brooded over the waters of the bay, when the men started down with the sledges, leaving us to sit awhile on convenient rocks, smoking and enjoying the splendid scenery. Presently we also set forth, not down, but across Highway Glacier to examine the rocks of its left bank. A very large lake-basin had to be crossed at the margin of the ice. It proved to have been drained by the biggest ice-tunnel I ever saw, a cavern at least fifty feet in diameter and more than a hundred yards long. I bolted into it, under the stones perched loosely on its brow, and took some photographs of the weird grotto, whilst Garwood climbed the riskily loose cliff behind and hunted for fossils. Keeping across the mouth of a minor side glacier, we came to the moraine crossed by us with so much trouble on the upward way. The great hollow beyond it was now perceived to be another and yet larger lake-basin, drained in its turn by the ice-cañon which had formed one of our first considerable impediments. This lake-basin is more than half a mile in length, and some hundreds of yards wide. It lies at the foot of Mount Nielsen. Here, losing sight of Garwood, I turned to seek the sledges. Not finding them, and being too cold to loiter about, I walked briskly on down the foot of the glacier, and did not halt till the base camp was reached. It remained just as we left it, thank goodness! But it must have had a narrow escape, for, at some time during our absence, a flood of water came down the fan on which it stood, cutting a new channel, whose still wet margin ran less than a hand’s breadth from the angle of the tent. Had the channel been deflected a couple of yards, all our goods would have gone to sea!

The roof of fog was overhead, yet the view was most beautiful, for the sun shone through holes in it upon the glacier’s terminal cliff, barring it with vertical bands of light and colour. There were stripes of purple, violet, green, blue, and white, made by the staining of the ice with stone _débris_, or by new fractures manifesting the varying transparency of the mass, or by the play of light and shadow upon it. The jagged hills looked down through holes or behind veils of mist. The water was absolutely calm, but more thickly covered with broken ice than when we last beheld it; in fact, over great areas, the floating blocks seemed to form a continuous ice-covering. In calm weather this mattered little, but if a northerly wind set in, all the ice would be driven and packed down upon us, and we should be imprisoned, who could say for how long? Obviously, therefore, it would be our business to shift camp as soon as possible to some more favourable situation.

Long I sat in the tent-door gazing at the view and dreaming. What changes had taken place here since Professor Sven Lovén’s visit in 1837, the first visit of any man of science to this part of Spitsbergen! The island of which he wrote so fully, with its “diminutive Alps” and moraines, was separated from the glacier at that time by a channel of open water 1000 feet wide; now the glacier almost surrounds it and has buried out of sight the ground on which he stood. It had already done so before Nordenskiöld’s visit in 1861, since when no considerable changes have taken place. This is only one of many instances of glacial advance during the present century. A comparison between the seventeenth and eighteenth century Dutch charts and the maps of the present day proves the general truth of this observation. The development seems to be still in progress. Witness the great glacier-front which has descended into Agardh Bay since 1871, and over which we went in crossing the Ivory Gate last year. Glaciers which end in shallow waters must, indeed, be advancing slowly as they fill up the bay heads, but this does not suffice to explain so great an advance as that of the Kings Glacier between 1837 and 1861.

The arriving sledges, dragged by men soaking with perspiration, stopped these meditations. Both sledges were on the point of breaking up, such had been the strain upon them during the last fortnight. They were extra strongly built, and the runners were protected with metal sheaths, yet there was not a sound joint left in them. The metal had all been scraped and torn away, the runners smashed up. If ordinary arctic travel were as rough as this work over crevassed inland glaciers, such a sledging expedition as Nansen made from the _Fram_ would be impossible, for no sledge could hold out a tenth part of his course. Our sledges, moreover, were lightly laden with about a third of the normal arctic load. Had they been heavier, they could not have been dragged along at all, or if forced forward they would have broken up the first day.

It is only on returning to the coast that one obtains a correct realisation of the silence of the higher regions. The glacier-front kept “calving”; the floating ice kept cracking up and turning over; there was a noisy torrent flooding down close to camp. Stones fell; waves broke on the shore. Such noises for a long time drove sleep away. When I did slumber it was to dream of glacier-lakes bursting, of avalanches falling, and other catastrophes.

Next day we had the boat to drag down to the sea--two hours’ work--all our baggage to overhaul, pack, and portage, so that it was late in the afternoon before we were ready to sail. The long hours of work were enlivened by the charm of the scenery beneath the grey roof of sea-fog, which still remained just where it had hung for so many days. The variety of effects was extraordinary, for there was no wind to move the fog, nor sunshine coming through it. The floating ice sometimes stood out white against the purple background and dark sky, sometimes dark against a white curtain of mist, and sometimes it glittered behind a vaporous veil. The water was now dark, like lead, now bright as burnished steel. There was continual change, yet no visible cause for change. Out into this fairy region of calm water and pure ice at last we rowed in search of new scenes, new beauty, and new delights.

Our first goal was one of Lovén’s Islands, away out in the midst of the bay, right over against the ice-cliff of the Kings Glacier. To reach this we had to row through a bed of water so closely covered with broken ice that a way was made for the boat by pushing the fragments asunder. They were of all sizes and colours. Surfaces that had been exposed to the air for some time were white, as all ice becomes under such conditions. Others newly cloven, or that had formed till recently the submerged face of floating blocks, were blue or green. There were pink pieces, dusted over with sandstone _débris_; but the majority of the small blocks, and most were small, were crystal clear, like lumps of purest glass. The water was absolutely still. Sunshine lay upon it, and the great glacier-cliff, along which we rowed, was reflected from the watery mirror. Every few minutes the glacier “calved,” and the resulting waves rattled the ice about us, whilst the booming thunder came echoing back from remote hollows of the hills. Nielsen was reminded of days spent by him as a sailor in fogs on the Newfoundland banks, when, as he said, they used to smell the icebergs long before they loomed into view. Kings Bay, of course, presents no bergs comparable in size to those that drift southward down the coast of Greenland, though the floating masses we were soon to approach were much larger than those ordinarily met with in Spitsbergen waters. As our distance from the south shore of the bay increased, the mountains behind it were better seen, and proved to be a fine ridge with many peaks, the watershed between Kings and English bays. A series of glaciers descend in their hollows, but none reach the sea, for there is a broad belt of flat land all along the southern shore. The view up Kings Glacier now became of entrancing beauty as the fog cleared away, and all our peaks from Mount Nielsen round to the Diadem were disclosed. How different was this view to our eyes, which recognised every feature and knew what was behind every impediment, from our first outlook there last year, in a brief interval between two storms! The culmination of the charm came when the small, partly ice-covered island rose into our foreground, and the surging waves of splintered glacier thrown up behind it contrasted with the smooth wide-spreading snowfields far beyond. The ice-cliff north of the island was more shattered than any we had yet beheld. Here the greatest floating bergs enter the sea. They do not fall into it, but simply float away, being already quite detached from one another by the deep clefts of the ice.

From an examination of a great many sea-fronting glacier-sections we learnt that crevasses, however long and wide, seldom penetrate very far down into the mass of ice. I do not remember ever to have seen any crevasse (except at this point) which cut a glacier-cliff down to sea-level. Higher up in the _névé_ region crevasses may be more profound, but towards a glacier’s snout I am sure that their depth is often greatly overestimated. The ice in the foundation of a glacier exists under great pressure and behaves very differently from the surface ice, which is free to break up under lateral strain. A careful study of arctic ice-cliffs would, I think, give rise to several unexpected revelations. The opening up of Spitsbergen to ordinary summer travellers would enable such simple but illuminating researches to be undertaken by holiday-making men of science.

The archipelago, which I have named Lovén’s Islands, after the explorer who first recorded a visit to them, was now close at hand. We made for a convenient cove and landed. Countless screaming terns saluted us with a chorus of unmistakable imprecations. No bird that ever I saw can swear like a tern. Till it opens its mouth you would think it the very incarnation of gentleness and grace, such the purity of its white plumage, the slenderness of its form, and the elegance of all its motions. But it is my matured conviction that in every tern there resides the spirit of a departed bargee. On these islands Lovén found countless nesting birds of many sorts, besides the spoor of reindeer and foxes. We found only eider-ducks, terns, and a very few geese; of reindeer not a trace. There are no reindeer left on the west coast of Spitsbergen. We never saw a footprint on the shores of Klaas Billen Bay, Kings Bay, or Horn Sound this year, though in all three bays are square miles of country admirably suited to feed and maintain them and once supporting large herds. The ruthless Norwegian hunter has exterminated them utterly.

I need not expatiate on the gorgeousness of the view from these islands. It was especially fine to the north where white icebergs of all fantastic forms floated in the dark purple reflections of the hills. The only sound heard, besides the screaming of the terns and the boom of the glacier-cliff, was the innumerable ploppings of water against the myriad floating blocks of ice. We landed on another island to cook a meal and survey. The little plants were putting on their autumnal colourings, most of the birds-nests were abandoned, the young broods--alas! sadly few in numbers--disporting themselves in the neighbouring waters. All the islands are smoothed by ice, for the Kings Glacier was once at least 500 feet thicker and very much longer than now. Probably, there are other mounds of rock, continuing under the glacier the line of these islands, and rumpling up the ice into a crevassed condition otherwise difficult to account for.

Turning away from the islands, we rowed toward the east end of the rounded hill standing out into the fjord, to which we gave the name Blomstrand’s Mound. From the published account of the Swedish Expedition of 1861, we were led to expect that Scoresby’s Grotto would be found in this direction. It was only afterwards, when we procured a copy in the original Swedish, to which are appended maps, not reproduced in the German translation, that we discovered the whereabouts of this grotto in Blomstrand’s Harbour.[9] We now had to wind about amongst large floating towers and castles of ice, entrancingly beautiful. The number of the great floating bergs seemed countless. We passed by devious ways along channels, between them, often being so entirely surrounded as to seem on a lake built all about with ice-castles. Some were hollowed out into caverns with walls thin enough to let the light of the low hanging midnight sun shine through. We manœuvred to get one of these directly between us and the sun, so as to enjoy the resplendence of its opalescent shimmer, contrasted with the blueness of the shadowed side of the ice. Deep in the substance of the crystalline wall shone out a host of sparkling points like many-faceted diamonds enclosed in cloudy crystal. The evening was perfect: calm, bright, mellow, clear to the remotest distance, save just at one point where a sea-mist came pouring over a pass from English Bay, with a rainbow mantling on its shoulder.

The drowsily creaking oars at length brought us to the mainland, where camp was quickly pitched on soft ground near a brook. There was no grotto anywhere in the neighbourhood. The slope of Blomstrand’s Mound rose temptingly behind. With plane-table and camera we hastened forth to gain a more commanding panorama. About 500 feet up was a convenient knoll, whence the upper part of the mound was displayed as an undulating plateau bending away to the culminating dome of the hill over a couple of miles of bog land and broken rocks, extraordinarily disagreeable to walk upon. The whole mound is encircled on three sides by the bay, whilst on the fourth a large glacier descending from the north abuts against it, and sends an arm down into the sea on either side. The view was, of course, most extensive and beheld under rarely favourable conditions, for the low-striking, golden sunlight mellowed all the glaciers and the hills. The bay spread abroad below, as in a map, and the icebergs on its surface were tiny dots of white, whilst the areas closely covered with smaller, broken ice resembled surfaces crisped by some gentle breeze.

At 4 A.M. (August 10) we turned in. A few hours later the weather was still fine, but at noon the Crowns began to put on caps of cloud. Mists gathered in all directions, wind rose, and soon all was overcast and rain was falling on the tent. The spell of fine weather was, in fact, at an end. By 3 o’clock we were rowing away in water no longer calm. Yet it was charming to watch the graceful rocking of the smaller pieces of floating ice, and to see them turn over as their equilibrium was disturbed. The old white surface went under, the new blue side came up. There was now but one day left before the _Kvik_ ought to call for us. The weather was too thick for surveying, so we settled to make at once for Coal Haven, where tertiary fossil plants had been found, though not the characteristic _Taxodium_.[10] Accordingly we rowed straight across the bay, though no sign could be seen of any inlet such as the chart marks. There is, in fact, no inlet at all, but only a low headland that protects the anchorage from westerly winds. It is completely open to north and east. On reaching the south coast and finding no trace of the expected inlet, we rowed along the shore toward Quade Hook for a couple of miles. It was an open, pebbly beach, on which we might have hauled up the boat, but whence it could not have been launched in face of any sea, like that now threatening to rise. Leaving the men to keep the boat off shore, Garwood and I landed to prospect. Just behind the narrow beach was a low cliff, the front of a wide area of boggy and stony ground from which the hills rise, half a mile or so inland. Westward was no bay whatever, so we concluded that Coal Haven lay to the east, where, in fact, we presently discovered it, behind a low spit of shingle a few yards wide, enclosing a lagoon.

While the men pitched camp, Garwood and I walked inland to look for the coal-bed. Its position is carefully described by Lamont, but we had only the book on the Swedish expedition of 1861 with us, and, though the members of that party visited and, I believe, discovered the coal, they give no accurate account of its position. We dimly remembered that it was found where a glacier-stream cuts a section into the ground. There were two glaciers ending about a mile inland from the bay, so we walked towards them and tracked up every stream flowing from them, but found no coal. I then went to the west, Garwood to the east, till every inch of land within Coal Haven had been traversed. It was no good. A big stone man planted on a mound, and with a slanting stick built into it, seemed likely to be a guide to the hidden treasure; but there was no coal in the mound, nor anywhere in the direction to which the stick pointed. We have since learnt that the cairn marks one of the points whose position was astronomically fixed by the Swedes,[11] and that it has nothing to do with the coal, which in fact is not found within Coal Haven at all, but within the next bay to the east, where of course we did not look for it.

A low cloud-roof, intermittently dropping rain, hung continuously over Coal Haven during our visit. Only the bases of hills and the grey snouts of glaciers emerged beneath it. Sometimes a dense mist came up; rarely the drizzle held off for half an hour. In this cheerless case black melancholy invaded Svensen. At a moment of gloomy forgetfulness he filled the pot with sea-water for brewing soup. The mistake was fortunately discovered in time, for there was no food to spare. When Garwood returned with half a dozen guillemots, the last shot-cartridge had been fired off. Svensen skinned the birds for the pot with the sadness of a man condemned to death. “We will only eat half of them to-night,” he said. “Why?” I asked. “Because this is the last proper food we shall have, and we may as well make it hold out as long as possible. When did you say the _Kvik_ is coming for us?” “At midnight to-night,” I answered. “Not a bit of it. _Ikke!_ I heard the sailors on the boat say the captain would not come for us at all. We shall starve here.” “Skittles! They’ll come for us to-day or to-morrow.” “_Ikke!_ they’ll not come at all, I believe.” “I tell you they will; the captain undertook to come.” “_Ikke, ikke!_” We finished all the birds, but the food almost stuck in Svensen’s throat.

When supper was done (it was the morning of the 11th) a surprising vigour seized our gloomy companion. He jumped into the boat, pitched its mast, sail, and some spars on shore, and carried them away to the point. We watched him build a big stone-heap and plant the mast in it with the sail suspended as a flag. Then he turned in and was heard loudly and solemnly prophesying to himself in his fine declamatory style. We breakfasted late in the afternoon on one of our last soups and some mouldy biscuits fried in the scrapings of the butter-pot; then we began to look out for the _Kvik_. The mouth of Kings Bay was not visible from camp, so we went for walks to various higher points, besides spending some hours over another hunt for coal; but neither coal nor _Kvik_ appeared. The drizzling night dragged its slow hours along. A meagre supper in the morning of the 12th was the occasion of more loud lamentations from our Norwegian Jeremiah. The others then turned in, whilst I went off to the ruins of an old Russian hut on the neighbouring cape to watch for the expected steamer.

Less than a century ago there was a big winter settlement of Russian trappers in and about Kings Bay. As in the case of other Russian settlements, there were a central house and a number of outlying huts widely scattered from one another. The central house of this group was in Cross Bay, in Ebeltoft’s Haven, I believe. The Coal Haven hut was only an outlyer, inhabited by a solitary individual, who at stated intervals visited the central depôt to leave his catch of furs and renew his meagre stock of provisions. Numbers of these trappers annually died of scurvy. The rock on which I sat had assuredly been witness to such unrecorded tragedies. There now remains nothing but the ground plan of the hut, with a few bits of mouldering wood and broken brick lying about. There were fragments of both Dutch and Russian bricks, as is not uncommon on these sites, for the Russians used the remains of older Dutch whaling “cookeries” in building their stoves. Against a big rock was a piece of stone wall and a rotting beam, apparently part of an old store-cupboard. Moss had crept up over it, and little arctic flowers were growing upon it with unwonted luxuriance. The bones of foxes and bears were in the ground, which was pervaded with corrupting wood-fibre and carpeted with a peculiarly rank moss that only grows thus luxuriantly on the abandoned sites of human habitation. What a desolate place for a winter dwelling, planted between a bog and the icy bay! Who lived here? I asked myself. What did he think about? Were the hills anything to him--the Three Crowns and those other peaks rising all around? Did the beauty of the long sunset heralding the arctic night find recognition in his eyes? Or was life too hard for the growth in him of any sense of beauty? Was he some poor creature forced as a last resource to come here for the bare means of subsistence, or some criminal forcibly expatriated to these inhospitable shores? Such indeed was the custom in Northern Russia before Siberia came into fashion as a place of exile. Long I sat, musing on these things in the grey night, and listening to the far-off rumble of the calving glacier. Every few minutes I scanned the sea horizon off Mitra Hook, and always thought I could trace the faint appearance of a remote steamer’s smoke. Imagination is a dreadful trickster, but time always shows up its character. No steamer came in sight, though the appointed hour had passed. My watch completed, I returned to camp and sent up Nielsen to look out. “They haven’t come,” said Svensen, “and they won’t come. _Ikke, ikke!_ We shall never get away from here.” This croaking raven of a man began to grate upon our nerves.

In the afternoon all turned out again. No signs of the _Kvik_. We assured one another that it was of no consequence. A fire was lit, the pot set on to boil and all our remaining provisions turned into it. If this was to be our last meal it should be as big a one as we could provide. Slowly the water came to the boil, all of us anxiously and greedily watching. Nielsen wandered forlornly off to the point. “The _Kvik_, the _Kvik_!” he shouted. “_Ikke, ikke!_” said Svensen, but no one heeded him; this time there was no mistake. Before our last food was swallowed she had rounded into the bay and cast anchor close by us.