THE LATEST ARCTIC EXPEDITION.

Globe, Volume VII, Issue 795, 9 January 1877, Page 3

THE LATEST ARCTIC EXPEDITION.

(Prom the Spectator.') The commanders of the Arctic ships have settled clearly and unmistakably the conditions on which alone those who control the next expedition can hope to succeed in reaching the North Pole by the route now tried. That is a most important service rendered both to science and the State, and we sincerely trust that if it were for this alone, both officers will be decorated and promoted as rapidly as the interests of the service will allow. They have failed, it is true, but they have done the best they could to succeed, and in doing it they and their comrades equally have exhibited qualities which make stay-at-home Englishmen who could not rival them even if they had the opportunity, flush with pleasure to think that such men are their countrymen. It has long been remarked that Arctic voyaging brings out the higher qualities of all engaged as no other dangerous service seems to do, and the narratives of the adventures of the Alert and the Discovery help to show that the moral greatness so often manifested by Arctic voyagers is not developed accidentally. No doubt the qualities chiefly wanted are those which are most usually found in our countrymen and in good sailors of all nations, but to find them in such abundance and in such degree is nevertheless a great pleasure, as well as a just source of national pride. The public thoroughly recognises, we believe, the courage and the fortitude displayed by the explorers, but we doubt if even yet it realises tne full weight of the conditions under which those qualities are displayed in an Arctic voyage. To make one of a forlorn hope is a brave deed, but to make one in a forlorn hope which must endure all for eighteen months, and must show its highest resolution, its most implicit obedience when partially blind, is a far grander effort. It is that night of 142 days, that continuous darkness as of a world without a sun, that long protracted sense of gloom, that inability to know anything for certain, which to us constitutes the special aggravating horror of all Arctic endurance. The sailors are called upon not only to be brave, but to be brave in the dark ; not only to be cheerful, but to be cheerful without heat; not only to face a danger, but to face a danger which continues, which is as pressing when you are ill as when you are in highest vigor, which, sleeping or waking, full-fed or starving, is always there. No nerve, they say, can stand the dread of assassination—even Oromwell broke down under it ; but the dread must be very like, in its continuousness and implacability, the horror of an Arctic night under which the crews of the Expedition no more lost their cheerfulness than their discipline. Severe work for months without relaxation often cows men, but the explorers from the Alert worked like slaves—in one instance, for seventy-two days—at unaccustomed work, in cold that would kill unacclimatised men, and under perpetual liability to scurvy, the moat heartbreaking of diseases, which struck other parties employed in surveying the coast severely; “owing to their inability to procure any fresh game, as most former expeditions had done, an attack of scurvy broke oat in each of the extended sledge parties when at their farthest distance from any help. The return journeys were therefore a prolonged struggle homewards of gradually weakening men, the available force to pull the sledge constantly decreasing, and the weight to be dragged as steadily increasing, as one after another the invalids were stricken down and had to be carried by their weakened comrades.” There is sustained heroism in an exploit of that kind which it is difficult fully to appreciate, from the mere difficulty of realising fully the horror involved in some of the conditions. We find it easier to admire Lieut Parr setting out for a lonely walk of thirty-five miles, guided over the soft snow and the heavy broken up ice by the fresh track of a roaming wolf, and so bringing succour to his diseasestricken comrades; or Mr Egerton and Lieutenant Bawaon, nursing Petersen, the interpreter, at the hazard of their own lives, while on their journey from the Alert to the Discovery, with the temperature 40deg below zero. Petersen, who had accompanied them with the dog-sledge, fell ill, and “at the utmost risks and with a noble disregard of themselves, they succeeded in retaining heat in the poor fellow’s body by alternately lying one at a time alongside of him, while the other by exercise was recovering his warmth ; and thus managed to bring him alive to the ship, but both feet were very badly frost bitten, and he ultimately sank from exhaustion two months afterwards,” All Englishmen, we hope, acknowledge conduct like that, yet it is scarcely nobler than that of Captain Nares, who lived thirty-six days in the “ crow’s nest ” in that horrible climate while his ship was in difficulties in the ice, till he was utterly exhausted ; and not nobler than that of the men who for days and weeks drew the sledges and their sick comrades, under cold which sometimes froze the joints, and amid scenes which to many natures would have suggested no feeling but despair. There is something in the continuity of the effort made in these regions, in the protraction of the endurance, in the day-by-day, week-by-week, month by-month heroism displayed till heroism has become a nature, which is to us inexpressibly admirable, and all the more so because for much of the time the hope of a brilliant success, which might live for ever in the mouths of men, must have faded out of the minds of all concerned. The discovery of the Pole might have repaid all for anything, but from the spring of this year that hope must have been slowly and reluctantly surrendered, and in the place of expected cheers the crews must have sought comfort in the feeling Lieutenant Jlawsou expressed when pitied for his sufferings in saving Petersen. “ When commisserated about their frost-bitten noses, cheeks, and fingers, Lieutenant Eawson jovially replied, ‘ Well, at last we feel that the cheers from Southsea beach have been fairly earned.’ ” The work which brings out such qualities so grandly can never be work done in vain, and we confess we are a little impatient of the gratulatory assurances that the voyage has proved the Pole to be impracticable, and that this particular form of enterprise must uow at last be abandoned. It will not, we venture to predict, be abandoned, On the contrary, Captain Nares and his comrades have contributed so much to tbe clearing up of the subject, that we believe that within five years tbe determination not to be beaten

will be revived among the Arctic experts, and that a new expedition, with new precautions, will be sent out, either by the State or private enterprise. What is proved is that it is possible, even by this route, to get a ship within 450 miles of the Pole, and that from thence a journey as long as from London to Edinburgh must be made in extreme cold —say, 50deg below zero—over immovable ice, packed into hummocks so high that sledges cannot move, and that a way must be cut with the pick axe at the rate of a mile and a quarter a day. The work, too, must be done within four months of starting, or for want of light and heat it can never be done at all. Those are terrible conditions for men to face, conditions such as make an order to attempt the feat absurd and immoral; but granted volunteers, the conditions are not. as they might have been, absolutely impossible. There is no wall of fog miles thick, such as seems to protect part of the Antarctic region from human observation. There is no sea within a circle of ice just broad enough to prohibit the the transport of the necessary boats. There is only a march of excessive difficulty under extreme cold, and in a country which produces absolutely nothing to eat, as little as if it were floored with marble, or were covered with the Sahara sand. The passage of those 400 miles cannot be an impossibility, for seventy of them were, by terrible exertions, but with no loss of life, successfully passed. Now that the difficulty is understood and is limited in men’s minds, that there is no further hope of an open Polar Sea, and no expectation of any supplies, however small, from the spot itself, science will furnish future expeditions with undreamt-of resources—portable light and heat, for instance, from the newly discovered mines at Disco; secure preventives against scurvy: methods of clearing a way more expeditious than the pickaxe ; and traction-agents for traversing the way when cleared indefinitely more powerful than Arctic dogs. With electric lights, and sufficient supplies of dynamite, and a traction engine for the smoothed load, the traversing of the dreary ice plain, broad as it is and hummocky as it may be, must be withia the limits of human energy and resource. Whether the object is worth all that trouble is a question which different minds will answer in different ways, but which the aggregate English mind will answer sooner or later, when it has recovered from the fit pf despondency which follows the return of every Arctic Expedition, by absolutely refusing to be beat. It is waste of money very likely, but if tbe taxpayers agree that they had rather waste their money than that England should recede from a maritime enterprise to which her credit is pledged, or in which her obstinacy is engaged, the waste of money need not to be discussed. It is not the twentieth of a penny in the income tax, after all. There will be sacrifice of human life ? Some, no doubt; but an Expedition can go out and return, as Captain Nares has shown, with less loss than there will be in London next week from reckless driving, or in playgrounds this winter from the use of a dangerous code for the game of football. The argument from waste of life would only be final, if conscripts were ordered on Arctic expeditions. But there is no object ? Well, then, it is no object that England should not, after her magnificent efforts and in the face of the whole world, publicly acknowledge herself defeated by the dangers and difficulties of a march one-fifth of which has already been accomplished.