(#) YACHTING IN THE ARCTIC SEAS *
a Notes of Fire Voyages of Sport and Discovery in the Neighbourhood of Spitsbergen and Novaya Zemlya. By James Lamont, F.G.S., F.H.G.S. London: Chatto and Windue. 1876.
THOSE who are interested in the work of Arctic exploration, or the sport to be found in Arctic seas, will hardly need an intro-
duction to Mr Lamont's book, but even the uninitiated would do well to look at the pages before us. The illustrations alone would sufficiently repay the time bestowed, for it is impossible to look at these, simple and unpretending as they are, without getting a fresh and very definite idea of the land and the animals they describe. We have looked again and again at the head of the walrus which stands by itself facing page 56, and each time with a fresh sense that we never understood the animal before ; per- haps, too, that we understand a little better why it is such a keen pleasure to kill him, for surely there is something demoniacal in that eye which suggests the necessity for quick and fatal aim, if man and' not beast is to come off triumphant. In 1858 and 1859, Mr. Lamont made two summer yacht voyages to Spitzbergen, and was, he tells us, haunted for years afterwards by reminiscences of the excellent sport he had enjoyed, and by the features of the little-known land he had visited. A conviction steadily grew in his mind in favour of trying what he could accomplish in the way not only of sport, but of scientific discovery, with the aid of steam-power. In 1859 he had had at his command only a very unsuitable vessel, he now determined (that was, in 1868) to abandon his seat in Par- liament, and concentrate his attention on the building of a vessel "which should embody all Arctic requirements in a moderate compass." The result was the Diana,' a steam yacht of 251 tons, "a cross between a yacht and a Scotch whaler," was, in March, 1869, launched in the Clyde. One reads the minute account of this vessel, given with all the reference to detail which characterises the experienced yachtsman, and involuntarily the picture of Hud- son, in his small, unpro visioned boat, or Sir Humphrey Gilbert, in his frigate of ten tons, rises in strange contrast before our imagi- nation. What might not such a vessel as this 'Diana' accomplish? But the race is not always to the swift or the battle to the strong, and so, though for six seasons the well-built yacht has stood, uninjured, all the vicissitudes of Arctic navigation, she has not greatly contributed as yet to the sum of human knowledge, by penetrating through any hitherto unknown channels nearer to the Pole, though Mr. Lamont lost no opportunity of penetrating every possible opening which might lead to the desired end. But the sportsman and the man of science will find much to interest him in these pages, especially the sportsman. There is nothing to be compared for enjoyment, Mr. Lamont thinks, to yachting in the Arctic seas. He says that during the ten years that intervened between 1859 and 1869, he had tried yachting and shooting in Greece, Turkey, and Africa ; had visited the West Indies, Paris, Rome, and Naples, tried salmon-fishing on the dreary coast of Labrador, and pigeon-shooting at Wormwood Scrubs, contested elections, and spent three years in Parliament, and only wishes he had spent every summer in the Arctic seas instead! And yet the fascination must be a strange one, to outweigh the sense of desolation which must at times take possession of the mind,—not always a cold desolation, however, even when an icy one. We have one sketch before us at this moment, in which the interminable stretch of ice looks bleak and frowning, ice which suggested to our author the impossibility of any ship whatever con- tending against such fearful odds as it presented, yet near by was marshy ground dotted over with buttercups and poppies ; and. after with toil and difficulty getting on to one of the islands, and ascending the highest point, Mr. Lamont records, "The heat was overwhelming,—not a breath of air. The unclouded sun blazing down was reflected from the dazzling snow, or radiated from the rocks, till one forgot the latitude, till the eye rested on the great expanse to the north. -Intense quiet every-where. No crashing of icebergs or grinding together of the floes heralded the approach of the advance-guard of the mighty pack ; but none the less steadily had it from day to day stolen down upon us. . . . . . I left the summit with a very definite picture of the ice engraved indelibly on my brain,—a picture which is called up in all its clear- ness whenever I hear wild talking, or read vague theories on the subject of traversing the pack to the North Pole."
The author speaks much of the hopes excited by unusually favourable seasons,—of the Austrians having, as we all know, in 1871, "added to the known Arctic seas which can be navigated in open seasons an area equal to that of the German Empire ;" but he says that the mistake was in forgetting that the ice was not in its normal, but in an exceptional condition. The hopes, then, entertained of a north-east passage Mr. Lamont greatly dis. courages. He says, "I do not say it will never be accomplished, but it is fraught with more danger than the north-west, and when made will be of less value to the world." But he renders full justice to the pluck and perseverance which distinguished the members of that memorable Austrian expedition, and draws one more of those graphic pictures with which our minds have been so
familiarised of late,—of the little, noble band who, after dragging through the long and perilous winter, found themselves still through the summer months in the icy grip of the forty-feet thick floe. It was not till October that the travellers set foot on Franz Josef's Land, and they had hardly done so, when the darkness of another winter fell upon them. Turning from that dark picture, lighted up as it was eventually by the sense of at least partial success, we have to face some of the dismal annals of Spitsbergen. The records of a Spitsbergen cemetery upon which Mr. Lamont came in 1858 strike us as weirdly horrible, like nightmare, or some scene from the Ancient Mariner, and we gladly turn to the livelier details connected with walrus-shooting and reindeer-hunting. With regard to the latter animals, Mr. Lamont supplies us with some curious little facts. He says the reindeer in the circumpolar regions are always terribly lean and in poor condition altogether early in the summer, but that in the few weeks during which, day and night, they can feed on the scurvy- gram, succulent saxifrages, and carices of the verdant slopes, the change is astounding. The loose, ill-fitting skin will fill out to the proportions of a barrel, with an outside layer of two or three inches of fat. The fact is, in winter their supply of food is so scanty, the reindeer really lives by consuming his own fat. We find the reindeer in Novaya Zemlya is a much larger beast than that of Spitzbergen, and Mr. Lamont says that though he gives his own opinion with very considerable hesitation, it yet appears to him that the deer of Spitsbergen is almost identical with the wild and tame deer of Norway and Lapland ; while those of Novaya Zemlya appear to him of a type allied to the reindeer of the American continent. Now this little fact, if correct, is an interesting one, for this reason. It is so extremely difficult to explain how such affinity could arise. As the author. points out, "the straits between Novaya Zemlya and the mainland must always be passable to reindeer in winter, whereas the 480 miles of stormy sea, which never freezes, divide Spitsbergen from the North Cape, forming a hopelessly impassable barrier." He proceeds to relate how to Liakhov, a Russian trader and explorer at Sviato Nos, long. 1400 E., the sudden appearance of a large herd of deer coming over the frozen sea from the North gave substance to the shadowy reports of Yakuts as to the existence of more land lying in that direction. With the promptness of a man whose business instincts are aroused, he set out with sledges the next month, and following the deer-tracks, discovered the group of islands known as New Siberia, some fifty miles from the mainland. Mr. Lamont thinks this circumstance at leastindicatesthe wander- ing habits of these animals, and suggests that the very existence of reindeer in Spitsbergen and Novaya Zemlya may be accidental, that is to say, that he is not really indigenous in a land which affords him five months of starvation, but in years of unusual severity has wandered out of his way, over water not generally frozen, and has had his return cut off. Whereupon Mr. Lamont argues thus :— " Did we meet with characteristics peculiar to the reindeer of one known district, we might reasonably infer that the deer of Spitz- bergen, for example, must have journeyed by a route unknown to us from that district. Now, as I have stated, we do find in Spitzbergen reindeer unlike in horns and general proportion to those of Novaya Zemlya, or the variety hunted by the Eskimos in Greenland and North America, but, on the other band, approaching very closely in type the tame deer used by the nomad tribes of Northern Europe and Asia. The inference I draw from this fact, viz., that the reindeer passes over ice and intermediate frozen lands to Spitzbergen, from a point of the continent of Asia almost exactly opposite in a straight line across the Pole, is susceptible of strong confirmation by some remarkable facts, which, as a frequent visitor to Spitzbergen, have come under my notice. More than once in this country I have been struck with the extreme tameness ofithe deer, and in a volume written ten years ago I stated my belief that this was duo to their ' never having seen man, or anything which could hurt them.' I am now more inclined to think the utter fearlessness of these deer is to be ascribed to early familiarity with men who have never attempted to shoot or hunt them. (For the Novaya Zemlya shores—cer- tainly the least accessible parts—are no more harried from the sea- board than the western shores of Spitzbergen, yet in all parts the Novaya Zemlya deer are excessively wild.)"
Another remarkable circumstance in connection with these Spits- bergen deer is that they are distinguished by certain ear-marks, "such as a Scotch shepherd gives his sheep." Mr. Lamont says Spitsbergen skippers told him they had killed hundreds of deer thus ear-marked. And the common belief seemed to be that these deer must have come by some unknown connecting islands from Samoyede Land. Our author thinks the chain of evidence points to the existence of a continent, or tracts of land separated by no great widths of channel, stretching from the neighbourhood of eastern Siberia, across the Pole, to eastern Spitzbergen. Turning from the question of the reindeer to that of the walrus, we find a large proportion of the work before us
devoted to what the writer certainly found most exciting sport, and with the remembrance of that particular walrus, with his demoniaral eye turned full upon us, we can understand that five pairs of oars pulled with the utmost strength, making the boat fly through the water, while a hundred of these animals were "roaring, bellowing, blowing, snorting, splashing, and making an acre of the sea all in foam," would be no unexciting matter. The struggle for existence has developed a certain amount of very perceptible intelligence in these creatures, who are endeavouring to make good their retreat into yet more remote regions, before the war of extermination is quite complete. Some twenty years ago, herds of thousands of walruses would go ashore in comfortable confidence of safety, and hundreds would fall an easy prey to the hunter, now it is very uncommon to hear of any great number ashore. Ten years ago Mr. Lamont estimated that about a thousand walruses were annually killed in Spitzbergen, and he enters into minute details as to the commercial value of these animals, giving a result of £12 108 for the finest ; and he draws special attention to this question for the following reason :—Though wishing all heartiest success to Government expeditions and ex- plorations on a grand scale generally, he believes the real work of discovery must be done by the patient, yearly hammering-away at the ice, such as whalers and walrus-hunters accomplish ; that the more private individuals can be induced to enter this field, the better ; that in fact, were all whalers and walrus-hunters gentleman sportsmen, that is to say, really educated men, the chances of the mysteries of the Arctic world being speedily unfolded would be considerably enhanced ; but private enterprise demands large private outlay, and the commercial information afforded about the walrus is to show private individuals who have not inexhaustible purses how it is possible to recoup themselves, in some degree at least, for the expenses attendant on Arctic enterprise, and any- one wishing to act on that suggestion could hardly do better than get his enthusiasm fairly kindled by the perusal of Mr. Lamont's narrative.
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