Motor Matt's Double Trouble; or, The Last of the Hoodoo
Page 18
HUDSON AND THE NORTHWEST PASSAGE.
A short time ago the newspapers announced that a feat which for fourhundred years stout ships and bold crews have been attempting had beenaccomplished by a little Norwegian vessel of forty tons and seven men.
Long ago, the news would have thrilled the harbors of England andHolland with joy and keen expectancy. Coming in the twentieth century,it has created little sensation. Perhaps, of all those who read theannouncement, only the few to whom "the Northwest Passage" was a namefull of history and heroism and romance realized what an interestingachievement had been made. For the practical value of the discovery hadlong since been discounted, and no "merchant adventurer" of the presentday would have sunk half his fortune in equipping an expedition tosolve the riddle that puzzled the brains of the men of long ago.
For the search for the Northwest Passage was from the first a businessaffair. It was a mercantile question. The whole inquiry arose out of atrade competition between the northern and southern seafaring nations.
This was the situation: Spain and Portugal had been first in thefield, as regards over-sea discovery; they had found the way to thetreasure house of Asia, and the unspoiled riches of the New World.The Portuguese held the monopoly of maritime trade with India--theVenetians had long governed the overland route, and grown wealthythereby--and the Spaniards looked upon South America as their privateproperty.
Of the two, the Spanish settlements on the American coasts with themines behind them drew the eyes of the adventurer, who secured hisprizes at the sword's point, but Asia was the more tempting to thetrader. The former dreamed of the sack of opulent cities; the latterdreamed of bustling wharves, and barter, and English ships coming homeladen with spices and silks, the peaceful spoils of the market placeand the tropical forest and the shark-haunted seas.
How to reach India "by a quick route, without crossing the sea pathsof the Portuguese and the Spaniards," this, in a word, was the originof the long and arduous search for the Northwest Passage.
It was the general belief that America was an island, but the size andshape of it was still only imperfectly known. That there was a waterway round the southern end of the great continent had been provedby Magellan, who, in his voyage round the world, had passed throughthe straits that bear his name. The question now was, did a similarwaterway exist at the northern end?
They believed that America tapered to a point northward, as it didsouthward. They little realized how the northern continent spreaditself out into the cold Arctic seas, and with what a network ofislands and ice floes it ended.
And so they sent out ships to search for a water way through thoseinhospitable seas, and the first to go was an Englishman, MartinFrobisher.
Greatly did he dare. We in these days of perfectly appointed ships,built of steel and driven by steam, can appreciate the hardihood ofthis hero and his crews, setting forth in two tiny craft of twenty-fiveand twenty tons burden, respectively, to solve the riddle of thenorthern seas! They sailed away--Queen Elizabeth herself waving themadieu from the windows of her palace at Greenwich--on June 12th, 1576,and a month later they were off the coast of Greenland.
Then came stormy weather. A pinnace with her crew of four was sunk, andFrobisher found himself alone--one ship among the never-ending ice. Forhis consort had gone home, discouraged by the forbidding outlook.
But almost immediately after this disappointment there came a gleam ofhope. He beheld what appeared to be a passageway trending westward. Itseems that this is still called Frobisher Bay. As he sailed through hethought that he had Asia on one side and America on the other. It wasbut a happy delusion. The projecting corner of Asia was far away; hewas only abreast of what has since been named Baffin's Land.
Frobisher's second voyage, made in 1577, was rather a gold quest than ajourney of discovery. A lump of stone (probably iron pyrites) had beenbrought home by one of the sailors as a souvenir of the first voyage.The particles of gold in it fired the fancies of some Londoners withthe idea that Eldorado might perhaps, after all, be among the northernice.
So Frobisher's ships went out again, and brought home something like200 tons of the black stone. A third time they made the voyage, no lessthan fifteen ships taking part in the expedition, the object of whichwas to establish a sort of settlement for the working of the supposed"gold mine." But nothing came of the attempt. Bewildering fogs andperilous storms and threatening icebergs beset the puny fleet; sicknessfollowed hard upon the exposure and privations long endured by the poorfellows who manned it, and at last the scheme was abandoned.
Yet in this disappointing third voyage Frobisher had unknowingly comevery near the discovery which originally he had in view! For, in thewords of the writer before quoted, "the truth was that Frobisher'sforemost ships had got farther to the south than was realized, andunwittingly he had discovered what is now known as Hudson's Strait--thesea gate of that very Northwest Passage on which his waking andsleeping thoughts so long had brooded."
He had been carried some sixty leagues up the strait, but as he knewnothing as to whither it led he reaped no advantage.
Several years went by without another attempt being made to solve theproblem, of the Northwest Passage, but at last, in the summer of 1585,some English merchants planned a fresh expedition.
Two ships were fitted out--one the _Sunshine_, of London, fifty tons;the other the _Moonshine_, of Dartmouth, thirty-five tons. The commandwas intrusted to a young Devonshire sailor, Captain John Davis, whosename is familiar to all schoolboys who have drawn maps of the northernparts of North America.
Though the records of the voyage abound with incidents relating to thevarious encounters that Davis' men had with spouting whales and baskingseals, uncouth Eskimos, and Polar bears, the actual achievements ofthis expedition were not great. The ships traversed part of what is nowcalled Davis Strait, and went some way up Cumberland Gulf, but by theend of September they were back in Dartmouth.
Davis set forth again, next summer, with three ships and a pinnace.The latter and one of the ships were dispatched up the east coast ofGreenland, while the commander, with the two other vessels, sailednorthwest. He got as far as Hudson Strait and farther. And in a thirdvoyage he reached a headland not far from Upernavik. The hardihood andpluck displayed in these attempts to penetrate the ice-encumbered seaswere splendid, but the results did not throw much light on the questionof how to get northwest by sea to the Indies.
Soon after this the kindred question of a Northeast Passage forceditself upon the seafaring people of Holland, and the city of Amsterdamfitted out four ships, and sent them forth under William Barents,in the June of 1594. The story of this and subsequent expeditionscannot, however, be told here, though it is full of heroism and strangeadventures.
It was the idea of a Northeast route which first laid hold of HenryHudson, the intrepid Englishman whose name figures so prominently onthe map of North America. Like Barents, he made his way to Nova Zembla,but, baffled by the seemingly insuperable difficulties to the eastward,he turned westward in his third voyage, and again when he set forth onhis fourth and last voyage.
Some of his men were evidently less stout of heart than theircommander, and when there began to be real prospects of being caught inthe ice, the spirit of mutiny got the upper hand. On June 21st, 1610,with a cowardice that was happily in strange contrast to the usualbehavior of English crews, it was decided to get rid of the captain.Next morning he and his little son, a loyal-hearted sailor (the ship'scarpenter), and half a dozen sick and helpless members of the crew,were put over the ship's side into one of the boats, and left to theirfate.
The years went by. Other expeditions were fitted out and sentnorthward, but the old reasons for finding out the Northwest Passagewere fast disappearing. The Portuguese monopoly of the sea-borne tradewith India and the supremacy of Spain on the ocean highways were thingsof the past. The ships of other nations had no longer to skulk pastthese aforetime kings of the sea.
Arctic exploration went on, but the idea
of reaching the North Polewas beginning to take the place of the idea of "making" the NorthwestPassage. That old problem, however, was in prospect of being solvedby the attempts made to solve the former. So that by the year 1853Collinson was able to sail so far that he came within fifty-sevenmiles--a mere pin prick on the map--of accomplishing the NorthwestPassage.
Finally, in 1906, the Passage, which, like a mountain tunnel, had beenworked at from both ends, was penetrated from one opening to the otherby the little _Gj?a_, a Norwegian sloop of forty tons, which sailedfrom Christiania on June 1st, 1903.
She was under the command of Captain Roald Amundsen, of that city, andhis right-hand man was Lieutenant Godfred Hansen, of the Danish navy;the crew numbered seven. She had not been built with a view to Arcticwork, so that before she went north into the realm of the ice king shehad to be fortified somewhat. An ice sheathing of two-inch oak planksadded greatly to her resisting power, and her petroleum motor of 13horse power enabled her, when she put to sea, to attain a travelingspeed of three knots in smooth water. But the _Gj?a_ trusted chiefly,like the stout little barks of other days, to the skillful handling ofher sails.
The winters of 1903 and 1904 were spent in harbor on the shores of KingWilliam's Land. Only the premature closing in of the ice prevented thelittle vessel from achieving the Passage in 1905.