Read Ebook: In Northern Mists: Arctic Exploration in Early Times (Volume 1 of 2) by Nansen Fridtjof Chater Arthur G Translator

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INTRODUCTION 1

INTRODUCTION

"For my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset and the baths Of all the Western stars until I die." Tennyson, "Ulysses."

In the beginning the world appeared to mankind like a fairy tale; everything that lay beyond the circle of familiar experience was a shifting cloudland of the fancy, a playground for all the fabled beings of mythology; but in the farthest distance, towards the west and north, was the region of darkness and mists, where sea, land and sky were merged into a congealed mass--and at the end of all gaped the immeasurable mouth of the abyss, the awful void of space.

Out of this fairy world, in course of time, the calm and sober lines of the northern landscape appeared. With unspeakable labour the eye of man has forced its way gradually towards the north, over mountains and forests, and tundra, onward through the mists along the vacant shores of the polar sea--the vast stillness, where so much struggle and suffering, so many bitter failures, so many proud victories, have vanished without a trace, muffled beneath the mantle of snow.

When our thoughts go back through the ages in a waking dream, an endless procession passes before us--like a single mighty epic of the human mind's power of devotion to an idea, right or wrong--a procession of struggling, frost-covered figures in heavy clothes, some erect and powerful, others weak and bent so that they can scarcely drag themselves along before the sledges, many of them emaciated and dying of hunger, cold and scurvy; but all looking out before them towards the unknown, beyond the sunset, where the goal of their struggle is to be found.

We see a Pytheas, intelligent and courageous, steering northward from the Pillars of Hercules for the discovery of Britain and Northern Europe; we see hardy Vikings, with an Ottar, a Leif Ericson at their head, sailing in undecked boats across the ocean into ice and tempest and clearing the mists from an unseen world; we see a Davis, a Baffin forcing their way to the north-west and opening up new routes, while a Hudson, unconquered by ice and winter, finds a lonely grave on a deserted shore, a victim of shabby pilfering. We see the bright form of a Parry surpassing all as he forces himself on; a Nordenski?ld, broad-shouldered and confident, leading the way to new visions; a Toll mysteriously disappearing in the drifting ice. We see men driven to despair, shooting and eating each other; but at the same time we see noble figures, like a De Long, trying to save their journals from destruction, until they sink and die.

Midway in the procession comes a long file of a hundred and thirty men hauling heavy boats and sledges back to the south, but they are falling in their tracks; one after another they lie there, marking the line of route with their corpses--they are Franklin's men.

And now we come to the latest drama, the Greenlander Br?nlund dragging himself forward over the ice-fields through cold and winter darkness, after the leader Mylius-Erichsen and his comrade, Hagen, have both stiffened in the snow during the long and desperate journey. He reaches the depot only to wait for death, knowing that the maps and observations he has faithfully brought with him will be found and saved. He quietly prepares himself for the silent guest, and writes in his journal in his imperfect Danish:

Perished,--79 Fjord, after attempt return over the inland ice, in November. I come here in waning moon and could not get farther for frost-bitten feet and darkness.

The bodies of the others are in the middle of the fjord opposite the glacier .

Hagen died November 15 and Mylius about 10 days after.

J?RGEN BR?NLUND.

What a story in these few lines! Civilisation bows its head by the grave of this Eskimo.

What were they seeking in the ice and cold? The Norseman who wrote the "King's Mirror" gave the answer six hundred years ago: "If you wish to know what men seek in this land, or why men journey thither in so great danger of their lives, then it is the threefold nature of man which draws him thither. One part of him is emulation and desire of fame, for it is man's nature to go where there is likelihood of great danger, and to make himself famous thereby. Another part is the desire of knowledge, for it is man's nature to wish to know and see those parts of which he has heard, and to find out whether they are as it was told him or not. The third part is the desire of gain, seeing that men seek after riches in every place where they learn that profit is to be had, even though there be great danger in it."

The history of arctic discovery shows how the development of the human race has always been borne along by great illusions. Just as Columbus's discovery of the West Indies was due to a gross error of calculation, so it was the fabled isle of Brazil that drew Cabot out on his voyage, when he found North America. It was fantastic illusions of open polar seas and of passages to the riches of Cathay beyond the ice that drove men back there in spite of one failure after another; and little by little the polar regions were explored. Every complete devotion to an idea yields some profit, even though it be different from that which was expected.

But from first to last the history of polar exploration is a single mighty manifestation of the power of the unknown over the mind of man, perhaps greater and more evident here than in any other phase of human life. Nowhere else have we won our way more slowly, nowhere else has every new step cost so much trouble, so many privations and sufferings, and certainly nowhere have the resulting discoveries promised fewer material advantages--and nevertheless, new forces have always been found ready to carry the attack farther, to stretch once more the limits of the world.

But if it has cost a struggle, it is not without its joys. Who can describe his emotion when the last difficult ice-floe has been passed, and the sea lies open before him, leading to new realms? Or when the mist clears and mountain-summits shoot up, one behind another farther and farther away, on which the eye of man has never rested, and in the farthest distance peaks appear on the sea-horizon--on the sky above them a yellowish white reflection of the snow-fields--where the imagination pictures new continents?...

Ever since the Norsemen's earliest voyages arctic expeditions have certainly brought material advantages to the human race, such as rich fisheries, whaling and sealing, and so on; they have produced scientific results in the knowledge of hitherto unknown regions and conditions; but they have given us far more than this: they have tempered the human will for the conquest of difficulties; they have furnished a school of manliness and self-conquest in the midst of the slackness of varying ages, and have held up noble ideals before the rising generation; they have fed the imagination, have given fairy-tales to the child, and raised the thoughts of its elders above their daily toil. Take arctic travel out of our history, and will it not be poorer? Perhaps we have here the greatest service it has done humanity.

We speak of the first discovery of the North--but how do we know when the first man arrived in the northern regions of the earth? We know nothing but the very last steps in the migrations of humanity. What a stretch of time there must have been between the period of the Neanderthal man in Europe and the first Pelasgians, or Iberians, or Celts, that we find there in the neolithic age, in the earliest dawn of history. How infinitesimal in comparison with this the whole of the recent period which we call history becomes.

What took place in those long ages is still hidden from us. We only know that ice-age followed ice-age, covering Northern Europe, and to some extent Asia and North America as well, with vast glaciers which obliterated all traces of early human habitation of those regions. Between these ice-ages occurred warmer periods, when men once more made their way northward, to be again driven out by the next advance of the ice-sheet. There are many signs that the human northward migration after the last ice-age, in any case in large districts of Europe, followed fairly close upon the gradual shrinking of the boundary of the inland ice towards the interior of Scandinavia, where the ice-sheath held out longest.

The primitive state--when men wandered about the forests and plains of the warmer parts of the earth, living on what they found by chance--developed by slow gradations in the direction of the first beginnings of culture; on one side to roving hunters and fishers, on the other to agricultural people with a more fixed habitation. The nomad with his herds forms a later stage of civilisation.

The hunting stage of culture was imposed by necessity on the first pioneers and inhabitants of the northernmost and least hospitable regions of the earth. The northern lands must therefore have been first discovered by roving fishermen who came northwards following the rivers and seashores in their search for new fishing-grounds. It was the scouting eye of a hunter that first saw a sea-beach in the dreamy light of a summer night, and sought to penetrate the heavy gloom of the polar sea. And that far-travelled hunter fell asleep in the snowdrift while the northern lights played over him as a funeral fire, the first victim of the polar night's iron grasp.

Long afterwards came the nomad and the agriculturist and established themselves in the track of the hunter.

This was thousands of years before any written history, and of these earliest colonisations we know nothing but what the chance remains we find in the ground can tell us, and these are very few and very uncertain.

It is not until we come far down into the full daylight of history that we find men setting out with the conscious purpose of exploring the unknown for its own sake. With those early hunters, it was doubtless new ground and new game that drew them on, but they too were attracted, consciously or unconsciously, by the spirit of adventure and the unknown--so deep in the soul of man does this divine force lie, the mainspring, perhaps, of the greatest of our actions. In every part of the world and in every age it has driven man forward on the path of evolution, and as long as the human ear can hear the breaking of waves over deep seas, as long as the human eye can follow the track of the northern lights over silent snow-fields, as long as human thought seeks distant worlds in infinite space, so long will the fascination of the unknown carry the human mind forward and upward.

ANTIQUITY, BEFORE PYTHEAS

The learned world of early antiquity had nothing but a vague premonition of the North. Along the routes of traffic commercial relations were established at a very early time with the northern lands. At first these ran perhaps along the rivers of Russia and Eastern Germany to the Baltic, afterwards along the rivers of Central Europe as well. But the information which reached the Mediterranean peoples by these routes had to go through many intermediaries with various languages, and for this reason it long remained vague and uncertain.

What the people of antiquity did not know, they supplied by poetical and mythical conceptions; and in time there grew up about the outer limits of the world, especially on the north, a whole cycle of legend which was to lay the foundation of ideas of the polar regions for thousands of years, far into the Middle Ages, and long after trustworthy knowledge had been won, even by the voyages of the Norsemen themselves.

Long before people knew whether there were lands and seas far in the north, those who studied the stars had observed that there were some bodies in the northern sky which never set, and that there was a point in the vault of heaven which never changed its place. In time, they also found that, as they moved northwards, the circle surrounding the stars that were always visible became larger, and they saw that these in their daily movements described orbits about the fixed point or pole of the heavens. The ancient Chaldeans had already found this out. From this observation it was but a short step to the deduction that the earth could not be flat, as the popular idea made it, but must in one way or another be spherical, and that if one went far enough to the north, these stars would be right over one's head. To the Greeks a circle drawn through the constellation of the Great Bear, which they called "Arktos," formed the limit of the stars that were always visible. This limit was therefore called the Bear's circle, or the "Arctic Circle," and thus this designation for the northernmost regions of the earth is derived from the sky.

According to the common Greek idea it was the countries of the Mediterranean and of the East that formed the disc of the earth, or "oecumene" . Around this disc, according to the Homeric songs , flowed the all-embracing river "Oceanus," the end of the earth and the limit of heaven. This deep, tireless, quietly flowing river, whose stream turned back upon itself, was the origin and the end of all things; it was not only the father of the Oceanides and of the rivers, but also the source whence came gods and men. Nothing definite is said of this river's farther boundary; perhaps unknown lands belonging to another world whereon the sky rested were there; in any case we meet later, as in Hesiod, with ideas of lands beyond the Ocean, the Hesperides, Erythea, and the Isles of the Blest, which were probably derived from Phoenician tales. Originally conceived as a deep-flowing river, Oceanus became later the all-embracing empty ocean, which was different from the known sea with its known coasts, even though connected with it. Herodotus is perhaps the first who used the name in this sense; he definitely rejects the idea of Oceanus as a river and denies that the "oecumene" should be drawn round, as though with a pair of compasses, as the Ionian geographers thought. He considered it proved that the earth's disc on the western side, and probably also on the south, was surrounded by the ocean, but said that no one could know whether this was also the case on the north and north-east. In opposition to Hecataeus and the Ionian geographers he asserted that the Caspian Sea was not a bay of the northern Oceanus, but an independent inland sea. Thus the "oecumene" became extended into the unknown on the north-east. He mentions several peoples as dwelling farthest north; but to the north of them were desert regions and inaccessible mountains; how far they reached he does not say.

He thus left the question undetermined, because, with the sound cool-headedness of the inquirer, which made him in a sense the founder of physical geography, he trusted to certain observations rather than to uncertain speculations; and therefore he maintained that the geographers of the Ionian school had not provided adequate proofs that the world was really surrounded by sea on all sides. But nevertheless, it was, perhaps, his final opinion that the earth's disc swam like an island in Oceanus.

This common name for the ocean was soon dropped, and men spoke instead of the Outer Sea beyond the Pillars of Hercules in contradistinction to the Inner Sea . The Outer Sea was also called the Atlantic Sea after Atlas. This name is first found in Herodotus. South of Asia was the Southern Ocean or the Erythraean Sea . North of Europe and Asia was the Northern Ocean; and the Caspian Sea was a bay of this, in the opinion of the majority. Doubtless, most people thought that these various oceans were connected; but the common name Oceanus does not reappear as applied to them until the second century B.C.

According to the Homeric conception the universe was to be imagined somewhat as a hollow globe, divided in two by the disc of the earth and its encircling Oceanus; the upper hemisphere was that of light, or the heaven; the lower one Tartarus, hidden in eternal darkness. Hades lay beneath the earth, and Tartarus was as far below Hades as the sky was above the earth. The solid vault of heaven was borne by Atlas, but its extremities certainly rested upon Oceanus , or at least were contained thereby. According to Hesiod an anvil falling from heaven would not reach earth till the tenth day, and from the earth it would fall for nine days and nine nights and not reach the bottom of Tartarus until the tenth. This underworld is filled to the brim with triple darkness, and the Titans have been hurled into it and cannot come out. On the brink the limits of the earth, the waste Oceanus, black Tartarus, and the starry heaven all coincide. Tartarus is a deep gulf at which even the gods shudder; in a whole year it would be impossible to search through it.

So early do we find three conceptions which two thousand years later still formed the foundation of the doctrine of the earth's outer limits, especially on the north: the all-embracing Oceanus or empty ocean; the coincidence of sky, sea, land and underworld at the uttermost edge; and lastly the dismal gulf into which even the gods were afraid of falling.

These or similar ideas still obtained long after the mathematical geographers had conceived the earth as a sphere. Pythagoras was probably the first to proclaim the doctrine of the spherical form of the earth. He relied less upon observation than upon the speculative idea that the sphere was the most perfect form. Before him Anaximander of Miletus , to whom are attributed the invention of the gnomon or sun-dial, and the first representation of the earth's disc on a map, had maintained that the earth was a cylinder floating in space; the inhabited part was the upper flat end. His pupil Anaximenes thought that the earth had the form of a trapezium, supported by the air beneath, which it compressed like the lid of a vase; while before him Thales of Miletus was inclined to hold that the earth's disc swam on the surface of the ocean, in the middle of the hollow sphere of heaven, and that earthquakes were caused by movements of the waters.

Parmenides of Elea divided the earth's sphere into five zones or belts, of which three were uninhabitable: the zone of heat, or the scorched belt round the equator, and the two zones of cold at the poles. Between the warmth and the cold there were on either side of the hot zone two temperate zones where men might live. This division was originally derived from the five zones of the heavens, where the Arctic Circle formed the boundary of the northern stars that are always visible, and the tropics that of the zone dominated by the sun. Pythagoras seems to have been the first to transfer it to the globe, the centre of the universe. This idea of the earth's five habitable and uninhabitable zones was current till nearly the end of the Middle Ages; but at the same time one finds, often far on in the Middle Ages, the former conceptions of the empty ocean encircling all, and of the "oecumene" swimming in it as an island. Occasionally we meet with a vast unknown continent beyond this ocean, belonging to another world, which no one can reach. Together with these theories, though not very conspicuously, the belief in the immeasurable gulf at the edge of the world also persisted; and this became the "Ginnungagap" of our forefathers.

The conception of the earth's form and of its uttermost limits was thus by no means consistent, and on some points it was contradictory. We must always, and especially in dealing with past times, distinguish between the views of the scientific world and those of ordinary people, two aspects which were often hopelessly mixed together. And again in the scientific world we must distinguish between the mathematical-physical geographers and the historical, since the latter dealt more with descriptions and were apt to follow accounts and legends rather than what was taught by physical observations.

The world which the Greeks really knew was bounded in the earlier period on the north by the Balkans. These again gave rise to the mythical Rhipaean Mountains, which were soon moved farther to the north or north-east as knowledge increased, and so they and the Alps were made the northern boundary of the known world. As to what lay farther off, the Greeks had very vague ideas; they seem to have thought that the frozen polar countries began there, where it was so cold that people had to wear breeches like the Scythians; or else it was a good climate, since it lay north of the north wind which came from the Rhipaean Mountains. But that some genuine information about the North had reached them as early as the time of the Odyssey seems to be shown by the tale of the Laestrygons--who had the long day, and whose shepherds, driving their flocks in at evening, could call to those who were setting out in the morning, since the paths of day and night were with them so close to one another--and of the Cimmerians at the gates of the underworld, who lived in a land of fog, on the shores of Oceanus, in eternal cheerless night. It is true that the poet seems to have imagined these countries somewhere in the east or north-east, probably by the Black Sea; for Odysseus came from the Laestrygons to the isle of AEaea "by the mansions and dancing-places of the Dawn and by the place where the sun rises." And from AEaea the Greek hero steered right out into the night and the mist on the dangerous waters of Oceanus and came to the Cimmerians, who must therefore have dwelt beyond the sunrise, shrouded in cloud and fogs. It might be supposed that it was natural to the poet to believe that there must be night beyond the sunrise and on the way to the descent to the nether regions; but it is, perhaps, more probable that both the long day and the darkness and fog are an echo of tales about the northern summer and the long winter night, and that these tales reached the Greeks by the trade-routes along the Russian rivers and across the Black Sea, for which reason the districts where these marvels were to be found were reported to lie in that direction. A find in the passage-graves of Mycenae of beads made of amber from the Baltic, besides many pieces of amber from the period of the Dorian migration found during the recent English excavations of the temple of Artemis at Sparta, furnish certain evidence that the Greek world had intercourse with the Baltic countries long before the Odyssey was put into writing in the eighth century, even though the northern lands of this poem seem to have been limited by a communication by sea between the Black Sea and the Adriatic, running north of the Balkan peninsula. Perhaps this imaginary communication may have been conceived as going by the Ister , which, at any rate later, was thought to have another outlet in the Adriatic. We may also find echoes of tales about the dark winter and light summer of the North in Sophocles's tragedy, where we are told that Orithyia was carried off by Boreas and borne over

... the whole mirror of the sea, to the edge of the earth, To the source of primaeval night, where the vault of heaven ends, Where lies the ancient garden of Phoebus

--though images of this sort may also be due to an idea that the sun remained during the night beyond the northern regions.

According to a comparatively late Greek conception there was in the far North a happy people called the Hyperboreans. They dwelt "under the shining way" north of the roaring Boreas, so far that this cold north wind could not reach them, and therefore enjoyed a splendid climate. They did not live in houses, but in woods and groves. With them injustice and war were unknown, they were untouched by age or sickness; at joyous sacrificial feasts, with golden laurel-wreaths in their hair, and amid song and the sound of the cithara and the dancing of maidens, they led a careless existence in undisturbed gladness, and reached an immense age. When they were tired of life they threw themselves, after having eaten and drunk, joyfully and with wreaths in their hair, into the sea from a particular cliff . Among other qualities they had the power of flying, and one of them, Abaris, flew round the world on an arrow. While some geographers, especially the Ionians, placed them in the northern regions, beyond the Rhipaean Mountains, Hecataeus of Abdera , who wrote a work about the Hyperboreans, collected from various sources, and more like a novel than anything else, declares that they dwelt far beyond the accessible regions, on the island of Elixoea in the farthest northern Oceanus, where the tired stars sink to rest, and where the moon is so near that one can easily distinguish the inequalities of its surface. Leto was born there, and therefore Apollo is more honoured with them than other gods. There is a marvellous temple, round like a sphere, which floats freely in the air borne by wings, and which is rich in offerings. To this holy island Apollo came every ninth year; according to some authorities he came through the air in a car drawn by swans. During his visit the god himself played the cithara and danced without ceasing from the spring equinox to the rising of the Pleiades. The Boreads were hereditary kings of the island, and were likewise keepers of the sanctuary; they were descendants of Boreas and Chione. Three giant brothers, twelve feet high, performed the service of priests. When they offered the sacrifice and sang the sacred hymns to the sound of the cithara, whole clouds of swans came from the Rhipaean Mountains, surrounded the temple and settled upon it, joining in the sacred song.

Theopompus has given us, if we may trust AElian's account , a remarkable variation of the Hyperborean legend in combination with others:

Europe, Asia, and Africa were islands surrounded by Oceanus; only that land which lay outside this world was a continent; its size was immense. The animals there were huge, the men were not only double our size, but lived twice as long as we. Among many great towns there were two in particular greater than the rest, and with no resemblance to one another; they were called Machimos and Eusebes . The description of the latter's peaceful inhabitants has most features in common with the Hyperborean legend. The warlike inhabitants of Machimos, on the other hand, are born armed, wage war continually, and oppress their neighbours, so that this one city rules over many peoples, but its inhabitants are no less than two millions. It is true that they sometimes die of disease, but that happens seldom, since for the most part they are killed in war, by stones, or wood , for they are invulnerable to iron. They have such superfluity of gold and silver that with them gold is of less value than iron is with us. Once indeed they made an expedition to our island , came over the Ocean ten millions strong and arrived at the land of the Hyperboreans. But when they learned that these were the happy ones of our earth, and found their mode of life bad, poverty-stricken and despicable, they did not think it worth while to proceed farther.

Among them dwell men called Meropians, in many great cities. On the border of their country is a place which bears the significant name Anostos , and resembles a gulf . There reigns there neither darkness nor light, but a veil of mist of a dirty red colour lies over it. Two streams flow about this place, of which one is called Hedone , the other Lype , and by the banks of each stand trees of the size of a great plane-tree. The fruit of the trees by the river of sorrow has the effect that any one who eats of it sheds so many tears that for the rest of his life he melts away in tears and so dies. The other trees that grow by the river of gladness bear fruit of a quite different kind. With him who tastes it all former desires come to rest; even what he has passionately loved passes into oblivion, he becomes gradually younger and goes once more through the previous stages of his existence in reverse order. From an old man he passes to the prime of life, becomes a youth, a boy, and then a child, and with that he is used up. AElian adds: "And if the Chionian's tale appears credible to any one, then he may be believed, but to me he seems to be a mythologist, both in this and in other things."

There can be no doubt that the regions which we hear of in this story, with the Hyperboreans, the enormous quantities of gold, the gulf without return, and so on, were imagined as situated beyond the sea in the North; and in the description of the warlike people of Machimos who came in great hordes southward over the sea, one might almost be tempted to think of warlike northerners, who were slain with stones and clubs, but not with iron, perhaps because they had not yet discovered the use of iron.

The legend of the happy Hyperboreans in the North has arisen from an error of popular etymology, and it has here been treated at some length as an example of how geographical myths may originate and develop. The name in its original form was certainly the designation of those who brought offerings to the shrine of Apollo at Delphi . They were designated as "perpheroi" or "hyper-pheroi" , which again in certain northern Greek dialects took the forms of "hyper-phoroi" or "hyper-boroi;" this, by an error, became connected in later times with "Boreas," and their home was consequently transferred to the North, many customs of the worship of Apollo being transferred with it . This gives at the same time a natural explanation of their many peculiarities, their sanctity, their power of flight and the arrow , their ceremonial feasts, and their throwing themselves from a certain cliff, and so on, all of which is derived from the worship of Apollo. Apollonius of Rhodes relates that according to the legends of the Celts amber originated from the tears of Apollo, which he shed by thousands when he came to the holy people of the Hyperboreans and forsook the shining heaven.

When, after the conquests of Alexander, the Greeks became acquainted with the mythical world of India, they naturally connected the Indians' legendary country, "Uttara Kuru," beyond the Himalayas, with the country of the Hyperboreans. "This land is not too cold, not too warm, free from disease; care and sorrow are unknown there; the earth is without dust and sweetly perfumed; the rivers run in beds of gold, and instead of pebbles they roll down pearls and precious stones."

The mythical singer Aristeas of Proconnesus --to whom was attributed the poem "Arimaspeia"--is said to have penetrated into the country of the Scythians as far as the northernmost people, the Issedonians. The latter told him of the one-eyed, long-haired Arimaspians, who lived still farther north, at the uttermost end of the world, before the cave from which Boreas rushes forth. On their northern border dwelt the Griffins, lion-like monsters with the wings and beaks of eagles; they were the guardians of the gold which the earth sends forth of itself. But still farther north, as far as the sea, were the Hyperboreans.

But the learned Herodotus doubted that the Hyperboreans dwelt to the north of Boreas; for, said he, if there are people north of the north wind, then there must also be people south of the south wind. Neither did he credit the Scythians' tales about goat-footed people and Sleepers far in the North. Just as little did this sceptic believe that the air of Scythia was full of feathers which prevented all seeing and moving; it was, he thought, continuous snowfall that the Scythians described thus. On the other hand, he certainly believed in the Amazons, though whether they dwelt in the North, as later authors considered, he does not say.

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