NEW LANDS WITHIN THE ARCTIC CIRCLE.*
A GOOD story bears repeating, and though some of the main incidents of Lieutenant Payer's work are already known to the public, no one who has had the pleasure of hearing him relate any part of the marvellous story of that Expedition in which he took so conspicuous a part, but must, we think, desire to know all that he has further to say ; and will, moreover, not be uninterested to learn a few particulars of his own and his brave comrade, Lieu- tenant Weyprecht's history. In the volumes before us, Mr. Payer tells his story with the simple directness of a man who knows that his unvarnished tale has power in itself to deeply move the reader. There is throughout his narrative a charm rarely to be met with in tales of Arctic adventure and discovery. In every page we are aware we are in the presence of a man of high culture, as well as conspicuous bravery, while his inimitable sketches make us at home with every scene of his adventures. In his preface he tells us how much the Expedition owed to the dauntless courage and distinguished abilities of its supreme com- mander (1eyprecht),—supreme, that is, so long as the duties of the expedition were strictly nautical ; Lieutenant Payer himself was responsible when sledging and surveying began. Now we are, or should be, all interested in the conclusions at which Lieutenant Weyprecht has arrived. We pointed out last autumn in these pages that he is inclined to believe that our work for the present is to utilise the discoveries we have already made in the furtherance of science, and the results of our own expedition tend to the same conclusion,—to throw still more doubt over the speculation that there is any " open sea " around the Pole, but to show that much gain to the scientific world may be drawn from these expeditions, and incidentally, possibly, new and as yet undreamed-of discoveries may result from the establishment of a girdle of observation round the highest stations already attained. Lieutenant Weyprecht dis- tinctly believes that by such means alone exploration over the whole Arctic zone can be accomplished, and the solution of all the larger Arctic problems hoped for. But the pages before us are not only the record of the oft-told tale of Arctic travel, they have all the charm of containing really the unconscious autobiography of a hero,—a hero of a type men in every age have delighted to honour. Julius Payer did not begin life as a sailor ; he was educated as a soldier in the Wiener-Neustadt Military Academy, and in 1866 served in the campaign in Italy. He was decorated for his distinguished services at the battle of Custozza, and afterwards, when serving in the Tyrol, gained experience and celebrity as an Alpine climber, experience he turned to good account in the Arctic regions. But of those regions he little thought, he tells us, when one day in 1868, after a day's surveying on the Orteler Alps, a newspaper containing an account of Koldewey's first expedition found its way into his hut, and from it he held forth to the herdsmen and jagers of his party on the North Pole and its dangers, wondering as much as any of them that men should be found to endure such hard- ships. The very next year he joined the German expedition, of which it is not too much to say he was the very life and soul. The failure of the second German expedition, so far from dis- couraging the dauntless men who led it, seems to have stirred them up to fresh enterprise, and in 1871 Austria resolved to help in the cause of scientific exploration. Graf Wilczek, with noble generosity, contributed 40,000 florins towards the equipment of an Austro-Hungarian expedition, and in order to prevent needless expenditure, a small reconnoitring or pioneer- ing expedition was despatched to the seas of Novaya Zembla, under the command of Weyprecht and Payer. The object of this expe- dition was not to reach high latitudes, but to ascertain whether an expedition which followed the course of the warmer waters of the Gulf Stream might not find fewer and less formidable obstacles than on routes exposed to the Arctic currents, bearing
• Narrative of the Discoveries of the Austrian Ship • Tegetthoff' in the Years 1872-74. By Julius Payer, one of the Commanders of the Expedition. London : Macmillan and 0o. 1876.
with them colossal masses of ice towards the south ; and the aim of the expedition was to report on the temperature of the water, air, and currents, and report the state of the ice and the prospects
of success for the larger expedition of the following year. The inferences drawn by Payer and Weyprecht during that pioneer voyage cannot be fully entered into here, but very briefly, they concluded that the Novaya Zemlya sea is not filled with impene- trable ice, but is open every year, probably up to 78° N. lat., is connected with the Sea of Kara, and possibly with the
Polynjii (ice-holes) in the north of Asia ; that the time most favourable for navigation in this sea is at
the end of August, when till the end of September ice may be said to be at its minimum ; that the Novaya Zemlya sea is a shallow sea,—a connection and continuation of the great plains of Siberia ; that Gillisland is not a continent, but either an island or a group of islands, and that how far the Gulf Stream
may have any share or influence in favourable conditions for the navigation of the Eastern Polar sea, cannot yet be positively de- termined. The result of the communication of these inferences to the authorities was that in the following year a thoroughly equipped expedition was despatched, the object of the expedition, broadly stated, being to ascertain whether it were not possible to penetrate yet farther into the Arctic region by a route between Novaya Zemlya and Spitz- bergen. And a return to Europe through Behring's Straits lay among the possibilities of the venture, to the minds of some probably of the least experienced, and so most sanguine. With the broad results of that expedition the world is familiar. Franz Joseph's Land was added to the map, but no open Polar sea, and a distinct conclusion was arrived at by those of them best qualified to judge " that the probability of reaching the Pole was so small, and the attempt to do it so disproportionate to the sacri- fices exacted and the results achieved, that it would be advisable to exclude it from Arctic exploration until, instead of the impotent vessels of the sea, we can send thither those of the air." (Payer distinctly recommends that in all future explorations a balloon should be taken, which could be secured by ropes to the ship.) At the time the lines quoted above were penned, the English expedition had not returned, and Payer adds, " When the attempt is again made to reach high latitudes with a ship, I would recom- mend the route through Smith's Sound ;" and adds further on, " the English Expedition will essentially contribute to solve the question whether the Pole is to be reached by this route," since which we have all grown familiar with the disappointment conveyed to us in Captain Nares's sentence, "Pole imprac- ticable." But while the love of the marvellous exists in the human mind, no amount of scientific failure or discourage- ment can diminish the interest of such a narrative as the one before us.
It was a bright morning, early in June, 1872, when the Tegetthoff ' lifted her anchor and started with four and twenty picked men from Bremerhaven, their ideal ob- ject the North-east passage, their immediate and definite object the exploration of the seas and lands on the north- east of Novaya Zemlya. And it was only August in that same year when the ship became a fast prisoner in the ice, and through the dreary and terrible winter the little band of heroic men maintained courage and discipline and hope amid the darkness,—hope which seemed destined to grow fainter day by day, till the morning of that 30th August, 1873, which brought such a surprise, says Lieutenant Payer, "as only the awakening to a new life can produce." They were leaning over the bulwarks of their ship gazing on their vast ice-prison, when a wall of mist suddenly lifted itself up, and away before them was revealed what to their excited imaginations seemed a radiant Alpine land. "There was not a sick man on board the Teget- thoff ' that day." says Payer, with a vivid flash of remembrance as he recalls the moment :—
" It was only under the influence of the first excitement that we made a rush over our ice-field, although we knew that numberless fissures made it impossible to reach the land. But difficulties notwithstanding, when we ran to the edge of our floe, we beheld from a ridge of ice the mountains and glaciers of the mysterious land. Its valleys seemed to our fond imagination clothed with green_ pastures, over which herds of reindeer roamed in undisturbed enjoyment of their liberty, and far from all foes. For thousands of years this land had lain buried from the knowledge of men, and now its discovery had fallen into the lap of a small band, themselves almost lost to the world, who far from their home remembered the homage due to their Sovereign, and gave toothe newly-discovered territory the name 'Kaiser Franz-Josef s Land:"
From this moment we get a keen interest, which lasts all through the narrative, in the dogs which accompanied the expedition,
and without• which many brave efforts would have proved not only fruitless, but fatal. The love of these animals for Payer comes out in many a half-unconscious touch, as when he records exertions which seem to us to have needed almost superhuman strength, but which he undertook, or rather the dogs undertook, with the Simple stipulation that he should be with them. He does not say this, of course, but the inference is plain to any one who can read between the lines, and he was destined to experience some severe troubles on their account. Poor Sumbu! Sumbu was a dog, a faithful little friend, who accompanied Payer in his ex- plorations, and for those two long years of frost-bound exile his cunning and impudence was an unfailing source of amusement. When first aware that he was stranded on the big wild waste of ice, poor Sumbu's wonted impudence quite forsook him, his countenance" assumed an expression of timidity and humility, and unbidden he offered his paw to all passers-by." What more natural, says his master, than that he should be beside himself if, in one of those vast solitudes, he should get sight of a living creature. And so it happened ; a gull flew over his head; poor Sumbu burst in a transport of delight from the sledge he was helping to drag, disappeared from sight, and was never seen again. Among more than a hundred sketches, taken on the spot, with which Mr. Payer has illustrated his work, not one is more graphic than the half-humorous, half-pathetic sketch of poor Sumbu and that bird. But Sumbu's fate, though sad, came, as people say, in the way of nature ; a harder trial awaited his com- panions, human and canine. The second winter had come and gone, and a third spring had brought with it the work of explora- tion in the newly-discovered land, for details of which we refer the reader to the volumes before us. There seemed every pro- spect of a third winter, and ultimately a grave on the ice for the whole party,—when, early in May, from the heights of Franz Joseph's Land, a single serpentine thread of water gleaming in the sun, stretching toward the south-east, could be detected. There was no time to be lost, though the short Arctic summer, with its possibilities of hope and deliverance, was still before them. Aban- doning the zoological, botanical, and geological collections, the result of so much heroic labour, weighted still heavily with the absolute necessaries of existence, they turned for a last look at the grave of their brave comrade, the only one of the band who had failen a victim to disease, the engineer, Kirsch, and for three months they dragged the boats and sledges over ice-floes, through ice-holes, with what difficulty may be imagined, when we mention that after a month's hard labour but a mile and a quarter had really been accomplished ! " After the lapse of two months of indescribable effort, the distance between us and the ship was not more than two German miles !"
At last, on the 15th of August, just as the position was getting desperate, and starvation stared them in the face, they sailed into their last ice-hole ; the noise of the waves, to their ears " the voice of life," was heard. The last line of ice was ahead, and beyond, the boundless open sea! But even so their case was well- nigh desperate. Twenty-three men provisionless, or at least on famine-rations, the Arctic summer gone, the merciless ice so close, and fifty miles to the nearest land. And now the dogs, through whose faithful services they had reached at last this possibility of deliverance, what of them ? We know them all so well. There was Torossy, born amid the ice, the pride and pleasure of the whole crew, who knew no other destiny than to draw a sledge, and devoted himself to his work zealously,—poor Torossy ! " who wagged his tail all day on deck, wagged it as he followed his masters on the ice, wagged it even when Sumba stole his dinner ; and Gillis, the eye-pleaser, all whose efforts in the sledge were mere sham ; and Jubinal, the red giant, with a paw as huge as a bear's,"—" a true comrade," Payer says of him, who had never departed from his side, but patiently borne all # the labours and toils imposed on him. And now, in the over- crowded boats, there was for them no room, no water, no provi- sions, no possibility, in short, of taking them. It must have been a terrible moment,—we pass it over. Yet more terrible work seemed ahead ; for ten days, through stormy weather, the heroic little party rowed on and on, till, at the moment of their uttermost extremity, they turned a corner of the rock, and there, within a few hundred yards, lay two Russian schooners. They were saved, but we imagine the choke in the throat of their brave leader when the first thing he records is, "Ten days sooner, and our poor dogs might have gambolled on the deck with us." In the long dark evenings yet before us, we know few books likely to be read with keener interest than will be excited by Lieutenant Payer's narrative.
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