AERIAL EXPLORATION OF THE ARCTIC REGIONS. 209 



This primary physical fact, that Arctic navigators have not been 

 stopped by a merely frozen sea, but by a combination of glacier frag- 

 ments with the frozen water of bays, and creeks, and fiords, should 

 be better understood than it is at present, for when it is understood, 

 the popular and fallacious notion that the difficulties of Arctic prog- 

 ress are merely dependent on latitude, and must therefore increase 

 with latitude, explodes. 



It is the physical configuration of the fringing zone of the Arctic regions, 

 not its mere latitude, that bars the way to the Pole. 



I put this in italics because so much depends upon it I may say 

 that all depends upon it for if this barrier can be scaled at any part 

 we maj' come upon a region as easily traversed as that part of the 

 Arctic Ocean lying between the North Cape and Spitzbergen, which 

 is regularly navigated every summer by hardy Norsemen in little 

 sailing sloops of 30 to 40 tons burden, and only six or eight pair of 

 hands on board ; or by overland travelling as easily as the Arctic 

 winter journey between Tornea and Alten. This trip over the snow- 

 covered mountains is done in five or six days, at the latter end of 

 every November, by streams of visitors to the fair at Alten, in lati- 

 tude 70, 3 degrees N. of the Arctic circle ; its distance, 430 miles, is 

 just about eqital to that which stands between the North Pole and 

 the northernmost reach of our previous Arctic expeditions. One or 

 the other of the above-named conditions, or an enclosed frozen Polar 

 ocean, is what probably exists beyond the broken fiord barrier 

 hitherto explored ; a continuation of such a barrier is, in fact, almost 

 a physical impossibility ; and therefore the Pole will be ultimately 

 reached, not by a repetition of such weary struggles as those which 

 ended in the very hasty retreat of our last expedition, but by a bound 

 across about 400 miles of open or frozen Polar ocean, or a rapid 

 sledge -run over snow-paved fields like those so merrily traversed in 

 Arctic Norway by festive bonders and their families on their way to 

 Yule-time dancing parties. 



Reference to a map of the circumpolar regions, or, better, to a 

 globe, will show that the continents of Europe, Asia, and America 

 surround the Pole, and hang, as it were, downward or southward 

 from a latitude of 70 and upward. There is but one wide outlet for 

 the accumulations of Polar ice, and that is between Norway ( and Green- 

 land, with Iceland standing nearly midway. Davis's and.Behring's 

 Straits are the narrower openings ; the first may be only a fiord, 

 rather than an outlet. The ice-block, or crowding together and 

 heaping up of the glacier fragments and bay ice, is thus explained. 



Attempts of two kinds have been made to scale this icy barrier. 

 Ships have sailed northward, threading a dangerous course between 

 the floating icebergs in the summer, and becoming fast bound in 

 winter, when the narrow spaces of brackish water lying between 

 these masses of land ice become frozen, and the " ice foot " clinging 

 to the shore stretches out seaward to meet that on the opposite side 

 of the fiord or channel. The second method, usually adopted as 

 supplementary to the first, is that of dragging sledges over these 

 glacial accumulations. The pitiful rate of progress thus attainable is 

 shown by the record of the last attempt, when Commander Markhani 

 achieved about one mile per day, and the labor of doing this was 

 nearly fatal to his men. Any tourist who has crossed or ascended 

 an Alpine glacier with only a knapsack to carry, can understand the 



