The Man Without a Country, and Other Tales by Edward Everett Hale (the little red hen ebook txt) 📗

Lieutenant Pim started with a sledge and seven men, and a dog-sledge with two under Dr. Domville, the surgeon, who was to bring back the earliest news from the Bay of Mercy to the captain. There was a relief sledge to go part way and return. For the intense cold of this early season they had even more careful arrangements than those we have described. Their tent was doubled. They had extra Mackintoshes, and whatever else could be devised. They had bad luck at starting,—broke down one sledge and had to send back for another; had bad weather, and [pg 152] must encamp, once for three days. "Fortunately," says the lieutenant of this encampment, "the temperature arose from fifty-one below zero to thirty-six below, and there remained," while the drift accumulated to such a degree around the tents, that within them the thermometer was only twenty below, and, when they cooked, rose to zero. A pleasant time of it they must have had there on the ice, for those three days, in their bags smoking and sleeping! No wonder that on the fourth day they found they moved slowly, so cramped and benumbed were they. This morning a new sledge came to them from the ship; they got out of their bags, packed, and got under way again. They were still running along shore, but soon sent back the relief party which had brought the new sled, and in a few days more set out to cross the strait, some twenty-five to thirty miles wide, which, when it is open, as no man has ever seen it, is one of the Northwest Passages discovered by these expeditions.

Horrible work it was! Foggy and dark, so they could not choose the road, and, as it happened, lit on the very worst mass of broken ice in the channel. Just as they entered on it, one black raven must needs appear. "Bad luck," said the men. And when Mr. Pim shot a musk-ox, their first, and the wounded creature got away, "So much for the raven," they croaked again. Only three miles the first day, four miles the second day, two and a half the third, and half a mile the fourth; this was all they gained by [pg 153] most laborious hauling over the broken ice, dragging one sledge at a time, and sometimes carrying forward the stores separately and going back for the sledges. Two days more gave them eight miles more, but on the seventh day on this narrow strait, the dragging being a little better, the great sledge slipped off a smooth hummock, broke one runner to smash, and "there they were."

If the two officers had a little bit of a "tiff" out there on the ice, with the thermometer at eighteen below, only a little dog-sledge to get them anywhere, their ship a hundred miles off, fourteen days' travel as they had come, nobody ever knew it; they kept their secret from us, it is nobody's business, and it is not to be wondered at. Certainly they did not agree. The Doctor, whose sled, the "James Fitzjames," was still sound, thought they had best leave the stores and all go back; but the Lieutenant, who had the command, did not like to give it up, so he took the dogs and the "James Fitzjames" and its two men and went on, leaving the Doctor on the floe, but giving him directions to go back to land with the wounded sledge and wait for him to return. And the Doctor did it, like a spirited fellow, travelling back and forth for what he could not take in one journey, as the man did in the story who had a peck of corn, a goose, and a wolf to get across the river. Over ice, over hummock the Lieutenant went on his way with his dogs, not a bear nor a seal nor a hare nor a wolf to feed them with: [pg 154] preserved meats, which had been put up with dainty care for men and women, all he had for the ravenous, tasteless creatures, who would have been more pleased with blubber, came to Banks Land at last, but no game there; awful drifts; shut up in the tent for a whole day, and he himself so sick he could scarcely stand! There were but three of them in all; and the captain of the sledge not unnaturally asked poor Pim, when he was at the worst, "What shall I do, sir, if you die?" Not a very comforting question!

He did not die. He got a few hours' sleep, felt better and started again, but had the discouragement of finding such tokens of an open strait the last year that he felt sure that the ship he was going to look for would be gone. One morning, he had been off for game for the dogs unsuccessfully, and, when he came back to his men, learned that they had seen seventeen deer. After them goes Pim; finds them to be three hares, magnified by fog and mirage, and their long ears answering for horns. This same day they got upon the Bay of Mercy. No ship in sight! Right across it goes the Lieutenant to look for records; when, at two in the afternoon, Robert Hoile sees something black up the bay. Through the glass the Lieutenant makes it out to be a ship. They change their direction at once. Over the ice towards her! He leaves the sledge at three and goes on. How far it seems! At four he can see people walking about, and a pile of stones and flag-staff on the beach. Keep on, [pg 155] Pim; shall one never get there? At five he is within a hundred yards of her, and no one has seen him. But just then the very persons see him who ought to! Pim beckons, waves his arms as the Esquimaux do in sign of friendship. Captain McClure and his lieutenant Haswell are "taking their exercise," the chief business of those winters, and at last see him! Pim is black as Erebus from the smoke of cooking in the little tent. McClure owns, not to surprise only, but to a twinge of dismay. "I paused in my advance," says he, "doubting who or what it could be, a denizen of this or the other world." But this only lasts a moment. Pim speaks. Brave man that he can. How his voice must have choked, as if he were in a dream. "I am Lieutenant Pim, late of 'Herald.' Captain Kellett is at Melville Island." Well-chosen words, Pim, to be sent in advance over the hundred yards of floe! Nothing about the "Resolute,"—that would have confused them. But "Pim," "Herald," and "Kellett" were among the last signs of England they had seen,—all this was intelligible. An excellent little speech, which the brave man had been getting ready, perhaps, as one does a telegraphic despatch, for the hours that he had been walking over the floe to her. Then such shaking hands, such a greeting. Poor McClure could not speak at first. One of the men at work got the news on board; and up through the hatches poured everybody, sick and well, to see the black stranger, and to hear his [pg 156] news from England. It was nearly three years since they had seen any civilized man but themselves.

The 28th of July, three years before, Commander McClure had sent his last despatch to the Admiralty. He had then prophesied just what in three years he had almost accomplished. In the winter of 1850 he had discovered the Northwest Passage. He had come round into one branch of it, Banks Straits, in the next summer; had gladly taken refuge on the Bay of Mercy in a gale; and his ship had never left it since. Let it be said, in passing, that most likely she is there now. In his last despatches he had told the Admiralty not to be anxious about him if he did not arrive home before the autumn of 1854. As it proved, that autumn he did come with all his men, except those whom he had sent home before, and those who had died. When Pim found them, all the crew but thirty were under orders for marching, some to Baffin's Bay, some to the Mackenzie River, on their return to England. McClure was going to stay with the rest, and come home with the ship, if they could; if not, by sledges to Port Leopold, and so by a steam-launch which he had seen left there for Franklin in 1849. But the arrival of Mr. Pim put an end to all these plans. We have his long despatch to the Admiralty explaining them, finished only the day before Pim arrived. It gives the history of his three years' exile from the world,—an exile crowded full of effective work,—in a record which gives a noble picture of the [pg 157] man. The Queen has made him Sir Robert Le Mesurier McClure since, in honor of his great discovery.

Banks Land, or Baring Island, the two names belong to the same island, on the shores of which McClure and his men had spent most of these two years or more, is an island on which they were first of civilized men to land. For people who are not very particular, the measurement of it which we gave before, namely, that it is about the size and shape of Ireland, is precise enough. There is high land in the interior probably, as the winds from in shore are cold. The crew found coal and dwarf willow which they could burn; lemmings, ptarmigan, hares, reindeer, and musk-oxen, which they could eat.