Part 23 (1/2)
Immediately after the _Vega_ lay-to, I therefore went down on the ice in order to see whether here too some such metalliferous dust, as I had before found north of Spitzbergen, was not to be found on the surface of the ice. Nothing of the kind, however, was to be seen. On the other hand, Lieutenant Nordquist observed small yellow specks in the snow, which I asked him to collect and hand over for investigation to Dr. Kjellman. For I supposed that the specks consisted of diatom ooze. After examining them Dr. Kjellman however declared that they did not consist of any organic substance, but of crystallised grains of sand. I too now examined them more closely, but unfortunately not until the morning after we had left the ice-field, and then found that the supposed ooze consisted of pale yellow crystals (not fragments of crystals) without mixture of foreign matter. The quant.i.ty of crystals, which were obtained from about three litres of snow, skimmed from the surface of the snow on an area of at most 10 square metres, amounted to nearly 0.2 gram.
The crystals were found only near the surface of the snow, not in the deeper layers. They were up to 1 mm. in diameter, had the appearance shown in the accompanying woodcut, and appeared to belong to the rhombic system, as they had one perfect cleavage and formed striated prisms terminated at either end by truncated pyramids.
Unfortunately I could not make any actual measurements of them, because after being kept for some time in the air they weathered to a white non-crystalline powder. They lay, without being sensibly dissolved, for a whole night in the water formed by the melting of the snow. On being heated, too, they fell asunder into a tasteless white powder. The white powder, that was formed by the weathering of the crystals, was a.n.a.lysed after our return--21 months after the discovery of the crystals--and was found to contain only carbonate of lime.
[Ill.u.s.tration: FORM OF THE CRYSTALS. Found on the ice off the Taimur coast. Magnified thirty to forty times. ]
The original composition and origin of this substance appears to me exceedingly enigmatical. It was not common carbonate of lime, for the crystals were rhombohedral and did not show the cleavage of calcite. Nor can there be a question of its being arragonite, because this mineral might indeed fall asunder ”of itself,” but in that case the newly-formed powder ought to be crystalline. Have the crystals originally been a new hydrated carbonate of lime, formed by crystallising out of the sea-water in intense cold, and then losing its water at a temperature of 10 or 20 above the freezing-point? In such a case they ought not to have been found on the surface of the _snow_, but lower down on the surface of the _ice_. Or have they fallen down from the inter-planetary s.p.a.ces to the surface of the earth, and before crumbling down have had a composition differing from terrestrial substances in the same way as various chemical compounds found in recent times in meteoric stones? The occurrence of the crystals in the uppermost layer of snow and their felling asunder in the air, tell in favour of this view. Unfortunately there is now no possibility of settling these questions, but at all events this discovery is a further incitement to those who travel in the High North to collect with extreme care, from snow-fields lying far from the ordinary routes of communication, all foreign substances, though apparently of trifling importance.
As this question can be answered with the greatest ease and certainty by investigations in the Polar regions, I shall here, for the guidance of future travellers, enumerate some discoveries of a like nature which have been made by me, or at my instance.
1. In the beginning of December, 1871, there happened at Stockholm an exceedingly heavy fall of snow, perhaps the heaviest which has taken place in the memory of man. Several persons perished in the snow in the immediate neighbourhood of Stockholm. During the last days of the snowfall I had about a cubic metre of snow collected and melted in a vessel. It left a residue of black powder, which contained grains of metallic iron that were attracted by the magnet.
2. In the middle of March, 1872, a similar investigation was made by my brother, KARL NORDENSKIoLD, in a remote forest settlement, Evois, in Finland. Here, too, was obtained, on the melting of the snow, a small residuum, consisting of a black powder containing metallic iron.
[Ill.u.s.tration: SECTION OF THE UPPER PART OF THE SNOW ON A DRIFT-ICE FIELD IN 60 N.L. One-half the natural size. ]
3. On the 8th August and 2nd September of the same year, I examined, north of Spitzbergen, in 80 N.L., and 13 to 15 E.L., the layer of snow that there covered the ice. The nature of this layer is shown by the accompanying woodcut, in which 1, is new-fallen snow; 2, a layer of hardened old snow, eight mm. in thickness; 3, a layer of snow conglomerated to a crystalline granular ma.s.s; and 4, common granular hardened snow. Layer 3 was full of small black grains, among which were found numerous metallic particles that were attracted by the magnet, and were found to contain iron, cobalt, and possibly nickel also.
4. On the melting of 500 gram. hail, which fell in Stockholm in the autumn of 1873, similar metallic particles containing cobalt (nickel) were obtained, which, in this case, might possibly have come from the neighbouring roofs, because the hail was collected in a yard surrounded by houses roofed with sheet-iron painted red. The black colour of the metallic particles enclosed in the hail, their position in the hail, and finally, the cobalt they contained, however, indicate in this case too, a quite different origin.
5. In a dust (kryokonite), collected on the inland ice of Greenland in the month of July, 1870, there were also found mixed with it grains of metallic iron, containing cobalt. The main ma.s.s consisted of a crystalline, double-refracting silicate, drenched through with an ill-smelling organic substance. The dust was found in large quant.i.ties at the bottom of innumerable small holes in the surface of the inland ice. This dust could scarcely be of volcanic origin, because by its crystalline structure it differs completely from the gla.s.s-dust that is commonly thrown out of volcanoes, and is often carried by the wind to very remote regions, as also from the dust which, on the 30th March, 1875, fell at many places in the middle of Scandinavia, and which was proved to have been thrown out by volcanoes on Iceland. For, while kryokonite consists of small angular double-refracting crystal-fragments without any mixture of particles of gla.s.s, the volcanic Haga-dust[191] consists almost wholly of small microscopic gla.s.s bubbles that have no action on the polarisation-planes of the light that pa.s.ses through them.
Similar investigations have since been made, among others, by M.
TISSANDIER in Paris, and during NARES' English Polar Expedition.
It may appear to many that it is below the dignity of science to concern one's self with so trifling an affair as the fall of a small quant.i.ty of dust. But this is by no means the case. For I estimate the quant.i.ty of the dust that was found on the ice north of Spitzbergen at from 0.1 to 1 milligram per square metre, and probably the whole fall of dust for the year far exceeded the latter figure. But a milligram on every square metre of the surface of the earth amounts for the whole globe to five hundred million kilograms (say half a million tons)! Such a ma.s.s collected year by year during the geological ages, of a duration probably incomprehensible by us, forms too important a factor to be neglected, when the fundamental facts of the geological history of our planet are enumerated. A continuation of these investigations will perhaps show, that our globe has increased gradually from a small beginning to the dimensions it now possesses; that a considerable quant.i.ty of the const.i.tuents of our sedimentary strata, especially of those that have been deposited in the open sea far from land, are of cosmic origin; and will throw an unexpected light on the origin of the fire-hearths of the volcanoes, and afford a simple explanation of the remarkable resemblance which unmistakably exists between plutonic rocks and meteoric stones.[192]
On the 14th August, when the fog had lightened a little, we got up steam, but were soon compelled to anchor again in a bay running into Taimur Island from the north side of Taimur Sound, which I named Actinia Bay, from the large number of actinia which the dredge brought up there. It is, besides, not the only place in the Kara Sea which might be named from the evertebrate life prevailing there, so unexpectedly abundant.
[Ill.u.s.tration: GRa.s.s FROM ACTINIA BAY. _Pleuropogon Sabini_, R. BR. ]
Unfavourable weather detained us in Actinia Bay, which is a good and well-protected haven, till the 18th August, during which time excursions were made in various directions, among others farther into Taimur Sound, where a variable strong current was found to prevail. The Sound is too shallow to be pa.s.sed through by large vessels. The rocks round Taimur Sound consist of gneiss strata, which form low ridges that have been so shattered by the frost that they have been converted into immense lichen-clad stone mounds.
Between these stretch extensive valleys and plains, now free of snow, if we except a snow-drift remaining here and there in the hollows. The plains were all covered with a very green continuous vegetation, which however on a closer examination was found to be not a true turf, but a mixture of gra.s.ses, allied plants, and a large number of different kinds of mosses and lichens. Actual flowers were found here only sparingly.[193] In this respect the coast _tundra_ shows a remarkable difference from the coast lands on Vaygats Island and Novaya Zemlya. On the other hand, the abundance of luxuriant lichens and mosses was striking. The mosses along the beach and the borders of the snow-drifts remaining here and there bore fruit in abundance. Animal life on land was scanty; some few reindeer were seen, a mountain fox was killed, and a lemming caught.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Sketch-Map of Taimur Sound; Map of Actinia Bay, both by G. Bove. ]
Only the following birds were seen: owls (_Strix nyctea_) rather numerous, of which one was killed; a species of falcon, which was hunted unsuccessfully; snow buntings, breeding very generally in the stone mounds; a covey of snow ptarmigan, of which some young birds were shot; six species of waders, the most common birds of the region, of which a large number were shot; two kinds of gulls (_Larus glaucus_ and _tridactylus_); _Lestris parasitica_ and _Buffonii_, the latter the more common of the two; _Anser bernicla_, very common; and finally the long-tailed duck (_Harelda glacialis_) in great flocks swimming in the Sound. Bird life, viewed as a whole, was still scanty here, in comparison with that which we were accustomed to see in the northern regions west of Novaya Zemlya.
In the sea the higher animal life was somewhat more abundant. A walrus had been seen during the pa.s.sage from the Yenisej, and on the ice drifting about in the Sound a number of seals, both _Phoca barbata_ and _Phoca hispida_, were observed. This gave rise to the supposition that at the sea-bottom animal life was richer, which was also confirmed by the dredging yield. Nowhere was seen on our arrival any trace of man, but a cairn now indicates the place, off which the _Vega_ and the _Lena_ were anch.o.r.ed.
In this sea never before visited by any vessel, however, we were nearly coming in contact with a countryman. For while we lay at anchor in Taimur Sound, Captain Edward Johannesen came into the neighbourhood of the same place with his sailing vessel _Nordland_ from Tromsoe. He had left Norway on the 22nd May 1878, had come to Gooseland in Novaya Zemlya on the 6th June, and had reached the northernmost point of that island on the 22nd July. Here loud thunder was heard on the 26th July. On the 10th August he steered eastwards from Novaya Zemlya across the Kara Sea between 76 and 77 N.L. in open water. On the 16th he had the Taimur country in sight. Here he turned, and steered first to the west, then to the north. In 77 31' N.L. and 86 E.L. from Greenwich he discovered and circ.u.mnavigated a new island, which was named ”Ensamheten” (Solitude).
The island was free of snow, but not overgrown with gra.s.s. The animals that were seen were some bears and bearded seals, terns, fulmars, ivory gulls, flocks of black guillemots, and a ”bird with a rounded tail and long bill,” probably some wader. On the north-east side of the island a strong northerly current prevailed. The remote position and desolate appearance of the island gave occasion to the name proposed by Johannesen. Hence Johannesen sailed with a great bend to the north, which brought him to 78 N.L., back to the northern extremity of Novaya Zemlya, and thence on the 12th September to Norway. During the return voyage across the Kara Sea also scarcely any ice was met with.[194]
An exceedingly persistent fog prevailed during the whole of the time we remained here, but at last on the 18th it lightened a little. We immediately weighed anchor and steamed along the western sh.o.r.e of Taimur Island. It is surrounded by a large number of islands that are not given on the map, and possibly Taimur Island itself is divided by sounds into several parts. During our voyage, however, the fog that was still very close hindered us from mapping, otherwise than in a very loose way, the islands, large and small, between and past which the _Vega_ searched for a pa.s.sage. So much we could in any case see, that the northern extremity of Taimur Island does not run so far north as the common maps show.
Ice we met with only in small quant.i.ty, and what we saw was very rotten fjord or river ice. I scarcely believe that in the course of the day we met with a single piece of ice large enough to flense a seal upon. We had as yet seen no true old drift-ice such as is to be met with north of Spitzbergen. In respect to the nature of the ice, there is a complete dissimilarity between the Kara Sea and the sea north and east of Spitzbergen. Another striking difference is the scarcity of warm-blooded animals which prevails in this region, hitherto exempted from all hunting. In the course of the day we had not seen a single bird--something which never before happened to me during a summer journey in the Arctic regions--and scarcely any seals.
On the 19th August we continued to sail and steam along the coast, mostly in a very close fog, which only at intervals dispersed so much that the lie of the coast could be made out. In order that they might not be separated, both vessels had often to signal to each other with the steam-whistle. The sea was bright as a mirror.
Drift-ice was seen now and then, but only in small quant.i.ty and very rotten; but in the course of the day we steamed past an extensive unbroken ice-field, fast to the land, which occupied a bay on the west side of the Chelyuskin peninsula. The ice, of which it consisted, appeared in the mist immensely rough and high, although in fact it was nearly as rotten as that of which the narrow belts of ice were formed which we now and then met with out at sea.
The fog prevented all view far across the ice, and I already feared that the northernmost promontory of Asia would be so surrounded with ice that we could not land upon it. But soon a dark, ice-free cape peeped out of the mist in the north-east. A bay open to the north here cuts into the land, and in this bay both the vessels anch.o.r.ed on the 19th August at 6 o'clock p.m.
We had now reached a great goal, which for centuries had been the object of unsuccessful struggles. For the first time a vessel lay at anchor off the northernmost cape of the old world. No wonder then that the occurrence was celebrated by a display of flags and the firing of salutes, and, when we returned from our excursion on land, by festivities on board, by wine and toasts.