1.- Robert Barlett in "The last voyage of the Karluk"
Call it love of adventure if you will; it seems to me the life that ought to appeal to any man with red blood in his veins, for as long as there is a square mile of the old earth's surface that is unexplored, man will want to seek out that spot and find out all about it and bring back word of what he finds. Some people call the search for the North Pole a sporting event;to me it represents the unconquerable aspiration of mankind to attain an ideal.
2.- Apsley Cherry - Garrard
"Dante was right when he placed the ice circles below the circles of fire"
3.- Ferdinand Von Wrangel about the SIberian TUndra
"Dante was right when he placed the ice circles below the circles of fire"
3.- Ferdinand Von Wrangel about the SIberian TUndra
Nothing can be more melancholy than the aspect of the tundra, where, says Wrangel, endless snows and ice-covered rocks bound the horizon, nature lies shrouded in all but perpetual winter, and life is an unending struggle with privation and with the terrors of cold and hunger ; where the people, and even the snow, emit a constant smoke, and this evaporation is immediately changed into millions of icy needles, which make a noise in the air like the crackling of thick silk ; where the reindeer crowd together for the sake of the warmth derivable from such contiguity ; and only the raven, the dark bird of winter, cleaves the sombre sky with slow-laboring wing, and marks the track of his solitary flight by a long line of thin vapor.4.- Answer received by Ransmussen by his guide Aua after asking him about his beliefs:
5.- William Edward Parry seems to have a very particular feeling about the arctic silence. during the winter of 1819 he wrote:
"The smoke which there issued from the several fires, alfording a certain indication of the presence of man, gave a partial cheerfulness to this part of the prospect, and the sound of voices which, during the cold weather, could be heard at a much greater distance than usual, served now and then to break the silence which reigned around us, a silence far different from that peaceable composure which characterizes the landscape of a cultivated country ; it was the death-like stillness of the most dreary desolation, and the total absence of animated existence."
Then again, during his third expedition he wrote the 24th of october of 1824 the following:
"In the very silence there is a deadness with wich a human spectator seems out of keeping"
"In the very silence there is a deadness with wich a human spectator seems out of keeping"
6.- This was writen by Willia Beechey in Magdalena Bay in Spitzsbergen on board of the Trent comanded by Franklin in june of 1818.
"...there was a stillness which bordered the sublime-a stillness which was interrupted only by the bursting of an iceberg, or the report of some fragment of rock loosened from its hold. These sounds, indeed, which came booming over the placid surface of the bay, could hardly be considered interruptions to the general silence, for, speedily dying away in the distance, they left behind a stillness even more profound than before"
7.- Russell Potter describing the Daguerrotypes of the men of the Franklin expedition:
" It is that odd solitude -- the awareness that every photograph is both oddly living -- preserving the gaze of the subject in a way that almost seems, wizard-like, to peer back at you out of its frame -- and yet announcing, without even having to say so, the ultimate mortality of us all -- that makes the Franklin daguerreotypes especially rich. Every one of them is a window, and a tombstone.
Which makes, I suppose, the mounting at Matlock a sort of cemetery, ranked in rows. "
8.- Rev. W.L.Gage D.D. De "Our lost Explorers the Narrative of the Jeannette Arctic expedition":
" Las historias de guerras y batallas traen a la luz mucha valentía, mucha resistencia, y a menudo también mucha grandeza de espíritu, pero éste testimonio está manchado con mucho derramamiento de sangre y crueldad, que no pocas veces parece más una transcripción de las más básicas pasiones humanas que de coraje heroico y nobles logros."
9.-" No middle road. It was cold or hot; it was night or day; it was stunningly calm or terrifyingly violent. Home. "
Jerry Kobalenko.
10.-" The dead don't feel the cold. " Moritz Stygge - Jens Munk expedition 1619-20.
"But if either by the Northeast, Northwest or North a passage be open, the sight of the globe easily sheweth with how much ease, inhow little time and expense the same might be affected, the large lines or meridians under the line, containing six hundred miles, contracting themshelves proportionably as they grow nearer the polewhere the vast line, the circunference itself becomes, (as the whole earth to heaven, and all earthly things to heavenly) no line any more, but a point, but nothing but Vanitie."
12. Heinrich Klutschak
"The silence had become tangible, perceptible; it settled the rock on which I sat; it settled on the river, On the ridges, and and everywhere. It had ceased to represent the negative significance of the non-presence of noise and, as the polar traveller Dr L.I. Hayes had So strikingly commented, it had emerged as a positive force. It reflects the majestic scale and magnificence of this region; it embraces its desolation and loneliness; in the fullest meaning of the words it is the'terrible silence of the polar night."
13. Godfred Hansen. Amundsen 1903-6 Northwest passage
Godfred Hansen and Per Ristvedt, members of Amundsen expedition to the Northwest passage, performed an impressive sledge trip with twelve dogs from Gjoa Haven to Victoria island during the spring of 1905. They found a Cairn in the Collinson peninsula which was allegedly built by Rae. Could it have belonged to the Franklin expedition?
I haven't read Rae's narrative of his journey in 1851 to Victoria island but there must be no doubts this cairn was his, since Amundsen doesn,t doubt it at any point.
Anyway, Hansen reflections about cairns are worth of being shared here:
"... we perceived near the other coast an island, with a very peculiar erection, like a cairn, at the highest point. This, of course, had to be investigated more closely.
The Eskimo do not build such cairns, they merely place single stones on the top of one another. This one, however looked quite monumental. .../...
I have always had an objection to this work of demolition. Cairns, miserable stoneheaps though they be, are signs of human beings, human work, in the midst of the wild deserts. But that is not all. One's hesitation to take it down is due to one's veneration for the men who have been there before. The cairns meant something to them, just the same as those we erect have a meaning for ourselves.
Some difficulty surmounted, some step forward towards a goal.They leave a trace of our wanderings that is to endure for centuries, when the snow has long since melted from under the sledge tracks and when our names have disappeared like the melting snow. They are a trophy of victory impressed upon land, won from darkness, from the spirits of evil.
But the cairn had to come down. We had to see if it contained anything, perhaps a message from our brave precursor, Rae.
We found nothing, however."
