The Sea: Its Stirring Story of Adventure, Peril, & Heroism (Vol. 1-4). Frederick Whymper
Thanks to Defoe, he lived to find himself so famous, that he could hardly have grudged the time spent in his solitary sojourn with his dumb companions and man Friday. Alas! the romance which enveloped Juan Fernandez has somewhat dimmed. For a brief time it was a Chilian penal colony, and after sundry vicissitudes, was a few years ago leased to a merchant, who kept cattle to sell to whalers and passing ships, and also went seal-hunting on a neighbouring islet. He was “monarch of all he surveyed”—lord of an island over a dozen miles long and five or six broad, with cattle, and herds of wild goats, and capital fishing all round—all for two hundred a year! Fancy this, ye sportsmen, who pay as much or more for the privileges of a barren moor! Yet the merchant was not satisfied with his venture, and, at the time of the Challenger’s visit, was on the point of abandoning it: by this time it is probably to let. Excepting the cattle dotted about the foot of the hills and a civilised house or two, the appearance of the island must be precisely the same now as when the piratical buccaneers of olden time made it their rendezvous and haunt wherefrom to dash out and harry the Spaniards; the same to-day as when Alexander Selkirk lived in it as its involuntary monarch; the same to-day as when Commodore Anson arrived with his scurvy-stricken “crazy ship, a great scarcity of water, and a crew so universally diseased that there were not above ten foremast-men in a watch capable of doing duty,” and recruited them with fresh meat, vegetables, and wild fruits.
THE “CHALLENGER” AT JUAN FERNANDEZ.
“The scenery,” writes Lord George Campbell, “is grand: gloomy and wild enough on the dull, stormy day on which we arrived, clouds driving past and enveloping the highest ridge of the mountain, a dark-coloured sea pelting against the steep cliffs and shores, and clouds of sea-birds swaying in great flocks to and fro over the water; but cheerful and beautiful on the bright sunny morning which followed—so beautiful that I thought, ‘This beats Tahiti!’ ” The anchorage of the Challenger was in Cumberland Bay, a deep-water inlet from which rises a semi-circle of high land, with two bold headlands, “sweeping brokenly up thence to the highest ridge—a square-shaped, craggy, precipitous mass of rock, with trees clinging to its sides to near the summit. The spurs of these hills are covered with coarse grass or moss. … Down the beds of the small ravines run burns, overgrown by dock-leaves of enormous size, and the banks are clothed with a rich vegetation of dark-leaved myrtle, bignonia, and winter-bark, tree-shrubs, with tall grass, ferns, and flowering plants. And as you lie there, humming-birds come darting and thrumming within reach of your stick, flitting from flower to flower, which dot blue and white the foliage of bignonias and myrtles. And on the steep grassy slopes above the sea-cliffs herds of wild goats are seen quietly browsing—quietly, that is, till they scent you, when they are off—as wild as chamois.” This is indeed a description of a rugged paradise!
Near the ship they found splendid, but laborious, cod-fishing; laborious on account of sharks playing with the bait, and treating the stoutest lines as though made of single gut; also on account of the forty-fathom depth these cod-fish lived in. Cray-fish and conger-eels were hauled up in lobster-pots by dozens, while round the ship’s sides flashed shoals of cavalli, fish that are caught by a hook with a piece of worsted tied roughly on, swished over the surface, giving splendid play with a rod. “And on shore, too, there was something to be seen and done. There was Selkirk’s ‘look-out’ to clamber up the hill-side to—the spot where tradition says he watched day after day for a passing sail, and from whence he could look down on both sides of his island home, over the wooded slopes, down to the cliff-fringed shore, on to the deserted ocean’s expanse.”
The Challenger, in its cruise of over three years, naturally visited many oft-described ports and settlements with which we shall have nought to do. After a visit to Kerguelen’s Land—“the Land of Desolation,” as Captain Cook called it—in the Southern Indian Ocean, for the purpose of selecting a spot for the erection of an observatory, from whence the transit of Venus should be later observed, they proceeded to Heard Island, the position of which required determining with more accuracy. They anchored, in the evening, in a bay of this most gloomy and utterly desolate place, where they found half-a-dozen wretched sealers living in two miserable huts near the beach, which were sunk into the ground for warmth and protection against the fierce winds. Their work is to kill and boil down sea-elephants. One of the men had been there for two years, and was going to stay another. They are left on the island every year by the schooners, which go sealing or whaling elsewhere. Some forty men were on the island, unable to communicate with each other by land, as the interior is entirely covered with glacier, like Greenland. They have barrels of salt pork, beef, and a small store of coals, and little else, and are wretchedly paid. “Books,” says Lord Campbell, “tell us that these sea-elephants grow to the length of twenty-four feet; but the sealers did not confirm this at all. One of us tried hard to make the Scotch mate say he had seen one eighteen feet long; but ‘waull, he couldn’t say.’ Sixteen feet? ‘Waull, he couldn’t say.’ Fourteen feet? ‘Waull, yes, yes—something more like that;’ but thirteen feet would seem a fair average size. … One of our fellows bought a clever little clay model of two men killing a sea-elephant, giving for it—he being an extravagant man—one pound and a bottle of rum. This pound was instantly offered to the servants outside in exchange for another bottle.”
Crossing the Antarctic Circle, they were soon among the icebergs, keeping a sharp look-out for Termination Land, which has been marked on charts as a good stretch of coast seen by Wilkes, of the American expedition, thirty years before. To make a long story short, Captain Nares, after a careful search, un-discovered this discovery, finding no traces of the land. It was probably a long stretch of ice, or possibly a mirage, which phenomenon has deceived many a sailor before. John Ross once thought that he had discovered some grand mountains in the Arctic regions, which he named after the then First Lord of the Admiralty, Croker. Next year Parry sailed over the site of the supposed range; and the “Croker” Mountains became a standing joke against Ross.
“THE CHALLENGER” IN ANTARCTIC ICE.
Icebergs of enormous size were encountered; several of three miles in length and two hundred feet or more in height were seen one day, all close together. But bergs of this calibre were exceptional; they were, however, very often over half a mile in length. “There are few people now alive,” says the author we have recently quoted, “who have seen such superb Antarctic iceberg scenery as we have. We are steaming towards the supposed position of land, only some thirty miles distant, over a glass-like sea, unruffled by a breath of wind; past great masses of ice, grouped so close together in some cases as to form an unbroken wall of cliff several miles in length. Then, as we pass within a few hundred yards, the chain breaks up into two or three separate bergs, and one sees—and beautifully from the mast-head—the blue sea and distant horizon between perpendicular walls of glistening alabaster white, against which the long swell dashes, rearing up in great blue-green heaps, falling back in a torrent of rainbow-flashing spray, or goes roaring into the azure caverns, followed immediately by a thundering thud, as the compressed air within buffets it back again in a torrent of seething white foam.” Neither words adequately describe the beauty of many of the icebergs seen. One had three high arched caverns penetrating far to its interior; another had a large tunnel through which they could see the horizon. The delicate colouring of these bergs is most lovely—sweeps of azure blue and pale sea-green with dazzling white; glittering, sparkling crystal merging into depths of indigo blue; stalactite icicles hanging from the walls and roofs of cavernous openings. The reader will imagine the beauty of the scene at sunrise and sunset, when as many as eighty or ninety bergs were sometimes in sight. The sea was intensely green from the presence of minute algæ, through belts of which the vessel passed, while the sun, sinking in a golden blaze, tipped and lighted up the ice and snow, making them sparkle as with brightest gems. A large number of tabular icebergs, with quantities of snow on their level tops, were met. They amused themselves by firing a 9-pounder Armstrong at one, which brought the ice down with a rattling crash, the face of the berg cracking, splitting, and splashing down with a roar, making the water below white with foam and powdered ice. These icebergs were all stratified, at more or less regular