Part 17

A similar cause retards the _beginning_ of summer in Arctic Norway and in Finland and Siberia. So long as the winter snow remains unmelted, _i.e._, till about the middle or end of June, the air is kept cold, all the solar heat being expended in the work of thawing. This work finished, then the warming power of a non-setting sun becomes evident, and the continuously accumulating heat of his rays displays its remarkable effect on vegetable life, and everything capable of being warmed. These peculiarities of Arctic climate must become exaggerated as the Pole is approached, the winter cold still more intense, and the accumulation of summer heat still greater. In the neighborhood of the North Cape, where these contrasts astonish English visitors, where inland summer traveling becomes intolerable on account of the clouds of mosquitoes, the continuous sunshine only lasts from May 11 to August 1. At the North Pole the sun would visibly remain above the horizon during about seven months—from the first week in March to the first week in October (this includes the effect of refraction and the prolonged summer of the northern hemisphere due to the eccentricity of the earth’s orbit).

This continuance of sunshine, in spite of the moderate altitude of the solar orb, may produce a very genial summer climate at the Pole. I say “may,” because mere latitude is only one of the elements of climate, especially in high latitudes. Very much depends upon surface configuration and the distribution of land and water. The region in which our Arctic expedition ships have been ice-bound combines all the most unfavorable conditions of Arctic summer climate. It is extremely improbable that those conditions are maintained all the way to the Pole. We know the configuration of Arctic Europe and Arctic Asia, that they are masses of land spreading out northward round the Arctic circle and narrowing southward to angular terminations. The southward configuration and northward outspreading of North America are the same, but we cannot follow the northern portion to its boundary as we may that of Europe and Asia, both of which terminate in an Arctic Ocean. Greenland is remarkably like Scandinavia; Davis’s Strait, Baffin’s Bay, and Smith’s Sound corresponding with the Baltic and the Gulf of Bothnia. The deep fjords of Greenland, like those of Scandinavia, are on its western side, and the present condition of Greenland corresponds to that of Norway during the milder period of the last glacial epoch. If the analogy is maintained a little further north than our explorers have yet reached we must come upon a Polar sea, just as we come upon the White Sea and the open Arctic Ocean if we simply travel between 400 and 500 miles due north from the head of the frozen Gulf of Bothnia.

Such a sea, if unencumbered with land ice, will supply the most favorable conditions for a genial arctic summer, especially if it be dotted with islands of moderate elevation, which the analogies of the known surroundings render so very probable. Such islands may be inhabited by people who cannot reach us on account of the barrier wall that has hitherto prevented us from discovering them. Some have even supposed that a Norwegian colony is there imprisoned. Certainly the early colonists of Greenland have disappeared, and their disappearance remains unexplained. They may have wandered northwards, mingled with the Esquimaux, and have left descendants in this unknown world. If any of Franklin’s crew crawled far enough they may still be with them, unable to return.

In reference to these possibilities it should be noted that a barrier fringe of mountainous land like that of Greenland and arctic America would act as a condensing ground upon the warm air flowing from the south, and would there accumulate the heavy snows and consequent glaciers, just as our western hills take so much of the rain from the vapor-laden winds of the Atlantic. The snowfall immediately round the Pole would thus be moderated, and the summer begin so much earlier.

I have already referred to the physical resemblances of Baffin’s Bay, Smith’s Sound, etc., to the Baltic, the Gulf of Bothnia, and Gulf of Finland. These are frozen every winter, but the Arctic Ocean due north of them is open all the winter, and every winter. The hardy Norse fishermen are gathering their chief harvest of cod fish in the open sea around and beyond the North Cape, Nordkyn, etc., at the very time when the Russian fleet is hopelessly frozen up in the Gulf of Finland. But how far due north of this frozen Baltic are these open-sea fishing banks? More than 14 degrees—more than double the distance that lies between the winter quarters of some of our ships in Smith’s Sound and the Pole itself. This proves how greatly physical configuration and oceanic communication may oppose the climatic influences of mere latitude. If the analogy between Baffin’s Bay and the Baltic is complete, a Polar sea will be found that is open in the summer at least.

On the other hand, it may be that ranges of mountains covered with perpetual snow, and valleys piled up with huge glacial accumulations, extend all the way to the Pole, and thus give to our globe an arctic ice-cap like that displayed on the planet Mars. This, however, is very improbable, for, if it were the case, we ought to find a circumpolar ice-wall like that of the antarctic regions; the Arctic Ocean beyond the North Cape should be crowded with icebergs instead of being open and iceless all the year round. With such a configuration the ice-wall should reach Spitzbergen and stretch across to Nova Zembla; but, instead of this, we have there such an open stretch of arctic water, that in the summer of 1876 Captain Kjelsen, of Tromsö, sailed in a whaler to lat. 81° 30´ without sighting ice. He was then but 510 geographical miles from the Pole, with open sea right away to his north horizon, and nobody can say how much farther.

These problems may all be solved by the proposed expedition. The men are ready and willing; one volunteer has even promised 1000_l._ on condition that he shall be allowed to have a seat in one of the balloons. All that is wanted are the necessary funds, and the amount required is but a small fraction of what is annually expended at our racecourses upon villainous concoctions of carbonic acid and methylated cider bearing the name of “champagne.”

Arrangements are being made to start next May, but in the meantime many preliminary experiments are required. One of these, concerning which I have been boring Commander Cheyne and the committee, is a thorough and practical trial of the staying properties of hydrogen gas when confined in given silken or other fabrics saturated with given varnishes. We are still ignorant on this fundamental point. We know something about coal-gas, but little or nothing of the hydrogen, such as may be used in the foregoing expedition. Its exosmosis, as proved by Graham, depends upon its adhesion to the surface of the substance confining it. Every gas has its own speciality in this respect, and a membrane that confines a hydrocarbon like coal-gas may be very unsuitable for pure hydrogen, or _vice versâ_. Hydrogen passes through hard steel, carbonic oxide through red-hot iron plates, and so on with other gases. They are guilty of most improbable proceedings in the matter of penetrating apparently impenetrable substances.

The safety of the aeronauts and the success of the aerial exploration primarily depends upon the length of time that the balloons can be kept afloat in the air.

A sort of humanitarian cry has been raised against this expedition, on the ground that unnaturally good people (of whom we now meet so many) should not be guilty of aiding and abetting a scheme that may cause the sacrifice of human life. These kind friends may be assured that, in spite of their scruples, the attempt will be made by men who share none of their fears, unless the preliminary experiments prove that a balloon cannot be kept up long enough. Therefore the best way to save their lives is to subscribe _at once_ for the preliminary expense of making these trials, which will either discover means of traveling safely, or demonstrate the impossibility of such ballooning altogether. Such experiments will have considerable scientific value in themselves, and may solve other problems besides those of arctic exploration.

Why not apply balloons to African exploration or the crossing of Australia? The only reply to this is that we know too little of the practical possibilities of such a method of traveling when thus applied. Hitherto the balloon has only been a sensational toy. We know well enough that it cannot be steered in a predetermined _line_, _i.e._, from one _point_ to another given _point_, but this is quite a different problem from sailing over a given _surface of considerable area_. This can be done to a certain extent, but we want to know definitely to what extent, and what are the limits of reliability and safety. With this knowledge, and its application by the brave and skillful men who are so eager to start, the solution of the Polar mystery assumes a new and far more hopeful phase than it has ever before presented.

THE ANGLO-AMERICAN ARCTIC EXPEDITION.

Commander Cheyne has gone to America to seek the modest equipment that his own countrymen are unable to supply. He proposes now that his expedition shall be “Anglo-American.” I have been asked to join an arctic council, to coöperate on this side, and have refused on anti-patriotic grounds. As a member of the former arctic committee, I was so much disgusted with the parsimony of our millionaires and the anti-geographical conduct of the Savile Row Mutual Admiration Society, that I heartily wish that in this matter our American grandchildren may “lick the Britishers quite complete.” It will do us much good.

My views, expressed in the “Gentleman’s Magazine” of July 1880, and repeated above, remain unchanged, except in the direction of confirmation and development. I still believe that an enthusiastic, practically trained, sturdy arctic veteran, who has endured hardship both at home and abroad, whose craving eagerness to reach the Pole amounts to a positive monomania, who lives for this object alone, and is ready to die for it, who will work at it purely for the work’s sake—will be the right man in the right place when at the head of a modestly but efficiently equipped Polar expedition, especially if Lieutenant Schwatka is his second in command.

They will not require luxurious saloons, nor many cases of champagne; they will care but little for amateur theatricals; they will follow the naval traditions of the old British “sea-dogs” rather than those of our modern naval lap-dogs, and will not turn back after a first struggle with the cruel arctic ice, even though they should suppose it to be “paleocrystic.”

MR. WALTER POWELL.

Scientific aerostation has lost its most promising expert by the untimely death of Walter Powell. He was not a mere sensational ballooner, nor one of those dreamers who imagine they can invent flying machines, or steer balloons against the wind by mysterious electrical devices or by mechanical paddles, fan-wheels, or rudders.

He perfectly understood that a balloon is at the mercy of atmospheric currents and must drift with them, but nevertheless he regarded it as a most promising instrument for geographical research. I had a long conference with him on the subject in August last, when he told me that the main objects of the ascents he had already made, and should be making for some little time forward, were the acquisition of practical skill, and of further knowledge of atmospheric currents; after which he should make a dash at the Atlantic with the intent of crossing to America.

On my part, I repeated with further argument what I have already urged on page 113 of the “Gentleman’s Magazine” for July, 1880, viz., the primary necessity of systematic experimental investigation of the rate of exosmosis (oozing out) of the gas from balloons made of different materials and variously varnished.

Professor Graham demonstrated that this molecular permeation of gases and liquids through membranes mechanically air-tight, depends upon the adhesive affinities of particular solids for other particular fluids, and these affinities vary immensely, their variations depending on chemical differences rather than upon mechanical impermeability. My project to attach captive balloons of small size to the roof of the Polytechnic Institution, holding them by a steelyard that should indicate the pull due to their ascending power, and the rate of its decline according to the composition of the membrane, was heartily approved by Mr. Powell, and, had the Polytechnic survived, would have been carried out, as it would have served the double purpose of scientific investigation and of sensational advertisement for the outside public.

If the aeronaut were quite clear on this point—could calculate accurately how long his balloon would float—he might venture with deliberate calculation on journeys that without such knowledge are mere exploits of blind daring.

The varnishes at present used are all permeable by hydrogen gas and hydrocarbon coal-gas, as might be expected, _à priori_, from the fact that they are themselves solid hydrocarbons, soluble in other liquid or gaseous hydrocarbons. Nothing, as far as I can learn, has yet been done with _silicic or boracic varnishes_,[22] which are theoretically impermeable by hydrogen and its carbon compounds; but whether they are practically so under ballooning conditions, and can be made sufficiently pliable and continuous, are questions only to be solved by practical experiments of the kind above named. Now that the best man for making these experiments is gone, somebody else should undertake them. Unfortunately, they must of necessity be rather expensive.

THE LIMITS OF OUR COAL SUPPLY.[23]

Estimating the actual consumption of coal for home use in Great Britain at 110 millions of tons per annum, a rise of eight shillings per ton to consumers is equivalent to a tax of 44 millions per annum. These are the figures taken by Sir William Armstrong in his address at Newcastle last February. As the recent abnormal rise in the value of coal has amounted to more than this, consumers have been paying at some periods above a million per week as premium on fuel, even after making fair deduction for the rise of price necessarily due to the diminishing value of gold.

Are we, the consumers of coal, to write off all this as a dead loss, or have we gained any immediate or prospective advantage that may be deducted from the bad side of the account? I suspect that we shall gain sufficient to ultimately balance the loss, and, even after that, to leave something on the profit side.

The abundance of our fuel has engendered a shameful wastefulness that is curiously blind and inconsistent. As a typical example of this inconsistency, I may mention a characteristic incident. A party of young people were sitting at supper in the house of a colliery manager. Among them was the vicar of the parish, a very jovial and genial man, but most earnest withal in his vocation. Jokes and banterings were freely flung across the table, and no one enjoyed the fun more heartily than the vicar; but presently one unwary youth threw a fragment of bread-crust at his opposite neighbor, and thus provoked retaliation. The countenance of the vicar suddenly changed, and in stern clerical tones he rebuked the wickedness of thus wasting the bounties of the Almighty. A general silence followed, and a general sense of guilt prevailed among the revellers. At the same time, and in the same room, a blazing fire, in an ill-constructed open fire-place, was glaring reproachfully at all the guests, but no one heeded the immeasurably greater and utterly irreparable waste that was there proceeding. To every unit of heat that was fully utilized in warming the room, there were eight or nine passing up the chimney to waste their energies upon the senseless clouds and boundless outer atmosphere. A large proportion of the vicar’s parishioners are colliers, in whose cottages huge fires blaze most wastefully all day, and are left to burn all night to save the trouble of re-lighting. The vicar diligently visits these cottages, and freely admonishes where he deems it necessary; yet he sees in this general waste of coal no corresponding sinfulness to that of wasting bread. Why is he so blind in one direction, while his moral vision is so microscopic in the other? Why are nearly all Englishmen and Englishwomen as inconsistent as the vicar in this respect?

There are doubtless several combining reasons for this, but I suspect that the principal one is the profound impression which we have inherited from the experience and traditions of the horrors of bread-famine. A score of proverbs express the important practical truth that we rarely appreciate any of our customary blessings until we have tasted the misery of losing them. Englishmen have tasted the consequences of approximate exhaustion of the national grain store, but have never been near to the exhaustion of the national supply of coal.

I therefore maintain most seriously that we need a severe coal famine, and if all the colliers of the United Kingdom were to combine for a simultaneous winter strike of about three or six months’ duration, they might justly be regarded as unconscious patriotic martyrs, like soldiers slain upon a battle-field. The evils of such a thorough famine would be very sharp, and proportionally beneficent, but only temporary; there would not be time enough for manufacturing rivals to sink pits, and at once erect competing iron-works; but the whole world would partake of our calamity, and the attention of all mankind would be aroused to the sinfulness of wasting coal. Six months of compulsory wood and peat fuel, with total stoppage of iron supplies, would convince the people of these islands that waste of coal is even more sinful than waste of bread,—would lead us to reflect on the fact that our stock of coal is a definite and limited quantity that was placed in the present storehouse long before human beings came upon the earth; that every ton of coal that is wasted is lost for ever, and cannot be replaced by any human effort, while bread is a product of human industry, and _its_ waste may be replaced by additional human labor; that the sin of bread-wasting does admit of agricultural atonement, while there is no form of practical repentance that can positively and directly replace a hundredweight of wasted coal.

Nothing short of the practical and impressive lesson of bitter want is likely to drive from our households that wretched fetish of British adoration, the open “Englishman’s fireside.” Reason seems powerless against the superstition of this form of fire-worship. Tell one of the idolaters that his household god is wasteful and extravagant, that five-sixths of the heat from his coal goes up the chimney, and he replies, “I don’t care if it does; I can afford to pay for it. I like to _see_ the fire, and have the right to waste what is my own.” Tell him that healthful ventilation is impossible while the lower part of a room opens widely into a heated shaft, that forces currents of cold air through doors and window leakages, which unite to form a perpetual chilbrain stratum on the floor, and leaves all above the mantel-piece comparatively stagnant. Tell him that no such things as “draughts” should exist in a properly warmed and ventilated house, and that even with a thermometer at zero outside, every part of a well-ordered apartment should be equally habitable, instead of merely a semicircle about the hearth of the fire-worshiper; he shuts his ears, locks up his understanding, because his grandfather and grandmother believed that the open-mouthed chimney was the one and only true English means of ventilation.

But suppose we were to say, “You love a cheerful blaze, can afford to pay for it, and therefore care not how much coal you waste in obtaining it. We also love a cheerful blaze, but have a great aversion to coal-smoke and tarry vapors; and we find that we can make a beautiful fire, quite inoffensive even in the middle of the room, provided we feed it with stale quartern loaves. We know that such fuel is expensive, but can afford to pay for it, and choose to do so.” Would he not be shocked at the sight of the blazing loaves, if this extravagance were carried out?

This popular inconsistency of disregarding the waste of a valuable and necessary commodity, of which the supply is limited and unrenewable, while we have such proper horror of wilfully wasting another similar commodity which can be annually replaced as long as man remains in living contact with the earth, will gradually pass away when rational attention is directed to the subject. If the recent very mild suggestion of a coal-famine does something towards placing coal on a similar pedestal of popular veneration to that which is held by the “staff of life,” the million a week that it has cost the coal consumer will have been profitably invested.

Many who were formerly deaf to the exhortations of fuel economists are now beginning to listen. “_Forty shillings per ton_” has acted like an incantation upon the spirit of Count Rumford. After an oblivion of more than eighty years, his practical lessons have again sprung up among us. Some are already inquiring how he managed to roast 112 lbs. of beef at the Foundling Hospital with 22 lbs. of coal, and to use the residual heat for cooking the potatoes, and why it is that with all our boasted progress we do not now in the latter third of the nineteenth century, repeat that which he did in the eighteenth.

The fact that the consumption of coal in London during the first four months of 1873 has, in spite of increasing population, amounted to 49,707 tons less than the corresponding period of 1872, shows that some feeble attempts have been made to economize the domestic consumption of fuel. One very useful result of the recent scarcity of coal has been the awakening of a considerable amount of general interest in the work of stock-taking, a tedious process which improvident people are too apt to shirk, but which is quite indispensable to sound business proceedings, either of individuals or nations.