Chapter V · THE ARCTIC ISLANDS.

Little is known of the interior of even the more southerly of the Arctic islands. Up to the present time exploration has been largely confined to their coasts, with only a few isolated lines run across their interiors. In this way, however, sufficient knowledge has been obtained to give a general idea of the geography, which will probably be greatly modified when future explorations have given more information.

Thanks to the work done by the numerous search parties for the unfortunate Franklin and his companions, the coast lines of many of even the most northern islands have been thoroughly explored. The work left undone by these parties has since been practically finished by the British expedition of 1875, and by the work of Greely, Peary and Sverdrup.

The physical features of the coasts visited by the Neptune have been described in detail in the narrative of the voyage, and need not be repeated here. All other information concerning the geography of these northern lands has been obtained from the printed records of earlier Arctic travellers, and is here used to give some general idea of the extent and physical condition of these islands.

The islands of the Arctic archipelago extend from the north side of Hudson bay and Hudson strait, in 62° N. latitude to 83° N. latitude, a distance of 1,500 miles. Their greatest extension westward is along the 73rd parallel, from the west side of Baffin bay to 125° W. longitude, a distance of 500 miles.

The islands have, for convenience, been divided into four natural groups, as follows:—

Group I.—The islands situated in the northern parts of Hudson bay and Hudson strait. These include the great island of Southampton, together with the smaller islands of Coats, Mansfield, Nottingham, Salisbury, Charles, Akpatok, Resolution and many other small ones still unnamed.

Group II.—Includes the islands lying between Hudson bay and Hudson strait, on the south, and Lancaster sound on the north, the western boundary of the group being Prince Regent inlet. The largest of all the islands, Baffin, belongs to this group. The only other island of considerable size is Bylot, while the remainder are small and fringe these two large islands.

Group III.—This contains the islands lying west of Prince Regent inlet and south of Lancaster sound, and its western continuation, Barrow strait. These islands are almost inaccessible, as they lie to the west and south of the ice-covered waters of Lancaster sound, the only channel by which they may be reached from the eastward; while the western islands of the group can only be reached by passing through the Arctic ocean from Bering strait, a long distance to the eastward of them. They are comprised of Banks, Victoria, Prince of Wales, North Somerset and King William islands.

Group IV.—The islands north of Lancaster sound and Barrow strait. Those include the great islands of Ellesmere and North Devon, whose eastern sides front on Baffin bay and Smith sound; the Parry islands—Cornwallis, Bathurst, Byam Martin, Melville, Eglinton and Prince Patrick—all on the north side of Barrow strait; the Sverdrup islands—Axel Heiberg, Ellef Ringnes, Amund Ringnes, King Christian and North Cornwall—situated to the west of Ellesmere and to the north of the Parry islands.

The following is a list of the islands of the archipelago, having an area greater than 500 square miles:—

Area

square miles.

Group I.—Southampton19,100

Group II.—Baffin211,000

Bylot.5,100

Group III.—Banks26,400

Victoria74,400

Prince of Wales14,000

North Somerset9,000

King William6,200

Group IV.—Ellesmere76,600

North Devon21,900

Bathurst7,000

Cornwallis2,700

Eglinton700

Prince Patrick7,100

Melville16,200

Axel Heiberg13,200

Ellef Ringnes4,800

Amund Ringnes2,200

King Christian2,600

North Cornwall600

————

Total area520,800

The configuration and the physical features of the islands depend upon the character of the rocks that form them; in consequence, a brief description of the geology of these northern regions is here given.

Granites, gneisses and other crystalline rocks, very similar to those forming the Archæan system of more southern regions, occupy the eastern shores of the great islands fronting on Baffin bay and Davis strait, from Smith sound to Hudson strait. On Ellesmere island these rocks form a wide band down the east side from the neighbourhood of Cape Sabine to Jones sound, where the western boundary is upwards of fifty miles from the mouth of the sound. They occupy the eastern part of North Devon, reaching, on its south side, some seventy miles up Lancaster sound. The whole of Bylot island and that part of northern Baffin island to the eastward of Admiralty inlet is formed of these rocks. The great island of Baffin has upwards of three-quarters of its area underlain by Archæan granites and other crystalline rocks, while the eastern side of Southampton belongs to that formation which is also found at Salisbury, Nottingham and Charles islands of Group I.

To the westward of this wide rim of Archæan rocks is a great basin which has been filled with deposits of limestone, sandstone and other bedded rocks belonging to the Palæozoic or middle formations of the earth’s crust. These rocks extend upward from the Silurian to the Carboniferous.

The lower rocks, consisting largely of limestones, are the most widely distributed. They extend southward and westward far beyond the limits included in this report. The rocks newer than these Silurian limestones are not found south of Lancaster sound and Barrow strait, except on the northern part of Banks island at the extreme west of the archipelago. These rocks of Devonian and Carboniferous age occupy the Parry islands and the western and northern parts of Ellesmere, and in many places contain good deposits of coal.

A yet newer series of rocks belonging to the Mesozoic are found along the western edge of Ellesmere and on the Sverdrup islands. Isolated patches of later Tertiary age probably also occur along the northern and eastern coasts of Baffin island, and are of importance in that they are often associated with deposits of lignite coal. Small areas of this age have been found in the Parry islands and on the western part of Banks island.

On these northern islands the country underlain by the crystalline Archæan rocks is very similar in physical character to like areas of more southern regions. Where these rocks occur, the coast is usually greatly broken by irregularly shaped bays and headlands. The shores are often fringed with rocky islands, and the adjacent sea-bottom is liable to be very uneven. The land, as a rule, rises rapidly from the coast into an uneven plateau or tableland, whose general level is broken by ridges of rounded hills which seldom rise more than a few hundred feet above the general level. The elevation of the tableland varies from a few hundred feet to an extreme height of nearly five thousand feet.

In the northern parts the surface of this Archæan tableland is usually covered with a thick ice-cap, through which only the loftier hills protrude. The valleys leading down to the coast from the ice-cap are filled with large glaciers which project into the bays, where they discharge numerous icebergs. As the ice-cap becomes thinner in the more southern parts the glaciers become less active, and generally terminate without reaching the sea, and consequently no icebergs are formed from them.

The country, formed of the limestones and other Palæozoic rocks, differs in its physical character from that already described. On the northern islands, where these rocks attain a considerable thickness, the land rises in abrupt cliffs directly from the sea. The summits of these cliffs vary in elevation from 1,000 to 3,000 feet, while the country behind is a tableland rising in steps inland, the front of each step being a cliff usually of much less thickness than the initial one by which the land rises from the sea. In the more northern islands the higher portions of these tablelands support ice-caps generally much thinner than those covering the adjoining Archæan tablelands. The coasts composed of these flat-bedded limestones are deeply indented by narrow bays or fiords in the valleys of the more important streams; each small stream and rill flowing off the land has left its sculptured mark upon the cliffs, so that the whole resembles, on a great scale, the banks of a stream cut into a deep deposit of clay. This minute sculpturing of the rocks points to their having been elevated above the sea for a very long period, during which time the streams were actively at work cutting their valleys down to the sea-level.

These high abrupt cliffs are characteristic of the islands on both sides of Lancaster sound and to the northward of it.

The limestone islands of Hudson bay and that portion of southwest Baffin underlain by these rocks are very low and flat, with shallow water extending several miles from their shores.

Those northern islands, wholly or in part formed of the Mesozoic rocks, are characterized by low shores and no great elevation inland. At Ponds inlet, where an area of Tertiary deposits occurs, the country overlying it forms a wide plain deeply cut into by the streams that drain it.