172. The Arctic Martyrs
The Arctic Martyrs
Job_37:10 : ’93By the breath of God frost is given: and the breadth of the water is straitened.’94
This is a river or lake or sea frozen over. The waters that would otherwise be free are straitened and in crystal shackles. In Job’92s time there had been no polar expeditions, but this text is descriptive of an arctic sea. In the most ancient times the tyrant Cold went forth and assailed the waters while at play, and took them into everlasting captivity, and the crash that the arctic explorer hears at midnight is only the restless captive turning over in her chains. It is the home where all our winters are hatched, in nest of iceberg under the wings of the north wind. There are long rows of castles in which the giants of the cold live. There are great battlements of glaciers’97Gibraltars and Sebastopols’97guarding the realm of frigidity, and ponderous gates of glass that swing open long enough to let adventurers sail in and then swing shut, leaving the world to guess about the lost shipping. Great cities of palaces and castles and minarets and domes and bridges and archways and obelisks and statuary lifted up with such splendors that the human eye is extinguished if it gaze too long. Cathedrals in which eternal silence worships. Thrones on which eternal stillness reigns. Continent uninhabited, save by walrus or bear or wild geese or ptarmigan or deer. Hundreds of miles that have never heard human voice or the sound of human footstep. Immensities of chilled quiet. ’93By the breath of God frost is given; and the breadth of the waters is straitened.’94
From those regions ten silent passengers have now arrived. Oh, the contrast between their going and their coming! July 8, 1879, summer day, steaming out from San Francisco harbor. Decorated yachts filled with distinguished citizens accompanying. Wharves and hills covered with enthusiastic spectators. Fort Point with twenty-one guns of salutation. Blast of steam whistles and dipping of colors, and by telegraph the whole country sympathetic with the gallant undertaking. Now their return after nearly five years! The poor remains of a fragment of the expedition passing amid lines of sorrowful thousands, but the chief objects of interest hearing not a sound of gun and seeing not an uplifted hat. ’93A failure!’94 say thousands of people. Two or three bare islands discovered, and the most of the bones of the adventurers flung by the polar winds or gnawed by the polar bears, while here and there a relic, from which all signs of humanity has been obliterated, comes home to revive the prolonged anguish of bereft households.
I protest here and now against this misleading cry of failure. In at least four respects the De Long expedition has been a magnificent success.
First, it has demonstrated in most stupendous manner and before all nations that religion may be carried into all enterprises, and especially into those which are scientific. Christ was not more certainly on the ship in Galilee than he was on board the Jeannette. Of their first Sunday out De Long’92s diary records: ’93Had the articles of war read and the ship’92s company mustered. Then read divine service, and was much pleased at observing that every officer and man not absolutely on watch voluntarily attended.’94 Yea; it was divine service every Sunday. I again open De Long’92s ice-journal, and read: ’93Sent back for Lee. He had turned back, lain down, and was waiting to die. All united in saying Lord’92s Prayer and Creed after supper.’94 Farther on I find the record: ’93Alexy dying. Doctor baptized him. Read prayers for sick.’94 De Long further records these words: ’93I was much impressed, and derived great encouragement from an accident of last Sunday. Our Bible got soaking wet, and I had to read the Epistle and Gospel out of my Prayer Book. According to my rough calculation, it was the fifteenth Sunday after Trinity, and the Gospel contained some promises which seemed peculiarly adapted to our condition’97Mat_5:24 : ’91Take no thought of your life what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink, nor yet for your body what ye shall put on.’92’93 The ice-journal of the closing days of that awful journey reads thus: ’93Lee died at noon. Read prayers for the sick when he found he was going.’94 Again he writes: ’93We are in the hands of God, and unless he intervenes we are lost.’94 Of the last Sabbath he says: ’93One hundred and thirty-third day. Everybody pretty weak. Read part of divine service.’94 Alas! he could read no more than part of it. Far away from home, and hungry and freezing and dying, they cried unto the Lord, and they went right out of a cold earth into a warm heaven. O we who neglect divine service because it is too cold or too hot, or we are too busy, or have company, let us take the chiding that came down from the North in the box containing the ice-journal of George W. De Long, the Christian commander.
They did not wait to pray till the cutters parted in the gale and the last can of pemmican was exhausted, and they were reduced to a little willow tea and a fried boot-sole, but while the Jeannette was in good trim and sailing on for a scientific conquest so promising that it excited the jealousy of naval officers at San Francisco, the Tuscarora and the Alaska and the Alert and the Monterey of the United States Navy joining not in the cheers and the salvos at the departure of the Jeannette. The prayers of the arctic explorers in good weather, as well as severe, are illustrious example for all who go down to the sea in ships as well as for all landsmen. Do not wait to pray till your provision gives out and your boat must be abandoned, and there is no game to bring down or fetch in, and you are lost in the snowdrifts. Prayer all the way from San Francisco to Lena Delta. Prayer, though the fingers were too numb to turn the leaves and the lips too stiff with cold to speak the words and the eye too dim with fatigue to see the page.
They were men of splendid physique, if their portraits are accurate, and of cultured intellects, if we may judge from their diplomas and correspondence, and were armed with all the meteorological instruments and philosophical apparatus; but they did not consider themselves strong enough or wise enough to do without God. Let the infidel and atheistic and blatant philosophy of our day hear it and repent. Do not stultify yourselves and your religion by saying that any expedition is a failure which sets up the banner of the Son of God on the glittering pinnacles of iceberg till all the nations behold the crimson standard. Gloria Patri, sung by these arctic voyagers while heaving icebergs played the accompaniment. Glory be to the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, as it was, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen! Oh, did it merely happen so? Was it only accidental? Was there no significance wide as earth and high as heaven in the fact that in that unending winter on monumental hill on Lena Delta the tomb was crowned with a cross? On that cold forehead of the world is set the most precious symbol of the Christian religion.
Another success of the polar expedition is in giving the world demonstration of unparalleled courage. Remember that it is different from that courage which we all admire’97courage in battle. It is a more difficult courage, for it was against the dumb elements. Going into ordinary battle the soldier knows that there is a possibility that the enemy may give way through cowardice. But icebergs never get afraid, and are never thrown into panic. Going into ordinary battle the soldier knows that it is possible that the enemy may be overcome by a flank movement or assailed from the rear. But the Arctic Ocean never was flanked. A soldier going into ordinary battle knows that there is a possibility that the enemy’92s ammunition may give out. But the polar regions never lack ice for bullets and ice for guns and ice for cavalry charge and ice for thunderous bombardment’97fleets of ice and squadrons of ice forever armed against shipping. ’93Come to me,’94 these armies of cold cry; ’93come to me, thou proud Jeannette, and I will crush in thy bows and take off thy masts and loosen thy rudder, and I will bury thee with no funeral honors in the same grave where I dropped the Resolute and the Intrepid and the Fury and the Pioneer and the Resistance.’94 The most heroic of all courage was the courage of De Long and his men, for they fought not other men who may be routed, but dumb forces of nature, which never give any quarter and never surrender and never die.
God in olden time sent forth Joshua and Elijah and Paul by their example to teach the world courage. Now he sends the Schwatkas, the Franklins, the Dr. Kanes, the Livingstones, the Stanleys, the De Longs, the Amblers, the Collinses, who do honor to the human race. More now than ever before there are giants among men, great throngs of men still conquering fatigue and hunger and physical woe that they may present the round earth to the cause of geographical discovery. We have found out at last how the world is bounded’97on the north, on the south, on the east, and on the west by the courage of man and the goodness of God. It is not more stirring, such explorers’92 discovery of the features of the globe, than what they discover of the capacity of man when he sets out for great enterprises. The influence of such example is most salutary. We want more men of that kind to effect the reforms of State and Church, endurance that cannot be frozen out by the world’92s frigidity. What is retarding the Church of God in our days is its namby-pamby membership. We have plenty of Christians in the vineyard ready to sit down and eat grapes, but few De Longs to push out into the cold. Yet God is fitting out expeditions on all sides, and men and women are wanted who care little for their own comfort and everything for what they can do for others. Frederick Oberlin commanded such an expedition, Florence Nightingale another, Alexander Duff another, John Howard another, Bishop Asbury another.
If you cannot command an expedition you can join one. The day will arrive when all the great Christian expeditions shall come back in the presence of many worlds, and not only the leaders but the led, not only the commanders but the commanded, not only the celebrated but the obscure, will get celestial and divine recognition. As Christ introduces his friends, and the question is asked, ’93Who are these thou introducest into our imperial company?’94 Christ will say: ’93This is the woman who gave a cup of cold water to the thirsty traveler. This is the child that read the Scriptures to her blind mother. This is the nurse that rocked the sick child’92s cradle. This is the female clerk of the store who patiently endured the insolence of customers. This is the mother who brought up her children for God. This is the man who forsook not his religion amid the ridicule of the hat factory. This is the fireman who fell dead in trying to get a child out of the third story of a burning building. This is the machinist or the coal-heaver or the fireman of the sunken Jeannette, who, kneeling in the arctic storm, prayed that their sins might be made whiter than snow.’94 And then Christ, waving his hand over a great multitude that no man can number, will say: ’93They were cold, they were sick, they were poor, they were despised, they were wronged, they came out of great tribulation and had their robes washed and made white in the blood of the Lamb.’94 That day will be the rectification of everything, and those who expected to take back seats in heaven will be called to take front seats, and those who would have been satisfied to occupy a footstool will be awarded a throne, and those who had no ambition except to get inside the shining gates will be made rulers over many cities.
Another success of this polar expedition is in the fact that it has persuaded the whole world that it is now time to stop pushing in that direction. It is a great thing for the world to know when it has struck the impossible. All down through the days of Cabot and Sir John Franklin and Dr. Kane and Nordenskjold and Schwatka the world has thought that there was an important passage to be discovered and great things to be won for geography, but the impression has come upon the most hopeful of us that God does not mean the race to move any farther that way. If there were fifty northwest passages, of what use would they be to the world if only one ship out of a hundred could reach one of them? Beside that, the whole demand for a northwest passage has changed from the fact that this continent has been cut through three times’97by the Union Pacific, the Southern Pacific and Northern Pacific railroads, and what is the use of going so far around when we can go straight through? Besides that, it is demonstrated that there is nothing there more valuable than frozen islands, and that the only crop yielded is ice, sheaves of ice, stacks of ice, harvests of ice to fill garners of ice.
This De Long expedition has proved that God does not want the world to be occupied any farther up that way. By the solemn emphasis of this polar disaster, he says: ’93Thus far shalt thou go and no farther.’94 Without this expedition the world would not have been satisfied. Let neither private munificence nor governmental authority pay another dollar or allow another life to be lost in arctic expedition, except it be relief enterprises like that now being fitted out. God has bolted and barred that gate and written on it, ’93No admittance.’94 Let not our foot attempt to pass it, for there are too many armed sentinels pacing up and down to make it safe for us to attempt to break through. God has some reservations. The Bible says that he keeps something even from the angels, and is it strange that he should keep something away from the human race? There must be paths where Jehovah can walk alone and without intrusion from human inpertinence. De Long and his men have made for us most important discovery, for they have found for us the limits of useful exposure. If Columbus was to be honored for finding the shore of this continent, let these dead men have an imperishable monument for the fact that they have, with their suffering predecessors, found the shore of the divine secret. It is a great thing to have seen for themselves and for all ages the burnished barriers of the Omnipotent, and to have just looked through the crystal pickets of the fence marked, ’93No thoroughfare.’94 Blessed are those men and those nations who are wise enough to know that there is a limitation to human thought and to human courage, and that at the highest latitude ever reached by ship’92s prow or reindeer sled is the white altar on which the human race must kneel in humble defeat, crying with Job: ’93He stretcheth out the North over the empty place.’94
Another great success of this polar expedition has been the demonstrating to the world, more powerfully than ever before, that our departed friends, however far off and however long gone out of life, are ours after death, as much as before, and this by divine and unmistakable intuition. Why this funeral march half round the earth, from Siberia to Russia, from Russia to Germany, from Germany to America, and one of them here to take steamer for Liverpool, keeping up the march of death for at least two weeks more? Why not let their bodies sleep where they fell? Neither private nor governmental largess can build so high or so brilliant or so vast a monumental shaft for those men as those uplifted splendors around the North Pole. No such sarcophagus as those of the eternal congealment, no such American or European cathedrals for pillar and dome and altar and lights as those St. Marks, those St. Pauls, those Holy Trinities of colonnaded and arched and transepted and chanceled and chandeliered architecture of the icy dominions. Lieutenant Chipp and his men, who were never found, are resting in Westminster Abbeys of splendor far beyond London’92s acropolis. No. The forty reindeer must be harnessed to the sixteen sleds, and through the atmosphere sixty-nine degrees Fahrenheit the dead are brought to Yakutsk, then two thousand miles farther to Irkutsk, then on to Moscow, then to Berlin and Hamburg, where wreaths are showered and bells rung in honor of these bodies coming home. Two men in our time were found mean enough to shoot a President, but I do not believe in all the land there is a man mean enough to criticise the expense of this long mortuary travel. Every man says that it is right. Bring them back to their own land, and, as far as possible, put them beside their own kindred, so that when they rouse in the great day of the awakening, which shall be to all graveyards and cemeteries, they may come hand in hand with those who were rocked in the same cradle and sheltered in the same mother’92s arms.
An instinct planted in all hearts must have been divinely planted and for some useful purpose. The divine lesson is that the dead are ours. Five years, fifty years make no difference. Write it on the cemetery gate and chisel it on the stone and embalm it in the heart. Ours. Never did God, since the day when he hung the world upon nothing, give such magnificent demonstration of that truth as by these eight thousand miles of obsequies, all nations with uncovered head bidding Godspeed to the silent procession.
Some people recklessly say they do not care what becomes of their bodies after they leave this life. I care very much. I want to lie down in the midst of my kindred. The same springtime that puts bloom on their grave I must have put bloom on my grave, and though we go there one by one, one by one, and years pass between this arrival and that arrival in the still country, I want us all to get up together and substitute for the last kiss of earthly heartbreak the goodmorning kiss of resurrection reunion. We must come out of the gates side by side. Yes, yes. Give De Long back to the widowed soul. Let Collins go to the arms of his brothers now waiting. Take Dr. Ambler back to his beloved Virginia, and Boyd to the Philadelphians waiting for him. Let dust seek kindred dust. And if any are not claimed, let the United States Government be mother to the homeless dead, and at the naval cemetery in Annapolis point to these as to others already garnered, saying: ’93These are my jewels.’94 Do not say: ’93Why all this waste of human life?’94 There has been no waste. If all these explorers had lived a hundred years at home they could not have given to the world such an irresistible lesson as now of the triumphant and world-electrifying fact that the dead are ours.
As we close up this volume of thrilling crystallography, let us rejoice that another volume of the world’92s suffering has ended. Volume after volume of pain and struggle added to the long shelf. Story of architects who fell from the scaffold of great buildings they were constructing. Story of chemists whose eyesight was blasted while making important experiments. Story of men who, by sword or pen or ship’92s compass or trowel or hammer or spade or plough or needle or kind word, achieved liberty for others. Volumes of suffering filling up nine-tenths of the world’92s library. Volumes illustrated with vignettes and plates of martyr’92s stake and perishing arctic expeditions. Pages printed in blue and black and red ink; blue for the bruises, black for the infamy and red for the carnage. While overtopping and outmeasuring all other volumes in importance is the ice-journal of the greatest of all explorers and sufferers who sailed into the arctic repulsions of this world that he might open passage for all the race to sail through, yet frozen of the world’92s neglects, and flung dead in the exploration. The first picture of that ice-journal a disagreeable manger, and the last picture an agonizing cross. God hasten the day when all the volumes of the world’92s suffering shall be ended and a new library be opened, all its shelves filled with stories of escape and jubilee and scrolls of new songs unto him who hath loved us, and washed us from our sins in his own blood, and made us kings and priests unto God forever.
Autor: T. De Witt Talmage