Trial by Ice (2 page)

A G
RAND
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EGINNING

Sixteen months before, things were quite different.

By 1870 the United States was ready for something new. To be the first to reach the North Pole fit the bill. Doing so would meld national pride with hard-nosed business. Such an expedition transcended
politics and touched Southern and Northern hearts alike. Here was something to raise the spirits of everyone: an American expedition. With eyes fixed northward, those on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line could forget the slaughter of five years before, the carpetbaggers plundering their property, and the legions of shattered bodies that had littered their hometowns. Grasping the unknown land to their bosom once more gave Rebel and Yankee a noble ideal, a worthy one that fit them both.

Here was an especially worthwhile endeavor, especially since the British had failed so miserably at attaining the same goal. There was little love for England in either Dixie or the North at this time. After all, John Bull had failed to enter the war on the side of the South yet had managed to extract an embarrassing apology from President Abraham Lincoln over the
Trent
affair. If the Americans were to succeed where England had failed, it was only just.

Besides, there was money to be made. Whaling was a million-dollar industry. Before the advent of petroleum mining, whale oil lit the lamps of the world. Baleen supplied the stays for ladies' corsets, and precious ambergris and spermaceti from the sperm whales made perfumes and cosmetics. And north was where the whales were.

Driven by this lucrative trade, whaling ships from New Bedford already braved the Davis Strait in the east and the Bering Sea in the west. A Northwest Passage would eliminate the need to sail round Cape Horn and cut months off the trip. Trade with the Far East would also benefit. Glory was all well and good, but a profit was even better.

The United States was going north to plant the Stars and Stripes at the North Pole. No matter that Danes, Britons, French, and Norwegians had tried and failed; the United States of America, fresh from a divisive civil war, was flexing its muscle. With Yankee ingenuity and American resolve, the first American polar expedition would succeed. No question about it.

America was ready.

And with typical Yankee stinginess, the Navy Department selected an unused steam tug named the
Periwinkle
for the honors. Why spend extra money to lay a fresh keel when this scow lay gathering barnacles? Weighing 387 tons, the screw-propeller
Periwinkle
had never been farther north than Gloucester. But to her went the honors of being the one to carry the flag farther north than anyone had previously gone. Planting the flag at the top of the world was the ultimate goal. Nothing less would do.

But a complete refitting was needed. In her present condition, the
Periwinkle
would not make Greenland, let alone the North Pole. Money being tight, a bill, called the Arctic Resolution, introduced in the Senate requested $100,000 to fund the expedition. Immediately the bloc of southern senators protested. Spending money to find the North Pole that could better go toward Reconstruction galled them.

Attached to a general appropriations bill, the resolution barely passed the Senate. Only the vote of Vice President Schuyler Colfax broke the tie. The bill was passed on to the House, where the Appropriations Committee, with its own share of southerners, compromised and promptly whittled the sum in half. Fifty thousand dollars might see the
Periwinkle
properly refitted, but nothing would be left over for supplies, equipment, and wages. The expedition appeared doomed.

Then behind-the-scenes jawboning by Sen. John Sherman from Ohio, the powerful brother of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, brought a reprieve. Having a hero of the Civil War as your brother and commander in chief of the army as well carried some weight. In the House Representative Stevenson (also from Ohio) lobbied heavily for the extra money the committee had cut. Each man had introduced the bill in his respective chamber. And President Grant added his cigar smoke to the smoke-filled rooms. Sullenly and discreetly the Committee on Appropriations guaranteed an additional fifty thousand dollars for refitting the ship alone.

It was no coincidence Sherman and Stevenson had pushed so hard for full funding. To them and most other Americans, only one man had the necessary credentials to reach the North Pole, Charles Francis Hall, a fellow Ohioan.

While the country had just fought a war to preserve the Union, states' rights and regionalism were by no means dead. Ohio would bask in the reflected glory of one of her sons planting the Stars and Stripes at the top of the world. Besides, both President Grant and the congressmen relished the idea of a western man leading a seientific
exploration. It tweaked the noses of those in the East who thought all learned knowledge stopped short of the Allegheny Mountains.

It made no difference that Hall had actually been born in New Hampshire in 1821. As a young man, he had the good sense to move west to Cincinnati. That made him a western man to his supporters. Filled with the spirit of adventure, the young Hall headed for what he thought was the frontier. But the frontier was rapidly moving west, far faster than Hall had imagined.

Working as a blacksmith before drifting into journalism, Hall craved more adventure than the rapidly civilizing Cincinnati could provide. The mild success of patenting “Hall's Improved Percussion Press” for making seals, owning an engraving business, and opening a newspaper did little for him. Soon he was languishing in the same dull existence he had sought to escape. Marriage and children failed to provide him what he cravedadventure. With little formal schooling, Hall still had a voracious appetite for knowledge. Night after night he expanded his grasp of mathematics, science, astronomy, and geography, devouring book after book on the subjects. In time he became expert in those areas. Yet he lacked the scrap of paper that would certify his breadth of knowledge. That missing diploma would haunt him.

Then on July 26, 1845, something happened that would direct Hall's focus to the Arctic and change his life forever. The aging Sir John Franklin, commanding an expedition to discover the fabled Northwest Passage across the frozen Arctic Sea to the Orient, vanished from the sight of civilized man. One hundred and twenty-nine men aboard the Royal Navy ships
Erebus
and
Terror
waved farewell to the
Prince of Wales,
a nearby whaling ship, slipped their moorings from an iceberg in Baffin Bay, and simply disappeared into the Arctic fog.

The world was shocked. The sixty-year-old Franklin, arguably too old for Arctic exploration, still had considerable experience in the region. As a young midshipman, Franklin had fought with Horatio Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar before going on to complete a distinguished career exploring the far North. Many believed him the best qualified in the entire world to lead such a quest. William Edward Parry, Franklin's peer among the British Arctic explorers,
endorsed him enthusiastically to the British Admiralty. “He is a fitter man to go than anyone I know.” Then, with typical bonhomie, Parry added, “And if you don't let him go, the man will die of disappointment.” And Franklin's crew loved him. A common seaman wrote, “Sir John is such a good old fellowwe all have perfect confidence in him!”

None of that mattered. The silent, waiting Arctic swallowed up the best-prepared expedition that any nation had ever mounted. Two naval vessels carrying 136,656 pounds of flour, 64,224 pounds of salted pork and beef, 7,088 pounds of tobacco, 3,600 pounds of soap, two musical organs, and one hundred Bibles evaporated into the cold, thin Arctic air. The North apparently cared little for cleanliness or godliness.

Like the ill-fated Scott expedition to the Antarctic in the next century, Franklin's party carried fatal but hidden flaws that the region would exploit. South or north, the extremes of the globe are extreme in all things. There is never room for mistakes. The slightest error can be fatal.

British naval tradition required Sir John's men to wear woolen uniforms and leather boots rather than adopt the sealskin parkas and mukluks the Inuit had refined through centuries of trial and error. Arctic wind penetrates canvas and wool, where it will not pass sealskin. Sealskin boots, oiled with blubber and soled in the thick hide of
oogrik,
the walrus, repel water and grip ice better than any leather or India rubber boot can.

Wet feet in the Arctic meant frozen feet, with frostbite and gangrene the end result. Unlike the dog, whose legs will not develop frostbite unless a tourniquet is tightened enough to cut off the blood supply, man's extremities succumb to freezing fairly easily. In an attempt to preserve the body's core temperature, blood is shunted away from the fingers and toes whenever necessary. Only recently has modern medicine discovered the exact mechanism of damage due to frostbite. The cause is both simple and devastating: ice crystals.

Over a certain span of temperature during the freezing process, ice crystals form inside the body's cells as the water inside each one freezes. The needle-sharp ice crystals cause all the damage. Like a
thousand tiny knives, these crystals puncture and spear the membranes of the important organelles inside the cell. If the solidly frozen part is
slowly
rewarmed, the crystals will reform and do their worst while the body's temperature rises through that critical period. Freezing, slowly rewarming, and then refreezing and thawing are the worst of all possible scenariosalmost guaranteeing gangrene and the resulting amputation of the affected part.

A solidly frozen limb is best left frozen until proper treatment can be initiated. Then
rapid
rewarming affords the best hope of saving the part. Of course, the early explorers of the Arctic knew nothing of this.

A subtler but equally deadly factor played another part. At Beechey Island, a windswept piece of hardscrabble rising from the water near the junctions of Lancaster Sound, Barrow Strait, and Wellington Channel, lies Franklin's first winter camp. Here rest the rectangular rock outlines and piled embankments of workshops, a house, and three untended graves. Preserved in the permafrost and perpetual cold are the bodies of three men from the
Erebus
and
Terror
who lie as mute signposts to the Franklin disaster. Scattered about the campsite are empty meat tins.

Recent studies of these tinned cans used to preserve the party's food reveal a startling finding. Since 1810 storing food in tinned cans had enabled far-flung voyages. Lead-based solder was used to seal the cans. But the toxicity of lead was not discovered until the 1880s. Unknown to Franklin and his followers, the lead solder was turning their food poisonous. A modern autopsy of two of the men who died early on in the expedition revealed toxic levels of lead. Franklin and his men may have fallen victim to lead poisoning.

But with two to three years of provisions, the Franklin expedition was labeled “lost.” No one could imagine them all dead, merely lost. Surely the men were trapped somewhere in that vast white expanse, gamely waiting to be saved. Rescue hysteria engulfed Great Britain. The government, prodded by the press, offered twenty thousand pounds' reward to the first intrepid adventurer to find and relieve the “Lost Franklin Expedition.”

Adding to this fervor was Lady Jane Franklin herself. Aided by her considerable wealth and the help of clairvoyants and
astrologers, she funded ships and relief parties on her own. Not to be outdone by a grieving wife, the government mounted three relief parties. The first searched the Bering Sea in hopes Franklin had successfully completed the passage from east to west and was waiting for them. They found nothing. The second party, starting in the middle of northern Canada, descended the Mackenzie River to its braided terminal of twisted channels into the Beaufort Sea. Expert trackers and fur traders on loan from the Hudson Bay Company could discover no clues of Franklin or his men. A third search, led by Sir John Ross, breached the ice-choked Lancaster Sound with two ships, the
Enterprise
and the
Investigator,
to search the maze of frozen inlets and bays of Somerset Island. Overland parties fanned out in all directions. Again not a trace of the missing men was found.