Trial by Ice (33 page)

All those were simply excuses that begged the true issue. Another, more pervasive thought had wormed its way into the mind of every man standing on the ship's heeling deck, a dark and selfish notion that no one would ever admit to in public: now
it was every man for himself.
They had lost most of their food and gear, their
ship was damaged beyond repair, and no rescue was in sight. There was precious little to go around. Freezing and starvation seemed likely. With half the mouths to feed, their chances of surviving suddenly doubled.

It was the ultimate rule of the Arctic: food and fuel are always scarce. Sharing what little you have threatened both donor and recipient. Two weakened individuals would die in the far North where one strong person at least has a chance to survive. The Inuit knew this well and accepted the consequences. Starving villages could not expect help from nearby settlements if it meant endangering that community's resources. A traveling hunter with only enough food for himself would run away from another traveler whom he found starving.

During his earlier searches for the Franklin expedition survivors, Charles Francis Hall encountered two Inuit, Tukeeta and Owwer, vv ho had actually met Francis R. M. Crozier, the captain of HMS
Terror,
and a party of his starving men. To the unfortunate Crozier h.id fallen the overall command of the surviving 105 men after Sir John Franklin died on June 11, 1847, and the two ships,
Terror
and
Erebus,
were abandoned.

These two Natives with others met the emaciated British near the southwest coast of King William Island. By careful interrogation, Hal pieced together an ugly but heart-wrenching picture. Crozier h.id approached the party and gestured with his hands to his mouth, repeating the word
seal.
The natives shared some of their seal meat with him and his men. However, somewhere in the one-sided exchange, the sharing threatened the stores of the Natives. Hurriedly they packed up and departed the next morning, despite the pitiful begging and entreating of Crozier, who tried to stop them but was too weak to do so.

The fact that these Inuit had deliberately turned their backs on the starving white men made a lasting impression on Hall. His ideal of the noble Arctic savage vanished in a darkened cloud of disillusionment. Hall penned a bitter pronouncement of their actions in his diary when he learned the full truth of what had happened:

These 4 families could have saved Crozier's life & that of his ccmpany had they been so disposed. But no, though
noble Crozier pleaded with them,
they would not stop even a day
to try & catch sealsbut early in the morning abandoned what they knew to be a large starving Company of white men.

The whites branded this a callous and selfish act; to the Inuit it was a wise and necessary move.

Blood ties, friendship, or camaraderie all will cause a man to risk his own life for that of another. Military fighting units foster such loyalty, and any combat veteran will tell you that in the grimmest of battles, he really fought for his buddies rather than for his country or high-minded principles. Such closeness would have dictated that the grounded men of the
Polaris
make every possible effort to locate their shipmates.

Regrettably the members of the
Polaris
expedition had no such unity. In reality, they couldn't even call one another shipmates. Divided by nationality, differing loyalties, and conflicting purposes, the crew of the
Polaris
had lost all cohesion. The rigors of the Arctic had reduced them to splintered coteries of men in league with one another.

Were Charles Francis Hall still alive, no doubt greater effort would have been made to retrieve the rest of the crew. Neither Bud-dington nor Bessel ordered anything more. Sadly none of the crew pressed to continue the search.

So one day's cursory scan of the horizon marked the sum total of all attempts to locate the men separated from the ship during the storm. Tyson and those on the floating ice were left to their own resources.

Strangely the crew did see two blue foxes scampering along the shoreline, which they duly noted in the ship's log. Their actions highlight a pitiful metamorphosis that had overtaken the expedition. Hammered incessantly by the Arctic, the members had lost their initiative, become tentative and timid, and retreated to the passive role of observers. Somehow they must have felt that recording these observations successfully fulfilled their mission and would compensate for their other failures.

The next morning Buddington ordered preparations for leaving the ship. He had slept in Chester's cabin along with Bessel, while
Morton, Hryan, and Mauch retreated to the forecastle. Scraps of clothing and blankets were scrounged from the belongings of Captain Tyson and others not present to protest.

Low tide revealed even more extensive damage to the bow. The entire stem, the curved timber where the bow planks join together, had now completely broken away below the six-foot mark, taking with it the iron sheeting and cross planks. Of the scant pieces of lumber left, several planks on the port side were bent sharply back. Such extensive damage should have rapidly sunk the
Polaris.
Only the insistence of Captain Hall that the bow be double-planked and backed with a watertight bulkhead had saved their lives. Neither Buddington nor Bessel gave the dead man that credit. “I called the officer's attention to it,” Buddington noted in his journal, “who only wondered she had kept afloat so long.”

Slowly the crew dismantled the dying steamship. Being rigged as a fore topsail schooner, the ship had two yards, two booms, gaffs, and two topmasts. Pole by pole the rigging was cut down and laid on the deck. To a sailor this duty must have been painful to perform, akin to disassembling one's home or dissecting a favorite pet. Wad ng ashore at low tide, the crew carried the spars ashore along with the yards of canvas sail.

Agair the sense that Buddington had washed his hands of his long-suffering ship pervades the scene. Until its removal, the standing and running rigging of the
Polaris
remained sufficient to sail the ship southward. The engines still worked, and the rudder and screw could provide some assistance. With the beached ship fully exposing the damage to the keel, repairs were possible. And the ship's carpenter, Nathan Coffin, mad as he was, could have made those repairs.

Perhaps in forsaking his vessel, Buddington relied upon Arctic history. Parry, Kane, and Hayes had all abandoned their ships and survived :o tell about it. Odds favored those explorers who had retreated ir the spring, hugging the coastline until they encountered a passing whaler or reached native villagers willing to transport them to the closest white settlement.

Unlike Buddington and his crew, those survivors had their small boats. The fourteen men stacking timber, canvas, and sail bags filled with coal and bread on the beach had no means of transportation
other than their feet. The dogs and sleds drifted on the ice with Tyson's group. Travel overland by foot was suicidal. No party could push or carry enough supplies by hand to survive. Sir John Franklin's expedition had proved that conclusively. Scott's Antarctic failure reconfirmed that grim fact years later.

Exactly what Buddington's plans for the future were are unclear. Enough timber existed for Coffin to build a lifeboat, even cabins on the shore. Being near Lifeboat Cove, he remembered rumors of an iron boat abandoned there by Dr. Hayes. Hayes and his men had mentioned it on their return ten years earlier. It is likely Buddington hoped that a tardy whaler might cross their path before the whaling season ended or expected that the United States Navy would come looking for them when the expedition failed to return. For the moment being on solid ground was enough for him.

The nineteenth of October dawned clear and tranquil, as so often happens following a storm. The northeast winds scoured the skies of all clouds and blew the obstructing ice from the straits. Standing on the shore Sieman and Hayes marveled at the irony. The sea before them lay clear of the ice pack as far as the eye could see. Dark water sparkled to the horizon southward and westward. Sadly there was nothing they could do about it. Reluctantly the men returned to their tasks of stacking and piling the meager collection of crates and boxes that constituted their winter supplies.

Then the yelp of barking dogs reached their ears.

Excitement gripped the working party. It had to be Tyson! Tyson with all the extra food and supplies. The sailors rushed about seeking to pinpoint the sounds echoing off the low foothills. Several men waded into the water and scanned the ocean for a floating island bearing Tyson's group into their cove. Only an empty sea greeted them. Other men rushed along the southern rim of their harbor, expecting to see their separated companions trudging along the beach.

Those who looked inland spotted tiny figures approaching from the east. Since the sixteenth the sun had skipped along the horizon well below the Greenland mountains. With the low winter's light glaring across the snow, the backlighting transmuted the approaching party into ghostly, shimmering images.

Slowly the shadows fused into two figures driving a sled.

A
DRIFT

As he wa :ched the
Polaris
slip behind the island, hope and despair struck Ty >on in the pit of his stomach like a fist. Why did they not come? Surely someone had seen them. He could clearly make out the deck and the vacant crow's nest, so anyone looking for them had to sec the black rubber blanket flapping in the wind. The vessel was mak ng way under power and sailwhich boded both well and ill for the men on the floe.

Long moments passed while Tyson wrestled with his misgivings. He sank to the ground while the crew returned to their blankets and cooking fires. The wind picked up again and tore at the canvas la d across the ice hummocks for shelter. His mind turned to saving the canvas from being ripped apart by the rising wind.

Poles for the supply cache he had been building when the storm struck stiil lay on the far side of their ice floe, so Tyson persuaded two men to retrieve them.

Half in hour later, the two returned to report they had spotted the
Polar's
again. Elated, the navigator jogged to the farthest point of the ice cake and pulled open his spyglass. The
Polaris
was indeed there, lying in the shelter of the island.
And she was tied up.

No smoke issued from her stack, and all the sails were furled. Facing as she was into the wind, Tyson assumed she was tied to the
surrounding ice, although he could not make out any ice hawsers. The uneasiness returned. She could not be disabled, he thought. She was steaming when he last saw her. Don't they intend to come over? he asked himself.

As he pondered his question, the ice beneath his feet began to move.

Tyson looked about. The ivory hills and tumbled landscape shifted before his eyes. Their floe had broken loose. The rising wind had dislodged the crumpled floe and wrenched it free from its wedged position between the two grounded icebergs.

They were drifting away from the tethered
Polaris.

Ice and slush accumulated within the channel separating the ship from the moving floe, but the whaleboats could cross the opening if they hurried. Already larger slabs drifted threateningly closer to the dark gap of water.

Tyson raced back and exhorted the men. “We must start immediately,” he shouted over the rising wind. To his astonishment, his words fell on unheeding ears. Instead of jumping to the task, the men stumbled about like automatons, collecting every scrap and article of their clothing as if they were precious jewels. Faced with the choice of speed or parting with their possessions, the crew opted to collect their scattered goods.

While Tyson ranted and raved for them to leave their trash, the men slowly packed one boat with everything that once littered their base. Naturally pushing and dragging the overloaded craft across the broken ice proved arduous and painfully slow. Exasperated, Tyson rushed ahead of the grumbling and muttering crew, leading the Inuit and the cook to the launching site.

Before he had stumbled two hundred yards, a blizzard struck, and the erstwhile leader vanished in a shroud of swirling ice and snow. Tyson backtracked to find only Jackson following his footprints. The Inuit had retreated. When the cook realized that he alone followed Tyson, he, too, fled back to the struggling boat party.

At long last the boat reached the far edge of the ice floe. Frightened by the wind-whipped strait with its churning slabs of ice, the men hesitated to enter their overloaded whaleboat. Tyson put his shoulder to the craft, launching it before he jumped inside. The rest
clambered in, following their worldly belongings into the jaws of danger.