Trial by Ice (39 page)

“If Meyer had not been on board the
Polaris,
these foreigners would probably have behaved better,” Tyson grumbled, “for then they would not have any one to mislead them about our position.”

Of Meyer's navigation, he wrote:

In that criticism he was justified. Their ice floe was miles from land, fart tier than any of them could travel. If the men believed Meyer's faulty readings and started for land, a real danger would arise.

Eventually Tyson grumbled about even Hans, blaming him for the failures of previous polar explorations. When the Inuit's actions spooked a bear the two were stalking, Tyson's spleen spilled over. “This Hans acts like a fool sometimes. He is the same Hans who deserted Dr. Kane, and the same who was the cause of Dr. Hayes losing two good men on his expedition.”

The epidemic of criticism even touched the normally taciturn Ebierbing. One day the hunter cried indignantly to Tyson, “They talk about Eskimo being dirty and stinking, but sailors are worse than Eskimo.”

They all chewed on scraps of sealskin, drank melted snow, and savored a half ounce of dried bread per day until the first part of February. Then the Hans whom Tyson had maligned captured a seal by using his ingenuity. A young seal poked his head through fresh ice that had formed over a section of open water. Immediately Ebierbing shot the animal. But reaching it before it sank posed a challenge. The ice surrounding it was too thin to support a man.

Jumping into the kayak, Hans hopped the craft across the thin ice by using his paddle while simultaneously lurching his body forward inside the frail craft. Pole-vaulting along, he reached the seal, attached a line to it, and bounced back without breaking through the frozen surface. Divided among the nineteen, it yielded one small piece for each.

The only bright event was the return of the sun, reappearing after eighty-three days of total darkness. The golden thread rimming the east so inspired John Herron that he lit his pipe and smoked the last of his precious tobacco as he sat outside his snow hut and enjoyed the glow. And with the light, the birds returned.

Hundreds of tiny Arctic dovekies soon darted and swooped over the ice. Similar in size to a sparrow, one or two of the stubby black-and-white birds, at four ounces apiece, hardly satisfied a growling stomach. And because Ebierbing and Hans had no way of making the long-handled basket snares the Inuit usually employed to catch the birds, each one had to be shot down, wasting powder and shot. The ghostly white shapes of narwhals appeared for the first time as the whales migrated north, shimmering below the surface like ivory blades. The carcass of one narwhal would feed the
crew for weeks. Ebierbing shot one, but the dying animal sank before he could reach it.

As March arrived, the situation looked bleaker than usual. Blubber for the stone lamps was nearly gone. Tookoolito had saved two small pieces, which would see her through the next two days. Hans had only one. Then there would be neither heat nor light.

Miraculously Ebierbing spotted a dark mound on the floe. It was a bladder-nosed seal, called an
oogjook
by the Natives, far larger than the usual spotted seals. He shot it, and the nine-foot-long anirral not only supplied a hearty meal but furnished thirty gallons of oil for the essential lamps. Another orgy ensued as the starving sailors tore into the raw flesh with fingers and knives. Blood spattered the snow and smeared their hands and faces until the men looked subhuman. Part of the skin was boiled to soften it to eat. Long past caring, the men drank the greasy water after swallowing the skin. Ebierbing shrugged and remarked stoically, “Anything is good that don't poison you.”

“You mustn't eat the liver, steward,” Tyson warned Herron.

“Why?”

“Because it's poisonous.”

The gaunt Englishman wiped his gory hands across his matted beard. He glanced at his shipmate. “Oh, damn the odds. We'll eat it. Won't we, Fred?”

Despire more warnings from Tyson, half the men gorged themselves on 1 he seal's liver. Arctic seals and polar bears concentrate vitamin A in their livers to such a high level that it is toxic to humans. Poisoned sy their meal, these men suffered cramps and diarrhea for a week, while the skin of their faces, hands, and chests blistered and then slouched off.

Only Herron admitted his mistake. “Oh, Captain,” he complained as he peeled the skin from his hands, “that
oogjook
liver played the devil with me.”

Tyson showed little sympathy. “Well, you know I told you not to eat it.”

Herron nodded wisely. “That's so, and I'll bet I eat no more of it … or bear's liver either.” Then the gnawing inside his stomach caused hin to reconsider. “Unless … yes, we might get a young
bear.” He looked hopefully at Tyson. “And then, perhaps, the liver would be good.”

The navigator shook his head while the stricken man studied his shedding skin.

“No,” Herron decided firmly, “I'll be damned if I trust it. No more liver for me.”

With the warming trend came renewed storms and the added danger that the thinning ice might break beneath their feet. As gales pounded their island, more than one night passed with the frightened men dressed and standing beside their sole boat while their floor buckled and groaned and the crack of ice splitting apart filled the air like artillery fire. Nervously the returning Inuit reported encountering
imarmrsaq,
openings clear through the old ice, not just cracks in the young, thin ice. Breakup lay around the corner. Their turning, unstable world was about to become an even more precarious anchorage.

And while birds and seals returned with increasing frequency, so did the bad weather. Amid hail and blowing snow, hunting proved impossible. So it went, weeks of agonizing hunger punctuated with brief periods of frenzied feeding on a single seal or a handful of scrawny fowl arriving just as the men were at the point of death by starvation. To a starving person, a sudden feast can be just as devastating as the hunger. Physically the body has made drastic adjustments to the lack of nutrients. The stomach has reduced in size, the alimentary tract has slowed to more efficiently extract what little food passes through, and all resources are focused on maintaining the vital functions at their lowest levels still consistent with life. The sudden ingestion of fat-laden, energy-intensive food like seal meat disrupts these adjustments. Cramps, bloating, and diarrhea follow as the food shocks the digestive system into overdrive. Lower-than-normal protein levels in the bloodstream make the person susceptible to fluid leaking out of the blood vessels into the surrounding tissues. An unexpected load of salt and protein greatly exacerbates this swelling.

So the erratic arrival of food to those enduring their trial on the ice proved just as unbearable as their periods of hunger. The food did little to relieve them of their pains and cramps and only ensured that they would be alive to suffer another day of their ordeal. This
cruel game of cat and mouse with death continued throughout February and March. Just when they had reached the end of their rope, fate tossed them a bone with no assurance that another one would follow. The psychological toll must have been terrible.

Spinning and drifting on the ice, everything was either hunter or hunted. Sometimes the tables turned unexpectedly. One night near the end of March, Ebierbing stuck his head out of his igloo. A sound near the kayak had caught his attention. There, ten feet away, a p }lar bear stood chewing on strips of sealskin saved for the lamps. Lcng since eaten by their masters, no dogs remained to give the alarm.

One rifle and a shotgun rested against the outside of the igloo. Ebierbing's rifle lay inside his kayak, behind the bear. Leaving their firearms out in the cold kept the metal from “sweating” in the warmer interior and rusting into a useless hunk of scrap, as everything was coated with salt spray from the wind-whipped spume.

Quickly the Inuit awakened Tyson. As the two men crept forward to retrieve the rifles, the navigator knocked over the shotgun. The bear spotted them and charged. Tyson snatched the rifle, dropped to his knee, and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. Big-game hur ters say the loudest and most frightening sound is the unexpected silence that follows a hammer's dropping on a useless cartridge. Tyson jerked the trigger three more times, but the heavy Sharps rifle failed to fire. Tumbling backward into the igloo, the shaken navigator hurriedly retrieved a handful of cartridges, reloaded, and poked his rifle down the dark tunnel. A white blur filled the Dpening. This time the rifle fired, hitting the bear at point-blank range. The bullet struck the animal in the heart and passed out the opposite side.

The bear provided a much-needed day's worth of food. Wisely no one touched the poisonous liver this time.

More than four months on the drifting ice had reduced the men to shambling, filthy, and haggard skeletons. The malicious touches of scurvy loosened all their teeth and covered their bodies with dirty, putrid scabs. One evening while her father, Ebierbing, divided a scrap of frozen hide with his hammer, Puney studied Tyson's gaunt frame with her serious eyes and remarked with a child's honesty and gravity, “You are nothing but bone!”

Her statement was only a slight exaggeration. Their stores of fat long since used up, their energy depleted, and their exertions minimal, their bodies began to feed on whatever tissue they could. Loss of muscle hampered even the strongest. Moving the light kayak about, normally a one-man task, took three to four men, and that exertion left them exhausted and out of breath.

While their ordeal wore away at their bodies, it took an even greater toll on their clothing, mainly a motley mix of wool, fur, and canvas. Since the men were wearing their shipboard clothing when ordered over the side, they did not have the full set of furs and mukluks normally worn during a sledding operation. Only the Inuit possessed their efficient Arctic wear. Razor-sharp ice cut and tore at their coats and leggings, wearing the fabric thin and making holes through which the relentless wind passed with ease. Tookoo-lito did her best to mend the rents. But food took precedence over clothing. Since the starving men ate every scrap of animal skin, nothing was left to use as patches.

Slowly, hour by hour, the Arctic was erasing these interloping humans from its surface, wearing them away into gray, transparent shadows of themselves. In time there would be nothing left. And all the while their environment tormented them.

Ice, fog, and blowing snow blinded the men as the winds rocked their island. The floor of each igloo trembled and bucked incessantly. Blocks of ice tumbled and crashed along the perimeter of their camp. All around the rifle shots of cracking ice startled them while a wall of impenetrable white prevented the anxious party from seeing their danger. As night fell, a sable curtain replaced the milky wall that enclosed them, yet the disruptions continued, robbing the exhausted sailors of sleep. The situation caused Tyson to remark, “If man has ever suffered on earth the torments of wretched souls condemned to the ‘ice hell’ of the great Italian poet, Dante, I think I have felt it here.”

April Fool's Day unleashed a cruel trick on the party. Tyson had just written in his notebook: “We have been the ‘fools of fortune’ now for five months and a half.” As the fog lifted, an even more alarming sight greeted him. Their home for five and one-half months dissolved. Wind and current had detached their minuscule
raft of ice from the rest of the ice pack. Some twenty miles of ice-choked w ives separated their home from the relative security of the drifting pack.

There was nothing left to do but launch the boat and row for the drifting mountains of ice.

Now the folly of burning their second boat for firewood returned to plague them. Cramming nineteen souls into a whaleboat designed 10 carry eight left no room for their provisions. The boat wallowed and shipped water with each wave. Icy seas lapped over the gunnels, drenching the tightly packed occupants and threatening to swamp the craft. In desperation Tyson threw their meat from a recent kill over the side, nearly one hundred pounds of it, and most of their spare clothing. Loss of this precious food must have come especially hard. Hundreds of rounds of metallic cartridges were abandoned before they even launched the boat. Ignoring pleas of the men to jettison the box, Tyson and Tookoolito preserved Captain Hall's writing desk.

To the rhythmic cries of the frightened Inuit children, the sailors poled anci rowed as best they could. Arms, heads, legs, and backs blocked each pull on the oars. By midday, the spent rowers reached the closest slab of ice. For all their efforts, the thick sections of the Greenland pack remained farther away. Exhausted, the sailors pitched their canvas tent and crawled inside. The Inuit slept in the boat.

For the next three days, Tyson and his party played a deadly game of chess with the water and ice. Rowing whenever they could and poling when they could not paddle, they threaded their craft among the razor edges of the brash ice. Whenever the ice closed around tr em, they landed at the largest floe and waited for another opportunity. Sea foam and waves soaked their clothing, which froze intc» sheets as stiff as iron. Once an edge of ice holed their boat and caused them to bail for their lives. When things looked darkest, as Tyson noted in his diary three days later, “[some] of the men, by their expressions, seemed to intimate that they would not have heshated to throw over the women and children to save their own lives.”

Finally they reached a substantial piece of ice and made camp.

Ebierbing built an igloo, and the spent party fell asleep. Herron found himself too cold to sleep and spent the time stomping around their tiny island to keep his feet from freezing.

At five in the morning on the fifth of April, a gale struck. Buffeted by the winds, their sanctuary broke apart. The startled inhabitants rolled out of the igloo just as the crack widened, and the ice house drifted away. The storm rose in ferocity and continued.