Trial by Ice (4 page)

Once again pressure rose for a shorter route to bring the goods to market. A passage across the top of Canada would be ideal. In 1743 Parliament offered twenty thousand pounds as an incentive. The race resumed. But Captain George Vancouver's meticulous surveying along the northwest coast proved conclusively that no major
waterway led from the Pacific side of the continent. If any way could be found to traverse the top of Canada to approach the West Coast, the Atlantic side held the key. Even if a ship could sail close enough to the Pacific to link with overland or river routes, it would be a great improvement. Thousands of sea miles would be eliminated.

Despite the cost of fighting the rebellious American colonies, the British Admiralty still could find money in its purse to offer prizes for Arctic exploration. Besides the reward for discovery of the passage, an additional twenty thousand pounds would go to the first to reach the North Pole and five thousand pounds to anyone who came within one degree of the magnetic pole. What once was a matter of commercial interest now evolved into one of national pride, involving the honor of the Royal Navy.

Enter one William Scoresby. While an enterprising and imaginative sailor, Scoresby did not have the privilege of naval rank. He made his living hunting whales. In the summer of 1806, he found himself facing a strange occurrence. The preceding winter had been unusually dry and warm. So had the spring. As a result the Greenland ice pack, which stands like a silent guardian, impeding all northern progress and preventing passage up both sides of Greenland, receded north instead of advancing across the open waters as it usually did.

Suddenly Scoresby found himself facing open water. Instead of lying to to await the southern migration of their quarry like the others in the whaling fleet, Scoresby loosed his canvas and sailed north. Soon he encountered the deadly ice, but due to the warm weather and light snow, areas of the pack ice proved thin enough to navigate. With consummate skill, Scoresby threaded his fragile ship through the icy eye of the needle. Using only the power of wind, battling currents reaching three knots, and fighting his doubts, the whaler slipped between icebergs that could easily have crushed his vessel. To his amazement and his crew's relief, Scoresby broke past the barrier and emerged into “a great openness or sea of water.” On he sailed, making careful notes, measuring the seawater's temperature, and filling in the blank portions of his charts.

Miraculously the whaler pressed onward to the latitude of 81°30' N, farther north than anyone save Henry Hudson had ever sailed. As the apogee of the earth, the North Pole is at 90° N;
consequently Scoresby rested less than six hundred nautical miles from the top of the world.

Undaunted by the physical and fiscal dangers of the enterprise, Scoresby indulged his scientific bent as he sailed, mapping the coast of Greenland, studying the effects on his compass as the magnetic core of the earth pulled the instrument's needle farther and farther to the west the farther he traveled north, and documenting the varied animals he encountered. One lowly whaler performed the work of an entire scientific expedition.

Ten years later similar changes in the ice pack recurred. Scoresby, now a veteran of fifteen voyages to that cold region and author of numerous papers on his findings, called this favorable event to the attention of the Admiralty. Now was the time to mount an attack on the North Pole, he urged. He offered his services, and if a few whales were struck along the way, he added, it might help to defray his expenses.

The navy was outraged. To the lords of the Admiralty, Scoresby's prodding only rubbed salt in their wounds. Here this commercial sailor had achieved success where the Royal Navy had not. The greatest sea power in the world, fresh from defeating the combined Spanish and French fleets, rankled at its failure. Now this whaler presumed to tell the navy its businessand suggest pulling a profit as well. Scoresby's scientific achievements also alienated the Royal Society, whose chair-bound members resented his careful work. Without letters behind his name, the whaler's work simply could not be taken seriously, they protested.

This division between academics and lay scientists laid the foundation for trouble for every future expedition into the Arctic. The rugged demands of Arctic travel required a robust, hardy, and adventurous natureone not usually found in the scholarly men who frequented universities. An ever-widening gulf would develop between those with formal education and those with knowledge gained from enthusiastic, on-site experience. On the one hand, you had the academics with impeccable credentials who were ill suited for the rigors and stress of Arctic travel. On the other hand, you had the explorers, able to withstand the extremes of cold, hunger, and darkness the North held, men whose findings were not accepted
in the centers of learning because they lacked formal education. The gap was never resolved in the nineteenth century.

This same chasm would plague Charles Francis Hall to his dying day.

The Admiralty did mount an expedition, but it was to be wholly a naval operation, commanded, crewed, and run like a military operation. Scoresby was snubbed. Even though he was best qualified to lead, Scoresby was refused command of the expedition; however, their lords did offer him a minor position. Of course, the proud captain refused. Academe went along to complete his humiliation, refusing to acknowledge him by name, referring to Captain Scoresby only as “this whaler” or one of the “Greenland captains.”

The Admiralty foray, led by Capt. James Ross, fell afoul of the same optical illusions that had baffled Baffin as he explored Lancaster Sound. The shimmering peaks of Somerset Island merged with the haze from the frigid waters to convince him that the sound was a bay. Turning back, he missed his golden opportunity to discover the passage into the Arctic Ocean. Once again the Arctic had conspired to mask its inner secrets. Men had not yet paid a high enough price for that knowledge. More lives and tears in tribute would be needed. And more would come.

Standing on the deck beside Captain Ross was William Edward Parry, a young lieutenant. Unlike Ross, Parry believed that Lancaster Sound was indeed a sound and not a bay. Being a sound meant that the body of water was open on more than one side and not just a vast, blind-ended indentation in the gray land. That promised exciting possibilities.

Returning in 1819 with two ships, the
Heda
and the
Griper,
Parry breached Lancaster Sound and sailed northwest into Barrow Strait. The route to the Arctic Ocean lay open. His ship
Heda
sailed within the vaunted one degree of the magnetic pole on September 4, and Parry claimed the five thousand pounds' reward.

Forced to winter over near Melville Island when the ice trapped his ships, Parry added another facet to Arctic exploration. Putting the delay to good use, he mounted overland forays using sleds. Returning a second time, Parry continued his combined sea-land
operations with increased success. From then on exploration into the Arctic would consist of driving as far north as possible by sea before the ice seized the ship and then using the trapped vessel as a springboard for mounting sled trips into the unexplored territory. The tools to pick the lock of Arctic secrets lay at hand.

Anxious to unlock the door, Parry returned in 1824 with
Hecla
and
Fury.
The wreck of
Fury
halted that trip.

The year 1827 found Parry mounting an amphibious assault of sorts on the Pole. Departing from Spitzbergen with two covered boats that could be fitted with sled runners, his party sailed away, expecting to slide their boats over solid ice and sail whenever they could. This well-planned expedition soon became a living hell.

Snow blindness forced the men to travel at night. But in the summer, even the nights are not dark. Old wounds opened and scars separated as scurvy struck the sailors. Parry and his men learned through painful experience why the Eskimo language has more than fifty words to describe ice. Not all Arctic ice is the same. Some forms are helpful, whereas others are deadly.

Sikurluk
is the Inuit name for a rotting ice floe, one that will give way and plunge the unwary into freezing water, just as
aakkarniq
is the same rotten ice forming into melting streams.
Maniillat
is the saw-toothed pressure ridge forced into the pack ice by wave action.
Imarnirsaq
is the opening in sea ice, but only
qup-paq
is the lead in the pack ice that is suitable to navigate. Each subtle differentiation came of necessity, learned through bitter experience by the Inuit. All Arctic ice is far from smooth and slick as the British presupposed.

Rough ice blocks, sharp as razors and tough as flint, shattered and split Parry's wooden sled runners. With little wind, ice crystals form in the frigid Arctic air to settle out as fine diamond dust. Snowfall combines with this hoarfrost and rime to layer the pack ice and exposed ground with a powdery cover. But strong winds can shape the snow into dunes and pack the loose crystals into rock-hard mounds. Erosion of these hillocks produces rugged, sharp-faced
sastrugi.
These steep, sharp rows, often three to six feet high, cut into the sled runners like teeth on a saw.

Pancake ice, floating in the seawater, trapped his boats and impeded their progress. To the Natives, being caught in their kayaks
by the floating disks meant certain death. Too thin to stand upon, pancake ice will surround a boat and hold it immobile. Paddling is futile, for the round disks spin off each other like the smoothed sides of grains of quicksand. With the ice whirling about without moving aside, no passage for the boat can be forged. The unwary seal hunter entrapped in pancake ice could only prepare himself for an agonizing death by starvation and freezing.

Then something unexpected happened. No matter how far they traveled north on the ice floe, each day their noon sextant shots placed them
farther south.
To their dismay, Parry and his men discovered that the endless field of ice over which they struggled was moving south. The ice floe was drifting relentlessly south with the ocean's currents. Like the White Queen in Lewis Carroll's
Alice in Wonderland,
they had to run as fast as they could to stay in one place. Battling north almost 300 miles, they now found themselves less than 175 miles from their starting point, the
Hecla.
Brokenhearted, the expedition packed it in.

By 1829 steam entered the equation. Now a ship could forge onward during windless days. HMS
Victory,
a side-paddle steamer, sailed and steamed its way to “Parry's farthest” latitude. A cross between a sailing vessel and a Mississippi paddle wheeler, the
Victory
pressed valiantly northwardonly to be trapped in the ice just as all the others had been.

Discouraged by the lack of progress, the British Admiralty withdrew its support and set about licking its sea wounds. Attention turned to land routes, backed by the Hudson Bay Company. Following the Mackenzie, Coppermine, and Great Fish rivers, which flowed north into the sea, men crept north with one foot on the land for security.

Then came 1845 and Sir John Franklin. Suddenly the Arctic once more filled the headlines. The name of Charles Francis Hall would become similarly well known when the American expedition was launched a little more than twenty-five years later.

It was no coincidence that in 1870 Vice President Colfax cast his vote to break the tie in the Senate and pass the Arctic Resolution. The day before the bill was introduced, Colfax had sat in the front
row of the Lincoln Hall in Washington beside President Grant while Hall preached his gospel. Hall pointed to the president and shouted that for $100,000 he could outfit an expedition to explore the Arctic. In an impassioned address, he called upon Congress to place the monies directly into President Grant's hands for disbursement. The house came to its feet amid cheers. Basking in the glory, Grant and Colfax smiled and nodded their heads repeatedly. After that outburst and show of enthusiasm from the crowd, there was no doubt about the funding. There was also no doubt about the expedition's leader. Charles Francis Hall's dream was becoming reality. At last he could head a full-fledged expedition to explore the top of the world.

Work began in earnest on the
Periwinkle
once the additional money arrived. As winter winds stripped the last colored leaves from the maples, hammers rang throughout the Washington Navy Yard. Mixing with the rasp of saws, the flat thud of caulking hammers reverberated in the cool light, driving oakum into any seam that might leak. Red-hot rivets glowed atop coal-fed fires, waiting their turn to be pounded into iron plate. The tang of hot pitch and burning charcoal filled the air. All around a small ship in the dry dock, an army of workers swarmed like ants infesting a honey bun.

The hull was stripped down to the keel, and then the ship's bare ribs were planked with six-inch solid oak. New caulk filled the seams before the oak beneath the waterline vanished under fresh copper sheathing. To batter through ice, the bows were layered with more oak until almost solid, then iron plate secured to a sharp prow. As an added precaution, a watertight compartment was built behind the bows for those who had doubts that heavy sea ice might not respect modern engineering.

Hall moved about the Navy Yard with growing enthusiasm, making suggestions, approving modifications, and adding his knowledge to the refitting. His years spent on the ice gave him a good grasp of what it could do. Rocked, tossed, and driven by capricious winds as well as the currents, the nature of the pack ice could change without warning. In minutes a stolid ice field, placidly encasing the ship and the sea around it, could turn into an attacking wall of frozen water. Offshore winds could drive slabs of ice the size of buildings onto each other like scattered dominoes. Grinding
and slithering tons of advancing ice would crush anything in their path. Scores of flattened campsites littering the shoreline attested to the dwellings of unwary Inuit demolished by sudden attacks of shore ice. Camping beneath the shelter of bluffs provided protection from the biting wind but always carried a risk. It was the action of the ice along with the wind that had hollowed out those dunes. Without warning the ice could return and claim more lives.