Moby-Duck (53 page)

After three hundred feet, the trail of pages ends. The story they tell does not. The latest entry Brainard finds, dated June 17, breaks off abruptly, after this sentence: “Only one meal is cooked a day now, as Fredericks is getting so weak; yet it is remarkable how he keeps up at all on this food with the work which he does.”

I picture Brainard looking up from this last sentence and gazing out in wonderment at the muddy, mile-wide river, on which trading scows and rafts and perhaps a paddle-wheel steamboat travel. Had I been in his shoes, I think I might well have set out for the Arctic that same day. Level-headed leveler that he was, Brainard did the far more sensible thing. He turned the papers over to his boss, thanks to whom we know the answer to this particular riddle. The pages were written by Private Roderick R. Schneider, Company A, First Artillery, United States Army, a member of the 1882 American expedition to Ellesmere Island led by Lieutenant Adolphus Greely.

The Greely expedition, after spending two years collecting scientific data and planting the American flag at 83.20°N, at the time the highest latitude ever attained, concluded in the usual way of disastrous nineteenth-century expeditions to the Arctic—gothically, in scurvy, frostbite, gangrene, starvation, drowning, shipwreck, dog meat, bear meat, pemmican, execution by firing squad, and, possibly, cannibalism. Caught in the ice, the relief vessel sent to fetch Greely and his men in the summer of 1883 had sunk into the depths of Baffin Bay, thereby condemning the explorers on Ellesmere Island to a third, unanticipated winter in the Arctic.

On foot and by boat, they retreated south, searching for caches of food and supplies, making it as far as Cape Sabine, where they set up camp on the bleak shores of Smith Sound. It was there that the events Private Schneider recorded in his logbook transpired. Out of twenty-five men, seven survived. Schneider, whose main duty had been to look after the sled dogs, all long dead, some eaten, held on until June 18, 1884, before he too succumbed to the effects of starvation. Just four days later a relief vessel arrived, and one of its sailors, after a copy of Schneider's diary had been made, purloined the original. A year later, as this sailor was steaming up the Mississippi on a riverboat, a thief purloined his suitcase and cast the purloined diary upon the muddy currents, which, on March 2, 1885, delivered a dozen of its pages into C. Brainard's lucky hands.

In the annals of drift, things get stranger still. On June 18, 1884, while Private Schneider, whose diary a year later C. Brainard would discover on the banks of the Mississippi, was expiring on Cape Sabine, 500 miles to the southeast, Eskimo fishermen from Greenland noticed some strange flotsam—or was it jetsam?—stranded on a floe.

History records neither the first initials nor the last names of these keen-eyed Inuit, which is a shame, for their discovery would prove far more consequential than C. Brainard's, and far more relevant to my own investigations. On that floe were some fifty-eight items (clothes, gear, papers)—the relics, evidently, of a shipwreck. In the journal of the Danish Geographical Society, Greenland's colonial director later cataloged them. They included, notably, a list of provisions hand-signed by Lieutenant George De Long, captain of the USS
Jeannette
; a list of the
Jeannette
's boats; a pair of oilskin breeches in which a certain Louis Noros had written his name; and the peak of a cap inscribed by one F. C. Nindermann.
³⁵

In 1879, in the mistaken belief that at the top of the planet there lay an open sea, the officers and crew of the
Jeannette
, a 142-foot steam yacht, had sailed through the Bering Strait, plowed boldly into the ice, expecting to break through it, and promptly, off the coast of Wrangell Island, found themselves beset—a fate that at the time few ships had been known to survive. The steamer lasted surprisingly long, drifting about for twenty-one months, before the ice crushed it. To the Norwegian scientist-explorer Fridtjof Nansen, the relics of the
Jeannette
discovered three years later off the coast of Greenland were not merely historical curiosities but data, data that seemed conclusively to prove the existence of uncharted, transarctic currents.

At the time, many geographers were reluctant to accept Nansen's conclusions. Some questioned the provenance of the relics. Wasn't it far more likely, they speculated, that they'd come from the sunken relief vessel sent to rescue the Greely expedition? Furthermore, the
Jeannette
had made it only to within 884 miles of the pole. Who could tell what lay beyond? Some obstinately or wishfully or devoutly clung to the theory of an open polar sea. Those fond of symmetries believed that at the North Pole as at the South there must exist a continent, or perhaps an undiscovered archipelago.

“It is doubtful if any hydrographer would treat seriously [Nansen's] theory of polar currents,” wrote none other than Lieutenant Adolphus Greely, namesake and leader of the disastrous expedition to Ellesmere Island that had claimed the life of Private Schneider. Seeking vindication, Nansen proposed to do what at the time seemed suicidal: in a smaller, better, more iceworthy ship, he would reenact the voyage of the
Jeannette
—or at least the first twenty months of it. He named this vessel the
Fram
, Norwegian for “forward,” because once he and his crew found themselves beset off the northeast coast of Siberia, Nansen foresaw, there would be no turning back.

The voyage of the
Fram
is one of the most heroic and least gothic in the history of Arctic exploration. Everyone survived, and everything went almost perfectly according to Nansen's carefully preconceived plan, and when it didn't, good fortune seemed almost miraculously to intervene.
³⁶
The
Fram
entered the ice pack in 1893. Three years and fifteen hundred miles later, passing through the strait that now bears that vessel's name, it emerged into the open waters east of Greenland.

 

 

When you go beachcombing in the annals of drift, you tend to notice coincidences, coincidences that seem to indicate the presence of subtle currents or eddies, currents or eddies that flow through time as well as through oceans. Consider this: In charting the likely transarctic route the castaway toys would take, Ebbesmeyer examined the precedents set by both the
Jeannette
and the
Fram
. Or consider this: The Greely expedition took place under the auspices of the first International Polar Year, or IPY. This expedition, the one I've joined, the one Eddy Carmack conceived, is taking place under the auspices of the fourth International Polar Year, in honor of which the
Louis S. St-Laurent
recently received a new paint job. Adorning the starboard side of the
Louis
's red hull is the new IPY logo, rendered in what might be called the United Nations style. A blue figure reminiscent of those that appear on the doors of men's rooms, assuming the splayed posture of Leonardo's famous portrait of man, stretches his limbs to the four corners of an abstract planet crisscrossed with longitudinal and latitudinal lines. Orbiting this planet is an alphanumerical caption: INTERNATIONAL POLAR YEAR 2007-2008.

The series of improbable events that would eventually deliver the pages of Private Schneider's diary to the banks of the Mississippi and me to the shores of the Northwest Passage began in Vienna in 1875, when, addressing a meeting of the Austro-Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Lieutenant Karl Weyprecht (naval officer, scientist, dreamer) laid forth a scheme as inspirational as it was implausible. For more than a century, ever since Captain Cook sailed to 70 degrees south and then to 70 degrees north, European explorers had been exploring the earth's two poles, or trying to. But to what end?

Yes, they'd charted previously uncharted coasts, and planted flags on previously unclaimed land, and pushed the point of farthest north farther and farther north, and that of farthest south farther and farther south. Yes, they'd performed heroic feats of derring-do, attaining glory and fame, but they'd also performed many disastrous feats of gothic folly ending in a diet of sled dog and lichen and boiled boot. But from that data what had been learned? Not much, Weyprecht believed. “Immense sums were being spent and much hardship endured for the privilege of placing names in different languages on ice-covered promontories,” he once wrote, but “the increase in human knowledge played a very secondary role.”

He knew whereof he spoke: From 1872 to 1874, Weyprecht and another naval officer, Julius von Payer, had led an Austro-Hungarian expedition to the Arctic. The objective was to reach the North Pole by ship, or, falling short, to transit the Northeast Passage, from Norway to the Bering Sea. Payer, Weyprecht, and the men under their joint command made it as far as Novaya Zemlya, an island due north of the Ural Mountains, before the ice closed in on their three-masted schooner. The Arctic currents carried them, fortuitously, to an archipelago of ice-covered promontories on which Weyprecht and Payer bestowed the name Franz Josef Land, in honor of their emperor. From there, all had made it home alive. Weyprecht was a hero. He'd earned his place in history books. Nevertheless, he considered the expedition a failure.

The two “forces of Nature” Weyprecht wished most urgently to illuminate were terrestrial magnetism and the aurora borealis. What was needed, Weyprecht told the scientists assembled in Vienna, was a coordinated, synchronous series of expeditions that would set up a ring of research stations around the poles and, using standardized instruments, carry out meteorological observations for at least one year. No single nation could accomplish a project of this scale. For the plan to work, the scientists and governments and militaries of many nations would have to set aside their rivalries and join in common cause.

Six years later, in 1881, just forty-two years old, a man of his time, Weyprecht died of tuberculosis. By then his plan had gained prominent adherents, and a year after Weyprecht's death, scientists from eleven nations put it into action. This first International Polar Year, like subsequent International Polar Years, would last longer than a year. Germany established an Arctic research station on Baffin Island, and another at the Antarctic island of South Georgia. The Austro-Hungarian empire established one on Jan Mayen Island, off the east coast of Greenland, Sweden another on Svalbard. The Dutch sent a ship into the Kara Sea. The French, Danish, Norwegians, Finns, and Brits also participated, as did the Russians. In all, fourteen polar expeditions took place between 1882 and 1884. The one that was the most ambitious turned out also to be the most disastrous and, historically, the most notorious—the Greely expedition to Ellesmere Island.

The scientists of the first IPY didn't manage to solve the mysteries Weyprecht set out to investigate, but they did manage to collect meteorological data thanks to which we now know just how much the Arctic has warmed in the past century—up to 4 degrees centigrade on average, 5 degrees on land, two to three times faster than the rest of the planet. Climatologists predicted this accelerated Arctic warming years ago. Its primary cause? The ice-albedo effect. Albedo is the amount of sunlight that the planet reflects back out into space. As anyone who's walked barefoot across a parking lot on a hot summer's day knows, white surfaces reflect the sun's rays; black surfaces absorb them. In the Arctic, when the ice retreats and the snow melts, earth and ocean absorb more heat, thereby melting more ice and snow, thereby absorbing more heat.

None of this was on the mind of Weyprecht when he organized that first International Polar Year, nor was it on the minds, fifty years later, in 1932, of the scientists who staged the second IPY. The organizers of the second IPY decided to reenact Weyprecht's dream on a more ambitious scale. The phenomenon they hoped to explain was the jet stream. Twenty-five years later, in 1957, yet another generation of scientists staged yet another synchronized scientific assault on the poles. Armed with technological instruments many of which had been developed during the Second World War, they confirmed the existence of mid-ocean ridges, measured for the first time the mass of Antarctica's ice, sent the first weather satellites into space, and collected some of the first evidence that man-made greenhouse gases were influencing the climate.
³⁷
By then, the theory of man-made global warming had been around for almost half a century, though few scientists took it seriously. Most physicists and oceanographers and meteorologists were confident that the oceans would absorb all but an irrelevant fraction of the CO
₂
we were adding to the atmosphere.

But in 1957, a group of scientists led by Roger Revelle, an oceanographer at the Scripps Oceanographic Institute, found that the ocean removed CO
₂
from the air far more slowly than expected. Also in 1957, another beneficiary of Weyprecht's dream, the climatologist Charles Keeling, set up a pair of observatories, one on Hawaii's Mauna Loa, another on Antarctica, and for the first time accurately measured atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide. In the following decades, his results would vindicate Revelle: atmospheric CO
₂
levels were rising dramatically.