The Ice Balloon: S. A. Andree and the Heroic Age of Arctic Exploration (22 page)

“Very shortly after, the ice exploded under our feet, and broke in many places, and
the ship broke away in the darkness, and we lost sight of her for a moment
,” Tyson wrote. It was snowing and dark, and the wind was blowing so hard that he couldn’t look into it. He didn’t know who was on the ice with him, but he knew that there were children because the last thing he had pulled from under the ship, where it might be crushed, was a bundle of ox skins in which two or three children belonging to the expedition’s Eskimo hunter had been wrapped. “A slight motion of the ice, and in a moment more they would either have been in the water and drowned in the darkness, or crushed between the ice.”

They had begun working at six in the evening, and the ship had broken away at ten. There were men standing on small floes, and Tyson rowed to them in a scow, which got swamped, so he switched to a whaleboat; these were the only boats he had. After everyone was brought together they didn’t move much, since in the storm they couldn’t tell the extent of the floe they were on. The crew and the women and children huddled in musk-ox skins, while Tyson walked the floe all night. The others had taken all the skins, and he didn’t think it was right to disturb them to ask for one.

By the morning the storm had quieted. Tyson scanned the horizon for the
Polaris
and couldn’t see it. Why it did not come to rescue them he couldn’t understand. He had eighteen people with him—nine crewmen, most of them Germans, and nine Eskimos—the two hunters and their wives and children. The floe was about four miles around, with hills of ice and freshwater pools. Tyson saw a lead that would take them to land, where they might find the
Polaris
or at least Eskimos to help them. He gave orders for the boat to be made ready, but the crew “seemed very inert, and in no hurry.” They said they were tired and wet and hungry and needed something to eat before they moved. Tyson knew he could get himself to safety, but if something had happened to the
Polaris
and it couldn’t come back, he thought the others would perish, so he waited. After the crew ate, they needed to change clothes. By the time they were ready, the lead was closing and the wind was turning against them, bringing ice with it. They shoved off, but the ice blocked them, and they had to turn back. Soon after, however, Tyson saw the
Polaris
eight or ten miles away, rounding a point of land and “was rejoiced indeed.” It was under steam and sail, but through his spyglass he could see no one on the deck. With a piece of India rubber cloth, Tyson set up a distress banner that showed dark against the ice. The
Polaris
did not come toward them but rounded the land and disappeared. “I do not know what to make of this,” Tyson wrote.

He sent some men to collect poles from a house he had built for provisions while the ship was moored to the floe. They came back saying the
Polaris
was moored behind the island. From a vantage point and through his spyglass, Tyson saw it with its sails furled.

“I did not feel right about the vessel not coming for us,” he wrote. “I began to think she did not mean to.” Tyson urged everyone to prepare to make for the island in hopes of reaching the
Polaris
. The men filled the boats with their possessions, which they insisted on bringing. “They seemed to think more of saving their clothes than their lives,” Tyson wrote. When they finally reached the water, it turned out they had brought only three oars and no rudder. Tyson set out anyway, in a gale, but with no rudder the wind threw them back against the floe. They were too tired to haul the boat to their camp, so they left it where it was.

During the night the floe separated, and the part with their boat drifted off, along with some of their provisions, and they had to chase after it. Meanwhile the floe they occupied drifted, apparently to the southwest; Tyson couldn’t be sure, because he had no instruments. Along with the maps, they were aboard the
Polaris
.

So that there would be no jealousies, they built a small scale and used lead shot to weigh out the increments of food they allowed themselves, “just enough to keep body and soul together,” Tyson wrote. Some of the crew were stealing from the storehouse, but the cold was too severe for someone to stand guard. The hunters went out every day after seals but found none. “It is not easy to find seals in the winter,” Tyson wrote. “They live principally under the ice, and can only be seen when the ice cracks; an inexperienced person would never catch one.” The holes the seals made at the surface to breathe were so small—about two and a half inches across—“that they are not easily distinguished, especially in the dim and uncertain light.” Tyson thought also that they were very shy and seemed to know when they were being watched. “A native will sometimes remain watching a seal-hole thirty-six or forty-eight hours before getting a chance to strike, and if the first stroke is not accurate the game is gone forever.”

As November wore on there was less to eat. “Some tremble with weakness when they try to walk,” Tyson wrote. The Eskimos oversaw the building of a small compound of igloos, connected by passages to one another and to the storehouse. The crew withdrew into their own, in which, although most of them knew English, they spoke German, so Tyson never knew what they were discussing. He prayed a prayer from the Arctic traveler’s prayerbook, “May the great and good God have mercy upon us, and send us seals, or I fear we must perish.” Wishing they didn’t have to, they killed five dogs—they had nine—and ate them. They cut up the smaller boat for fuel. By then they had given up hope that the
Polaris
would rescue them.

Tyson held the highest rank, but the Germans hardly listened to him. “I can scarcely get an order obeyed if I give one,” he wrote. To avoid unpleasantness, he tried to do anything that needed to be done by himself. The men stole when they could. They “seize hold of any thing they can lay hands on and secrete it,” he wrote. Aboard the
Polaris
, while Tyson was engaged in other matters, each man had been given a gun. Now Tyson was the only man on the floe without one. He shared quarters with one of the Eskimos and his wife and child. These particular Eskimos had been to England and had lived in Connecticut, so he could speak to them.

The hungrier Tyson grew, the colder he got, and the more he thought about food. For Thanksgiving he had two biscuits, dried apples from a can, seal entrails, and some blubber. “I am thankful for what I do get,” he wrote. “Thankful that it is no worse.” For all but two hours of the day they lived in complete darkness. The rest of the time they had “glimmering light, so that we can just make out to walk over the uneven ice.”

As much as he could, Tyson lay still in his hut. “The stiller we keep and the warmer, the less we can live on,” he wrote. His clothes were too thin for the cold. Having been working on the floe when the
Polaris
broke away, he hadn’t had a chance to get his warmer ones. By December they were living in total darkness, which made it impossible to hunt seals, which they relied on not only for food, but also to burn in their lamps. “Bears only come where seals are to be caught so we need not look for them,” Tyson wrote. One of the men shot a scrawny fox, “all hair and tail,” and they ate every part of it.

One of the Eskimos, who had two guns, gave Tyson one. “He says he don’t like the look out of the men’s eyes,” Tyson wrote. “Setting aside the crime of cannibalism—for if it is God’s will that we should die by starvation, why, let us die like men, not like brutes, tearing each other to pieces—it would be the worst possible policy to kill the poor natives. They are our best, and I may say only, hunters.” The Germans swaggered around with their weapons, and conveyed to Tyson the impression that the Eskimos were a burden.

“I see the necessity of being very careful,” Tyson wrote, “though I shall protect the natives at any cost.” Above all, he thought, a quarrel must be avoided, for “that would be fatal.”

Toward the third week of December, Tyson wrote,
“The fear of death has long ago been starved and frozen out of me.”

In January, one of the Eskimos finally killed a seal. Tyson ordered that it be taken to the Eskimos’ hut to be dressed, but the crew took it and “kept an undue proportion for themselves.”

Through February they lay in their huts, sometimes bickering. The wind blew continuously. During the first week of March, while they were subsisting on only a few ounces a day—“a well kept dog receives more”—one of the Eskimos shot the largest seal Tyson had ever seen. It weighed between six and seven hundred pounds, and “took all hands to drag him to the huts,” he wrote. “It was, indeed, a great deliverance.” They had been, he wrote, “just on the verge of absolute destitution.” Some of the crew ate until they were sick.

As they drifted farther south, they began to encounter more seals. On a day toward the end of March they shot seven, and on another they shot nine. Bears left their tracks in the camp at night, but the hunters weren’t able to shoot any. Meanwhile, the Germans, everlasting tinkerers and mechanical improvers, had dismantled nearly every rifle and most were ruined. “They must work away at every thing, and never stop till it is rendered useless,” Tyson wrote.

On the twenty-eighth a bear came into camp and fed on their sealskins and blubber. Tyson, creeping up on it, knocked over a standing shotgun—to prevent their guns from seizing up from the vapors of their breath, they had to leave them outside. When the bear growled, Tyson fired, “but the gun did not go; pulled a second and third time—it did not go; but I did, for the bear now came for me.” Tyson made it to his hut and got another shell. He crept out again, saw the bear in the darkness, and as it turned toward him he fired and this time hit the bear in the heart. It ran about thirty feet and fell over dead. The meat, Tyson wrote, tasted “more like pork than anything we have had to eat for a long time.”

In a gale at the end of March, Tyson felt “a great thump, as if a hammer a mile wide had hit us,” and looked out to see that their floe had gotten in the way of an iceberg. Where they were, he couldn’t tell. “Our little ice-craft is plowing its way through the sea without other guide than the Great Being above.”

By the first of April their floe had separated itself from the larger one it had been part of and was small enough that Tyson no longer thought it was safe. They decided to use the whaleboat to try to reach the larger floe. They had to leave behind their store of meat, which had grown to a size to feed them for a month, and a good part of their ammunition, because of its weight. What they did bring, in addition to their sleeping gear, was Captain Hall’s writing desk. Some of the men wanted to throw it overboard, but Tyson “positively forbade it, as it was all we had belonging to our late commander.” Nineteen people, including five children, fit into a boat built for six or seven. The children were frightened and crying. The boat was nearly swamped, but they made twenty miles, spending the night on a floe. They regained the pack on the fourth. Three days later, as they were having breakfast, the floe split beneath their tent. They managed to get out, but their breakfast went in the water. “What little sleep I get is disturbed and unrefreshing,” Tyson wrote.

Their boat was so close to the tent that there was no space to walk between them, but the following day, in a storm, the ice split, carrying off the boat, a kayak, and one of the men. “We stood helpless, looking at each other,” Tyson wrote. The man on the floe—he was the cook, whose name was Meyers—couldn’t manage the boat by himself, nor did he know how to use the kayak. He cast it adrift, hoping it would reach the men on the other floe, who could come get him or at least throw him a line, but it went in another direction. The two hunters went after it, jumping from one piece of ice to another. Night fell. Tyson and the others tried to get some rest. In the morning they could see the boat and the two men, who hadn’t the strength to manage it either, and the kayak about a half mile in the opposite direction. Tyson and another man went after them, hopping like goats among the ice. When they reached the boat, all of them were so weak that they couldn’t move it. Finally every man in the camp but two, who were afraid to cross the ice, came, and they got the boat back to camp. Along the way two men had to be pulled from the water. “We are all more or less wet,” Tyson wrote, “and Meyers badly frozen.”

They set up a tent and passed an uncertain night. In the morning the sea was running high—“the water, like a hungry beast, creeps nearer.” Tyson wrote. “Things look very bad.” That evening the sea overran the tent. They got their possessions into the boat and prepared to launch it, “but I fear she can never live in such a sea.” The women and children had begun to spend all their time in the boat, since the ice could split at any moment and they might not have time to reach it otherwise. The sea’s overwhelming the floe meant that there was no freshwater ice to melt, and all of them suffered from thirst.

By midnight the ice closed in around them, quieting the sea, and they tried to sleep. In the coming days they saw a fox and some ravens, leading Tyson to conclude that they weren’t far from land. They also saw some seals but were unable to reach them. “Are very hungry, and are likely to remain so.”

On April 13 Tyson wrote, “I think this must be Easter-Sunday in civilized lands. Surely we have had more than a forty days’ fast. May we have a glorious resurrection to peace and safety ere long!” The night before, sitting alone and pondering their circumstances, he had taken hope while watching the northern lights. “The auroras seem to me always like a sudden flashing out of divinity,” he wrote. The ice was so close about them that they saw no water and therefore couldn’t move. The edges of their floe were wearing away. “Things look very dark, starvation very near,” Tyson wrote.

They saw seals but not close enough that they could kill them. Snow fell thickly on the fifteenth, then the sun came out, and although the weather would have been good for traveling they saw nothing but ice around them. “Some of the men have dangerous looks; this hunger is disturbing their brains. I can not but fear that they contemplate crime. After what we have gone through, I hope this company may be preserved from any fatal wrong. We can and we must bear what God sends without crime. This party must not disgrace humanity by cannibalism.”