The Ice Balloon: S. A. Andree and the Heroic Age of Arctic Exploration (8 page)

While Andrée was in Spitsbergen at the Swedish station, making measurements and shut in darkness, the American delegation to the International Polar Year was on Ellesmere Island, opposite the northern end of Greenland, on Lady Franklin Bay. Their camp was about six hundred miles from the pole, and the northernmost of all the nations’ camps. The twenty-five members lived in a hut which was sixty feet long and seventeen feet wide and which they had built and called Fort Conger, after a Michigan senator named Omar Conger, who had supported Arctic research. The officers—there were four of them—slept at one end, and the enlisted men at the other. The expedition was to make scientific observations and also to search for the
Jeannette
, which had left to discover the pole in 1879, and disappeared.

The delegation’s leader was Adolphus Greely, who had asserted at Andrée’s talk in London in 1895 that although Andrée might reach the pole, the Arctic winds, which at that elevation blew only north, would strand him, and then said that the congress ought not to support such a plan.

(illustration credit 16.1)

In
Three Years of Arctic Service
, a fantastically understated title, Greely described some of his comrades at Fort Conger, all of whom had volunteered. Lieutenant Frederick Kislingbury, “in a service of over fifteen years, had a fine reputation for field duty,” Greely wrote. James Lockwood “had served eight years, almost always on the frontier, and was highly recommended as an officer of sterling merit and varied attainments.

“Edward Israel and George W. Rice, in order to accompany the expedition, cheerfully accepted service as enlisted men. The former, a graduate of Ann Arbor University, went in his chosen profession as astronomer, while the latter, a professional photographer, hoped to add to his reputation in that art by service with the expedition. Sergeants Jewell and Ralston had served long and faithfully as meteorological observers; while Gardiner, though of younger service, was most promising. Long and hazardous duty on the Western frontier had inured the greater part of the men to dangers, hardships, and exposure.”

“Long and hazardous duty on the Western frontier” meant fighting Indians.

In August of 1881, Greely and his men, intending to stay two years, had been left in the Arctic by the
Proteus
. A ship was to visit the following summer to replace anyone who was sick and to leave food and supplies. If ice kept it from reaching the camp, a ship the following year was to stay in Grinnell Sound, about two hundred miles south of Fort Conger, “until there is danger of its closing by ice,” the orders said. If the ship had to depart, it was to leave men and food on Littleton Island in Greenland, about 260 miles south. The men were to sledge north through a part of Ellesmere Island called Grinnell Land, after a New York shipowner who had paid for two expeditions to find Franklin, and meet Greely, who had been ordered to abandon his camp no later than September of 1883 if no one had reached him. Greely was to travel by boat along the coast of Grinnell Land in the hope of meeting the sledgers or else of making it to Littleton Island.

Greely was thirty-eight when he left for the Arctic. He was born in Massachusetts in 1844. His father was a shoemaker. Greely was not an especially good student, and in 1861 he enlisted in the Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. He was at the Battle of Yorktown, and was wounded twice at Antietam, the most fatal battle of the Civil War, where 23,000 men died in twelve hours. After he recovered he was made second lieutenant in the Ninth Regiment, Corps d’Afrique, which was stationed in Louisiana. To try to recover wages owed to his troops, he wrote to his superiors in Washington that “colored soldiers deserve as much as white soldiers, as they are fighting for the same cause.” After the war the army sent him west, and by 1873 he was a member of the Signal Corps, the branch that supports the troops with information, and was mostly involved in sending weather bulletins to Washington. The following year he went to Texas to string telegraph lines through bandit and Indian territory.

Greely was tall and wiry and wore glasses, and he had never been to the Arctic but had read a lot about it. As close as he had come was to live through a three-day blizzard on the plains. He liked discipline, he didn’t like gambling, and he forbade his men to curse—he appeared, in other words, to be something of a prig. Three years before leaving, he had gotten married, and he and his wife had two children. When he left the
Proteus
, he wrote her, “I think of you always and most continually. I wonder what you and the darling babes are doing. I desire continually you and your society, our home and its comforts. I am content at being here only that I hope from and through it the future may be made brighter and happier for you and the children. Will it? We will so hope and trust. There seems so little outside of you and the babes that is of any real and true value to me.”

Motley parties of servicemen and civilians didn’t usually do well in the Arctic. The servicemen were accustomed to hierarchical discipline, and the citizens were not accustomed to discipline at all. Greely’s crew had nineteen soldiers, three who had been mustered into service for the purpose, two Greenland natives as hunters and guides, and a civilian doctor, Octave Pavy, who was also the expedition’s naturalist and the last person to join. Pavy had been born in 1844 in New Orleans, but he was sent to France as a child to be educated. He had come back to America in 1872 to undertake “The Pavy Expedition to the North Pole,” but his backer died before he could leave. In 1879, he joined another Arctic expedition, which was given up in Greenland when its ship was judged unfit. The ship went home, but Pavy stayed, learning to speak Eskimo and, according to his wife, Lilla May Pavy, making “himself an adept, so far as a foreigner can become such, in the management of the Eskimo sledge.” (Lilla May Pavy was from St. Louis, but another woman turned up from Paris and said she was also married to Pavy.) In addition, he collected plants, rocks, and animals he stuffed, and studied diseases specific to the region and how to treat them. He was a little prickly and regarded himself as better educated and more knowledgeable about the Arctic than Greely and the others. Greely had command of him, since Pavy was, nominally, for the expedition, a soldier, but he pretty much refused to be bossed or only acceded resentfully.

The
Proteus
left them at the northern end of Ellesmere Island, across from Greenland, about eleven hundred miles above the Arctic Circle, then got caught in the ice before it could leave. On flat ground about a hundred yards from the shore, they built Fort Conger. Perhaps two hundred yards from it they also built a small hut as a place to make magnetic observations.

Before a month had passed Greely had reprimanded his two lieutenants, Lockwood and Kislingbury, for sleeping late. Lockwood, an insomniac, reformed, but not Kislingbury. Kislingbury had strung telegraph lines with Greely in Texas, and Greely had invited him. Three years earlier Kislingbury’s wife had died, and he had married her sister and then she died, too, apparently of scarlet fever at Fort Custer while Kislingbury had been gone several weeks on a scouting mission. By his two wives he had four sons, two of whom also came down with scarlet fever but recovered. He wrote Greely that the expedition would be an opportunity “to wear out my second terrible sorrow.” His sons, he wrote, “will love me better when I return and will be proud of the father who dared to brave the dangers we have read about of a sojourn in the Arctic regions,” then added, “You will find no truer friend or devoted servant.”

For three days, with the
Proteus
still in view, Greely held breakfast half an hour for Kislingbury. When reproached, Kislingbury said they should have started without him. Officers should not have to rise with the enlisted men anyway, he added. Greely said that the agreeable compliance with orders was essential to an officer’s usefulness. Kislingbury said nothing and walked away. He wrote Greely a letter saying morosely that he felt that Greely had no confidence in him, and might prefer that he left.

Greely called the officers to a conference far enough away from the hut that the men couldn’t hear him, and read the letter to Pavy, Lockwood, and Kislingbury. Then he said that he didn’t go in for intimations and if he wanted an officer removed, he would say so. Kislingbury, perhaps from hurt feelings, said that the effect of Greely’s treatment had amounted to as much. Greely asked Kislingbury if he still wished to be relieved, and Kislingbury said yes.

Carrying his bags, Kislingbury was walking toward the
Proteus
, half a mile away, when a passage opened in the ice and the ship sailed off. Disbelieving, he watched it for some time. Then he walked back to Fort Conger. Greely wrote orders specifying that Kislingbury was to be treated as someone “temporarily at this station awaiting transportation”—as a citizen, in other words, someone unable to ask a soldier to do the simplest thing for him.

The
Proteus
’s leaving signified the start of their term. With the ship, Greely wrote, went “my intense longing to get back to my wife and children.” He announced that on the Sabbath no games could be played, and that even those among the crew who were not religious would have to listen to him read from Psalms. The first one he chose was 133, which begins, “Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity.”

In October, Greely climbed a hill to watch the sun disappear. During the Arctic night the North Star seemed to hang overhead like a distant lantern. The Great Bear and Orion’s Belt were the brightest constellations. The dark was so thick at times that they couldn’t read a wristwatch, and on occasion they saw the moon for days at a time.

Commander Winfield Schley, the officer who eventually rescued them, wrote in his report, “Over everything was dead silence, so horribly oppressive that a man alone is almost tempted to kill himself, so lonely does he feel.”

They hunted musk ox and drew coal from a mine that was three miles away. Despite their intimate terms, they knew only so much about one another. Sergeant David Ralston’s birthday they celebrated with a meal of oyster soup, roast beef, vegetables, jelly cake, peach pie, cherry pie, and coffee, unaware that Ralston’s wife had been a widow who said that Ralston had married her for her late husband’s money, and had left her destitute. Dr. Pavy embarked on a sledge trip to establish depots for other sledge trips and returned early, going only half as far as he had been expected to, but had been stopped by ice, he said, which annoyed Greely, who thought Pavy at least ought to have waited for the tide to turn to see if the ice moved.

In the darkness resentments accumulated between Greely and Pavy, but sometimes also with and among the men. Greely announced that the soldiers would have to do the officers’ laundry, asked for volunteers, and got none. He told a sergeant named David Brainard to assign someone. When the men’s response was to feel aggrieved, Greely, according to Brainard’s journal, said that “he was not a man to be trifled with and in case of mutiny he would not stop at the loss of human lives to restore order.”

To invoke routines from regular life, they ate with silver-plated knives and forks on linen that they changed twice a week. Each day they made five hundred notations from their instruments, including a pendulum. They made observations of the northern lights, which Greely described as resembling “a beautiful and brilliant arch formed of convoluted bends of lights similar to twisted ribbons,” and another time as “lances of white light, perhaps tinged with gold or citrine.” To keep the men outdoors for an hour a day, Greely had Brainard invent projects. Around the hut, for example, three feet from the walls, they built a barrier of ice six feet tall, so that falling snow would fill in the interval and insulate the place. They spread gravel and sand on the floor to make it smooth enough to sleep on. Against boredom Greely began teaching math, grammar, geography, and the weather science he had learned in the Signal Corps. He also spoke twice a month about other polar expeditions and the Civil War. Lieutenant Lockwood edited “Arctic Moon,” a broadsheet with news and commentary contributed by “the finest minds of the country.” They established depots and mapped parts of the interior. Their triumph was Lieutenant Lockwood’s traveling nearly a thousand miles by sledge, reaching eighty-three degrees twenty-five minutes north, by four miles the farthest north ever—about halfway to the pole, and three hundred miles north of Fort Conger. “Before them all was new,” the naval report said of Lockwood and the men in his party. They had traveled in territory “which had never before met the vision of civilized man.”