The Ice Balloon: S. A. Andree and the Heroic Age of Arctic Exploration (9 page)

(illustration credit 16.2)

The first member to crack in the prevalent darkness was Jens Edward, one of the Greenlanders, who wandered from camp and was brought back by men who followed his tracks for ten miles. Not long after Edward’s collapse, the other Greenlander, Thorlip Frederick Christiansen, who was called Eskimo Fred, began waving a cross at the others, whom he believed meant to shoot him. He was eventually pacified. Greely and Pavy indulged their dislike of each other. Pavy wrote in his journal that Greely was full of vanity, and Greely wrote that Pavy was tricky and two-faced, “idle, unfit for any Arctic work except doctoring and sledge travel and not first class in the latter.”

The ship that was to relieve them, the
Neptune
, got no closer to Fort Conger than 150 miles when its captain tried to force the ship through a lead and its boiler burst. At Littleton Island and at Cape Sabine, three hundred miles south, he left small caches of food, each sufficient for ten days. He also left a whaleboat at each place. His orders were to return with his provisions if he hadn’t reached Fort Conger. He tried once more to advance, and went home with enough food to sustain a retreat lasting two and a half months, should Greely find it necessary to abandon Fort Conger to reach the next summer’s ship.

No one got along any better during the second winter. “Perfect ease of mind cannot come until a ship is seen again,” Greely wrote in the spring. He prepared for the ship’s arrival by, among other tasks, ordering that a catalog be made of all the natural-history specimens collected. Dr. Pavy’s military commission ended on July 20. On the nineteenth Greely asked for his records and his diary. Pavy gave up the records but not the diary, saying that it was a private account and had no place in the expedition’s archive. Greely had him arrested.

The second relief ship was the
Proteus
, which had brought them to the Arctic. It was accompanied by the
Yantic
. The
Proteus
sailed farther than the
Neptune
but got caught in the ice and sank slowly. While it was going down, the captain ordered that the ship’s supplies be thrown onto the ice, but most of the crew gave up their posts to save their belongings. About a third of what went overboard went into the water. What remained was left at Cape Sabine for Greely. Then the crew rowed lifeboats south to the
Yantic
.

A man named Henry Clay, who was initially a member of the expedition but had quarreled with Dr. Pavy and quit only days before it left, wrote a letter to the
Louisville Courier-Journal
saying that if a ship did not reach Fort Conger by September, Greely would have to leave for Cape Sabine, more than 250 miles away. If he made 5 miles a day, Clay wrote, it would take him until November to arrive, and by then night would have fallen for the winter. “Their condition will be truly pitiable,” Clay wrote. Likely they would be stranded at Cape Sabine, where they would run out of food. Then they would “lie down on the cold ground, under the quiet stars,” being “past all earthly succor.”

In August of 1883, enacting the plan to retreat if no one had come for them after two years, and leaving dishes on the table and the beds unmade, collections of lichens and moss and fossils, ten musical instruments, some stuffed birds and some sealskin coats, twenty-three dogs, with enough food to last in case the expedition returned, and nailing the door shut, Greely and his men left Fort Conger in their steam launch, which was named
Lady Greely
. The launch towed two smaller boats and a dinghy, which were loaded with their diaries and records, their scientific instruments, including chronometers and the pendulum, four rifles, two shotguns, a thousand rounds, and Greely’s dress uniform with his sword. Sergeant William Cross described the flotilla as resembling a “load of trash.” They had occupied Fort Conger for 721 days, 268 of them in darkness. The dogs barked as the expedition departed.

For thirteen days they drifted among pack ice, “suffering horribly from the cold,” according to the naval report. When a lead opened, they had to wonder if it would stay open or close while they were in it and wreck them. Waves broke over them sometimes, and it snowed. The officers’ journals are full of bickering about Greely’s decisions. He wanted to abandon the boats and drift on the ice. While he slept, Pavy told Brainard and Rice that if Greely insisted, Pavy would pronounce him unstable and replace him. Greely’s “frequent outbursts of passion evinced insanity,” Pavy said. Under Kislingbury—whose position, if he hadn’t lost it, would have made him second in command—they would return to Fort Conger and try to leave again in the spring. Brainard realized that he was required to report the exchange to Greely, but he was concerned that if he did, Greely would act in such a way as to deliver himself into Pavy’s hands. Brainard was as close to an ally as Greely had, but he wrote, “All that ignorance, stupidity, and an egotistical mind without judgment can do in the injury of our cause is being done.”

Pavy’s plan became unnecessary when Greely called the officers to a meeting in the launch. He told them that the circumstances being what they were, he had no right to act alone. “I am not infallible,” he said.

To try to reach land, they left the launch and crossed the ice. A few times they came within two or three miles of shore, but a gale moved the ice and carried them off. In August, on a flyspeck piece of rock called Washington Irving Island, they found food left in 1875 by the British polar expedition led by George Nares. The cache was small and mostly rotten. Among it were tins of dog biscuits, which they opened. In all there were 110 pounds of biscuits, only 58 of which were preserved. The rest were “a mass of filthy green mould.” Greely ordered the spoiled ones thrown away, but the men found them and ate them until Greely forbade them to. A few days later, Lockwood wrote, “Occupied some time this morning in scraping, like a dog, in the place where the moulded dog-biscuits were emptied. Found a few crumbs of small pieces, and ate mould and all.”

In the third week of September the worst storm they had seen sent waves washing over their floe, “the spray freezing to them and causing them intense suffering,” the report said. They waited for the waves to break up the floe and drown them. Instead another floe drifted close to theirs, and they climbed onto it and from there on September 29, after 51 days at sea, they arrived at Eskimo Point, about twenty miles south of Cape Sabine. While the party collected stones for a shelter, Sergeant Rice and Jens Edward walked to Cape Sabine, hoping to find either a ship or food one had left. In a cairn, they found a note telling them that the
Proteus
had sunk. It also told them where to find three small caches of food which were sufficient for less than a month. The report they brought Greely “sent a thrill of horror to every heart,” the naval officer wrote. “Every one knew that death must come to nearly all of the party long before the ship of rescue could force its way.”

Greely decided to move to Cape Sabine. “It is not easy to give an idea of the desolate and horrible aspect of this bleak and barren spot,” Schley wrote when they reached it. “To the north is the sea, filled with ice,” and behind it were glaciers and mountains. All around was “barren rock, except where the snow still lay deep in the hollows.” From stones, they built a shelter twenty-five feet long and seventeen wide, which hardly held them all. The walls were four feet tall and three feet thick and were chinked with loose rocks and moss. To make a lodgepole, they stood their whaleboat on end and over it they stretched a canvas sail. Snow fell and covered it. They named their refuge Camp Clay, after Henry Clay.

Among the food from the
Proteus
were some lemons wrapped in newspapers. From the newspapers the men learned that Chester Arthur had become president after Garfield had been shot. The papers, astonishingly, included Henry Clay’s letter, which also said, “The cache of 240 rations, if it can be found, will prolong their misery for a few days.”

Within weeks everyone was desperately hungry. Some of the food had rotted and was buried, but a few of the soldiers dug it up and ate it anyway. Hoping to make what they had last the winter, Greely allowed each man fifteen ounces of food a day. These included six and a half ounces of bread and dog biscuits; four and a half ounces of meat and blubber; one and two-fifths ounces of canned vegetables and rice; one ounce of berries, pickles, raisins and milk; nine-tenths of an ounce of soup and beef-extract; and three-quarters of an ounce of butter and lard.

In early November, Greely sent four soldiers—George Rice, Julius Frederick, Joseph Elison, and David Linn—to retrieve 144 pounds of meat he thought had been left forty miles away by the Nares expedition. Eight days later Rice returned at two in the morning, exhausted, and said, “Elison is dying at Ross Bay.”

Thirst is a constant threat in the Arctic, and Elison had gotten so thirsty that he had eaten snow, which should never be done. To begin with, it is painful. According to Julius von Payer, an Austro-Hungarian explorer from what is now the Czech Republic, colder than thirty-seven degrees below zero, snow feels in the mouth, “like a hot iron.” It is also impossible to eat a sufficient amount to slake one’s thirst. Furthermore, eating snow was seen as a failure of character. “Snow-eaters during the march were regarded by us as weaklings much in the same way as opium-eaters are,” Payer wrote.

The snow froze Elison’s hands and face. The others tried to warm his hands by placing them between their thighs. “The poor fellow cried all night from the pain,” Frederick wrote. In addition, his feet has frozen and he couldn’t stand. To carry him on the sledge they had to leave the meat behind. The next night they had to warm him again. The following day his face became frosted, and his eyelids froze shut. A gale arrived. Linn and Frederick got into the sleeping bag on either side of Elison, and Rice started for the camp, which was twenty-five miles away. To walk there took sixteen hours. In the meantime Frederick and Linn lay in the sleeping bag with Elison, whose lips were frozen together, so he couldn’t take any of the beef they tried to feed him. He merely lay groaning. His suffering was so difficult for Linn to bear that he tried to leave the bag, which would have meant dying from exposure, and Frederick had to hold him back. Elison wet himself and his urine soaked the bag and froze, so for eighteen hours they lay as if clamped in place.

When the rescuers reached them, Elison said, “Please kill me, will you?” To get him out of the bag, they had to cut it apart. They wrapped him in a blanket and placed him on a sledge. His feet had turned black.

Greely could think of no other way to divert the men’s attention from their suffering, so he began lecturing again, about geography and the states. “Talked for nearly two hours to-day on the State of Maine,” he wrote, “touching on its climate, its vegetable and mineral products, its river system, mountain ranges, principal cities, its most important resources and manufactures, its history and the famous men who have come from the State; and also as to its inducements to emigrants to settle within its limits. Subsequently I called upon Jewell, who has lived in Maine, to supplement my statements by any additional information he might possess; and, late, invited questions from any of the party on mooted or neglected points.” Private Henry, because he had the most penetrating voice, read aloud. On November 24, “Instead of the customary reading from the Bible, Dickens, and the Army Regulations,” Greely wrote, “this evening was given up to reminiscences pertaining to the past lives and domestic surroundings of the men.”

Food began to disappear. “During last night someone, without doubt, took bread from Corporal Elison’s bread-can,” Greely wrote on December 4. “I was awake, and plainly heard it done.” A knife used to open a milk tin stolen from the storehouse belonged to a soldier named Schneider, who said he had lent the knife to Pvt. Charles B. Henry. Henry’s real name was Charles Henry Buck, but they didn’t know it. (A thief and a forger, he had also killed a man in a fight and gone to prison for it. After being kicked out of the cavalry, he had signed up with his new name.)

Game was scarce, and neither Greenlander had any luck hunting. By the middle of November, Greely lowered rations to four ounces a day. “We are all more or less unreasonable,” Brainard wrote in his journal, “and I can only wonder that we are not all insane.”

Lockwood made lists of meals he planned to eat after being rescued. In the middle of other notations, he would sometimes insert references to food. “Oranges and pineapples cut up together, and eaten with grated cocoanut,” one of them says; then he went on to wonder whether his father was alive and if he would see him again. On another occasion he wrote, “Brainard is to come to supper at my home on reaching Washington, and I have promised him sally lun, stewed oysters, smearkase, and preserved strawberries with cake. After supper a smoke, and then wine and cake.” Also, “I have invited Fredericks and Long to come to the house and eat some preserved strawberries and black cake.”

Cross died first. He had been splitting wood, then he fell into a coma and died two days later. Pavy thought scurvy had killed him. According to the naval report, however, he died “from the use of liquor. He would drink anything that had a suspicion of alcohol about it, even paint.” They sewed him up in canvas sacks, Greely read the burial service over him, then they hauled him on a sledge to a hill above a lake, which Greely named Cross Lake. “A ghostly procession of emaciated men moving slowly and silently away from their wretched ice prison in the uncertain light,” is how Brainard described them. Not having the tools they needed, they dug a grave with their hands and placed on it a ring of stones. Cross died the day before he would have been forty. They discovered that he had saved up bread and butter to celebrate.

In his excellent
Ghosts of Cape Sabine
, Leonard Guttridge describes their routines in the days following the funeral. “The men kept mostly to their sleeping bags. Those who managed to leave the hut did so only from physical necessity. Few read. Frost and ice coated the interior walls. In the dim blubber-fueled lamplight, the commander strained weak eyes over psalms and poetry, his voice barely audible above buffeting wind gusts. Lieutenant Lockwood improvised a lecture on the St. Louis riots, and while smoking a blend of tobacco and tea leaves, he dreamed of a restaurant in that city named The Silver Moon, where fifty cents bought a dinner, and a nearby bakery offered ‘excellent bread and something fine in the way of tapioca and coconut pies.’ The lieutenant interrupted his soliloquy to hand Sergeant Ralston a piece of tobacco for plugging a painfully hollow tooth. This makeshift filling enabled Ralston to murmur memories of early days as an Iowa farmhand. Then he read from
The Pickwick Papers
. Brainard talked of Indian fighting; Pavy described a bullfight and a walking tour through Switzerland. Such efforts were to sustain morale.” Greely one day asked the men to help him make a “chronological table of all the principal events of the world.”