Trial by Ice (34 page)

While the craft bobbed along the ice, Tyson ordered out oars. To his consternation, only three oars appeared.
And no rudder I

In their misguided zeal to save their belongings, no one had shipped the tiller, sails, or the rest of the oars. Sourly Tyson wondered if the omissions were deliberate, as the men clearly were reluctant to leave the ice floe.

What followed was folly. Without sufficient oars and with no tiller, the vessel made no headway in the turbulent seas. The wind rose to gale force and easily tossed the whaleboat about before blowing it back against the icy island. Nothing could be gained by further efiort, Tyson realized. “We shall all have to suffer much for such obstinacy,” he cried out to the unheeding wind.

Pulling the boat back onto the ice sapped the last of their strength. Night was falling as the party flopped exhausted onto the edge of the floe.

“We have to drag the boat back where she was,” Tyson ordered. Distressingly no one had the energy. Leaving the loaded boat, the party retreated to the higher center of their migrating home.

Tyson crawled under a scrap of canvas and rolled himself in a musk ox lide. Chewing a piece of frozen meat, he fell fast asleep. He had been on his feet for forty-eight hours without rest.

While he slumbered, the storm descended with full force upon the bay. Waves and fetch roiled the pack ice, and wind piled drifts of snow against the jumbled hummocks. Too exhausted to dream, Tyson slept on, unaware of the changes raging about him. A piercing cry from the Inuit jostled Tyson to his senses.

Bolting to his feet, he screwed his mittened hands into his eyelids to wipe away the frost that had glued them shut. The wavering Arctic twilight greeted him. He'd slept the entire night, he suddenly realized.

Focusing his eyes, Tyson followed the outstretched arm of Ebierbing, and his heart jumped into his throat. The storm had broken their floe into pieces. Salt water lapped at the edge of their island of ice less than 75 feet away! The one on which Tyson and the seamen slept measured less than 150 yards across.

Worse, the loaded whaleboat with the bulk of their provisions
and the pole tent drifted silently away on the other slice of their island. Urgently Tyson roused the sleeping sailors. Confused, tired, and fearful, the men could only stand and stare at the growing separation. Finally the lead of frigid water widened beyond any hope of jumping the gap, and Tyson slumped helplessly onto the snow to watch the current catch the other piece and swirl it into the mists.

The effects of the storm continued to hammer their tiny kingdom. The heavy seas, running under the bite of the wind, chipped away relentlessly at the edges of the diminishing plate. As he watched inch after inch of ice break off, Tyson could only pray: “God grant that we may have enough to stand upon.” Laconically he realized the
Polaris
could sail right up to the stranded men if it ever sighted them.

For two more days, the tempest raged while Tyson's hungry party huddled around their flimsy camp. Strangely, spotted seals bobbed nonchalantly in the heaving waters. For these marine animals, the storm and the breaking ice pack were simply part of their normal day.

Now the hunting skills of Ebierbing would prove crucial. Most of their food had drifted away in the other boat. The seals could provide not only food but also oil for cooking and to keep them warm. Cautiously he slid his kayak into the water and paddled toward the unsuspecting animals. Using his barbed-tipped bone spear instead of his rifle so as not to alarm the creatures, he caught one seal on each day. He might have taken more, but the cheering and rushing about of the grateful sailors prompted the other seals to dive out of sight.

While Ebierbing hunted, Tookoolito and Merkut dutifully unpacked their seal-oil lamps and set up camp. When Ebierbing returned with his kill, the ice floe took on the appearance of a slaughterhouse. Blood streaked the snow as cubes of seal meat and blubber were divided among the party. The hungry men wolfed down the slices of raw meat. Nothing was wasted. Congealed blood from the kill was collected in a tin pot, mixed with snow, and cooked into a thin soup over one of the stone lamps. The blubber was diced and squeezed to coax its release of precious oil for the
lamps. With that meager meal in their bellies, the men retreated to their robes to await their fate.

Two clays later Ebierbing cried, “I see the boat!”

Tyson swung his telescope where the Inuit pointed. He spotted the whale boat holding their supplies lying on the ice at the extreme end of thi ice pack. The perversity of the winds and currents had reunited the divided portions of the original floe and returned the errant bo at to the far side of the ice. Tyson and the Native, along with six ded dogs, hurried to retrieve the craft before the plates drifted apart again. Rocking against each other as they were, it was only a mitter of minutes before this would happen. Hitching the dogs to tie boat, the two men managed to slide it across to their side. Now the party was reunited with the sum of their food and furnishings.

Over the next day, their tiny domain drifted tantalizingly close to the shore of Greenland, to the east, close enough to tempt Tyson to consider making a dash for land. But the young ice would neither support a man's weight nor allow them to use their boats. While the captain pondered his dilemma, the wind blew their raft back westward toward Ellesmere Island. Playing with the floating base like a cat plays with a mouse, the sea batted them back and forth until it finally tired of the game and abandoned the insignificant sliver of ice holding nineteen souls in the very middle of the strait.

Facec with the facts that they could not reach land and that their minuscule oasis of ice would hardly withstand another gale, Tyson decided to move camp to a larger island abutting their plate. Hitching the teams of dogs, Tyson and the Inuit pulled one whale-boat after the other over to firmer ice.

Just as they completed this task, the gap between their islands started to widen. The Eskimo's two kayaks still remained on the smaller floe. None of the worn-out sailors responded to Tyson's plea to save those useful craft. When Ebierbing risked his life by jumping the gap to save his boat, the cook, Jackson, and Lindermann followed. Despite their efforts, they could save only one kayak. Now they wer-3 down to a single kayak, essential for hunting seals, and two wha eboats. Soon even that number would change.

Ironically all their efforts had returned them to the original section of the ice floe where Tyson had first built his pole tent beside the
Polaris.
For all their risks and pains, they were back where they started and much worse off, for land was far beyond reach.

Still, the two whaleboats were intact, and they had retrieved two compasses, twenty-seven cans of preserved meat, and eight hundred pounds of bread.

Stoically the Inuit realized that this place was to be home for some time. The men commenced building better shelter. Ebierbing excelled at this task. Using his long-bladed knife to cut blocks of snow, he set about creating igloos. Hard packed by the wind, the snow shaped readily under the Inuit's skilled hands. First, he leveled the floor before building a raised platform opposite the future entrance. This elevated portion served as the sleeping quarters, designed to catch the rising heat from the seal-oil lamp. Then, cutting blocks as he went, Ebierbing built the spiraling walls up around himself, carefully shaping, carving, and sloping each successive layer until an arched roof enclosed the entire structure.

A low, tunneled entrance completed the building. Inside, bodies would sleep packed tightly together like sardines in a tin. Scarcely large enough for a man to stand in the very center, the structures were designed for survival rather than luxury. Heat from the stone lamp and body warmth would keep the interior just above freezing regardless of the subzero temperatures raging outside.

Working quickly, Hans and Ebierbing constructed an entire village, building an igloo for each of the Inuit families, a half-igloo for Tyson and Meyer, and a larger branched structure for the crew, which had a storehouse and cooking room attached by tunneled corridors.

Without a stone lamp of their own, the crewmen adapted a tin pemmican can and a strip of twisted canvas for the wick. Tyson and Meyer managed the delicate task of keeping their lamp lit without difficulty. The crew did not. Half the time they set the entire tin of seal oil ablaze, and the other half they managed to smoke themselves out of their dwelling.

In frustration they did an extremely foolish and dangerous thing: they broke apart one of the whaleboats and used it for firewood.
Again the ugly lack of discipline endangered them all. Since Tyson had never formally commanded the crew, and since he had no firearms while they did, he could do little to stop the piecemeal cannibali2ing of the boat for fuel.

In his journal Tyson noted his helplessness: “This is bad business, but [cannot stop them, situated as I am, without any other authority than such as they choose to concede to me. It will not do to thwart them too much, even for their own benefit.”

Now
i
single kayak and one whaleboat remained for the party of nineteen.

Doing his simple arithmetic, he noted the problems a single boat presented: “These boats are not designed to carry more than six or eight men, and yet I foresee that all this company may have yet to get into the one boat to save our lives, for the ice is very treacherous.” He was to prove unerringly prophetic.

More calculating revealed another alarming fact: Their island was locked in the center of the massive Greenland ice pack. Drifting erraticall} southward at a snail's pace, the pack kept them centered in the middle of Smith Sound and eventually Baffin Bay while preventing their reaching the shore. It would be a good six months before the spring breakup released their island to drift ashore or enabled t lern to row to land. Neither could they expect rescue by another sailing ship before spring. No whaling vessels would venture this far north in search of whales before April or May.

Despite the twenty pounds of chocolate, canned hams, dried apples, ti ined meat and pemmican, dividing that amount of food by nineteen mouths revealed a shocking conclusion: there was simply not eiough to feed them all for the six months it would take for spring; breakup to free the ice. Captain Buddington's relief, expressed a ter the death of Captain Hall, that they would not starve to death on the ice was proving prematureat least for this fraction of the crew.

Friction reared its ugly head almost immediately. Tyson quarreled with Meyer over their location. Meyer placed their last sighting of the
Polaris
close to Northumberland Island. “I ought to know,” tie Prussian sniffed when Tyson questioned the sighting, “for I tock observations only a day or two before.”

Tyson disagreed. “Of course he ought to know, and of course he
ought
to be right,” the maritime navigator griped over the landsman Meyer's reckoning. “But my recollection is that Northumberland Island is larger than the one the
Polaris
steamed behind.” That island had to be Littleton, he judged. Both islands arise in Smith Sound where it narrows into Smith Passage, but Littleton Island is considerably north of the other island.

Next someone stole the remaining chocolate. After four servings the entire twenty pounds vanished. What canned meat or bread was also purloined was impossible to tell from the disorganized piles. While Tyson and Meyer took pains to measure out the daily rations of eleven ounces per person, no practical way existed to place a guard on the supplies. The subzero weather prevented anyone's standing watch. Grumbling increased as the navigator tightened the daily allotment. Stealing and hoarding rose, offsetting his restrictions and defeating his efforts.

Alarmingly the seals disappeared with the departing sun. As the temperature fell, open leads of water froze over, and the animals no longer sunned themselves on top of the ice. Choosing to spend all of their time in the relatively warmer water, the seals could be found only when they surfaced at breathing holes to gulp fresh air before diving again. No white man in the group could spot the two-inch airholes amid the jumbled and tossed
sastrugi.

Finding a breathing hole was just the beginning. Seals cleverly scattered their openings randomly across the ice and visited them irregularly. Just locating a breathing spot was no guarantee that a seal would stick its nose through it. Only an Inuit hunter had the patience to sit silent and unmoving beside a seal hole for the thirty-six to forty-eight hours it usually took for the animal to show.

If he was lucky enough to be at the right hole at the right time, the hunter had to quickly strike the seal in the center of its rounded head with his spear. The barbed point of the spear would penetrate the thin skull and keep the creature from sinking while the man furiously enlarged the hole. Only then could the prey be pulled onto the ice.

That left two men, Hans and Ebierbing, to hunt for them all. Both men excelled at this sort of thing. Disturbingly, the bad joss of the whole expedition appeared to divide itself to follow the men
on the ice as well as Captain Buddington and the ship. Good hunting failed to favor the Inuit's tireless efforts. Three weeks passed without a single catch. Belts were cinched tighter as the rations grew slimmer. “May the great and good God have mercy on us, and send as seals, or I fear we must perish,” Tyson scribbled in his journal.

With little seal oil remaining, the meat rations were eaten frozen. Re serving the precious oil for heating the igloos, Tyson even cut back on using it to melt ice for fresh water. Men turned to eating snow.

The dogs, too, suffered, starving faster than the crewmen. By the end o f the month, the crew shot five dogs and ate them. After that the daily meal consisted of dried biscuit, usually one and one-half crackers per person.

By the first of November, the weather cleared enough for Tyson to make cut Cary Island some twelve miles southeast. If they could reach it, they would have solid land beneath their feet. In desperation Tysoi ordered a run for the distant shore with the remaining dogs. Leaving early in the morning with their heavily loaded sled, the entire group pushed across the roughened surface in the dim twilight. The thickened ice easily supported their progress for several miles.