by Barry Lopez
If the bear was not already dead when the hunter arrived, the hunter removed a few stones at the head of this mechanism and drove a spear into the bear to kill it. I thought about the bear, about pihuqahtaq, “the one who walks,” after we left. Inuit hunters in Nunavut today say of the polar bear, nanuq, “he’s the one most like us.” A polar bear stands erect like a person. They still-hunt seals, a technique requiring terrific patience. They construct snow houses for shelter and for birthing. They move seasonally, as Inuit did in the old days. Polar bears are considered the most skilled of hunters, the angakkuq’s most powerful helper, and the most intelligent of all animals. The bear is symbolically complex for Inuit people, seen as a mediator between the sea and the land, as one who moves easily between the human and the nonhuman world. They are thought to live in villages where they appear to each other as humans. Inuit dead are given water removed from the body of a bear, if it is available, to help them on their journey.
The scene in which the Thule hunter comes upon the trapped bear, the living hunter encountering the dead hunter, is as eschatologically complex, probably, as anything in the Thule world. (A branch of theology, eschatology deals with death, destiny, and the final journey of the soul.) I wanted to listen to it spoken of. The inert eight-hundred-year-old trap was a reminder that in this extreme locale, survival was the dilemma every hunter had to deal with.
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WE LANDED AT Cape Sabine on Pim Island, at the eastern tip of Johan Peninsula, putting down amid a jumble of rocks and boulders in a trough between two rocky ridges. In the summer of 1884, the survivors of the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition (1881–1884) awaited rescue here. It was the second winter of waiting with their leader, Lt. Adolphus Greely.
Approaching the ruins of this starvation camp in silence, we could see that very little had been disturbed over the past century. Here a piece of worn-out clothing, there half a dozen rusting barrel hoops, the staves having been burned to provide warmth. Peter tells me that whenever he comes here, he brings an offering of food, remembering the men, especially those whose bodies were buried here.
Peter went ahead to the graveyard with his gifts while the rest of us separated in the chilly air and began walking slowly around the shabby bivouac barracks.
The place is called Camp Clay.
When the Second International Polar Conference met in Bern, Switzerland, in 1880, the United States agreed, for its part, to establish a research outpost along the northern reach of Ellesmere Island’s east coast. In the late summer of 1881, Greely and his party were put ashore at Discovery Harbor, Lady Franklin Bay, where they erected Fort Conger, their winter quarters. Throughout the winter of 1881–82 and the following summer, Greely, his twenty-two men, and their two Inughuit dog handlers, hunters, and survival experts, named Thorlip Christiansen and Jens Edward, conducted field surveys and laboratory research. When the rescue ship that was to have come for them in August of 1882 didn’t arrive, they were forced to overwinter again. They resumed their field and laboratory work, hoping for rescue late in the summer of 1883. On August 9, running dangerously short of supplies at Fort Conger and knowing the seemingly capricious pack ice might be holding up the rescue vessel, Greely ordered his men to abandon the camp. His plan was to advance southward along the Ellesmere coast, watching for any sign of a food cache that might have been left behind the previous year by the vessel sent to rescue them. They kept a sharp eye out, too, for a second rescue vessel, one they fully expected to encounter in the weeks to come.
The party of twenty-five men (they’d left twenty-three sled dogs behind at Fort Conger), carrying a sixty-day supply of food packed into a launch and three boats, found no food caches along the way and saw no sign of a ship. By mid-September Greely had given up hope of being rescued that year. The party put ashore at Eskimo Point on Johan Peninsula, about twelve miles south of Pim Island, where they managed to reconfigure several old Thule winter houses to create winter shelters. The Inughuit hunters, who were described by the party’s second-in-command as “worth their weight in gold,” killed a 600-pound bearded seal, which greatly improved their overwintering prospects. Some weeks later one of the Inughuit, Jens Edward, drowned while hunting seals to secure more food for the months ahead.
One of the search parties Greely sent out from Eskimo Point that autumn discovered a small food cache at Cape Sabine on Pim Island. Greely decided to move the entire party there, despite the strenuous effort they’d already made to create a winter quarters at Eskimo Point, and despite the fact that it would have been far easier to move the food at Cape Sabine to Eskimo Point than to move the boats and the rest of their equipment and supplies north to Cape Sabine. The men were openly critical of Greely, and Greely realized his men were beginning to doubt him. It was the start of a chaotic time.
At Cape Sabine the men built a low stone wall in the shape of a square and inverted the launch over it. The boats’ oars served as rafters and the sails were sewn together to make a ceiling. The whole of it was roofed over with a layer of sod. They chinked the walls with clots of earth, with socks and other bits of cloth. (The supplies that had been left for them at Cape Sabine in the fall of 1882 were so inadequate they seemed an insult. The rescue efforts of both 1882 and 1883 were poorly organized and then badly managed.) Of the twenty-five men who went ashore at Eskimo Point on the last day of September 1883, only seven survived long enough to be rescued, and of those, only three seemed ever to fully recover. Most of the men starved to death. One committed suicide and another was executed for stealing food in a camp plagued by theft and mistrust.
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I TURNED AWAY from the party’s now-roofless shelter, with its empty tin cans and abandoned scraps of clothing, and began walking toward “Cemetery Ridge,” where Peter had been and where I would find, I knew, the ashes of the party’s last fire, still undisturbed. The bare ground around the hut walls had been trampled flat a hundred years ago. Denuded back then, the ground had never recovered. It was muddy now from summer melting in the upper level of permafrost. On the ridge, a glacial moraine of coarse gravel, I found a series of parallel depressions. The first graves, empty now. (The bodies of five of the dead buried there were washed out to sea before two rescue ships, the Bear and the Thetis, finally arrived to take aboard the living and the bodies of the exhumed.) One survivor, Corporal Joseph Elison, who’d lost his feet and seven fingers to frostbite and weighed only 78 pounds, died en route to Godhavn, Greenland. There the body of the other Inughuit man, Thorlip Christiansen, was taken ashore and turned over to residents. The body of Jens Edward was never recovered.
I was already familiar with many of the details of the overly optimistic Greely expedition, and with the failings and ineptitude of some of his men. I also knew about the lack of integrity and the absence of courage that had characterized the first two rescue missions, which were the indirect cause of the eighteen deaths at Cape Sabine. I could not in that moment on the ridge, however, find the frame of mind in which to assign blame to anyone. I felt only sorrow. That I could not feel any admiration, though, shamed me. By this point in my own life, I knew how easily things could go bad for a small party in the Arctic, how Death could draw near, even in the long days of summer; but there was at Camp Clay an element of vainglory, of willful ignorance, that undid my instinct for compassion, disrespectful of the dead as this is to say. Greely’s party, like Sir John Franklin’s party exploring here forty years before Greely, had no clear idea of what they were getting themselves into, or of how flawed their idea of establishing a “supply line” of small food caches in country like this was, how far short of perfection their survival skills were. The two Inughuit had served the expedition well and faithfully when they might easily have put themselves first and walked away. Still, Greely wrote that these Eskimos were “unable to appreciate the objectives” of his expedition. Most of Greely’s party, too, condescended to the Inugh
uit’s knowledge of how to survive in these circumstances, feeling it beneath them to inquire among such people, to adopt their strategies or their methods.
If there is a human tragedy at Cape Sabine, these notions of racial superiority are a prominent part of it.
I found myself greatly conflicted, staring at the depressions in the gravel ridge and slowly walking the whole of this “God forsaken” site. I picked up a strip of shirt cloth with a button still attached, the broken frames of a pair of glasses. I set them both back down. I climbed over a jumble of red granite boulders and ascended the larger of the two ridges that cradled the camp and watched my friends below, walking slowly with their heads bowed, unsure of how to behave, how to regard the evidence.
We were glad, each one of us, that we had not been called upon in our lives to endure what went on here.
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TEN MONTHS BEFORE I arrived at Cape Sabine I stood on the tidal flats of the River Dart, in Devon, in conversation with the polar explorer Wally Herbert. He and three companions had arrived at the North Pole with their dog teams on April 6, 1969, probably the first people to do so, the enduring claims of partisan supporters of Admiral Robert Peary’s claim to have gotten there in 1909 notwithstanding. Herbert would later write of Peary’s “self-destructive craving for fame” and expose in a book called The Noose of Laurels, in relatively gentle and compassionate words, the dishonesty behind Peary’s claim.
I asked Herbert how he imagined the conversation might go if he were to find himself in a room with Peary, Robert Falcon Scott, Vilhjalmur Stefansson, Roald Amundsen, and the other polar explorers of a hundred years ago, if it was only them in the room, no reporters, no one who had not been to the extreme outer edge of human endurance in that environment.
“If there were no others, just us?”
“Yes.”
“We would be respectful. Compassionate, perhaps even solicitous about each other’s health. It wouldn’t be necessary to say much.”
All of these men, Peary most all, have been criticized as vain and self-promoting, all but the Norwegian explorer and Nobel Peace laureate, Fridtjof Nansen.
After Herbert answered my question, he went back to watching a flock of sheep grazing in a lush pasture with stone fences on the far side of the river. The tide was going out and the mud flats around us had become more extensive. On a steep upland behind Herbert, I could make out through a copse of trees three large estate buildings. This had once been the home of an English explorer and master mariner both of us admired, John Davis (1550?–1605).
“I had a talk with Peary about this once,” Herbert volunteered.
In 1985, he went on, he’d traveled to Washington, D.C., at the invitation of the National Geographic Society, a longtime champion of Peary and of his claim. They wanted Herbert to write a definitive article about Peary’s quest for the North Pole for National Geographic. With the society vouching for him, the Peary family allowed Herbert to examine Peary’s personal diary from the spring of 1909, the record of his approach to the pole, which until then they had declined to make available to historians.
While he worked on the article at the society’s headquarters in Washington, Herbert told me, he occasionally went to visit Peary’s grave, across the Potomac River in Arlington National Cemetery, in Virginia. He’d sit on a bench opposite Peary’s catafalque. One day, after he’d finished the lunch he usually brought along, he climbed the steps of Peary’s monument and placed his hands palms down on a stone slab directly above the coffin.
“I said, ‘Why did you lie? You know I’ve been there, and you know that I know you lied. Why?’ ”
Herbert told me that at that moment Peary’s coffin became visible to him through the stone. It began to rise and seemed to shed water as it did. He was able to make out Peary’s face. His eyes were open and he was staring at Herbert, but he didn’t speak. Herbert repeated the question. Why had he lied? Peary continued to stare, and then the coffin began to sink. Water washed over it and Peary’s face became distorted. The coffin stopped and began to rise again, until Herbert could see the face clearly once more. Peary looked at him without expression, Herbert told me, and then said, “Be kind.”
Earlier that day, in his studio, Herbert had shown me his Xerox copy of Peary’s 1909 diary. Using maps of the regular patterns of sea ice movement around the pole for reference, he took me page by page through Peary’s diary, pointing out faint pencil marks in the margins where, he said, Peary had calculated the numbers he would need—the geographical positions and the distances in miles-made-good over the moving ice. Peary then went back and inserted these numbers in spaces he’d previously left blank while writing his daily entry. What he’d done, Herbert explained, was to determine the figures he would have had to have in order to support the claim that he had actually gotten to the pole.
The historical issue, Herbert told me, was not really whether Peary had reached the pole. The real question was why he had lied about reaching it. It was a few hours after this, sitting on rocks on the tidal flats of the river, that Herbert described the talk he’d had with Peary that day at the cemetery.
Herbert later sent me a limited edition print of one of his paintings, which has hung ever since in my studio. It shows ten dogs approaching a landfall over the sea ice. They’re arrayed in a fan hitch, pulling a sled over crusted snow. It’s clear they’ve been traveling nonstop for some time—the dogs’ hitch lines are tangled from their crisscrossing behind each other for miles. It’s also clear from tracks in the snow that three other sleds have recently come this way, though these sleds are not visible in the distance. The painting is from the point of view of the last sled driver—Herbert—and the place in the background is the north coast of Spitsbergen, in the Svalbard Archipelago, the first sighting of land for Herbert and his companions in more than a year.
Two of the ten dogs are looking back over their shoulders at the driver. They, too, seem to understand what they’d accomplished.
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THE EVENING I WAS planning to listen to the Beethoven Ninth I abruptly changed my mind about how to go about it. I took the tape player and my day pack, left the tent, and headed across the island’s isthmus for the Sverdrup site.
Much of classical music encourages, for me, thoughts of a physical or metaphorical landscape somewhere. I have to pause and recall the meaning of some of the technical terms—adagio, toccata, fugue—but it’s a relatively easy and straightforward task to distinguish the four movements of a Beethoven symphony, and to remember from one year to the next (sometimes) the structure of a symphony like the Ninth, an homage to the brotherhood of mankind, inspired by Friedrich Schiller’s poem “Ode to Joy.” The moment in the symphony I most frequently recall is when the baritone’s voice is heard for the first time, in the fourth movement. Emotions raised by the music alone are suddenly invigorated by the sound of a human voice. The abstractions of the orchestra—the musical tones—are joined in that moment by literal words, language sung by the soloists and the chorus. The effect is so profound that some listening intently during a live performance momentarily lose their composure. You can sometimes hear it in the audience’s quick inhalations.
For as far back as I can remember, a feeling of affection toward what the poet Adam Zagajewski calls “the mutilated world” has welled up in me when I’ve listened to the Ninth Symphony, to Mahler’s Second Symphony, to Bach’s Passion According to St. John, or to the contemporary music of the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. In my experience, a change in the quality of light falling on a hillside or a single choreographed movement by a ballerina might as easily release in someone else similar feelings of tenderness toward the wounded world, and feed the hope that these wounds might somehow be healed.
My faith in the capacity of certain works of art to break down ingrained prejudice, to undermine cynicism, to open a calloused hea
rt, was strong at this particular point in my life on Skraeling Island, but fragile.
Leaving the tent, I had no inkling of the size of the error I was about to make.
I crossed the saddle of the ridge on Big Skraeling and descended into the old Thule camp. I wanted to listen to the Beethoven Ninth in the presence of the ghosts I felt were here. During my days on the island, looking at objects the Thule had made, I’d come to admire them, in that uninformed way one might feel admiration for a grandparent, having had an unanticipated but deeply illuminating conversation with her or him. I could put aside the violence and ethical failures of which I knew the Thule, like every other people, were capable, their lack (in the Western mind) of ambition or of any focus on the sort of progress that my own culture values so highly.
It is the case, I think, that it’s what is decent, brilliant, and wise in a people that now we most need to know more about, and need to share with each other, not the banal evidence of their miscalculations or the supposed absence in them of the kind of sophistication we imagine ourselves to be in exclusive possession of.
Crossing the island, I thought it was the light, not the darkness, in ourselves that best characterizes our efforts, and that it is this very light that we’re most in danger today of not recalling.
The Ninth Symphony, with its “titanic emotions,” its faith in the Divine, its unrestrained evocation of selfless generosity, is an expression of belief in the brotherhood of all humans. I wanted to sit in the karigi in the Sverdrup camp, with the Thule ghosts occupying those stone benches, and play this music for them. Even if it proved to be only cacophony in their ears, tedious and grating, I wanted to offer it. A gesture of respect toward those who had repeatedly faced extreme difficulty and found a way through. I imagine that their triumph was akin to that of my own ancestors in Europe, Magdalenian Cro-Magnons, or of Afghan agriculturalists in that war-torn country today, continuing to plant and harvest and feed their families in the river valleys of the Hindu Kush.