He feared if they failed to reach the ship, many if not all of them would perish before winter was done. Yet the men whose lives he was fighting to save stood their ground defiantly, wasting precious time.
Finally, a spokesman for the Germans announced that they would take their belongings with them and as many provisions as they could carry. Furthermore, they would haul only one boat across the floe because two boats would be difficult to take overland such a distance. Once again, it was apparent they felt no obligation to follow the orders of a ship’s officer. A single overloaded boat in these waters trying to circumvent drifting ice was a recipe for disaster, but Tyson was outnumbered. All he could do was stand back as the men loaded the one boat.
Tyson led the way across the ice to the launch site he had found, followed by the Eskimo families and then the men bringing the boat with help from the dogs.
They had not gone more than two hundred yards before a gale burst upon them, filling the air with flying snow and lowering visibility to only a few yards. Tyson got across the floe, but when he reached the water, he was surprised to see that the natives and seamen were not behind him. Only the cook, William Jackson, had followed, and when he saw the others were not behind him, he ran back for them.
When they finally arrived, the men complained about having to launch the boat after the exhausting trek across the ice. As they rested, Tyson set out to ready the boat. When he looked for the oars, he found only three when eight were called for; the sail was missing, and unbelievably, there was no rudder.
Tyson flung an oar angrily onto the ice. He had trusted the men to prepare the boat while he went to find a launch site, and this was the way they had done it! He could not imagine why the men were so lackadaisical about getting off the floe. For experienced sailors to start on a boat trip with three oars and no rudder and sail was inexcusable.
They launched anyway; by then the wind was blowing furiously in their faces. In the crippled condition of the overloaded boat, they were soon blown back and were compelled to haul the boat back on the ice. By this time the men were spent. No one had the energy to carry the boat back across the floe, so they left her where she lay.
Night was coming on. The day was lost, and their opportunity with it. They would be spending another night on the ice.
Back at camp, Tyson put up a small canvas tent. After chewing on a slice of frozen meat until it became edible, he was glad to creep into a tent he shared with several others, pull a heavy musk-ox skin over him, and get his first sleep in two days. The rest of the party slept under the boat, which was overturned to provide protection from snow and sleet.
Tyson was awakened in the morning by a cry of alarm. He quickly crawled from between the ox skins, now wet underneath because his body heat had melted the ice.
It had snowed during the night, but that was nothing.
Tyson saw the new threat: the ice had broken into several pieces. They were separated from the portion of the floe upon which they had left the other boat. He called the rest of the men awake, advising them to go for the second boat before it was too late. It could have been done safely with teamwork, for there was no sea running between the broken pieces as yet and they had not separated much. But the men, stupefied with fatigue and fear, were afraid. They refused to budge.
They had drifted southwest, Tyson reckoned, although he had neither compass nor chronometer with him. A compass had been left in the other boat, and he did not even have his watch, which was back aboard ship.
Their piece of ice, which had been the centermost and thickest part of the floe, was no more than a hundred and fifty yards across in any direction. A windswept sea was running, and before their eyes, piece after piece of their fragile island broke off into the frigid waters.
Standing with his frightened shipmates, Tyson offered a silent prayer.
God, grant us we may have enough left to stand upon.
Tyson beseeched Joe and Hans to catch seal. Hans had signed on with the expedition as hunter and dog driver, and he was capable in both regards. Joe was one of the best hunters to be found in all the Far North.
Tyson knew if Joe and Hans could hunt enough seal, they could all live through the long winter, even after their provisions were exhausted. Without seal, they would have no fresh meat and no warm food, for they would cook with blubber oil as the natives did.
Their first day hunting, Joe and Hans bagged three small seals, enough to feed a few people, but hardly more than a few morsels each for nineteen people. They could have caught more but for the irresponsibility of the men who frightened off many by taking long-range pot shots at the seals when they raised their heads in open waters.
For the next two days the weather was so bad they could do nothing on the ice. When it cleared, they saw their floe had been driven toward land—the eastern shore of Ellesmere Island was only six miles away. New ice had formed between their position and the land, however. It was too thick to get a small boat through but not yet strong enough to walk upon. They were stuck in a no-man’s-land where, in ice closely packed and stationary, they were to remain for the next two weeks.
On the morning of October 21, Joe was hunting on the ice when he saw one end of their lost boat nearly buried in snow on a nearby chunk of ice floe, from which it seemed possible to recover the vessel.
Tyson and Joe set out to do so right away. They knew they might not have such a good a chance again. They took the dogs and, when they reached the boat, harnessed them to it. In this way they were able to drag it back, and managed to do so without damaging the hull. They also recovered one large can of pemmican, twenty-seven two-pound cans of preserved meat, and six large bags of bread.
Everyone now agreed that their best chance was to wait for the ice to get strong enough for them to walk to shore. Tyson rued the fact that they had no sledges. If they used the boats to haul their provisions over rough ice, there was the danger of damaging them and rendering them unseaworthy should they be needed to escape by water. Still, as bad as their situation was, having the boats with them was a piece of luck. The vessels were their salvation, for in an emergency they could use them for both water and overland travel.
Tyson saw that a large floe had shifted during the night and lay halfway between them and shore. Since their piece of ice was shrinking constantly, he convinced the others that they should move to the bigger floe while it was so close. They did so on October 23, dragging the loaded boats over the ice by dog and manpower, then launching them for the short trip. In the process they expended every ounce of their energy and used all of the few hours of diminishing daylight the Arctic afforded them in mid-fall.
The only things left behind on the dwindling piece of ice were the kayaks belonging to Joe and Hans. None of the white men knew how to use the unballasted sealskin shells, but they were indispensable to the natives for open-water hunting in spring and summer. When Tyson asked for volunteers to help save them, no one stepped forward. After Joe and Hans started off alone, the cook, William Jackson, and William Nindemann, the brave seaman who had climbed an iceberg to secure Polaris by ice anchors, ventured over to help. Unfortunately, only Hans’s kayak was saved.
The next step was making shelters. They built igloos, with Joe doing most of the work because he knew how and was energetic, but with all hands assisting and carrying out his directions. First, the ground was leveled off, and then the half of the floor farther from the entrance was slightly raised above the other half. The raised part at the back was the parlor and bedroom; the front part was the workshop and kitchen. The walls and arched roof were composed of square blocks of hard snow, packed solid by the force of the wind. A block was about eighteen cubic inches of compressed snow or ice. A piece of animal membrane, if one was to be had, could be fitted in for a window. The entrance was very low, and because it was reached through an alleyway of similar construction, one had to almost crawl inside. At night or whenever it stormed or was very cold, the entrance was closed up—after the residents were in
side—by a block of snow. There was hardly room to turn around in the huts, and an ordinary-sized man could stand up straight only in the center of the dome. From that point the walls sloped gradually until they met the ground.
Their form allowed igloos to withstand the harsh Arctic weather well. Often snowed under so that they could not be distinguished from natural hillocks, these ice huts could not be blown over in the fiercest wind. Eskimos used igloos in winter only; the summer sun was fatal to them, as was rain. When the igloos began to thaw, Eskimos took to their sealskin tents for shelter.
Quite an encampment was built: a large igloo for the men, a smaller one for Tyson and Meyer to share since they were the two senior ranking members of the party, a storage hut for the provisions, a cookhouse, and a residence for Joe and Hannah and their daughter. These structures were united by arched alleyways built of snow, with one main entrance and smaller ones branching off to individual huts. An igloo for Hans and his family was built separately but nearby.
With an oil-burning lamp, an igloo could be kept sufficiently warm. The lamp traditionally used was made out of a soft sandstone indigenous to the land. It was hollowed out, like a shallow dish, with an inverted edge on which was placed a little moss for wicking. When lit, the moss sucked up the oil from seal or whale blubber. This was all the fire Eskimos had in the cold country for heating their huts or for cooking.
They had no proper lamp with them on the ice, however. One was contrived out of an old pemmican can, and having no moss, Hannah cut up a piece of canvas for wicks. It worked so well she made more for the other huts, although somehow the seamen could not understand how to use the makeshift lamp. They either got the blubber all in a blaze, or else they got it smoking so badly that they were driven out of their igloo.
The men, frustrated, soon began breaking up one of the boats for firewood.
This was bad business, Tyson knew, for the boats were not designed to carry more than eight men. That had been obvious when they loaded the entire party into one and found it impossible to make progress. If they had to travel in a single boat again to save their lives in treacherous waters, it could be disastrous. But he could not stop them, situated as he was without any authority other than what they chose to concede to him.
What’s more, the men were armed, while Tyson was not.While he had been on the ice trying to look after the ship’s stores as they were being flung overboard, the crew had been gathering their guns and other possessions in the event the ship was abandoned. If for no other reason than the guns they all carried, Tyson knew to choose his battles with the men carefully.
He took account of their provisions. By successive trips across the ice, they had gathered all together nearly everything that had been on the floe when they first drifted away from Polaris. He found they had twelve bags of bread—each containing a dozen loaves—fourteen cans of pemmican, fourteen hams, ten dozen cans of meats and soups, one can of dried apples, and twenty pounds of chocolate and sugar. While the pemmican cans were large, each weighing forty-five pounds, the meats and soups were only one- and two-pound cans; the hams were small and the dried-apple can was a twenty-two pounder.
When the food was divided into portions for nineteen people, it was obvious—unless they reached land or could catch seals to live on—that they would not survive. If they had to remain on the floe, it would be April or May before they would drift far enough south where they could expect to be discovered and picked up by a commercial whaling ship.
Tyson instituted a daily allowance of eleven ounces for each adult, and half rations for the children—just enough, he reckoned, to keep body and soul together. A pair of scales, using shot as weights, was fashioned to measure out portions so there could be no complaints of favoritism. He established this system and insisted on its observance or else their supplies would soon run out altogether.
This caused a good deal of discontent, particularly from those who had regularly been eating more than others. It was hard for some of them to reduce their intake, and a number of men became weakened. Tyson, built on a large frame, became so weak as his body struggled to adapt that he staggered from sheer want of strength, but he understood and accepted—as some of the men did not—the sheer necessity of rationing.
Tyson saw that this was a new concept to the Eskimos, who traditionally preferred to eat while they had food and let tomorrow take care of itself, even if they knew that they might have nothing for many days. As a result, Eskimos sometimes had abundance and other times were reduced to famine. They would on occasion store away provisions and build caches on their traveling routes, but this was done only when they had more than they could possibly consume at the time—as when they had been fortunate enough to kill a whale or walrus.
Tyson gave the Eskimos the same amount as everyone else. He secretly hoped the rationing would encourage continued determination in their seal-hunting efforts. However, there was one consequence he did not foresee: Before anyone noticed, Hans had taken away two of the dogs, and killed and skinned them. His wife cooked the meat over the blubber-oil lamp in their igloo, and it was served to the hungry family at one sitting.
They were now down to seven dogs, and soon those too would go from companion to entree. There was nothing for the dogs to eat, since the canned meat was in too limited supply for the humans to share with animals. The dogs would eat only in the event of surplus seal meat. In the meantime, they were down to nothing and almost dead.
Joe and Hans went out daily in search of seals. The blubber was nearly gone, and if they did not bring in some seals, the igloos would soon be in complete darkness and the party would be eating frozen food, with no means to cook or even thaw it. They also needed to keep melting freshwater ice for drinking. Fortunately, enough of this type of ice had gathered in crevasses from the snowstorms, but they still had to have a means of melting it.
On a cold and dark night Tyson, weak and hungry, wrote by flickering light in the igloo he shared with the Eskimos:
Oct. 26. We lost sight of the sun’s disk three days ago. May the great and good God have mercy on us, and send us seals, or I fear we must perish. We are all very weak from having to live on such small allowance, and the entire loss of the sun makes all more or less despondent. There now seems no chance of reaching the land—we have drifted so far to the west. We are about eight or ten miles offshore.
“Miserable we,
Who here entangled in the gathering ice, Take our last look of the descending sun; While full of death, and fierce with tenfold frost, The long, long night, incumbent o’er our heads, Falls horrible.”
13
Cry with Hunger
Like a wandering tribe of the Far North in the dead of winter, the lives of the ice-floe party now depended on their native hunters finding seal.
The seal had long been the Eskimo’s staple winter food and most valuable resource. It provided them with not only their own diet but also food for their sledge dogs, as well as clothing, material for making boats, tents, harpoon lines, and fuel for light, heat, and cooking. But finding seal in winter is not easy since they live principally under the ice and can be seen only when the ice cracked. An inexperienced person would never catch one.
Being warm-blooded, seals cannot remain long under water or ice without breathing, and in winter they are forced to make air holes through the ice and snow through which to breathe. At the surface these holes are small—not more than two and a half inches across—and are not easily distinguished, especially in the dim and uncertain light of wintertime.
Seals are very shy, too, and seem to know when they are being watched. A native hunter sometimes remains sitting over a seal hole—bundled up in skins and not moving or making a sound—for as long as forty-eight hours before getting a chance to strike. And if the first stroke is not accurate, the game is lost.
At that time barbed spears were used. Because the skull of the seal is exceedingly thin, if the blow was well aimed it was sure to penetrate. The seal could then be hel
d securely until the breathing hole was sufficiently enlarged to pull the body through. Although Joe and Hans sometimes shot seals, they had to spear their prey before it sank or floated away.
On most days the two Eskimos went out hunting, and nine times out of ten they returned empty-handed. The long hours of traversing across the ice through blustering winds and near-zero visibility and waiting patiently over seal holes did not demoralize them, nor did their repeated failure to find game. Each understood his role and was prepared to do it again the next day, and the day after.
Following a brief storm, thick with new snow, the weather cleared up on November 4. Tyson could see that the floe was entirely surrounded by water and drifting swiftly in the current.
Two days later, Joe killed a seal, for which everyone was grateful. Its carcass provided a few bites of fresh meat for every man, woman, and child, blood for a strong fat-laced broth made by Hannah, and enough blubber to keep the lamps going.
The weather turned bad the next day, and all were confined to their igloos, with the exception of Joe and Hans, who went hunting in a driving blizzard. After they had been out for some time, they became separated. Joe, after trying his luck hunting alone, made it back to the camp, fully expecting to find Hans had preceded him. Joe was much alarmed when he learned Hans had not arrived. He persuaded one of the seamen to go back with him to find Hans. As they were going along, peering through the fast-coming darkness, they saw what they took to be a polar bear approaching them. They cocked their pistols and made ready to open fire as soon as he came into range. When the creature came a few steps closer, they saw that it was not a bear but poor, lost Hans. In the heavy weather they had been completely deceived. The fur clothing Hans wore was covered with snow, and he had been crouched over nearly on all fours, scrambling up a snow-covered hummock.
Fatal North Page 15