One of the most egregious examples of pernicious leadership was that of First Lieutenant Adolphus Washington Greely. Born in Newburyport, Massachusetts, descendant of an old New England family and the son of a shoemaker, Greely had volunteered for the Union Army as a seventeen-year-old, taken part in bloody battles like Antietam, been wounded twice, and then worked his way up the ranks from private to brevet major by the time the war ended. (By the time he finally retired, in 1908, Greely had attained the rank of general, making him the first American soldier to rise from the lowest rank to that level.) A few years later, as a lieutenant in the Signal Corps, he had volunteered and been selected to lead a military party to Greenland in the fall of 1881 aboard the steamer Proteus, as part of a coordinated international effort to collect scientific data about the Arctic region. Having never served at sea before, let alone been to the Far North, Greely was an odd choice for this assignment. Most likely it was his experience as an infantry officer during and after the Civil War, as well as his knowledge of meteorology, that earned him command over these soldiers. (None of them had ever been to the Arctic either: their previous service was in the cavalry on the Great Plains.) Maintaining discipline was absolutely essential during a protracted stay far from civilization, and Greely's Civil War and frontier service suggested that he could manage well under these circumstances.46
Surprisingly, the Proteus found open water all the way to Ellesmere Island, off the northwestern coast of Greenland (in a bay named for Lady Franklin), and the men unloaded their 350 tons of supplies just as winter was closing in. Working day and night, the twenty-five soldiers and officers hammered together a poorly insulated, three-room building and makeshift observatories at this site some six hundred miles south of the pole—making it the northernmost inhabited spot on the planet. They named it “Fort Conger,” in honor of the Republican US senator from Michigan who had sponsored a bill to fund the expedition. Forging a cohesive, mutually supportive unit would turn out to be much more daunting. There had already been considerable friction en route: some of the enlisted men had balked at being ordered to clean a rifle belonging to one of the lieutenants. In apparent retaliation, Greely had made them submit to bare-chested physical exams—something the soldiers found humiliating.47 Another source of discord was the civilian surgeon, Octave Pavy—a native of New Orleans, Paris-educated, worldly wise, and veteran of one previous voyage to the Arctic—who had joined the party in southern Greenland. (The War Department had relaxed its regulations so that he could take part in this military mission.) Henry Independence Clay, a grandson of the famed Kentucky lawmaker, had put aside his own political career to sign up for the Proteus voyage. After wintering together in the Arctic, he and Pavy were scarcely on speaking terms.48 Rather than jeopardize the men's health by depriving them of a doctor who had “shown a marked disposition to extreme measures” if Clay stayed on, the latter announced that he was leaving on the soon-to-depart Proteus, in the interests of “harmony.”49
The second-in-command, Lieutenant William Kislingbury, suffering from depression brought on by the recent death of his second wife, declared his unhappiness with Greely's strict regulations and asked to be relieved of his duties. He intended to go back on the ship, too, but it sailed while he was busy with paperwork, so he was stuck at Fort Conger, stripped of all official duties, and reduced to performing housekeeping chores—trapped in a bizarre limbo. With the long polar night almost upon them, and the men now crammed into their new quarters, completely cut off from the outside world, other petty grievances soon poisoned the claustrophobic atmosphere. Chiefly these involved Greely and Pavy: the doctor bridled under Greely's martinet-like regimen. After items such as overcoats, mittens, axes, and tent poles were lost or damaged during the unloading of the Proteus, or on subsequent excursions, the lieutenant convened formal boards of inquiry to determine who was responsible (and thus avoid having to pay for this government property himself).50 He reprimanded two lieutenants for sleeping late and missing breakfast. He also antagonized the enlisted men by telling them they had to do the officers’ laundry. (They refused.) The men shivered in temperatures so low that kerosene for the lamps had to be thawed out before it could be used. Once one of their puppies ran outside and froze so fast in its tracks that they had to take an axe to chip it free.51 All of them suffered from the demoralizing darkness, which was to persist for another five months. They stopped eating and showed signs of “gloom, irritation, and depression” as the days dragged on. They argued over inane questions such as which city had the better fire department, New York or Chicago. To keep the talk civil, an “Anti-Swearing Society” imposed fines for cursing. The soldiers found it hard to sleep. Their skin took on a ghastly greenish hue. Their hold on reality grew tenuous. One December morning, an Inuit in their party, Jens, decided that he was going to walk back to his home in Greenland—some one thousand miles away—or die trying, and he had to be tracked down in the snow and coaxed back.52 He was not the only one to temporarily lose his reason. A private, William Whisler, became delirious from staying outside for a long spell and went “out of his head” for several hours after returning to the fort.53 As soon as the sun returned, in March, Greely insisted on sending out sledge parties to reconnoiter and lay the groundwork for spring explorations. The men suffered terribly during these excursions, sleeping for days on end in bags that stiffened as hard as iron in temperatures falling as low as minus 48 degrees and becoming badly frostbitten. Greely's obsession with setting new records turned some men against him, even though he promised each a reward of nine hundred dollars if they reached a “northing surpassing any ever before attained.”54 On May 13, 1882, a party led by Sergeant David Brainard did just that, trekking to a headland located at 83.23.8 degrees north and thus ending a nearly three-century-old British polar monopoly by surpassing, by four miles, that country's previous Farthest North.
This ecstatic triumph quickly gave way to more discontent, and then despair, as the expected resupply ship failed to materialize, and the Lake Franklin Bay party had to brace itself for a second winter on drastically reduced rations. Greely and Pavy sparred over this decision, and others in the party chafed under the lieutenant's tight control—forbidding them, for example, from going more than five hundred yards from the ship without first getting his permission. (This restriction was imposed, he said, because of the risk of polar bear attacks.) Sergeant David Linn, who was wont to mutter the incantation “United we stand, divided we fall,” took umbrage at this policy, and Greely promptly reduced him in rank for making “disrespectful” remarks. Some men complained about having to attend Sunday services, during which Greely intoned passages from the Book of Psalms, sounding like the prophet Jeremiah. He, in turn, laid into Kislingbury for “fraternizing” with the enlisted men by playing cards with them.55 Worried about another ship not being able to reach them, Greely mulled over a long-shot scheme to navigate through the ice in small boats when spring arrived to reach a depot believed to exist at Cape Sabine, some 250 miles to the south. (His orders from Washington had dictated this course of action in case no relief vessel made it to Fort Conger.) The men thought he was crazy to think of leaving their safe and relatively comfortable outpost for the hazards of the open sea, but Greely would not be deterred. Pavy told him flatly that this risky and foolish undertaking was likely to end “disastrously.” Another breach of discipline occurred that July, when Pavy announced that, with his one-year contract now up, he had no intention of renewing it. When asked to turn over his private diary and other papers, he refused, insisting that he was no longer under Greely's command and therefore didn't have to comply with his demands. Greely then had the doctor temporarily placed under arrest.
After giving up all hope of a ship arriving that summer, a despondent band of soldiers departed the fort on August 9, 1883, in their five boats. Brainard nailed the door shut, leaving twenty-one dogs and two pups inside, along with overturned barrels of blubber, pork, and bread to feed on, but there was little hope of the
ir surviving very long.56 Only one sergeant on board had any navigational experience, and Greely was completely out of his element. He spent long stretches sulking inside his sleeping bag on the floorboards. Intermittently, the lieutenant barked orders, dismaying the others with his poorly thought-out plan to abandon the boats and drift southward on an ice floe. (Pavy thought the lieutenant should be relieved of his command for this “suicidal” proposal, and three of the men secretly plotted to take over command, but then changed their minds when they realized they had no one who could replace Greely. Brainard scribbled just one word in his diary—“Madness.”57) The breakdown in order continued when the engineer, Sergeant William Cross, who was chronically drunk—this time on stolen fuel alcohol—ran the launch aground and then uttered “insolent” words. Greely wanted to punish him, too, but no one else knew how to keep the engine running.
Two weeks out, the ice closed in on them like a pack of white wolves, and Greely's party had no choice but to take to a floe. Miraculously, after having drifted at the mercy of erratic currents for fifty-one days, they came ashore on the rocky, barren coast near Cape Sabine. The men had to find shelter in a hastily built stone hut—a place they named Camp Clay—for a third winter, with starvation looming: musk ox and other wild animals were nowhere to be found. Nor could they locate any of the expected food caches. They had to settle for moldy dog biscuit, supplemented by a small stash of meat, dried potatoes, and pickles they had unearthed nearby, left years before by British mariners. To make meager these supplies last as long as possible, Greely cut back their rations to one-fifth of the normal five thousand calories per day needed in the Arctic. Slowly, on this meager diet, the men weakened, burrowed deeper into their shared sleeping bags, and waited to die. With their food nearly exhausted, the emaciated soldiers argued and traded blows over scraps. By mid-March 1884, their rations were down to eleven ounces of pemmican and bread a day. To appease their empty stomachs, they chewed on candle wax and the soles of their boots. They fantasized about sumptuous feasts. Indifferent to discipline, a few of them responded to Greely's commands with “insolent” language and refused to do work like shoveling snow or cooking breakfast. Ever worried about maintaining his control, Greely vowed to shoot anyone who tried to wrest it away. When the enlisted men refused to obey one of his commands, he made one of them crawl outside and stay there until he showed more respect. Once the lieutenant became so enraged at Pavy that he came close to grabbing a rifle and dispatching him.58 A German-born private, Charles Buck Henry, who had a history of thievery, stole some precious bacon, and the lieutenant ordered him shot in June to discourage others from doing this. (Henry was not the only soldier to take more than his share of provisions: the diary kept by Sergeant Brainard records several instances of others pilfering and hoarding provisions. The private may have been singled out for extreme punishment because his thefts were the most frequent and egregious and because he was not an American.59) Day after day, Greely's efforts to stop his men from undermining his authority, surrendering their last vestiges of humanity, and turning into “brutes” warred against their steady physical decline. It was a struggle of mind against matter—the commander's insistence on upholding standards versus their bodies’ failing. As Brainard wrote in his diary, “The constant gnawing of hunger almost drives us mad.”60 By May, with other soldiers making out their wills, he conceded there was “nothing else to do but die like men and soldiers.”61
In bunches—five in April, four in May—they lapsed into unconsciousness and died, some babbling like babies or calling for their mothers, others completely silent as if sleeping. Too heavy to be carried outside, some bodies were left on the hut floor, turning it into an impromptu morgue—or a vision of hell as conceived by Hieronymus Bosch. By the time a rescue party reached Littleton Island by ship on June 22, 1884, only seven of the original twenty-five men were still alive, and they only barely so. Starvation, extreme cold, bullets, and the frigid Arctic waters had claimed the rest. Greely was one of those who had survived the winter—testimony to his iron constitution. And, indeed, his life was far from over. Adolphus Washington Greely would live for another half a century, to the age of ninety-one, finally dying of a blood clot in his leg at Walter Reed Hospital in 1935. He would then be buried with full military honors in Arlington National Cemetery next to his faithful wife, Henrietta, mourned as an illustrious hero, the grand old man among American polar explorers, and a recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor.
Like Elisha Kent Kane before him, Greely was a man who stubbornly imposed his will on those he commanded—and by sheer perseverance etched his name in the history books. Both gained heroic stature not so much because of what they had achieved but because of what they had managed to endure. Without his infamous ordeal at Cape Sabine, Greely would have gradually faded into obscurity, just as Kane would have without the engrossing tales of almost incredible ordeals and survival he had written. Around both men, too, grew up a legend that was larger than life and often at odds with the facts. (Their shortcomings were largely overlooked or forgotten, although rumors that Greely's men had resorted to cannibalism tarnished his image for years.) The exploits of these two explorers—like those of Franklin and Scott—fueled a nineteenth-century hunger to sanctify suffering, a need for secular Christ figures whose sacrifices endowed life with a higher purpose. The hunger for self-glorification that had taken hold of both these explorers and driven them to go to such lengths—manipulating others to follow—had no place in this apotheosis, and so it, too, was kept out of the record. It was the legend that needed to be printed, not the truth.
A personal note: one day, in the course of doing research for this book in the stacks of Columbia University's Butler Library, I pulled a copy of Greely's 1885 memoir, Three Years of Arctic Service, off a shelf and gently opened it. Tucked inside the front cover was a letter—an old letter judging by the crisp feel and yellowish tint of the paper. I unfolded it and found to my great surprise that this was an original letter, written by Greely toward the end of his life to Bassett Jones, a frozen-food magnate and bibliophile with a passion for polar books. Somehow this letter had been left inside this volume—part of Jones's collection, purchased by Columbia for its rare-book collection—which had never been properly shelved. Reading it that afternoon, I was transported back into a bygone era, and into the mind of an elderly, but still defiant and willful Adolphus Greely. He denied having earned any money from giving lectures on his Arctic exploits, even though he had had six children to support on a modest army salary. He had likewise not deigned to ask his friends for loans, even though it had taken two decades for the American Geographical Society to acknowledge the significance of what he had accomplished in the Greenland wilderness. Furthermore, the crusty old brigadier went on, “I am proud that nothing claimed in Three Years of Arctic Service has ever been disputed.” But it was in his final sentences that Greely really tipped his hand, thinking no doubt that at this point in his life, and in this letter, he had nothing more to hide: “However,” he concluded, “I have what no single man can give or take away—FAME. In my 88th year the people are proud of me, judging from their letters.”62
Fittingly, Captain James Cook's first encounter with Antarctica in 1774 contained all the elements that later explorers would associate with this mysterious continent—indistinct shape, massive size, frightful cold, sudden danger, seductive allure, and grandiose metaphor. As on later expeditions, there was even a dog involved. For several years, Cook had been roaming the South Pacific in search of the fabled Terra Australis—a gigantic land mass believed by the ancient Greeks to exist somewhere in these largely unexplored waters. The year before, his HMS Resolute had crossed the Antarctic Circle for the first time in recorded history, navigating cautiously between huge icebergs and floating chunks of ice, until, further slowed by heavy mist and snow, the vessel once again turned northward. In December, Cook had resumed his dogged quest, again heading south, his way again blocked by large “ice islands” and
a curtain of fog. But in late January 1774 a favorable wind and calm seas bore the Resolute up close to a large ice mass, and Cook sent out two boats to bring back samples. It was so cold that cascading snow stiffened the rigging, and the sails hardened like “boards or plates of metal.” On the morning of the 30th, the clouds congregated ahead of them were an unusual snowy white, indicating an ice field lay ahead, and they made for it.
As they approached, they could see that the ice stretched in either direction out of sight. Over this amorphous white mass, the sun's rays rose like a curtain of pale, flickering flame. In the distance, Cook and his men counted as many as ninety-seven icy peaks, which rose so high they disappeared in the clouds. Around the edge of this sheer shelf, a mile or so in width, floated a phalanx of ice floes, jammed so closely together that they threatened to crush like an eggshell any vessel that dared to come any closer. So Cook prudently ordered the Resolute to reverse course and make for safer climes.1 And the dog? Well, it so happened that the tireless, globe-circling captain soon afterward suffered acute pain from gallbladder stones and had to be put to bed for several days. The only food he could keep down was fresh meat, and the only source of that was one of the dogs on board—the darling of Cook's polymath Scottish naturalist, Johann Reinhold Forster. The animal involuntarily obliged, thus becoming the first in a long line of canines to be sacrificed in the Antarctic for the good of their hungry masters.
So began the modern era's fascination with the Seventh Continent—a place unlike any other on earth, fraught with perils but as irresistible to explorers as the Sirens’ call was to Odysseus's crew. Perhaps most enchanting was its staggeringly expansive landscape. For Europeans from outside Scandinavia, these soaring, jagged, dazzlingly white icebergs were truly an amazing spectacle. Without comparison in their experience, the bizarre shapes defied description. Explorers felt as if they had landed on another planet: everything was that strange and overwhelming. In their written accounts, early voyagers like Cook groped for the right words to describe what they had seen.2 But they were poorly prepared to do so, for the English language of their day was ill-equipped to adequately capture such grandeur. Furthermore, they were seafarers used to dealing with familiar facts and concrete problems, not disposed to reflect upon natural wonders and ultimate mysteries. The largely unschooled Cook conceded as much in his history of this South Seas voyage, in which he cautioned readers not to expect “ornament” from his prose, only “candour” and “fidelity” to the truth—that is, a catalog of information, compiled by a “plain man” who was simply doing his duty. His choice of words typified an eighteenth-century preference for depicting Nature in objective, neutral terms, rather than reacting to it with romantic embellishment. For Cook and his contemporaries, ice was simply ice, not something sublime or a “vehicle and revelation of vital energy.”3 Their polar surroundings were not some richly evocative realm where the physical and metaphysical merged, but merely a series of obstacles to be avoided.
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