Moral confusion and contradiction seemed to dog nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western explorers wherever they went. Extending their countries’ power and building an empire was a messy, ugly business and scruples only got in the way. Racist thinking made some lives less valuable than others, and killing natives seemed like a minor transgression in this “civilizing” process. Occasionally, however, the moral lines would become blurred and explorers would be forced to act toward their own men in a way that violated the principles they were supposed to exemplify: they behaved like the “barbarians” they looked down upon. Some of Franklin's men faced this paradox early in 1821, when poor planning and the unexpectedly early onset of winter had forced them to take refuge at Fort Enterprise, on the shore of a lake in northern Canada, with almost nothing to eat. To survive, they had to depend on a young Iroquois named Michel Teroahoute to kill game. One day Michel showed up bearing some strange-tasting meat he claimed came from a wolf, but the Englishmen suspected this was actually human flesh: two French-Canadians in their party had recently disappeared. Faced with this accusation, Michel threatened to stop hunting and gathering firewood—a virtual death sentence for the others.
This tense situation came to a head when the men inside the fort heard a shot, and their leader, the naturalist Richardson, ran outside to discover a young midshipman and talented artist named Robert Hood lying dead in the snow with a bullet hole in his head. Michel, who was already on the scene, insisted that Hood, who had been near death from lack of food, had committed suicide. But Richardson was certain that Michel, who was also desperate for something to eat, had murdered him: the bullet had entered through the back of Hood's skull. Although Richardson had previously described the Iroquois youth as an “instrument” of God, sent there to save the Englishmen, he now saw Michel as an imminent threat, unrestrained as he was by any “belief in the divine truths of Christianity.”47 To prevent him from taking another life, Richardson waited for Michel to return carrying firewood, and then shot him point-blank in the forehead. He showed no qualms in committing the very same crime for which the young Iroquois had stood accused. Later, after they had managed to survive this horrible winter and return to civilization, Richardson and the others declined to say how they had found enough food to live without Michel's help. There were rumors that they had resorted to cannibalism—broken the same taboo that they had accused him of violating. But there would be no investigation into these allegations: no one in England wanted to know that these intrepid explorers had sunk so low in order to save their lives. So the full story of their miraculous survival was never told.
When they ventured into the perilous polar realms, European and American explorers had confidence that their superior religious faith, knowledge, skills, and character would see them through. By adhering to civilized norms under the most trying circumstances, they would show that they were indomitable. Demonstrating this exceptionality was as important as setting foot on untrodden territory. Largely for this reason, many explorers did not stoop to make use of the “primitive” methods honed by Arctic peoples over the centuries but, instead, stubbornly clung to the customs and way of thinking that they were conditioned to believe were best—social rules, organizational structures, clothing, types of food and shelter, and means of travel. Most of these would turn out to be disastrously ill suited to polar survival. Only some explorers (mainly Scandinavian and American ones) came to realize that they had to change and “go native” in order to come back alive. For the rest, doing so would have been a defeat—recognition that they did not enjoy a monopoly on wisdom and know-how they had long taken for granted.
Before, during, and after the modern era of polar exploration, the most horrifying crime one could commit was cannibalism. It was so abhorrent as to be unspeakable. Thus, when reports trickled back to England that some of John Franklin's men had resorted to eating each other's flesh to stay alive, the public flatly refused to believe them. It would take a long while for the British public to accept that sailors and officers of the Royal Navy could have done so. By then, the lines between “civilized” and “uncivilized” peoples had begun to blur, and notions of morally acceptable behavior had become more fluid than what William Parry or Franklin himself would ever have countenanced.
As the ice closed in around them, the crew of the small, onetime herring sloop Gjøa reluctantly made preparations to spend the winter where they were—trapped in the Arctic ice south of King William Island. Roald Amundsen's lifelong dream of being the first to traverse the Northwest Passage would have to wait until spring. They hastily covered the old sailing vessel with canvas—just in time, as frost would be coating it in the morning. The Eskimo dogs on board, which had fought incessantly and taxed the nerves of the six-man Scandinavian party, finally had a chance to stretch their legs, and they made the most of it, yapping and racing around the slippery deck like incorrigible children on a school recess. Many of the dogs had died during the voyage up the Greenland coast earlier in 1903—victims of some mysterious malady that had first rendered them lethargic, then paralyzed their limbs, and finally killed them, as they lay inert and stiff in their cramped quarters. As soon as one died, the other starving dogs tore it apart and gulped down every last scrap of bloody meat. The men shot numerous reindeer and ptarmigan—Amundsen hoping these additional stores would see them through the barren Arctic winter and help them avoid the fate of the much larger Franklin party, which had perished half a century earlier in these waters after running out of food. Wisely, the men skinned the deer and made undergarments from their hides, to stave off the cold. But the dogs had no concept of the future, no way of imagining beyond the moment and their frenzied need for food. There was still not enough to go around, and so they kept dying.
One day a bitch named Silla gave birth to a litter, and as the slick, eyeless pups twitched and whimpered in a snowdrift near the ship, the other dogs, growling menacingly, pounced on them like an angry mob and devoured them all in a few seconds. Struggling to her feet, Silla staggered back toward the Gjøa, and then stopped, quivering for a moment, until the last pup slid out of her. Before the other dogs could approach, the new mother—a cross between a Norwegian elkhound and an Eskimo husky, born a few years before on Nansen's Fram—hesitated only a second before thrusting her neck forward and swallowing the pup whole.1 The crew could only watch in stunned disbelief. Before their eyes, life's most sacred and instinctual bond—a mother's attachment to her young—had been broken. Survival was all that had mattered to these huskies. At core, Nature was pitiless and cruel. This was not a moral universe.
Of course, dogs were mere brutes, without conscience or compassion, driven by a will to live that was intensified by frantic desperation as death was closing in. Unleashed and unwatched, they would turn on the weakest one and eat it. Newborn pups were unexpected snacks. Adolphus Greely had seen this happen during his party's stay in Discovery Bay, when three litters of pups had been born in rapid succession, and another bitch had managed to kill one of them before some of the men had dragged her away. A soldier had to stand guard over the remaining pups. Leaving any of the adult dogs unattended was an invitation to attack. Not long after the sun had slid below the horizon, in November, several of them died, and the rest of the pack quickly ate them.2 The crew did all they could to keep the dogs alive as long as they were still healthy and useful. But they also had to keep an eye out for other threats. Sometimes polar bears would pick up the scent of dogs or humans and saunter close to a ship looking for a meal, and the men would have to yell and fire their rifles to drive the bears away. Other times the huskies would go tearing off in mad pursuit and end up getting the worst of their encounter, returning slashed and limping. Dogs were the explorers’ best friends, but it was a friendship of necessity: without them to drag the sledges over rough snow and ice, the men could not get very far. So they watched over the dogs with keen interest, like mothers, attune to the slightest changes in their moods and health. If one became sick or was bad
ly injured, there was little the men could do but pet it and try to feed it, and then, afterward, mourn its loss in silence.
Nansen had been so taken by the strength of huskies belonging to some Russian traders his party had met in Siberia that he had brought thirty-four of them with him on the Fram. He had done this after calculating their practical value to him: there would be enough on board to enable him to reach the pole should the vessel become frozen solid. But these Siberian dogs did not take to shipboard life and fought like demons, killing one and exasperating their new owner. Still, Nansen soon came to pity these “wretched” creatures, so removed from their element on the high seas. When one puppy was caught in the axle of a mill, its howls were “heartrending,” and he was greatly relieved to learn it had not been badly harmed. The dogs had a particularly tough time during their first winter. They snarled and snapped at each other. Several died from the cold. If they were left on the ice overnight, they would fight to the death. One morning three of the dogs had disappeared, forcing several of the crew members to bundle up and go out in the subfreezing air to look for them. They came upon one dog being gnawed by a polar bear—which they promptly shot—but got there too late to save this husky. Two other half-eaten carcasses lay nearby, stiff and hard as bricks. One of these dogs had taken a disliking to the boiler stoker Hjalmar Johansen and barked and bared its teeth whenever he came near, but instead of feeling glad that it was now dead, he told Nansen he regretted that they hadn't had a chance to “make it up.”
In December, another hungry bear climbed onto the snow-covered ship and made off with two more dogs. When spring returned to the Arctic in 1894, an increasingly impatient Nansen placed all of his dwindling hopes of being the first man to reach the North Pole on the huskies’ well-being, but then several pups mysteriously went “mad” and died. When he and Johansen finally set out, nearly a year later, they took along twenty-eight huskies, panting in harness, tongues lolling, dragging three four-hundred-pound sledges on skis over the uneven hummocks. Nansen had decided to undertake this overland journey with so many dogs—all of those on board save for a few puppies—for one reason: they would eventually become the only available food for the other animals—and, perhaps, for the two men themselves. He and Johansen could not count on shooting seals or walruses along the way. When they started out, the two Norwegians got by on cans of pemmican, bread, chocolate, bacon, cake, and eighty-six pounds of butter. They had enough provisions to last a hundred days, but the dogs had biscuits for only thirty. After hauling for many days, the dogs became exhausted, stopped in their tracks, chewed on their traces, and had to be prodded with poles to go on. The biscuits were soon used up, and so the two men had to start culling the pack. Killing the first one was very unpleasant: Nansen admitted this was the most “disagreeable work” he had to perform. He had to hold it from behind and slit its throat with a knife. At first the other huskies only sniffed curiously at the steaming chunks of bone and meat flung on the snow near them and then stalked off, but after a few more days of laboring in harness most of them overcame their scruples and ate this now-hardened flesh.
The going was agonizingly slow and taxing, with ice ridges rising up ahead as much as thirty feet. The remaining dogs were spent, their whitened tongues dragging, and the explorers had to kill some more off to keep the others alive. Nansen now hated this slaughter more than ever: he and Johansen had become close to them during their long trek. Like bank robbers with hostages in tow, they had gotten to know their different personalities and think of them as fellow sufferers rather than as captive beasts at their mercy, destined to be eaten, despite all their hard work and loyalty. Killing these uncomplaining and unsuspecting creatures was a “horrible affair.”3 By mid-May only a dozen of them were still left. They were mostly skin and bone. Gaunt and tottering on their blood-stained and shredded paws, they could barely haul the sledges a few feet forward without having to stop and pant. The men themselves were running out of food, down to two ounces of bread and two of pemmican per day. At one point they killed a dog and made porridge out of its blood. In order to save ammunition, the two men tried to stab some of the remaining animals, but this task was now so repellent that they gave up and tried to strangle one instead. But they were too weak to finish the job. By now Nansen had given up on his dream of getting to the pole, and they were making a beeline westward, hoping to reach Spitsbergen before their supplies were completely gone. In mid-June, after one hundred days on the Arctic ice, the two Norwegians had only three dogs left to share their misery, trudging endlessly and wordlessly through the summer slush. They cut the animals’ rations to a bare minimum, just enough to keep them from refusing to move. On July 24, 1895, Nansen and Johansen finally spotted land on the distant horizon and were ecstatic to realize their ordeal was nearly over. The remaining trio of dogs staggered on, oblivious, like drunken sailors. For several days, they had nothing to feed them now but then a few seabirds appeared, and they were able to shoot one out of the sky and share this bounty. Their dwindling band kept going.
On August 3rd, while paddling between floes in a kayak, Johansen was attacked by a bear and knocked over. He grabbed the surprised animal by the throat and pulled away. Hearing his cry, Nansen grabbed a rifle out of his kayak, got a good bead on it, and killed the animal with a single shot to the head. Twelve days later, the Norwegians put their boots on dry land for the first time in two years. They were so thrilled that they jumped from one granite boulder to the next like mountain goats, just to feel solid rock under foot again. They raised a wrinkled Norwegian flag. They had no idea where they were, but that didn't matter. They were back on Mother Earth. But they were now also completely alone: on the edge of the ice, where they had lashed together their kayaks and put up a mast and a sheet to sail the rest of the way to shore, they had shot the last dogs and eaten them.4
The relationship between men and dogs at the poles was complex and fluid. One man's meat could be another man's pet. Sometimes it was based on emotions, at other times on a practiced indifference. Attitudes could change with circumstances. Culture could also influence them: The Inuit treated their dogs—well, like dogs—and considered puppy stew a delicacy. Many Americans and Europeans, on the other hand, were used to thinking of border collies back home as members of the family. This was particularly so for British explorers, who were loath to think of their beloved pets as beasts of burden, let alone as meals on paws. (Partially because of this sensibility, dogs had not been taken to Antarctica until Borchgrevink brought seventy of them on the Southern Cross in 1898. Even after this expedition, some British parties continued to see “manhauling” as the true test of stamina and looked on dog-drawn sledges as a form of cheating.) Scott's paternal affection for the dogs he had reluctantly decided to take with him on his 1912 trek to the South Pole may have been extreme, but it was not that exceptional. In his journal, Scott expressed regret that his dogs were the “main sufferers” when the weather worsened. When one, named Mukaka, was inadvertently run over and dragged by a sledge while the men were unloading supplies at Hut Point, Scott took special interest in the welfare of this “poor little beast” that was no longer of any use to him, in the same way that a frontline commander might inquire about a gravely wounded soldier in his unit.5 After several others had fallen into a crevasse, he insisted on being the one to be lowered down by rope to rescue them. During the long months spent in total darkness, explorers grew sentimentally attached to their canine companions and openly showed this affection. One can even say that having dogs living with them so intimately for so long humanized the explorers, allowing them to express their emotions more fully than could happen in their “civilized” world, where masculine codes discouraged such openness. Some of them would play with their favorites—even dance them with them to maudlin tunes played on an accordion.6 Expedition members gave them names that captured their distinguishing traits or features (“Devil,” “Girly,” “Little Bear,” “Foxy,” “Ginger Bitch,” “Slippery Neck,” “The Pim
p,” and “Grandmother”) or connected them with illustrious figures (“Franklin,” “John Bull,” “Scott,” “Shackleton,” “Bismarck,” “Caruso,” “Nansen,” “Osman,” “Peary,” “Cook,” “Pavlova,” “Shakespeare”). Men tried to protect their dogs and save those they were most fond until the bitter end. Even a pragmatic person like Amundsen developed a soft spot for his huskies. (He claimed he could read their characters by looking into their eyes and selected dogs based on this visual assessment of how well they would stand up to the demands of polar trekking.7) While the Fram was sailing to Antarctica in 1910, the Norwegian divided up responsibility for looking after the dogs among the crew members, to assure that each animal would be sufficiently “pampered” and in good shape for the dash south. When he and his party met Scott and his men in McMurdo Sound, Amundsen took pride in showing the stunned Englishmen how fast and how well his dogs ran in harness, making clear the advantage this would give his team.8
When supplies ran low, a beloved pet dog was quickly dispatched, as Nansen and Johansen had been forced to do. For some men, the slaughtering came easily. For others, it was fraught with moral qualms, guilt, or squeamishness. Despite his generally utilitarian philosophy, Amundsen became so attached to his dogs that he would turn up the flame in his Primus stove so that he didn't have to hear the shot when one of them was killed.9 When he was traveling with Borchgrevink on a sledge journey toward the South Pole, Louis Bernacchi was distraught at having drawn the task of slaying one of their weaker dogs: “As I approached the doomed animal, it lifted its wise grave face and regarded me with the dignity of a sea-god and I felt but little inclined to slay such a rational-looking creature.”10 Overcoming this resistance, Bernacchi took another step forward and drove his Bowie knife into the dog's heart.
To the Ends of the Earth Page 15