Even some explorers who did not bond with their dogs—or consider them useful—turned up their noses at the thought of actually eating one. It simply wasn't a proper thing to do. (Animals could be held to the same high moral standard. A sensitive soul like Robert Scott was so revolted by the “horrid” sight of puppies eating their own excrement on the deck of Discovery that he summarily shot them.11) Remaining a civilized person meant drawing certain lines and honoring them, no matter what circumstances arose. Behaving like an animal ultimately turned one into that animal, and that was simply inexcusable. But for some explorers, such inflexible rules did not apply under the exigencies of the Arctic and Antarctic. During a mapping expedition into the Antarctic interior in December 1912, the Yorkshire-born, Australian geologist Douglas Mawson and his two companions were running out of food—for them as well as their dogs—and energy. When one of the two other men—a twenty-five-year-old lieutenant in the Royal Fusiliers by the name of Belgrave Edward Sutton Ninnis—fell to his death in a deep crevasse, their situation became dire. Almost all their remaining food, their main tent, tools, and six of the dogs, had vanished into the abyss with Ninnis and his sledge. And they were still roughly 320 miles from the base camp.
With the few dogs left running out of stamina, Mawson and Xavier Mertz, a Swiss law-school graduate, dog handler, and expert skier, decided they would have to kill one of the six animals for food. Unaware that the liver of dogs (as well as polar bears) was highly toxic, they saved this “delicacy” for themselves, but eating it only made them weaker. When the last dog, Ginger, perished when the two survivors were scrambling down the face of Ninnis Glacier, they cut up her carcass and boiled her head, gulping down the meat inside her skull, eyes, and brain, as well as her paws—even as they were still lamenting the loss of this loyal beast. Because of their inadequate diet, skin was now peeling off both men's bodies, and frostbite setting in. Rapidly losing both his strength and his mental balance, Mertz, bit off the fleshy tip of one finger to show that it was frozen. Mawson tried to feed him some biscuit, but Mertz couldn't manage to swallow any of it. So thoroughly chilled that he could not move, suffering from delirium, he slipped into a coma inside the tent and died in the early morning of January 8, 1913.
Summoning the little energy he had left, Mawson staggered on, his skin falling off in strips—the exposed raw flesh causing him excruciating pain with each step. He restricted his daily diet to two biscuits and two sticks of chocolate for the twenty days he estimated it would take him to make it back. Each night when he removed his boots, the soles of his feet came off with them. Mawson had to reattach these calloused flaps in the morning with bandages and lanolin and plod on. Once the geologist fell into a crevasse some fourteen feet deep, but somehow pulled himself out and kept going. With Mertz's jacket stitched into a makeshift sail and held over his head, strong tailwinds propelled him forward, and by the sheerest fluke Mawson stumbled upon a cairn containing a bag of food that had recently been left at the spot, only about twenty miles from the coast. After holing up there for a few days, gorging on biscuits and chocolate, he pressed ahead until he finally came into sight of the hut on a cove where he and his two companions had started out nearly three months before. Spotting this haggard apparition approaching him, the first person to emerge from the shelter stared back with confusion and disbelief, his expression silently communicating the question Which one are you?12 At this point Mawson weighed only one hundred pounds—half what he had when he had left. That he was still alive was unfathomable.
In the years that followed, admiration for Mawson's incredible feat of endurance became sullied by doubts that his story—the only surviving account of this journey—told the whole truth. Some speculated that the explorer could not have trekked so far on the meager rations he had described in his book: he must have had some other source of food. There were even suggestions that Mawson had resorted to eating human flesh—sawing off chunks of Mertz's corpse with a knife and cooking them over his Primus, as he had done with Ginger's head.13 But no one could know for sure if this had actually happened. Posterity was left to ponder if Mawson was, in fact, an exemplary heroic figure, a despicable monster—or a little bit of both.14
In Mawson's day, revulsion at cannibalism was still deeply entrenched in the Western moral consciousness. It was associated with the savage stage of human evolution, which modern-day Europeans and Americans looked back on with horror. According to myth, the ancient Egyptians had regularly eaten human flesh until the time of Osiris, who had introduced organized religion and a system of laws. But the practice had persisted in some parts of the world, among primitive tribes, up to modern times. These were detailed in Sir James George Frazer's magisterial, cross-cultural study of folklore and religion, The Golden Bough, first published in 1890. Here Frazer recounted the eyewitness accounts of missionaries and explorers who had seen human beings being torn apart by teeth and eaten as part of grotesque religious rituals carried out by native peoples in the Americas.15 During the Age of Exploration, Western voyagers had observed acts of cannibalism in many remote, exotic places, and these gruesome scenes had helped to justify their conquest and subjugation. Influential works like The Golden Bough further legitimized this colonization. However, in drawing a dividing line between these “savage” practices and those of “civilized” peoples, Frazer neglected to remind his readers that “medicinal” cannibalism had widely practiced in Europe and North America as late as the seventeenth century. Furthermore, this consuming of the body continued—at least symbolically—in in the form of wafers during Holy Communion. Since cannibalism was believed to be confined to distant times and places, “enlightened” Europeans and Americans could not easily admit that it could take place among them. Maintaining this belief was essential to preserving their cultural superiority.
However, the experiences of crews who sailed across the oceans forced a reassessment of this comforting illusion: sailors drifting in lifeboats or shipwrecked on Pacific islands without food often had only one way to stay alive—to eat each other. An early recorded instance of Western cannibalism took place after the American cargo vessel Peggy was dismasted and disabled during an Atlantic storm on its way back to New York in the fall of 1765. After having consumed all other edible items on board—including tobacco, pigeons, barnacles, and the ship's cat—the men drew lots to see which one would be sacrificed for the sake of the others. In what was apparently a rigged lottery, the captain's African American slave drew the shortest straw and was immediately shot. Eating his raw liver caused some to go “mad,” and this dissuaded the others from eating more of his body. The Peggy survivors were finally rescued by a passing ship after more than four months in their rudderless vessel. In other cases, African American crew members were similarly singled out, no doubt because racist thinking made their being murdered more palatable. (As a rule, officers were the last to be carved up.16) On whaleboats from the sunken Essex in the Pacific, starving crew members ate the bodies of African American sailors, although they had apparently died of natural causes.17
When news of these incidents leaked out, the public was shocked, but forgiving. They could excuse cannibalism in such extreme situations (it was known euphemistically as the “custom of the sea”), and few sailors were ever prosecuted for it.18 Still, the taboo was upheld. Western seafarers were not supposed to succumb to this self-preserving instinct: it was preferable for them to starve to death. Public distaste was well described in Edgar Allan Poe's 1838 novella, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. In this macabre tale of a seagoing odyssey gone awry, the four survivors of the wrecked Grampus draw straws, and the one with the shortest is stabbed to death, his blood drunk, and most of his body eaten by the others. Poe describes this act with a certain degree of acceptance: the sailors had no choice. But not all men could be so easily forgiven. Those who belonged to a higher class—that is, a ship's captain and his officers—were supposed to abide by the credo “Death before dishonor.” Otherwise, they woul
d sink to the level of beasts, as graphically depicted in Landseer's painting, Man Proposes, God Disposes. Here the artist implies that by overreaching and venturing far beyond the pale of civilization, human beings have gone where their moral and physical powers are not supreme: near the poles, the law of brute survival prevails. The implicit choice depicted in this work was that explorers either had to become like the beasts or be devoured by them.
Since neither option was acceptable for officers of the Royal Navy, the only way of avoiding these two possible outcomes was to pretend they didn't exist—much the way these same officers with polished brass buttons on their coats would deny lusting after a comely, sexually available Inuit woman they might run across on the coast of Greenland.19 For a long time, people back home in England preferred not to hear about such base impulses—let alone find out that they were acted upon. But these unpleasant facts were hard to keep hidden, especially once public fascination with polar explorers intensified. Prurient curiosity to find out what really had taken place on these voyages then clashed with a reluctance to expose odious realities. In the end, curiosity won out: newspaper readers enthralled by polar expeditions wanted more than one-dimensional, hagiographical accounts of their heroes’ adventures. They wanted the truth, salacious as that might be. What had once been inappropriate to read about or even imagine became so compelling that the whole story eventually had to emerge. This change in sensibility came in the wake of the mysterious disappearance of the Franklin party and the later, shocking discovery of what had happened to some of its members. By vanishing so inexplicably, the “man who ate his boots”—the amiable, kindly commander who could not bring himself to kill a fly—became a tragic figure. His whereabouts and fate obsessed his nation, much as the disappearance of Amelia Earhart would her fellow Americans nearly a century later.
Although many of those who sailed off to locate the missing Franklin did so primarily out of personal ambition—to set new geographical records—concern for his party was genuine and widespread: Americans and Europeans alike longed for some sign of life and for years nurtured hopes that the crews would be found alive—or, at least, that some telling “relics” would turn up. The fact that the “gallant navigator's” quest to navigate the Northwest Passage now seemed quixotic did not stop millions from celebrating Franklin as a national hero. For, whatever his purpose, he was carrying England's proud seagoing tradition into uncharted Arctic waters. Some felt that the longer the sailors were not heard from, the greater the likelihood that they had achieved some historic breakthrough—perhaps sailing across the Open Polar Sea all the way to Japan. At time passed, and no trace was found, interest in the Franklin expedition remained intense. The discovery of three graves on Beechey Island in August 1850, by members of the First Grinnell Expedition, only heightened it. In fact, preoccupation with the lost expedition was so strong that in March 1854 the Admiralty had to declare Franklin and his men dead in order to divert the nation's attention from them to an impending war with Russia. An indignant Lady Franklin showed her disdain for this decision by donning pink and green mourning garb.20
Later that year, John Rae, a forty-one-year-old Scottish physician and explorer, was mapping the Arctic coastline along the Boothia Peninsula, approximately seventy degrees north of the equator, when he came upon a group of Inuit who had some stunning news: while hunting seals four years earlier, they had encountered a party of approximately forty white men, dragging a boat over the ice southward, where they hoped to find deer. These men were almost completely out of food. Using signs, the leader communicated that their ships had been crushed in the ice. Not long afterward, the same group of Inuit had happened upon the bodies of thirty of these sailors, all apparently starved to death. Many of their bodies showed signs of having been cut up, with knife marks visible on some bones. In cooking pots nearby was the residue of what appeared to be human flesh. From these disturbing signs, Rae had deduced that the white men had “been driven to the last dread alternative” to stay alive.21 He was also shown and purchased a number of items unmistakably belonging to the Franklin expedition—engraved silverware, a compass box, part of an engraved gold watch, two certificate boxes marked with initials, a monogrammed knife handle, and a similarly marked piece of vest.22 These proved beyond any doubt that the bodies discovered by the Inuit were those of crew members of the Erebus and Terror. In its desire to bring this mystery to a close, the Admiralty released Rae's findings in October 1854, concluding that the entire party had perished, but without going into details about how: top naval officials did not want to delve deeper into indications of cannibalism.23 However, Rae's veiled reference was sufficient to create a sensation. The London Times published a front-page article quoting from his official report, and this provoked a collective shudder of dismay in England—followed by loud condemnation of what Rae had dared to say. Newspapers, prominent public figures like Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens, top Admiralty officials, and—most vociferously—Lady Franklin denounced the stories told by the Inuit, who were dismissed as “savages” and liars.24 How could their word be trusted? How could an exemplary English gentleman like Sir John Franklin possibly have done what they claimed? (At that point, it was not clear that he had died several years before.) A book published in 1855 (by a surgeon who had taken part in the search for Franklin) pointed out that Rae's allegation had been “wholly rejected” in the press.25 At the same time, many wondered aloud how English sailors and their officers could have failed to find food while the “primitive” Inuit had succeeded in doing so. Perhaps there had been foul play. Dickens asserted as much in a series of articles in his magazine Household Words. The novelist theorized that the English sailors had actually been “set upon and slain by the Esquimaux themselves,” since they were a “gross handful of uncivilised people, with a domesticity of blood and blubber.” He fiercely defended the moral character of Franklin's party, writing that it was inconceivable that they “would or could in any extremity of hunger, alleviate that pains of starvation by this horrible means.”26 Some who did accept Rae's version of the facts regretted that the doomed crew had not simply starved to death: that would have been the right thing for them to do.
Rae stubbornly stuck to his story and defended the integrity and honesty of his Inuit informers. In private, many eminent explorers agreed with his findings, but they kept quiet in public. Rae was shunned, denounced as “power hungry,” and his reputation ruined. Instead of being applauded for having finally discovered the last unmarked section of the Northwest Passage (as apparently he—and not Franklin—had done), his name and his deeds were largely written out of the history books. It would take nearly a century and a half, until 1997, when more human bones with knife cuts on them were found on King William Island, for Rae's account of the Franklin party's demise to be vindicated.27
Despite the discovery of one of Franklin's ships—Erebus—in the waters north of this island in 2014, and of Terror over two years later some distance to the south, the full story of what happened to this party may never be told. (The location of Terror does indicate that it had reached the “missing gap” in the Northwest Passage and thus deserves the credit for this navigational breakthrough.) Toxicological analysis of the discovered bones in the 1980s revealed a high lead content, which suggested that at least some crew members had been poisoned by eating from contaminated tin cans, but more recent studies have disputed this. Disease and starvation likely took most lives. As for Franklin himself, the finding of a piece of paper by an English search party led by Captain Francis L. McClintock in 1859 established that he had died as early as 1847—long before the party had begun to run out of food—or committed cannibalism. Thus he had been spared the horrors that later befell his men: as McClintock diplomatically put it to in a letter to Lady Franklin, her husband had not been “harassed by either want of success or foreboding of evil.”28 His reputation as an honorable English officer could thus remain intact. Franklin would be remembered for having been forced to eat his boots,
but nothing worse than that. His exoneration made the scandal about knife-scarred bones easier to absorb.
For years after these remains had been found, the desperate steps taken by members of the Franklin party acted as a cautionary tale for any subsequent explorers who might find themselves in similar straits. If these Englishmen had committed cannibalism, that still did not make that act morally permissible for anyone else. The taboo was upheld. At least that was what those returning from the poles professed. When some men belonging to Charles Hall's 1871–1872 Polaris expedition became separated from their ship and were marooned on an ice floe, the man nominally in charge, navigator George Tyson, feared that some Germans in this group—lacking in “self-control, bravery, or endurance”—might attempt to seize control and then shoot the two Inuit accompanying them—for food. “God forbid,” Tyson scribbled in his journal, “that any of this company should be tempted to such a crime! If it is God's will that we should die by starvation, let us die like men, not like brutes, tearing each other to pieces.”29 Killing several seals helped stave off starvation and any test of Tyson's resolve. After drifting on the floe for 197 days, over some fifteen hundred miles, this emaciated band was spotted by a sealer and brought to safety.
But nineteenth-century polar exploration did not fully escape the specter of cannibalism. The second most infamous instance occurred during the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition, when Adolphus Greely and his men took refuge in a hut on Cape Sabine at the beginning of winter in 1883. With supplies running low and men already dying from starvation, Greely had zealously protected their storehouse, and when one soldier—a German immigrant named Charles Henry—was caught stealing stolen shrimp from the common pot, he was promptly shot. The surviving men grew weaker and weaker, with only one of them—Sergeant Brainard—still able to crawl out of his sleeping bag: he would put out nets to catch tiny shrimp and bring these back to the others. When a rescue party finally reached the hut toward the end of June, only seven men were still alive, and they barely so. But more than by the grotesque condition of these survivors, the rescuers were appalled by what else they found on this barren, wintry site: the body of Lieutenant Frederick Kislingbury, who had died earlier in the month, showed signs of having been stripped of some flesh. The nearby remains of a private named Wheeler, who had died more recently, also appeared to have been cut up. Autopsies of several bodies dug up near the tent and taken back to the States later revealed they, too, had been cannibalized.30 The army tried to keep this information under wraps, but it leaked out. In August 1884, The World ran a lurid story under the banner headline “Eating Dead Comrades.”31 Like the British public three decades before, Americans were aghast at this news: their first reaction was to exculpate Greely's soldiers. An 1884 article in the Medical Journal contended that persons deprived of adequate nutrition for a long period of time regressed mentally, “lapsing into a stage where brute instincts and brute appetites predominate.” In this “state of positive frenzy or insanity,” they could not be held accountable for their actions.32 The best way to prevent such “revolting” behavior was to stop sending men into the Arctic wastes. A fierce debate ensued about whether or not polar expeditions should continue, given this hazard. The English explorer George Nares argued that extending geographical boundaries was like war: men were expected to die for the greater good.33 But the Lady Franklin Bay party was never exculpated. Dogged by accusations of cannibalism under his command, Greely denied any knowledge of any such acts and continued to serve in the Signal Corps for another two decades, retiring as a brigadier general in 1908. A quarter century later he was given the Medal of Honor. But a whiff of scandal never left him.
To the Ends of the Earth Page 16