However, the Greely party was poorly manned to carry out scientific tasks. The newly appointed Secretary of War, Robert Todd Lincoln, who had not the slightest interest in Arctic exploration, had dragged his feet on authorizing the expedition, leaving Greely little time to assemble a qualified team of scientists. In fact, only half of those who joined the expedition had had any scientific training. All of the soldiers were—like Greely and his second-in-command, Second Lieutenant Frederick Kislingbury—totally unfamiliar with polar conditions. This ignorance led them to grossly overestimate what could be accomplished in a place like northern Greenland. The chief scientist and medical officer, Dr. Octave Pavy, a native of New Orleans educated in France, was the sole exception, having already taken part in two Arctic expeditions. He would have sailed on a third—the doomed Jeannette—if he had not been disqualified because he was a civilian.5 Subsequently, Pavy had conducted extensive studies of the weather, as well as animal and plant life, in Greenland. He had also learned the Inuit language and became conversant with their way of life. While Pavy was highly regarded for this field work, what he really wanted to do was sail a ship to the North Pole. As early as 1872 he had proposed such a voyage by way of the Bering Strait. This plan had to be scrapped when his chief financial backer died. But Pavy's territorial ambition persisted and would distract him from doing scientific work on the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition.
The other members of Greely's scientific team were enlisted men, young and inexperienced. After they had built their quarters, Fort Conger, in the summer of 1881, they went about their duties with military precision. Sergeant Hampden S. Gardiner, whose job it was to keep records about the tides and weather, walked out onto the ice every hour to note how high the water beneath was, while being besieged mercilessly by mosquitoes. Another polar neophyte, Gardiner slipped and broke his left leg in late November while attempting to make a tidal reading. He was then laid up for three months. Sergeant Edward Israel—only twenty-three years old when he came to Greenland, having been selected for this assignment while still a student at the University of Michigan—had made a positive impression on Greely because of his meteorological and astronomical know-how, as well as his congenial temperament. He, too, showed great diligence in making hundreds of observations daily, including ten visits to a shed where he had to calculate the tilt of a magnet suspended by a silk thread. But Israel was short and had a “weak physique.” After he had staying out in the open air in January—three times a day for sixteen days in a row—with the temperature hovering around minus 50 degrees, to observe the movement of a pendulum so he could gauge the pull of gravity—he developed frostbite in one foot, making further such work exceedingly painful.6 Another sergeant, Winfield S. Jewell, hailed from New Hampshire, and apparently his chief qualification for conducting Arctic weather observations was the year he had spent in charge of the observatory on the top of Mount Washington. Scientific measurements at Fort Conger were also hampered by Greely's discovery that, because they had been short on funds and in a hurry to depart St. John's, Newfoundland, before winter ice set in, he had brought along many instruments that didn't function well in this subfreezing climate.7
While all these data were being carefully recorded during the early fall of 1881, Greely and several others went on sledge trips into the interior, ostensibly to reconnoiter, but also to test how well these heavy conveyances held up in deep snow, and to lay down caches for future excursions.8 After Greely injured one of his knees, these periodic outings from the fort continued without him. After a winter's hibernation, they were resumed, with Pavy told to see how far north he could go over the frozen Polar Sea. (Greely concealed his eagerness for a “geographical success” by asking the surgeon to also look for signs of the still-missing Jeannette.)9 Meanwhile, his new second-in-command, Lieutenant James Lockwood, was busy exploring the northern Greenland coast with sledges pulled by men and dog teams—a task Greely considered the “most important…geographical work of this expedition.” In early April, Lockwood took a party of four sledges, laden with two thousand pounds of food and equipment, toward the northeast, to get information “regarding lands within the Arctic Circle.” When they ran into a gale with winds up to sixty miles an hour, the party laid low in sleeping bags for two days before moving on. But even stronger winds then battered them—one gust blowing a sledge into one of the soldiers, injuring him badly. Violent storms damaged two other sledges, and they had to be abandoned. The men staggered in their drag ropes but kept going, even though it was now impossible to get any sleep when they stopped: their bags were frozen solid. The gales were relentless. Whenever the men tried to pitch a tent it was almost immediately covered by drifting snow. During one brief lull, Lockwood read aloud to the men a letter from Greely—still unable to make the trek himself—promising them a reward of nine hundred dollars or more if they set a new Farthest North record. Four days later this small party—totally exhausted and crippled by snow blindness—arrived at Cape Bryant, where the channel separating Greenland from Ellesmere Island emptied into the Arctic Sea. There they began looking for a cairn left by British explorers when they had set the highest latitude record: this was the milestone they intended to surpass.
From that spot Lockwood chose Sergeant David Brainard and an Inuit named Frederick Christiansen to accompany him out onto the rough, frozen sea. The men with the other remaining sledge were sent back to Fort Conger. After four days this threesome reached Cape Britannia—a rocky promontory guarded by glaciers—and pushed on ahead toward their ultimate destination, Cape Washington. After a ten-hour haul through heavy snow on May 13, 1882, they came upon a pyramid-shaped island jutting up out of the ice, which they named “Lockwood.” After they had made camp at its northern end, Lockwood calculated they had attained the latitude of 83.23.8 degrees north—a new record. The following day, to celebrate this triumph, the two Americans scaled a two-thousand-foot-high cliff near their tent and unfurled a Stars and Stripes on its summit, as Brainard put it, “to the exhilarating northern breezes with an exultation impossible to describe.”10 For the first time in history, Americans had gotten closer to the pole than any other human beings. It was a tremendous national success. And it was also—Adolphus Greely would feel when he got the news—money well spent.
But it would take a long time for Greely to secure the honor and fame he had so assiduously sought—over half a century, in fact. For years after he and the six other survivors of the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition returned to the States, their reputations would be tainted by reports of murder and cannibalism. These would overshadow the geographical milestone the Americans had achieved—a record that would last thirteen years, until the Norwegians Nansen and Johansen surpassed it by nearly three degrees. Then the Greely party's accomplishment would be further eclipsed by the expeditions of Robert E. Peary, whose claim to have reached the North Pole in 1909 would make him the most celebrated American polar explorer since Elisha Kent Kane. In his later years Greely would soldier on, rising to the top rank of brigadier general in the Signal Corps but never receiving the recognition he felt he deserved. Instead, he published climatological studies and helped create what would become the National Weather Bureau. He became a leading advocate for the international use of the telegraph, and in 1888 was one of the founders of the National Geographic Society. In 1906, Greely coordinated relief operations in San Francisco following the devastating earthquake there. As time passed and memories of the horrors at Cape Sabine faded, he did finally earn some acknowledgement of his Arctic service. As early as 1886 he had been awarded the Founder's Medal of the Royal Geographical Society of London. But it was not until 1922 that the American Geographical Society presented him with its Charles P. Daly Medal, for “valuable or distinguished geographical services or labors”—the first time an American organization had so honored him. Finally, at the very end of his life, on March 27, 1935, on the day Greely turned ninety-one and after embarrassment over the government's long neglect had grown too onerous, a proces
sion of soldiers on horseback, followed by the Secretary of War in a limousine, clattered up to his Georgetown house bringing Greely the Congressional Medal of Honor for his “life of splendid public service.” (At that point he was only the fourth explorer—after Floyd Bennett, Richard Byrd, and Charles Lindbergh—to receive the nation's highest award.) When these words were read to him, Greely's eyes welled with tears, and his hand trembled visibly as he saluted the band outside serenading him with a military march. His long, long wait had finally paid off. The lasting fame he had been denied for so many years was now his.11
As Greely had foreseen when he set out for Ellesmere Island, this belated honor was bestowed on him not for any contributions to science, but for his party's Farthest North. The citation did not refer specifically to the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition, perhaps for fear of recalling its infamous events, but the message was clear. Heroes made the nation proud, and nothing did that more emphatically than acts of extraordinary daring and bravery. Coming closer to the North Pole than explorers from any other country was as thrilling back then as what Lindbergh had recently done in crossing the Atlantic alone in the Spirit of St. Louis. Even though he had not personally set foot at this high latitude, Greely deserved this medal as the leader who had guided his men that far.
Like so many other nineteenth-century polar explorers, Adolphus Washington Greely had professed he was going to the ends of the earth to add to human knowledge. And like almost all of them, he had lied. His motives were purely selfish: he wanted to become famous, earn lots of money, and be proclaimed a hero. But, in order to have a chance at getting these rewards, he had to first pretend to have “higher” reasons for risking his life and enduring such hardship. Advancing the cause of “science” was what nations in his day had adopted as their rationale for expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctic, and so this was the purpose he and other explorers had to pretend they fully endorsed. If they didn't, they weren't funded. Roald Amundsen would learn this lesson two decades later. After returning from his maiden voyage on the Belgica to Antarctica, the twenty-seven-year-old Norwegian sat down to talk with his already-famous countryman, Fridtjof Nansen, in Oslo. Likely as a result of this encounter, Amundsen enlarged his agenda for his next expedition, realizing that it “must have a scientific purpose as well as the purpose of exploration. Otherwise I shall not be taken seriously and would not get backing.”12 He then visited a prominent German explorer and scientist (who was also a colleague of Karl Weyprecht's) and won his crucial support by declaring that locating the North Magnetic Pole was his real objective, not traversing the Northwest Passage.
One can liken this calculated embrace of science to an arranged marriage: it brought financial security by feigning genuine affection. The explorers’ true passion was for breaking records and making a name for themselves. But this “mistress”—the bitch-goddess Success—had to be kept out of sight, since society frowned upon would-be heroes who displayed naked and unabashed egotism.13 So the pursuit of the poles was a kind of fraud—a deception perpetrated by vainglorious men on the millions desirous of transcendent, self-sacrificing deeds, abetted by governments anxious to demonstrate their own superiority on the world stage. In this light, Weyprecht's dream of nations cooperating for mutual benefit seems like the exception that proves the rule: fierce competition in pursuing territorial conquests—much like being first to put a man on the moon—was the order of the day.
Explorers’ jaundiced view of science was apparent from the early forays into the Arctic wilderness. Lieutenant George Back of the Royal Navy, Franklin's trusted, artistically talented companion on two land expeditions starting in 1819, had been handed the unenviable assignment of surveying the route northward to the Open Polar Sea—a mission that was both daunting and deadly. As a result of surprisingly cold winter weather and poor supply lines, half of his men died on the way. Each of them was weighted down by roughly eighty pounds of gear and provisions and had to carry these loads up and down steep mountains, around lakes, and across rivers. Often Back's party had to make time-consuming detours in order to map a curving coastline, at a time when their food was fast disappearing. Back's journal of this “unfortunate voyage” contained some caustic verses on the surveying job they were supposed to carry out at such a human cost:
Th’ inhospitable regions are explored around—
and large tracts added to Science's name—
Unfortunately there—no sustenance is found
To crown our prospects and future fame—14
Even a trained naturalist like Elisha Kane, whose books glamorized his dramatic adventures purportedly in the name of science, made use of his treks in northern Canada and Greenland to look for desirable routes to the Open Polar Sea.15 Being media-savvy and keenly aware of the need to give his readers the hero they wanted, he was careful to couch his real intentions as an ennobling quest.16 When Kane departed for the Arctic on the Advance in June of 1853, he stressed that this voyage was being undertaken “for the double purpose of scientific discovery, and to learn of the fate of Sir John Franklin.”17 Kane was hardly the first or only explorer to use the missing and much-lamented English navigator as an excuse for investigating new territory. But his duplicity was craftier: the fact that Kane fell in love with a younger woman, Maggie Fox—who had convinced many people that she and her sisters were spiritual mediums capable of contacting the dead through séances—says a lot about his own character.18 Possessing distinguished medical credentials made it plausible for him to claim that scientific curiosity was motivating his expeditions. Kane adroitly marketed himself as a hero of science through his vivid, dramatic writings and spellbinding public appearances.19 On occasion, Kane would let his guard down and admit that the “agony” of taking outdoor measurements in midwinter seemed pointless. He had his men continue these tasks mostly to relieve their boredom and feelings of depression. Personally, Kane had no patience for this tedious, taxing work. He once described his observing the movement of a magnetometer at twenty below zero with evident sarcasm. Someday, he wrote, a “grateful nation” will doubtless appreciate the 480 weekly recordings made under these frightful conditions and “will never think of asking, ‘Cui bono all this?’”20
The turning of polar explorers into larger-than-life figures bearing the collectives hopes and dreams of their people toward the poles and bringing back knowledge that would make the world a better place had started—posthumously—with Sir John Franklin. Decades after he had disappeared into the Arctic, the “portly and sedentary” Englishman was remembered as a person who was “filled with that spirit which is even more national than the love of adventure, more English even than the passion for the ‘great waters’—the thirst for the discovery of the unknown.”21 The American explorer Hall echoed these sentiment when he applauded Franklin as a “martyr to science,” thus misconstruing what had actually been a quest to complete the Northwest Passage.22 As was noted earlier, Hall himself was largely ignorant of scientific matters, and this deficiency proved problematic when he sought funds from Congress for his 1871 polar expedition. The lawmakers insisted on his having a scientific raison d'etre: in the post-Civil-War era, explorers had to be more than “frontiersmen.”23 In the end, he only got $50 thousand for his voyage by promising that he would bring along a scientific team—a condition that bothered him a great deal, since their presence might divert from his real goal, which was to stand on “that spot of this great and glorious orb of God's creation where there is no North, no East, no West…[on] the crowning jewel of the Arctic dome.”24 Hall also (rightly) concerned about dissension arising between him and these scientists.
Even Hall's competitor for funding, Isaac Hayes—like Kane a medical doctor—seems to have taken on a research mission only to satisfy his backers. After his first trip to the Arctic, accompanying Kane in 1855, Hayes had made clear his intention to trek as far north as possible the next time. However, after failing to attract money to search for the Open Polar Sea because many prospective donors reg
arded his proposal as too dangerous, Hayes then recast it, giving it a scientific purpose, and quickly won support from the recently established Smithsonian Institution and the American Philosophical Society.25 So when he sailed out of Boston Harbor on the deck of the schooner United States, in July 1860, he could boast of his voyage as being “purely a scientific one.” But, in fact, Hayes spent most of his time searching for a passage to the Open Polar Sea and achieving a new Farthest North. (When temperatures plummeted that winter, Hayes was forced to face the fact that a polar sea free of ice was illogical. He felt “defeated,” his hopes of becoming another “scientist hero” like Kane dashed, his chance for lasting fame gone.) Instead of immersing himself in scholarly articles about the Arctic at night in his cabin, he dipped into Marco Polo's tale of traveling along the Silk Road. Adding to Hayes's disappointment, his claim to having reached the latitude of 82.30 degrees north was later disproven: Hayes had overestimated how far he had gotten by 140 miles and made other untrue statements, including that he had come within sight of the ocean. But these reversals did not stop him from entitling his 1867 book on this expedition The Open Polar Sea.26
Pretending to put science first was common practice in the nineteenth century—another instance of the Victorian tendency to cover over what one really desired by what was socially acceptable. Even some Scandinavians evinced this predilection. Borchgrevink, who had constructed an image of himself as the only “real” scientist interested in exploring Antarctica, showed his true colors by his lack of skill in handling specimens and using scientific instruments properly. While stopping in Madeira on the way south he had riled the scientists on board by complaining that they were spending too much time doing research, and then, in Antarctica, he had insisted that the geologist Louis Bernacchi stop taking magnetic readings so that he could take a photograph of a seal instead.27 Nansen, the dean of Norwegian polar explorers, was also wont to speak about his devotion to science, although with some equivocation. He had once affirmed that scientific study ought to be the “sole object of all explorations,” while admitting that many explorers—himself included—were driven by an obsession with the “Holy Grail” of reaching the pole first. Once that had been accomplished, then doing “pure” science could come paramount.28 In his youth, the Norwegian had been torn between doing what he had been trained to do as a PhD student in Oslo (then called “Christiana”)—namely, devote his life to learning more about the nervous system of simple marine life forms—and satisfying his hunger for adventure, discovery, and fame. This conflict came to a head after the Fram had been drifting slowly for months, and the “coldly professional” Nansen secretly made up his mind to leave the ship and the rest of its crew behind to strike out overland for the pole with just one other man, Hjalmar Johansen.29 Up until that point Nansen had waffled like Hamlet, at one point seemingly resigned to giving up his dream when the Fram kept pointing south. On New Year's Day in 1904, he wrote, “Perhaps the gain to science will be as great, and, after all, I suppose this desire to reach the North Pole is only a piece of vanity.” As if needing to convince himself, he added that vanity was merely “a child's disease, got over long ago.”30
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