To the Ends of the Earth

by John V. H. Dippel

  Nansen wanted strong, healthy Norwegian sailors who shared his hunger to reach new frontiers. This shared motivation—not personal allegiance—tended to hold them together when the chips were down, when the usual protocols no longer seemed to make any sense. When the goals of a leader and those of his men were at odds, a falling out—if not worse—was apt to occur. This was most likely to happen when the head of the expedition tipped his hand and revealed—as Peary and, before him, Kane and Nansen did—that his desire for personal fame was paramount. Much like “glory hounds” in combat—zealous, brash, and ambitious infantry lieutenants who order their troops to “go over the top” so that these officers can afterward win medals—selfish expedition leaders invited disaffection, wrath, and even mutiny by breaking faith with their men. Such was the case with the Second Grinnell Expedition in 1854. Elisha Kane wanted to spend another winter locked in ice on board the ironically named Advance so that this would put him in a good position to push on to the Open Polar Sea in the spring. But many of his men and officers were desperate to get back home and felt—rightly—that Kane was putting his wishes ahead of their well-being. With little left to eat, they were “wretchedly prepared” for another long confinement on the ship. When staying was first put to a vote, only one of the seventeen men favored remaining in the Arctic. After a second vote, a party of nine left for an Inuit outpost at Upernavik, Greenland, in what Kane considered an act of mutiny.45 The rest reluctantly stayed with him.

  Charles Hall, equally obsessed with getting to the pole, likewise faced an apparent uprising in 1868 when some of his men began to doubt that their vessel would ever be freed from the ice. Hall had to shoot and kill the ringleader—an unarmed sailor named Patrick Coleman—to quell this revolt-in-the-making, although it remains unclear that he was justified in doing so. (Some historians believe Hall was beside himself because of his party's failure to make any significant progress toward reaching the North Pole.46 A group of whalers he had recruited to guide his ship to the North Pole had quit, leaving him without skilled navigators.) And then, during the infamous Polaris voyage a few years later, Hall—a poor leader and judge of character—had gotten into acrimonious arguments with the ship's medical officer, several other scientists, and members of the crew, resulting in acts of insubordination and, possibly, Hall's murder. A major source of his problems was that his men were not personally loyal to him: they had joined the expeditions for reasons of their own—either for the money or to do scientific work, not to complete Hall's territorial quests.

  Another liability on the Polaris expedition was its binational nature. Soon after the ship had sailed from the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the German scientists formed their own clique in opposition to Hall's authority. The German crew members, who accounted for most of the sailors, sided with them, fracturing the party along national lines and making it impossible to reach consensus. Such divisiveness was even more pronounced on the later voyage of the Belgica: the plethora of languages spoken on board turned it into a floating Tower of Babel. Growing anxiety and adversity during polar expeditions induced those with a common language and background to draw together, to the exclusion of all the others. But, instead of allaying fears, this bonding tended to reinforce them. Increased isolation only made crews feel more alone and helpless. Miscommunication and suspicion could easily arise when there were language barriers—as frequently existed between Western explorers and their Inuit and other indigenous contacts. Trust could be broken, and unity of purpose could be lost. Intensifying alienation could weaken one's hold on reality. Inevitably, members of multinational parties could be more susceptible to mental and emotional breakdowns.

  Conversely, homogeneous bands of explorers—men from the same country who celebrated the same holidays, who loved the same dishes, who knew by heart the same bawdy songs, who grew misty-eyed at the hoisting of the same flag, and who longed for the same home thousands of miles away tended to stick together. When the going got tough, they could find comfort in these communal ties. Love of country also gave men stranded in the polar realms greater reason for enduring their ordeal. As Alexander Armstrong, surgeon on HMS Investigator during its 1848 search for the Franklin party, wrote of its crew, their “noble spirit and patriotic feeling” helped them overcome hunger-induced weakness to carry supplies off the slowly sinking ship. He hailed this feat as “one of the brightest pages in the history of our country.”47 While sailing south to Antarctica on the Discovery in 1901, Scott's men dropped off postcards at ports of call along the way to call attention to their expedition. These messages conveyed that they understood the connection between their mission and their nation's renown, as did these lines of Kipling's:

  What is the flag of England? Ye have but my bergs to dare,

  Ye have but my drifts to conquer, Go forth for it is there.48

  Such chauvinism sustained many polar expeditions, during a time when European powers were competing against one another around the world. When a band of Italians from the beset Polar Star were trekking toward the North Pole on sledges at the turn of the century, they concluded their Sunday prayers with shouts of “Long Live the King!”49 And sailors who followed Nansen and Amundsen to the ends of the earth were buoyed by similar sentiments. To mark their national independence day, on May 18, 1894, the crew of the Fram (they were all Norwegians) breakfasted on smoked salmon and ox tongues, after having affixed blue-white-and-red ribbon bows to their shirts. Then, having raised a Norwegian flag to the top of the mast, they marched out onto the ice holding pennants, stepping smartly to patriotic songs played by Johansen on his accordion. Followed by more men bearing rifles and harpoons, this “stately cortege” strode twice around the icebound ship and then gave her a hearty cheer before returning for more raucous festivities on board.50

  Careful selection of crew members, a mutually agreed-upon purpose, wise planning, an astute, honest, and unselfish leader, and cohesiveness made for a successful expedition. But all these advantages could prove insufficient if the polar world conspired against the explorers. Lack of food and extreme cold, helplessness and desperation, a crushed hull or an early winter could not be surmounted by even the wisest of commanders and the most dedicated of crews. An unforeseen catastrophe could wreck an expedition in a minute. In the end, Nature still reigned in this hyperborean realm, and the best any party could do was to prepare as much as possible and then respond wisely to the circumstances it had to deal with. Survival had to be a collective effort. With very, very few exceptions, no man could stave off disaster by himself.

  A self-professed “romantic” with an “unconquerable love of adventure,” William Godfrey jumped at the chance to go north with Elisha Kane in search of Sir John Franklin in the spring of 1853. When the Advance slipped loose of her tarred mooring lines in New York harbor, bands blared “The Star-Spangled Banner,” crowds on the docks roared, horns in the bay tooted, and Godfrey and the rest of the excited crew experienced “a feeling of expansion…as though we had all been suddenly enlarged to heroic dimensions,” with tears of joy rolling down their cheeks. It felt, he would later write, that “our voyage was all romance and unalloyed pleasure,” as if this they were commencing a blissful marriage. But this Arctic honeymoon would not last very long. From the start, Godfrey noticed that the brig was not adequately equipped for a long stay in the Far North. Like a bridegroom eloping in haste, Kane had not planned well, and all on board would suffer for his impetuousness later on. On the way to Newfoundland, many of the men became violently seasick. Continuing on toward Baffin Bay, the Advance was besieged by huge ice floes and then became stuck fast. The men were spent and homesick and fearful of dying like Franklin's crew, but Kane insisted on pressing ahead, overland. Later, a party he led, determined to locate the Open Polar Sea, nearly starved and froze to death during twenty-seven consecutive days in the open. Temperatures as low as forty below made some of the men go temporarily mad—chanting strange ditties, howling like animals, and making wild, spastic gestures. After that, they w
ere never the same again. The chill settled permanently in their bones. With the arrival of winter, depression set in. As Godfrey would recall, the “very soul of man seems to be suffocated by the oppressive gloom, the horrid silence, the changeless appearance of surrounding objects, among which no signs of animated nature can be discerned; for all that the eye can compass is fixed and still, like a sad and dreary picture, or some magnificent piece of sculpture, representing a scene of utter desolation.”1 Hostility and insubordination festered in the dark bowels of the imprisoned ship. The second winter it was worse—all eighteen men packed into a single room, many stricken with scurvy, the others sullen, gaunt, hollow-eyed, and ready to explode. One time, an irate Kane took a belaying pin and smashed it over the head of one sailor who had disobeyed his orders and laid the other—Godfrey—out flat. Sailors punched each other with the ferocity of dogs locked up in a metal cage. When Kane caught Godfrey trying to abandon the ship, he pummeled him with a slug of lead hidden inside his mitten. He then fired a shot at the fleeing sailor, but missed. Godfrey disappeared into the snowdrifts.2 At that point, the men on the Advance had another four months of this hell to get through before they could escape to the south.

  Anyone who has ever lived in close quarters with a group of strangers will not be surprised that polar explorers readily got on each other's nerves, grew testy, turned hostile, lashed out in anger, and even became violent. Much as expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctic may have started out cheerfully like the Advance, all too often simmering resentment below decks destroyed this camaraderie. To some extent, this fraying of nerves can be chalked up to the perils of their mission: sailing into uncharted, ice-choked waters, plodding through untrustworthy, hip-deep snow, running out of food, encountering fierce storms and vertical pressure ridges, sleeping in bags on shifting floes, remaining for months and even years in cheerless outposts devoid of all life—this relentless struggle against the polar elements tried men's souls more than any other endeavor at this point in human history, an era still innocent of mass slaughter by machine gun.

  It is thus no wonder that so many explorers “broke” under these conditions, as Godfrey's shipmates did, and railed at each another. Someone was to blame for the disaster that had befallen them—and someone had to be held accountable. Screaming at an approaching iceberg or baying at the moon like Inuit dogs didn't help: unless one was deeply religious, there could be no hope that God would respond and part the ice. Cursing the wind would not make it stop blowing. Nature would not relent or show any mercy. So, looking for scapegoats, men like those on the Advance turned on each other. The fellowship that had been an antidote against isolation and despondency became the locus of discontent. Welling, ugly emotions that they could no longer be contained erupted with a fury. Those among them who represented “the Other” were the first targets of their wrath.

  Differences in class, country of origin, and status set them apart. Diverse crews on vessels like the Southern Cross and the Belgica soon thus splintered into national cliques. The men on the Belgian ship spoke French in the main cabin, German and English in the scientific quarters, and a hybrid of English, Norwegian, French, and German in the forecastle—a linguistic stew that Frederick Cook professed to find salubrious, making the Belgica feel like a “well-regulated family.” But using so many different languages did not bring them closer. Once fears of having winter in the Antarctic arose, the crew slipped into a “disgruntled” funk, “hopelessly oppressed by the sense of utter desertion and loneliness.” Retreating inward, the men tried not to provoke each other, but under these circumstances that could hardly be avoided. As a medical doctor, Cook reasoned that tension was common on long voyages like theirs—one of those dirty little secrets that never left the ship or made it into print. Boredom bred a “monotonous discontent” since men were forced to stare at the same faces, listen to the same jokes, and put up with the same annoying personality quirks day after day without interruption.3 But, being new to these conditions, Cook underestimated how much linguistic and cultural barriers could stoke this smoldering anger.

  On the doomed Polaris, the German scientists agreed from the start to speak only their own language, and this decision only increased their disaffection from Charles Hall and his cockamamie scheme to strike out in blinding snow to notch a new Farthest North. For his part, Hall had even more reason to distrust these foreigners, whose presence on board he had only grudgingly accepted. How could he not interpret their animated conversations below decks as signs of plotting against him? Complaints by the chief scientist Emil Bessels and his compatriots about having to blindly follow Hall's orders bubbled over into talk of quitting the ship. The German deckhands—only one member of the crew was American—sided with their countrymen, raising the specter of a mass mutiny off the west coast of Greenland. Hall considered reaching for his revolver to squelch this threatened uprising. In the end, it did not come off, but shortly before Hall died under mysterious circumstances in his stateroom on November 8, 1871, he accused Bessels of having poisoned his coffee.4 Even Hall's death, which Bessels would later describe as “the best thing that could have happened for this expedition,” did not end the rancor. Instead, the German scientists formed an even tighter and more secretive circle. Later on, in December, when the crippled Polaris abruptly sailed off, the Germans left behind adamantly refused navigator George Tyson's order to take up pursuit: they insisted he had no authority over them. All the highly experienced whaler could do was fume in his journal that the German sailors were “determined to control their destiny. They want to be masters here. They go swaggering about with their pistols and rifles…”5 Tyson also had to worry that the rebellious crew members might shoot him or one or more of the Inuit in their party and then commit the ultimate barbarity of eating their flesh.

  As was noted earlier, Adolphus Greely had his own share of troubles with a quasi-foreigner who had come with him to Lady Franklin Bay. His nemesis was the French-educated and French-speaking Dr. Octave Pavy, whose disdain for military protocol was as repellent to his commanding officer as his dubious character and purportedly “Bohemian” lifestyle.6 Greely wrote his wife that he considered Pavy “a tricky double-faced man, idle, unfit for any Arctic work except doctoring & sledge travel & not first class in the latter.” The feisty physician gave as good as he got, agreeing with Lieutenant Kislingbury that Greely was a self-absorbed martinet unfit for this mission and scribbling similarly derogatory comments in his journal.7 These two strong egos openly clashed when Pavy refused to obey Greely's written order that he hand over his notes on the various species he had observed and collected at Fort Conger, along with his personal diary. Greely then had the physician put under guard—an indignity that a defiant Pavy accepted “physically, but not morally.”8 Given the deteriorating conditions at their isolated Arctic outpost, Greely's response to Pavy's noncompliance (as to that of his good friend and second-in-command, Kislingbury) comes across as excessive and counterproductive. It certainly did not increase his expedition's chances of surviving. In Pavy's case, what it revealed was the incompatibility of the military and civilian approaches to such a precarious situation.

  Conflicts like these arose from more than differences in language and background. As was evident on the Greely expedition, temperament could also create disharmony. But national differences could easily become personal. The lone Norwegian who accompanied Scott, twenty-three-year-old champion skier Tryggve Gran, found himself in an awkward position knowing that his English party was in a tight race to the South Pole against his countrymen. The aristocratic Oates at first would have nothing to do with him and disparaged Gran “as both dirty and lazy” simply because he wasn't British and thus presumed to be hostile.9 Gran made no secret of his hope that Amundsen would get to the pole first: he proudly tacked up a Norwegian flag over his bunk. Ironically, it was Gran who would later be told to bring the Union Jack to Scott's Southern Party, which had forgotten it in their haste to get started from Hut Point. This “irony of f
ate” made Gran feel that he was, indeed, part of this “mixed brotherhood.” Later, returning from the site where he and the others had just discovered the frozen bodies of Scott, Bowers, and Wilson, the young Norwegian reflected that being with these men had taught him the true meaning of friendship—a bond that could, at times, transcend patriotism.10 It was this same sense of a deeper bond among kindred spirits that allowed ordinary Germans to express concern about the fate of Ernest Shackleton and his largely English party when they were attempting to cross Antarctica in 1914—at a time when their two countries had just declared war on each other.

  Just as potentially injurious to an expedition's success as nationalistic feelings were disagreements over its purpose, its priorities, and its strategies. Some of these conflicts were inevitable: expeditions were sometimes funded and organized for a variety of reasons and then expected to carry out these different missions. For example, the reporters whom New York Herald publisher James Gordon Bennett Jr. had assigned to go along as “seamen for special service” on the Jeannette in 1879—to publish sensational scoops about reaching the pole—clashed frequently with the naval officers who were trying to run the ship according to military regulations. The journalists’ annoyance over having to toe the line “hardened into outright rebellion” once the ship became icebound.11 On one occasion, Jerome Collins, one of the two of them on board, refused to comply with De Long's orders and was promptly relieved of his duties. When the other, Raymond Newcomb, challenged the commander's authority, he was placed under arrest. More importantly, the goals of scientific investigation and territorial discovery were frequently incompatible. This was the case regardless of the nationalities involved. In conflict from the start, these disagreements over purpose only intensified at sea. This was certainly the case on the Southern Cross: en route south, in Madeira, the scientists had tarried to collect specimens, exasperating the expedition's leader, Borchgrevink, who was focused on getting to Antarctica before winter set in.