The Arctic Grail

by Pierre Berton

  To Kane this was not only madness, it was also “a gross violation … of everything gallant and honorable.” He saw these men as traitors. And yet, if he refused the dissidents permission to leave he would be faced with an appalling morale problem. “We are a set of scurvy-ridden, broken down men … a reluctant, brooding, disheartened spirit would sweep our decks like a pestilence.…”

  He discussed the situation with Sonntag, the German scientist, who reassured him that not many would want to desert him and that the success of their proposed expedition was doubtful. On August 24 Kane called the company together to warn them of the dangers they faced. He gave them twenty-four hours to make up their minds.

  The following day he got his answer, and it was a shocker. All but five opted to leave. Of these loyalists only Morton and “Irish Tom” Hickey, the cabin boy, were fit for duty aboard ship. Goodfellow, thoughtless and lazy, was useless. Brooks was flat on his back from amputated toes; Hans, the Eskimo, could only work outdoors and might take off at any time.

  To Kane’s dismay, four of his officers were determined to leave. Hayes he could understand – the party would need a doctor – and Hayes was convinced that if the crew did not split up, the entire brig would become a hospital. But Sonntag’s defection was indefensible; he had added deceit to treachery! Amos Bonsall, his old Pennsylvania neighbour, had also quit, and he couldn’t talk him out of it, even though his arguments reduced the former farmer to tears. Wilson, who couldn’t stand Kane, had second thoughts and returned to the fold, also in tears. James McGary also began to waver, couldn’t make up his mind, but finally elected to stay. Nine of the ship’s company of seventeen wanted to leave.

  Kane refused to speak to the defectors, communicating with them through Ohlsen and in writing. He would give them provisions, equipment, and a boat to be built by Ohlsen, whom Kane called “the instigator of the whole concern, scheming and non-reliable but efficient.” He advised them to elect a leader; they chose Ohlsen. But Ohlsen started to vacillate when Kane insisted that he and the others sign a statement making it clear that “from the moment of your leaving the brig you will be under your own control and your connection with the expedition will be regarded as closed.”

  In Kane’s description, Ohlsen refused, “argued, urged, entreated, almost threatened, behaved like a madman.” Kane then withdrew his permission for Ohlsen to leave; he would do so, he declared, at his peril. At the last minute the carpenter relented. If Kane would let him go, he said, he’d sign the waiver. Now Kane refused. If Ohlsen tried to leave, he said, he’d shoot him as a deserter. Ohlsen, “crying like a woman,” had no choice but to remain.

  The defectors took three days to organize themselves. On the surface the leave-taking was cordial; Kane even broke out his private stock of champagne. Later he would claim that “they carried with them a written assurance of a brother’s welcome should they be driven back.” Inwardly, he seethed with a black rage. They were deserters who had betrayed him by leaving their posts. He washed his hands of them. Their departure was, he thought, “a purgation, ridding me of condemned material worthy heretofore but rotten now.” Those who had stayed were “natural gentlemen.” He speared the malcontents with his pen: Bonsall, Hayes, and Sonntag “never had the associated gallantry or right mindedness of Goodfellow … or McGeary [sic] … Peterson [sic] was always a cold-blooded sneak, Ohlsen, double-faced, fawning and insincere.”

  He saw himself as a martyr, put upon by traitors. “I have made up my mind to act towards these miserable men without a thought of self … God will take care of us. I did not know before this awful prospect of a second winter that I had so much faith.”

  A few days later the pugnacious Blake and another of the crew, George Riley, returned crestfallen, complaining of a lack of order and discipline among the defectors. Actually, they had become panic-stricken when their small sledge went through the ice and almost drowned them. Blake rejoined the defectors, but Riley remained with Kane. On September 5, 1854, all connections were cut. The seven dissenters, led now by Petersen, vanished, presumably forever.

  Outwardly calm, Kane that night poured out to his journal all his feelings of betrayal, his sense of personal injury, and his self-justification of the events of the previous weeks. It is an extraordinary passage, in which he began softly and then slowly worked himself into a vengeful rage against the men who had deserted him. He had sent them a larger sled, along with a letter to which they had not bothered to reply: “… neither written advice … nor thanks, nor goodbyes, nor words of any sort. So they go. From my very heart I can say a blessing go with them. Neither their ingratitude nor their selfishness shown in clear repulsiveness only after their departure can make me feel unkindly to these men.

  “… They are deserters, in act and in spirit – in all but the title. They leave their ship, abandon their sick comrades, fail to adhere to their commander, and are false to the implied trust which tells every true man to abide by the Expedition into which he has entered.

  “When the first roll was called … I said not a word … all I exacted was a signed paper.… Since then, one by one – some from doubt, some from selfishness and some from fear – five strong men have come back to me.… So Providence favoured me in doing my duty.…

  “One satisfaction I have – no slight one – that this misguided party have wanted for nothing – they have had the best of everything, even at self sacrifice. Their ingratitude is nothing. They should have had the same treatment had they spit in my face. I cannot but feel that some of them will return broken down and suffering to seek a refuge on board. They shall find it to the halving of our last chip – but – but – but – if I ever live to get home – home! . And should I meet Dr. Hayes or Mr. Bonsall or Mister Sonntag – let them look out for their skins. If I don’t live to thrash them … why then, brother John, seek a solitary orchard and maull [sic] them for me. Don’t honour them with a bullet and let the mauling be solitary save to the principals. It would hurt your Character to be wrestling with such low minded sneaks.”

  With that off his chest, Kane set about turning a portion of the ship into a reasonable facsimile of an Eskimo igloo. The crew tore the planking off the upper deck to use as winter firewood, sealed the quarterdeck with a padding of moss and turf, and prepared a living-space eighteen feet square. Ceiling and floors were lined with moss and the floor was caulked with two inches of oakum and plaster of Paris. The entrance, a long, narrow passage between decks, was also insulated. This would be winter quarters for the company of ten. Fortunately Ohlsen, who had been blubbering in his bunk, now recanted, shook hands with his captain, and reported for work.

  Kane realized he would have to depend on the Eskimos for fresh seal and walrus meat to stave off scurvy and for dogs to pull sledges. But to his dismay he discovered that a band of natives with whom he had been dealing aboard ship had slipped away, taking a number of cooking utensils and buffalo robes with them. Something would have to be done – and quickly – to restore relations and stop any further pilfering.

  He dispatched his two best walkers, Morton and Riley, to the tiny community of Anoatok, halfway between the ship and the main Eskimo village of Etah. There they found three of the culprits, a boy and two women, asleep with their loot. They sent the boy to Etah to report to the headman, Metek, and then kidnapped the two women, one of whom was Metek’s wife. Held prisoner aboard the ship, wailing and singing doleful songs, the women were the bait that brought Metek posthaste back to the brig to return a sledgeload of pilfered objects. Then and there Kane concluded a formal treaty with the Eskimos. They promised to supply him with fresh meat and dogs and to refrain from further thefts. He on his part swore to give them presents and guns with which to hunt. The pact was solemnized and the bargain held to by both sides.

  A worse irritant was an infestation of rats that quit the hold for the warmth of Kane’s makeshift igloo. There were rats under the stove, rats in the cushions, rats in the lockers, rats in the bedding. They chewed away at furs
, woollens, shoes, specimens – everything. When Kane put his hand into a mitten one day he was bitten by a mother rat that was raising her brood inside it. Before he could staunch the blood, the rat family had run off with the mitten! But Kane put the rats to good use. During his adventurous years around the globe he had eaten everything from bats to puppy-dogs. When travelling with the Eskimos he cheerfully ate the raw blubber that nauseated some of his crew. Now he simply cooked and ate the rats. By the end of October half his company was down with scurvy, but Kane scarcely suffered, thanks to the fresh meat.

  As the weeks dragged on, the brig was slowly stripped of all available firewood. The upper deck, bulwark, fancy shelving, and bulkheads were all gone by early November. The oppressive Arctic night was shattering the crew’s morale. McGary became so homesick one night that he walked the deck, disconsolate, refusing to eat anything. Wilson was tormented by thoughts of home and friends, especially one particular friend, Bessie Pierce, whose “dear image seems to float around me like a halo around the sun.” A gloomy thought crossed his mind. Perhaps she had decided to marry! The prospect seemed “to cast a shadow over all my bright anticipations … and rush me back into the darkest recesses of seclusion.…”

  Kane, too, confessed to moments of despair: “My thoughts, my diseased craving for love and caressment, everything that unbends, I crush, strangle, before they take shape. The Father – I cease to remember his years – the Mother – I will not count her tears – weeping on her wet pillow for her firstborn and her last.”

  He could not, as leader, allow these feelings to show. On the contrary, he continued the authoritarian style that added to the tensions aboard the Advance that winter. To Wilson, the cramped cabin was “the most perfect hell hole.” Kane was venting his increasing rages on the youngest member of the crew, Tom Hickey. But none was exempt from the captain’s temperamental outbursts. According to Wilson, “from the time he gets up in the morning until we are all turned in, he is incessantly quareling [sic] with someone or making use of his arbitary [sic] power.” Kane’s habit of going to bed at three or four in the morning but never rising until noon was another irritant. “He turns day into night,” Wilson recorded, “but makes us all get up at 7 bells … and breakfast at 8.”

  To the crew, Kane was a martinet. Kane, of course, saw himself as the rock on which the others depended, the stern parent keeping his errant children in line. “Every energy of my nature – a vile foul nature too – is bent to bear myself and those who lean on me out of this great trial. If I let weakness come over me now – we, I mean all of us – are gone. But if – if the Lord does not blot me out and I will return as a man who has braved a hard temptation and abided by his trust, then those who live either with me, or after me … will give me credit for something more than a blind will & a groping materialism.…”

  His loneliness was accentuated by his estrangement from the one companion he thought of as a gentleman, and thus worthy of a certain intimacy. This was Henry Goodfellow, a feckless youth who had been taken on as a natural history observer as a favour to Kane’s brother Tom. Goodfellow was worse than useless. Wilson found him “lazy, dirty, ragged and impudent to every one.” To Kane, who continued to indulge him, he was “one of the most impracticable and helpless men I was ever connected with.” Goodfellow grew more slovenly by the day, neglected his duty, refused to look after himself, and slowly withdrew from his shipmates, most of whom were no longer on speaking terms with him. When Kane lost his temper with him, Goodfellow cut him dead; to avoid further turmoil and discord, Kane relieved him of all duties and took them over himself. While the others toiled, Goodfellow lounged about, reading novels.

  Kane could “never speak to him without disgust” but, martyrlike, still catered to him. “This is the man to whom I had looked for an interchange of home thoughts – for confidential copying – for relief from my heavy daily toil – yet for him – rather say for Tom – I’m keeping a double set of nightly watches, losing my scanty hours of sleep. He asks me for a glass of lime juice and water. ‘Yes, Henry.’ So off I go to get it and he now just awake and prepared for a new guzzle and a new nap. He has more cool impudence than any man I ever knew.”

  By early December, five of the crew were prostrate with scurvy. Morton’s Achilles tendon was so badly perforated the bone was exposed, but Kane feared that an operation would bring on tetanus. The chief antiscorbutic consisted of gratings from raw potatoes. There were only twelve of these left, at least three years old – “poor old frozen memorials of the dear land they grew in.”

  The three healthy men were put to work tearing the oak ribbing off the ship for firewood. Kane had managed to collect more than a ton of fuel in this way, but that would scarcely last past January. For February and March, the worst of the winter months, he counted on the three inches of oak sheathing, nailed to the ship’s side as protection against the ice. Ohlsen was sure that its removal would not greatly affect the brig’s seaworthiness if it were cut off no deeper than the waterline. That would provide an extra two and a half tons of firewood. “With this – God willing – I may get through this awful winter and save the brig besides!” Kane told himself.

  But these wishful hopes were dashed at about three o’clock on the morning of December 7. Kane was wakened with the news that five sledges with six teams of dogs, each with strange drivers, were approaching the ship. A few minutes later, a group of Eskimos came aboard, supporting Bonsall and Petersen, both in dreadful condition. They had left the brig fourteen weeks before but, as Kane had prophesied, they had not been able to reach Upernavik. The other defectors, exhausted and starving, were crouching in a stone hovel some 150 miles to the south. The pair had managed to get back to the brig by bribing the southern Eskimos. Now they pleaded for help for their comrades.

  Kane acted at once, gathering up a hundred pounds of provisions and dispatching them with the strange Eskimos. Petersen and Bonsall were too far gone to move. Kane and the able-bodied men couldn’t desert the sick aboard the ship. Although he didn’t trust the new natives to take the food back to the others, he had no choice. He gave them presents, sent them on their way, and hoped for the best.

  2 Kalutunah

  The eight men who had left for the south the previous August were an oddly assorted lot – a German astronomer, a Baltimore seaman, a Pennsylvania farmer, a Greenland cooper, a Hull sailor, an East River boatman, an Irish patriot, and a Philadelphia medical student. Of these, only the Greenlander, Petersen, had any Arctic experience. But it can scarcely be said that Petersen was in charge. For the man on whom the party really depended for its life or its death was a cheerful and voluble Eskimo angetok (medicine man) from the village of Netlik. His name was Kalutunah.

  They had encountered him during the first winter and met him again as they struggled with maddening slowness in their two small boats through an almost impenetrable wilderness of ice. By the time they reached Netlik on the coast near Northumberland Island, they were running short of food and fuel. Kalutunah’s people gave them blubber to eat and moss for lamp wicks in return for needles and knives. Four days later on September 16 the ice closed in for good, and they realized they had no hope of reaching civilization before spring. They set to work in the freezing cold to build a shelter on the shore using boulders, chinked with moss, and tin and lumber from the two boats.

  Southward route of Kane’s defectors, autumn, 1854

  On October 9, after more than three weeks of “unmitigated misery,” to quote Dr. Hayes, they moved at last into this “cold, fireless, damp vault-like den.” By the eighteenth their biscuit was gone and they were reduced to eating rock moss, which produced dreadful cramps and diarrhea. Exposure, starvation, and certain death faced them.

  Two days later, they were reprieved when two of the most inhuman-looking creatures the men had ever seen crawled into the hut – “shapeless lumps of whiteness” in Hayes’s description – covered from head to foot in a coating of ice and snow. Kalutunah and a companion had travelled
for thirty-six hours without a break to bring frozen meat and blubber, which the destitute men fell upon like wolves. Two years earlier, George McDougall, one of Kellett’s officers aboard the Franklin search ship Resolute, had recorded his disgust at seeing “these degraded creatures,” as he called the Eskimos, eating seals’ intestines. To him they were an object of pity. Now, however, the mukluk was on the other foot.

  It was obvious that the party could not survive without native help. The Arctic Highlanders were eager for the white men’s goods, especially metal and wood. Petersen, the only one who spoke their language, carefully negotiated a treaty: food for knives, needles, and other treasures. It required considerable diplomacy, for he guessed that if the whites were seen to be starving, the natives might prefer to let them die in order to make off with everything. Petersen, accordingly, insisted to Kalutunah that with their magic sticks (guns) the whites were perfectly able to look after themselves. Kalutunah, however, wouldn’t rent or sell them dogs or sledges. Clearly, he didn’t want them to get away.

  The two Eskimos left, leaving meat enough for one meal and some blubber for fuel. It was two weeks before the party saw them again. Unskilled in hunting, they survived the fortnight on rock moss, growing steadily weaker. When the Eskimos finally turned up with several days’ supply of blubber, they began to recover.

  It was a maddening, cat-and-mouse existence. The natives, in total control, appeared sporadically, bringing a little food and fuel, and then vanished. Here were eight civilized creatures, trapped in their wretched shack, scrabbling for moss, unable to bring in more than an occasional fox or ptarmigan in spite of their superior weapons, while the Eskimos came and went at will. Hayes was astonished at the natives’ indifference to the elements. One day a young woman turned up with a six-month-old baby strapped to her back. She had travelled forty miles in –35° weather, often dismounting from the dogsled and walking because of the roughness of the route, her only motive being an insatiable curiosity to see the white strangers and their treasure.