The Arctic Grail

by Pierre Berton

  They must get free of the Eskimos! The best chance was to send back to the ship for more supplies, hole up for the winter in the hut, and try to reach the whaling fleet in the spring. Petersen agreed to go with Kalutunah to his village and bargain for dogs and sleds for a flying trip to Rensselaer Harbor. Godfrey offered to go with him as far as Netlik.

  They reached the village on November 3. At first they were well fed and well treated, but as time passed, Petersen, a cautious Dane who had lived among the Eskimos for twenty years and was married to one, began to feel uneasy. Many strangers began to crowd into the village including a glowering dog driver named Sip-su, who boasted that he’d killed two members of his own tribe because they couldn’t hunt. And Kalutunah seemed to be under Sip-su’s spell.

  Petersen was anxious to be on his way: the huts were crowded with people; a dozen sleds had been collected together, but now he was told with some surliness that nobody wished to go with him. When all the Eskimos laughed heartily at that announcement, he knew he was in danger. He quietly warned Godfrey in the next hut to be on his guard and told the crowd that if anything happened to him, his friends would arrive with their magic guns and kill them all. At those words, the Eskimos laughed all the more.

  His suspicions were confirmed when he offered to buy a dogteam. The sombre Sip-su turned to Kalutunah and asked a sinister question: “Don’t you think we can get his things in a cheaper way?”

  Petersen’s only security lay in the Eskimos’ belief that he had a pistol in his pocket. The natives feared it, convinced it was a magic wand. Actually, he had no pistol and his rifle, which the natives also feared, was outside the hut. They crowded around him, urging him to have a nap, their duplicity transparent. Petersen closed his eyes, feigned sleep, and listened to them piecing together a plot to kill all the white men and capture their belongings. Sip-su was the instigator; he announced he would lead the attack with Kalutunah as his lieutenant.

  Petersen opened his eyes just as Sip-su started to search for the non-existent pistol. Outside, a crowd had gathered around the rifle, afraid to touch it. Petersen managed to seize it and announced he was going off to hunt for bear. The Eskimos tried to persuade him to stay, insisting they meant no harm. But Petersen was determined to get back to the hut with Godfrey, in spite of the intense cold.

  They had at least forty miles to go and had proceeded no more than two when the Eskimos gave chase. Petersen brandished the magic rifle, keeping them at a distance. But he could never be sure that they did not lurk in ambush behind one of the frozen hummocks. That forced the white men to lengthen their journey to avoid such dangers, while Petersen, his hands freezing, kept his weapon at the ready.

  They could not stop to sleep. If the natives didn’t get them the cold would. Drowsy, exhausted, starving, and mad with thirst, they stumbled into the hut after trudging for twenty-four hours and fell forward on their faces crying “Water! Water!” They had survived only because the Eskimos had fed them well during their three days at Netlik.

  Now the party prepared for an attack. Instead, Kalutunah appeared, all smiles, with a large piece of walrus meat and some liver. To Hayes, “the Eskimos appear to us more as our good angels than as our enemies.” He was convinced that they had been influenced by a bad leader and by extraordinary temptation: the miserable store of trade goods, which were to the natives like precious jewels.

  Hayes was right. Another Eskimo, Kingiktok, appeared and explained that the sinister Sip-su had repeatedly said that if the white men died, those who followed him could get all the valuables. Kalutunah was opposed, arguing that the white men’s magic weapons would keep them alive. But the band grew impatient; they could see that they themselves were keeping the white men alive – or at least Kalutunah was. The more treasures he brought back the more they wanted. When Petersen and Godfrey reached the village, Sip-su plotted against them, only to have his courage fail in the presence of the magic gun.

  The party, having managed to get five dogs from the natives, decided to return en masse to the brig. It was not possible. After a few miles they turned back, stupefied by cold and exhaustion. The following morning the two strongest, Petersen and Bonsall, set off alone. Those left behind were again without food except for pieces of walrus hide; by the third day even that was gone.

  In a moment of lightheadedness, Dr. Hayes walked out into the moonlight “with desolation and the silence of death everywhere before me,” sat down on a rock facing the frozen sea, and “better than ever before, better probably than ever again … felt what it was to depend upon oneself and God.”

  In a demented act of determination he banished the cheerless vista from his view. He forgot his loneliness, forgot the cold moon, the dark cliffs, the desolate waste of white, and in his mind forced the bleak landscape into a pastoral mode. The sea became a fertile plain, the ice hummocks walls and hedges. The vapour rising from an open channel became smoke from cottages. Clusters of ice blocks suggested herds of cattle and flocks of sheep. Larger masses were converted into trees, while a wall of snow casting a dark shadow in the moonlight became the margin of a forest. A pinnacled berg in the distance appeared as a church, another became a ruined castle, and far to the southwest he thought he saw the outlines of a great fort under whose bristling guns lay a fleet of stately ships.

  The vision brought back a flood of boyhood memories. He turned away, resolved to continue the struggle for existence, determined to live to view some day in the future the spectacle that his disordered mind had conjured up on the moonlit surface of that pitiless sea.

  When Kalutunah and two others returned again, the desperate men became convinced that they meant to leave them to their fate. The Eskimos had food, but they had hidden it. They refused to take the party north or to rent them dogteams. It appeared that they were determined to let the men starve to death and then plunder the hut. Hayes, with his new resoluteness, had no intention of allowing that. The party must take matters into their own hands. He didn’t want to murder the Eskimos; his plan was to put them to sleep with an opium derivative, laudanum, then steal their dogs and sledges and head for the brig.

  The Eskimos allowed them two small pieces of meat. Hayes made a soup and offered some to Kalutunah and his friends, dropping the contents of a vial of laudanum into their bowls. While the whites watched and waited, the natives ate greedily. Soon they became drowsy. Hayes and the others helped them off with their coats and boots, and then moved quickly to don their own travelling clothes.

  At this point Godfrey reached for a tin cup. The contents clattered to the ground. Panic! With a single sweep of his hand, Hayes doused the light. Kalutunah grunted and asked what was the matter. Hayes gave him a hug and muttered the Eskimo word for sleep. Kalutunah laughed and began to snore.

  They knew they had no time to lose. They crawled out of the hut, taking the natives’ boots, mittens, and coats, then barricaded the doorway as best they could. August Sonntag already had the sledges ready. Unaccustomed to these strange and inexperienced drivers, the dogs howled in terror and were off at the first crack of the whip.

  It was a clumsy journey. None of them understood how to handle Eskimo dogs – an art that requires months of training. One sledge overturned and the dogs, squirming out of their traces, hightailed it back to the hut. With three men on each of the remaining two sledges, the party blundered on as far as Cape Parry, where they found shelter in a cave.

  Their freedom was short-lived. The Eskimos had awoken quickly and, with their usual ingenuity, fashioned mukluks out of blankets, cut up other blankets as ponchos, retrieved the lost sled and the wandering dogs, and quickly picked up the party’s trail. Since they knew how to handle the dogs, it was no trick to catch up with the white men. There they stood, silent accusers, their heads protruding from blankets – one red, one white, one blue – their feet wrapped in old cloths and, in one case, a discarded pair of boots, and their arms filled with the treasure they could not bear to abandon – tin cups, saucers, cutlery, even an old
hat. The situation would have been ludicrous had it not been so threatening.

  Hayes held them off with a rifle. The Eskimos pleaded with him not to shoot. Hayes managed to take two prisoners and, in sign language, offered a deal. If Kalutunah would drive the party north, the dogs, sledges, and clothes would be returned. Otherwise he would shoot them. Kalutunah cheerfully agreed, grateful that he was not to be killed with the magic weapon.

  They were taken north through a series of tiny Eskimo settlements where they were treated with great hospitality, fed, and rested. The last stop was the larger village of Etah, but to reach it they must travel around Cape Alexander, “the blowing place,” where they were forced to cling to a narrow shelf in the cliffside no more than fifteen inches wide, high above the sea. After five miles of terror they reached Etah to discover that Petersen’s Eskimos had devoured all the food that Kane had sent back with them – and they still had seventy miles to go!

  The natives helped them, but by the time they reached the brig one man was stupefied by cold and the others were at the breaking point. Hayes, in later life, could never remember their arrival; but Kane could! Hayes, he said, had managed to utter a few words: “We come here destitute and exhausted to claim your hospitality; we know we have no rights to your indulgence but we feel that with you we will have a welcome and a home.”

  Kane took one look at him – covered with snow, fainting from hunger – grasped his hand, and beckoned his companions to come aboard. The young doctor’s feet were so badly frostbitten and gangrenous that Kane had to amputate several of his toes. Then he gave him his own bed to sleep in.

  But he did not forgive him.

  3 Retreat

  He forgave no one. The addition of eight men to his crowded ship presented an embarrassing problem. They arrived with only the clothes on their backs. All the equipment they had taken, including the two boats, was lost. They didn’t even have blankets. Kane had hoped to eke out an existence through the winter with his small but faithful company and then make a dash for the sea; now he had almost double that number. They must share and share alike – he was prepared for that – but the unfaithful could not be treated like the faithful.

  The loyal party was more than a little bitter at the returnees, who had squandered their goodwill as well as their clothes, food, and equipment. Well, he, Kane, had warned them! He had predicted exactly what would happen and they hadn’t listened to him – to him, with his Arctic experience. They had leaned on him, trusted him, “and like little children been taught by me their very walk,” and yet in their innocence and stupidity they had gone against his “drearily earned experience of Arctic ice.”

  “God in Heaven,” Kane wrote in his private journal, “it makes my blood boil!”

  He could not let go. In page after page he scribbled once again the full story of his crew’s defection. There is an air of self-justification here, of self-pity and, above all, of disdain for these “eight weak or timid or immoral men.” At first, charity – “Poor devils, how they eat, how they swilled coffee and meat-biscuit soup” – but also condescension: “Like the Eskimos they had unconsciously adopted their very manners.”

  Soon this turned to fury, not unmixed with the snobbishness of the well-bred Philadelphian. Bonsall was “a country boy of low bred training and selfish instincts.” Sonntag was “a weak, sycophantic spécialité student, a German Jew employed of a second-rate observatory.” Hayes was “a vast extenuator of every abomination,” Petersen “a double faced mischief maker.”

  “These men can never be my associates again,” Kane wrote. And so, on that cramped little vessel with its one crowded room, he ordered an incredible arrangement. The ship’s company would be divided into two groups: the faithful and the unfaithful. Each would mess separately. The unfaithful would be forbidden any duties connected with the ship. They would contribute to their own daily routine, but they would be treated as guests aboard the Advance. The faithful would do all the work, but since most were down with scurvy or useless, that meant that Kane, ever the martyr, must take on most of the burden himself.

  This extraordinary disposition was further complicated by Blake and Godfrey, the two malcontents, who were so unpopular that they were forced to mess apart from the others. An act of insubordination by this unruly pair finally forced Kane to violence. He seized a belaying pin, bashed in Blake’s skull, and knocked Godfrey to the ground. A third man, George Whipple, “a poor weak unfortunate” in Kane’s words, fell to his knees begging forgiveness and escaped with a cuffing. Blake suffered a concussion but recovered. Kane warned him that if it happened again he’d use a real weapon and if there was a third breach of discipline, he’d kill him. “This is what should have been done long since,” John Wilson remarked. “Then we would all have been saved much trouble.…”

  Christmas came without fresh food and only one bottle of champagne left to toast the Yuletide. Kane thought that night of his family in Philadelphia who must be worried sick about him. Some day, he confided to his journal, he would have their “approval” – a word that occurs more than once in Kane’s nocturnal scribblings, supplying one key to his restless, impulsive nature. He was determined – almost pathetically so – to justify himself, the reckless wanderer, to the stern and proper jurist who had fathered him.

  Now on this dark Christmas night, the man who had scoffed at Margaret Fox’s séances, had a mystical experience of his own, one that he attributed to an “animal magnetism” he could not control. He saw his home as clearly as he saw the crowded room in which he and the company were quartered. It embarrassed him. “How I saw it,” he wrote, “no journal shall ever record. I dread the non-practical, mystified atmosphere of the whole matter.” He did not then, or later, mention the nineteen-year-old spirit rapper whom he had closeted in a Pennsylvania backwater. But he had her portrait and, it is said, carried it with him wherever he travelled.

  As the winter wore on, tempers again began to fray. Goodfellow and Brooks came to blows. Wilson was convinced Kane’s brain had become unhinged: “He must have someone to quarrel with all the time, first one, then another.” Kane saw it differently: “My task is a hard and thankless one, totally unappreciated by my clients and made, thank Heaven, without care or regard for their appreciation or non-appreciation.”

  Fresh meat was scarce; even Hans the hunter was hard put to find anything; at Etah he found the Eskimos starving. The stalwart Brooks, peering at his own ravaged face in the mirror, burst into tears. Although the crew remained divided into the faithful and unfaithful, to use Kane’s terms, he had to call upon the healthier of the former deserters to help with duties, making it clear that this in no way represented any kind of restoration to their posts. By March, fourteen men were flat on their backs with scurvy.

  But now Kane faced a more serious problem. He learned that Godfrey and Blake were planning to steal dogs, sledge, and provisions and leave for the south; the date was set for March 20.

  Kane rose that morning, armed himself, and ordered Godfrey to cook breakfast. Then he crawled through the narrow passageway between decks that led to the sleeping quarters, concealed himself, and waited. Blake appeared first, showing none of the previous signs of the illness he said had plagued him. Godfrey, dressed for travel, followed. Kane leaped out and thrust a pistol an inch from his nose. When Godfrey confessed to the plot, Kane knocked him down and hammered him with a piece of lead concealed inside his mitt. But now he faced a dilemma: he could not confine the malefactors, for he needed every able-bodied man. As a result, Godfrey managed to slip away. Kane was alarmed. He had sent Hans south with the sledges on March 18 on another attempt to get meat at Etah. If Godfrey caught up with him and took his team, there would be no escape for any of them, for the brig, looted for fuel, was no longer seaworthy.

  To Kane’s further alarm, Hans did not return. A week passed; nothing. A few ptarmigan, shot by Petersen, helped keep the invalids alive. Then on April 2, a man was seen a mile from the brig. Could it be Hans? No – it wa
s William Godfrey with two dogs and a sled-load of walrus meat. He had made an incredible trip on foot seventy miles in –50° weather and reached Etah in thirty hours, something no one else had been able to do. Now he was back to report that Hans was ill and that he himself had decided to live with the natives.

  Kane’s version of what happened differs from Godfrey’s account. Both were self-serving. To Kane, Godfrey was a deserter who must be clapped in irons. Godfrey thought of himself as the saviour of the ship’s company. A verbal tussle ensued, with Kane ordering Godfrey aboard and Godfrey refusing, claiming he was going back to Etah for more supplies. Kane threatened to shoot Godfrey, who pointed out, reasonably enough, that he had returned of his own accord with meat for all. “Is this an offense that deserves capital punishment?” he asked.

  Kane handed a pistol to Amos Bonsall and ordered him to shoot Godfrey if he tried to leave. Godfrey defiantly walked away. Bonsall’s pistol misfired; Kane used his rifle, but it failed in the cold. A second attempt sent a bullet whistling over Godfrey’s head. Not in the least disturbed, he continued to walk away. Incredibly, he reached Etah, staggering into one of the huts, where the Eskimos massaged his half-frozen limbs and let him sleep for fifteen hours.

  The meat he’d brought to the brig was a godsend. Kane, however, was still suspicious. Godfrey was at large, and his crony, Blake, was aboard ship. What mischief were they planning? Certainly the sternest discipline would be needed if Godfrey’s example was not to be followed. He called the men together and warned that anyone who deserted would be shot.

  He couldn’t let Godfrey get away with it; on April 10 he set off for Etah himself, and there he found Hans hunting seal, no longer ill but in love with the young Eskimo woman Merkut, who had nursed him. With Hans back on the brig, Kane again turned his attention to Godfrey. “Cost what it may I must have him back,” he declared. He disguised himself as an Eskimo, took one of Hans’s friends with him, armed himself with a six-shooter, packed a set of leg irons, found Godfrey in a hut at Etah, and forced him back at gunpoint. Godfrey came meekly enough. Either he was afraid of his captain (as Kane suggested) or the meeting was more amiable than Kane made out (as Godfrey suggested).