The Arctic Grail

by Pierre Berton

  Hall had expected to take a ship to the Arctic and had settled on John Quayle, a whaling captain he had met in New London, as its navigator. But Hayes also was after Quayle and succeeded in hiring him for his own expedition, “a piece of double dealing” that drove Hall to a fury and turned his enthusiasm for Hayes’s venture into bitter opposition. All the bile that lay dormant in his nature rose as he contemplated Hayes’s “damnable work.”

  “I dare not put on paper … the rank inhumanity of Dr. I.I. Hayes & of Captain P.T. [sic] Quayle,” he wrote, putting it all on paper. “Here I am, life devoted to rescuing of some lone survivor of Sir John Franklin’s men and yet within their hearts must lurk deep damnation.” In Hall’s view, Hayes was beneath contempt. “I pity him, I pity his cowardice & weakness. I spurn his trickery – his DEVILRY!” But Hall had no intention of being put off by such setbacks. “Let the Curtain drop – I will go on, God willing, with my work.”

  As it turned out, he would have no need of a navigator because he would have no ship; he couldn’t afford one. He had managed to raise only $980, of which Henry Grinnell supplied $343, plus some supplies. That did not deter him. He managed to wangle free passage on a whaler out of New London. It would drop him off on Baffin Island and return for him at the end of the season. He would spend the summer living with the Eskimos, perhaps learning their language, and pursuing his search for Franklin’s men by sailing in a small boat to King William Island. It was an ambitious, even foolhardy adventure. No explorer, not even Rae, had attempted such a feat – to live alone in the Arctic, supported only by the natives.

  He left New London on May 29, 1860, aboard the whaler George Henry, his funds increased by Horace Greeley, who was happy to engage him to write his experiences for the New York Tribune. The little schooner Rescue accompanied the whaler as a tender. Hall saw her presence as a happy omen, for the Rescue had been one of the two American vessels seeking Franklin on the First Grinnell Expedition a decade earlier.

  Hall not only felt that God had ordained his expedition but, like several other Arctic explorers, was also convinced that the Almighty was watching over him personally. That belief was confirmed in August when his revolver dropped on some rocks during a shore excursion and exploded so close to his face that he thought himself dangerously wounded. Fortunately, the ball just cleared his head. “THANKS BE TO GOD I STILL LIVE!” he exulted in his journal. “… No other arm but the Almighty’s could have shielded me.…” He interpreted the event as a miracle and raised a small stone monument to the Deity.

  Hall’s first expedition: Frobisher Bay, 1860-61

  Although much of the coastline of Baffin Island had been explored, the interior, fringed by bays and inlets, was largely unknown. In mid-August, the George Henry anchored in the mouth of what was then known as Frobisher Strait, discovered 284 years earlier by the Elizabethan knight for whom it is named. Beyond lay the mysterious land that Elizabeth I had named Meta Incognita. Hall was ecstatic as he gazed into the distance through his telescope. “I saw its mountains,” he wrote to Henry Grinnell, “like giants holding up the sky. My eyes felt charmed at what was before me. Never did I feel so spell bound to a spot as that whereon I stood.…”

  He followed the northern horizon with his spyglass and noted that the mountains seemed to be joined to the land on which he stood. Was that possible? Could it be that this historic strait was actually a bay, with no exit that would lead to Foxe Basin and then on to King William Island? Very shortly, the Eskimos confirmed it; they had an astounding sense of geography and could draw maps of which few professional cartographers would be ashamed. This new information – that Frobisher Strait was actually a bay – threw Hall’s plans into disarray.

  As it turned out, he could not have reached King William Island anyway. A dreadful storm wrecked the schooner Rescue as well as another whaling brig, the Georgiana, both anchored in the bay. The crews were saved, but his own small boat was torn from its moorings and reduced to kindling. Only the George Henry escaped, to anchor farther north in Rescue Harbour off Cumberland Sound. In the face of his calamity, Hall did not flinch. “I was determined,” he wrote later, “that, God willing, nothing should daunt me; I would persevere if there was the smallest chance to proceed. If one plan failed – if one disaster came, then another plan should be tried.…”

  On November 2, while he was working in his cabin on his journal, he had an extraordinary encounter that was to affect the rest of his career. He heard, behind him, a “soft, sweet voice” – clearly feminine – “musical, lively and varied.”

  “Good morning, Sir!” the voice said; obviously, Hall thought, a lady of refinement. But here? On this whaling vessel anchored off Baffin Island? Could he be dreaming? His astonishment at the sound was nothing to the shock he received when he turned his head. There, in the doorway, backlit from the cabin’s skylight and extending an ungloved hand, was a sturdy woman in crinolines and flounces, wearing a broad “kiss-me-quick” bonnet and a long, fringed cape of caribou hide. Peering up at her, Hall realized that this woman must be an Eskimo.

  This was Tookolito – “Hannah” to the white men – who with her husband, “Joe” (Ebierbing), would become Hall’s constant companions until the day of his death. In 1855, in the Repulse Bay area, the couple had come to the attention of British whalers who, impressed by their intelligence, had taken them to London. They spent two years there, created a sensation, were presented to the Queen, took tea with her and the Prince Consort, and learned something about the white man’s world, which they much admired. On arriving in London, Joe’s first act was to spend everything he had on an umbrella, which he considered the mark of a civilized man. Hannah and Joe took in the sights gravely and curiously – the hansom cabs and buggies, the narrow cobbled streets, the curiosity-seekers who stopped them continually – without a trace of culture shock. By the time they returned, at their own request, Joe spoke some English and Hannah was fluent. He took odd jobs piloting whaling vessels up the coast while she taught the Eskimo women how to knit wool.

  Hall was charmed by the “exceeding gracefulness and modesty of her demeanour.” There was, he declared, “a degree of calm and intellectual power about her that more and more astonished me.” He was ecstatic at meeting a native he could converse with, since his entire plan had been to learn as much about the Eskimos as possible – to live with them, sleep in their snow houses, travel with them, and eat their food. He called them by their own name, Inuit, and was the first to use that term regularly in his writings.

  He visited Hannah next day in her village and found her knitting socks for herself and her husband. She gave him tea – she had acquired the taste in England – and asked if he liked it strong or weak. He had given her a book at that first meeting, and she brought it out and asked for instructions. She had managed to spell words of two letters and to pronounce them properly; she felt triumphant at her success, for she was determined to learn to read.

  The two Eskimos willingly agreed to work for Hall as guides and interpreters. They did not care greatly for the whalers, whom they considered coarse and unruly. “I feel very sorry to say that many of the whaling people are very bad,” Hannah told Hall. “… They swear very much and make my people swear. I wish they would not do so. Americans swear a great deal – more and worse than the English. I wish no one would swear. It is a very bad practice, I believe.” Hall was embarrassed at this stain on his country’s reputation.

  Yet, like almost every white explorer who entered the land of the Eskimos, Hall could not escape from the mind-set of his own culture. What he admired most about Ebierbing and Tookolito was the sheen of civilization they had acquired in England. If only all their people could knit socks, pour tea, talk in fluent English, and abhor swearing! “The Esquimaux,” he wrote, “really deserve the attention of the philanthropist and Christian. Plant among them a colony of men and women having right-minded principles, and, after some patient toil, glorious fruits must follow.” Hall did not live to observe the
glorious fruits that eventually did follow, when Christians with right-minded principles helped to destroy the native culture, even banning the use of the Innuit language in the schools.

  Nevertheless, Hall was the first white explorer to identify himself totally with the natives. He visited them frequently in their village, and they in turn came to see him on the ship. One night while writing in his journal, he counted seven Eskimos of both sexes asleep in his cabin, two of them in his own sleeping bag.

  In January 1861, he decided to go with Joe and Hannah on a trip by dogsled to Cornelius Grinnell Bay. For the next forty-three days he lived as a native, sleeping on the frozen ledge of a snow house and eventually living on whale blubber. Hannah cut his hair and when his feet turned to lumps of ice, massaged them in the night with her own. (Hall tells the story so innocently in his memoirs that it is impossible to believe the encounter was in any way sexual.) When he returned to the ship on February 21, he found that after his nights in the native igloos, his cabin was too comfortable for sleep. Two of the crew were down with scurvy when he returned. Hall told them the best cure was to live with the natives.

  He made two more sledge trips that spring. One night he found himself sleeping with eight adult Eskimos and a babe in arms, all jammed into a snow house no more than ten feet wide. But what really intrigued him was an interview with Joe’s grandmother, a woman who must have been a hundred years old and who told him stories she had heard as a child about ships and white men who had arrived many years before her time and left behind supplies that Hall recognized as coal, brick, and iron.

  The first arrivals, she said, had come in two ships. The following year, three ships came. The third year, many ships arrived. Hall was astounded, for he knew that Martin Frobisher had made trips in three successive years, first with two ships, then with three, and finally with fifteen. There were other details that fitted written history, including the tale of five seamen whom Frobisher had lost on one of the voyages. It dawned on Hall that the folk memory of Frobisher’s expedition had been handed down orally for nine generations.

  Other clues from Frobisher’s day began to turn up. On one of his sledge journeys to an Eskimo village near Frobisher Bay, Hall came upon a piece of red brick. Joe told him that as a child he had played with many such bricks left by the white men years before. Hall was transfixed. He was holding in his hand a relic of an expedition that, just eighty-six years after Columbus’s discovery of America, had visited these shores.

  “This relic,” he wrote, “was more precious to me than the gold which Frobisher sought there under the direct patronage of Queen Elizabeth.” Until that moment no one had been sure that Frobisher had actually visited the so-called strait that bore his name. Now Hall was sure – and he was sure of something else: if these folk memories could extend down through time for almost three centuries, surely memories of Franklin’s expedition would still be fresh in the minds of those who had heard the story of his tragedy.

  Hall made plans at once to go by whaleboat to King William Island. Joe and Hannah were ready to accompany him. But the captain of the George Henry dashed his hopes when he made it clear that no whaleboat was equipped for so arduous a journey.

  Hall took the setback in his stride. He would return home, mount a second expedition, build a boat strong enough to make the journey, and return to try again. That would cost a year. Meanwhile, he would try to discover more evidence of Frobisher’s party.

  The ice broke in the anchorage in mid-July 1861. At the end of the month, the George Henry headed off for the whaling grounds, leaving Hall alone with the Eskimos and a leaky old whaleboat, in which he hoped to make the trip to Frobisher Bay. As the whaler steamed off, he felt the strangeness of his position – “at last alone; the ship gone; all of my own people, my own blood, my own language, departed.…” Yet he was far from despondent. He felt exhilarated, for this was what he had planned. Here was real freedom: “Freedom dwells in the North – freedom to live as one pleases, act as one pleases, and go where and when one pleases.…” The fetters of civilization, of family life, of the need to earn a living were off. He was on his own.

  2 The Open Polar Sea

  On July 6, 1860, about a month after Hall’s departure, his despised rival, Isaac Hayes, set off on his own expedition in search of the legendary Open Polar Sea – the pool of relatively warm water, ringed by ice, that Hayes, like so many others, was convinced circled the North Pole. His plan was to enter Smith Sound and then push his way into the ice belt, dragging a boat across it using Eskimo dogs, until he reached the open water and, perhaps, the Pole itself.

  He had had some trouble raising money. The Franklin tragedy had caused some sober second thoughts about the romance of Arctic travel, and now, with Franklin’s fate unravelled, Hayes knew it would be difficult to rouse enthusiasm for further polar exploration. To “instruct the public mind,” as he put it, he had organized a lecture tour. This was the spark that had fired the imagination of Charles Francis Hall, Hayes’s most ardent supporter at the outset and his bitterest enemy a few months later.

  The young doctor’s public relations campaign worked. His lectures to the American Geographical Society and the Smithsonian Institution and his tour through the United States brought in funds from scientific societies in America and Europe and from private individuals, the most generous of whom was the ever-dependable Henry Grinnell. Volunteers clamoured to join the expedition. Most had never been to sea, but all pronounced themselves eager to serve in any capacity, “a declaration,” as Hayes remarked dryly, “which too often on this, as on other occasions, I have found to signify the absence of any capacity at all.”

  Like most other American undertakings, in contrast to those of the British Navy, this would be a compact one. Instead of two big ships there would be one smaller vessel, the schooner United States, especially strengthened for Arctic service and, at 133 tons, less than a third the tonnage of the British ships. She would be manned by fourteen officers and men – a fraction of Franklin’s 133 followers.

  Hayes was obsessed by the need for dogs. When he reached the Greenland coast, he was chagrined to find the Eskimos wouldn’t sell him their best teams. “They knew by bitter experience the risks of going into the long winter without an ample supply of dogs to carry them over the ice.” Hayes knew them, too, from his days with Kane. “To part with their animals was to risk starvation.” He finally managed to secure a handful of dogs, but not enough for his purposes. At Upernavik he bought a few more and also winter garments of reindeer and seal.

  Only two other men in his party had had any previous Arctic experience. One, Gibson Carruthers, died before the party left Upernavik. That left August Sonntag, Hayes’s former trailmate from the Kane expedition. Hayes strengthened his crew by adding three Eskimo hunters, an interpreter, and two Danish seamen, bringing his party to nineteen. Then he set off in his little ship through the transparent waters, crowded as always with great monoliths of ice, which “conjured up effigies both strange and wonderful.” On deck were his thirty dogs, some tethered, some in cages along the bulwarks, others running free, all badly frightened, most fighting and making day and night hideous with their howls.

  Surprisingly, the United States made the passage across the treacherous Melville Bay in just fifty-five hours – a startling contrast to M’Clintock’s frustrating experience three years before and proof again of the capriciousness of the Arctic pack. At Cape York, Hayes kept a lookout for natives, for he had a feeling that Hans Hendrik, the youth who had been Kane’s favourite, might be in the vicinity. Sure enough, as the schooner slid close to the shore, a group hailed the ship.

  Hayes and Sonntag went ashore to find Hans himself with his wife, Merkut, whom he had married after leaving Kane, together with a new baby and a young mother-in-law. Hayes looked at Hans sceptically, noting that “six years’ experience among the wild men of this barren coast had brought him to their level of filthy ugliness.”

  It turned out that Hans had been longing
for some such encounter. Year after year, from a lookout 200 feet above the sea, he had searched in vain for a ship. Now he was eager to accompany his friends north again. He came aboard with his wife, baby, tent, and household goods, leaving behind his in-laws in spite of their cries and entreaties. Hayes, who had never cared much for Hans, suspected he would have been just as happy to leave his wife and child behind, too. The sailors gave them all red shirts to wear, which they loved. Then the crew did their best to scrub all three down with soap and water, which they resisted. Was this the white man’s religious rite? a baffled and outraged Merkut asked her husband as the sailors scoured away.

  At ten o’clock on the evening of August 29, Hayes, warming himself beside a red-hot stove in the officers’ cabin – a teakettle singing and bubbling in the background – looked out on a terrifying spectacle. Dead ahead loomed the lofty cliffs of Cape Alexander, guarding the entrance to Smith Sound, with its twin, Cape Isabella, just visible in the distance on the western side.

  “The imagination,” Hayes wrote in his journal, “cannot conceive of a scene so wild.…” Great sheets of drifting snow rolled down over the cliffs, pouring into every ravine and gorge like gigantic waterfalls. Whirlwinds shot skyward from the hilltops, spraying dense clouds of white through the air. A glacier tumbling into a valley was obscured by a vast cloak of revolving white. The sun was just setting on a black and ominous horizon. But the wildest scene was the sea itself. A solid mass of foam lashed the cape and was hurled through the air by the wind, breaking over the icebergs and fluttering across the sea like a thick fog, rising and falling with each gust.

  “Earth and sea are charged with bellowing sounds,” Hayes wrote, “… shrieks and wailings, loud and dismal as those of the infernal blast which, down in the second circle of the damned, appalled the Italian bard.…” He tried to capture the spectacle on the page of his journal and gave up. “My pen,” he admitted, “is equally powerless.”