The Arctic Grail

by Pierre Berton

  Two days later, the schooner collided with an iceberg, losing a lifeboat, a jib boom, and two masts. Hayes realized he could go no farther. He found a wintering place in a small bay he named Port Foulke, about eight miles northeast of Cape Alexander and some twenty miles south of Kane’s old wintering spot at Rensselaer Harbor. There the schooner remained until July 14 of the following year.

  Fortunately, the neighbourhood teemed with game. The Eskimo hunters loaded the winterized vessel with reindeer, rabbit, and fox meat. The two Danish crewmen made dog harnesses, and Hayes set about the exacting business of learning how to drive a spirited team of twelve. Peter Jensen, the interpreter, took him out on a mad dash up the fiord “not calculated for weak nerves,” as Hayes put it. The superiority of dogs over men was never better demonstrated than in one course of six measured miles, which the dogs covered in twenty-six minutes. Without stopping to rest, they turned about and made the return journey in thirty-three.

  Hayes also received a practical demonstration of why so many of the earlier explorers had shunned dogsled travel. It took consummate skill and a great deal of experience to handle the animals. Hayes must have thought back ruefully to the time when he and his friends from the Kane expedition had tried to steal two teams to escape from the sleeping Eskimos. The natives had no trouble overtaking them as they blundered across the snow with tangled traces and overturned sleds.

  These dogs were guided solely by voice and by a four-foot whip of strong sinew. As Hayes discovered, “your control over the team is exactly in proportion to your skill in the use of it.” An experienced driver could touch any of his dozen dogs with a single crack of the whip. “You see dat beast?” Jensen asked, pointing to a recalcitrant animal that had exhausted his patience. “I takes a piece out of his ear.” To Hayes’s astonishment, he nipped off the tip of the ear with a single snap of the whip “as nicely as with a knife.” Hayes did his best to learn the peculiar turn of the wrist necessary to handle the whip properly and decided that if he were ever obliged to turn driver in an emergency, he would be equal to the task. “But I fervently hope that emergency may not arise.”

  At last he decided he was ready to try his hand at a run around the harbour. Things went smoothly until he tried to turn the team back into the teeth of the wind. The dogs sensed his awkwardness. He brought them round in the end but was able to keep them on the trail only by the constant use of the lash, which, three times out of four, was blown back in his face. He knew he could not hold out for long. His face was freezing, his arm felt paralysed, and the whip trailed in the snow. The dogs, aware that something was wrong, looked back over their shoulders and found the whip no longer menaced them. They increased their speed, turned about, and dashed off on their own course, “as happy as a parcel of boys freed from the restraints of the school-room, and with the wild rush of a dozen wolves,” yapping and rejoicing in their liberty. As the strength returned to Hayes’s leaden arm he began to use the whip again. After a short struggle, in which the sled was overturned, the dogs meekly gave in. “I think they will remember the lesson,” Hayes wrote triumphantly, but added, “and so shall I.”

  That month, October, Jensen, who, according to Hayes, looked on the Eskimos “as little better than the dogs which drag their sledges,” discovered a couple of native graves and brought in two skin-robed mummies, which he thought would make fine museum specimens. Almost immediately Hans’s wife set up a terrible howl: she had recognized the clothing as belonging to one of her relatives. Hayes, “in respect to humanity if not to science,” restored them to the piles of stone that were their tombs, “the mournful evidences of a fast dwindling race.”

  Hans Hendrik had been Kane’s favourite. Hayes much preferred the other Eskimo hunter, Peter, who was “always eager to serve my wishes in everything.” Peter’s zeal was rewarded with a quantity of coveted red flannel shirts and even a suit of clothes made of pilot-cloth. Hans became jealous of Peter, sulking openly and coming home without any game from the hunt. To Hayes he was “a type of the worst phase of the Eskimau character.”

  Hayes found the natives interesting but not as useful as the dogs; they could be controlled with a whip, while the Eskimos could not be controlled at all. “They might properly be called a negative people in everything except their unreliability, which is entirely positive.” Though they never denied help when asked, they ordinarily left to fend for themselves those who were sick, needy, or in other distress. Hayes wrote, “They are the most self-reliant people in the world. It does not appear ever to occur to them to expect assistance, and they never think of offering it … I cannot imagine any living thing so utterly callous as they. Why, even my Eskimo dogs exhibit more sympathetic interest in each other’s welfare.” This harsh assessment, from a man raised in a totally different culture, failed to take into account the pitiless Greenland environment. Without their flinty code for survival, which often required them to destroy their own offspring when they had more babies than they could support or to allow a sick parent to die alone in a snow house, the race would long since have vanished from the Arctic.

  Hans, meanwhile, had pitched his tent on the schooner’s upper deck and, with his wife and infant half buried in deerskins, was living “the life of a true native.” Merkut, in Hayes’s patronizing phrase, was, “for an Eskimau not ill-looking. In truth she is, I will not say the prettiest but the least ugly-looking thorough-breed that I have seen.” The ten-month-old baby was “a lively specimen of unwashed humanity.” The other two hunters, Marcus and Jacob, lived in a tent, too, but had grown fat and lazy aboard ship and lost their usefulness.

  As the light began to fail, Hayes instituted a rule that all birthdays would be celebrated with a sumptuous banquet, each man so honoured being allowed to order the best that Hayes’s own lockers and the steward’s storeroom could furnish. He knew from bitter experience the winter gloom that was facing them and that “whether men live under the Polar Star or under the Equator they can be made happy if they can be made full.” He had learned from Kane the value of fresh meat, whether it be venison or boiled rat, and so kept his hunters working daily bringing in every kind of provender from seals to dovekies. By the end of October, the carcasses of seventy-four reindeer were stowed aboard ship and thirty more were frozen in the snow. But on the sledge journeys a minimum weight would be carried – bread, meat, coffee, little else.

  The winter moved on with small alarms and larger tragedies. Hans’s wife had a mind of her own and refused point-blank to act as a servant for the crew, who wanted her to sew sealskins into coats, pantaloons, and boots. “The indolent creature persistently refuses to sew a stitch,” Hayes exclaimed. “She is the most obstinate of her sex; feels perfectly independent of everything and of everybody.”

  After one domestic spat, Merkut announced that she would abandon her husband and return, with her baby, to her own people. Off she headed on foot toward Cape Alexander, while Hans complacently smoked his pipe and let her go. That worried Hayes.

  “Where is she going, Hans?”

  “She no go. She come back – all right.”

  “But she will freeze, Hans.”

  “She no freeze. She come back by by – you see.”

  He continued to smoke his pipe, chuckling quietly. Two hours later Merkut returned.

  Meanwhile, the rivalry between Hans and Peter increased. In late November, Peter simply ran away, never to be seen again alive. Hans, when questioned, gave what Hayes called “vague and unsatisfactory answers.” Hayes was sure that Hans had driven Peter off, but couldn’t prove it. A search party found a small bag with Peter’s possessions, but nothing more. It was Hayes’s belief that Hans had convinced his rival, who spoke no English, that the crew was against him and thus engineered his flight.

  As the winter approached its climax, Hayes was faced with another problem. The Eskimo dogs began to die, stricken by the same mysterious disease that had affected Kane’s teams, perhaps a form of distemper. Each dog became restless, then started to d
ash about the ship as if in mortal dread of some imaginary object. The symptoms increased, the eyes became bloodshot, froth appeared on the mouth, the dog attempted to snap at anything that approached, until, weak and prostrate, it fell into a series of fits that ended in death.

  By the third week in December, only nine dogs were alive. Hayes knew that without his teams he had no hope of discovering the Open Polar Sea. Hans had told him there were Eskimo villages in the vicinity. When the full moon rose on December 21, Hayes sent him off with Sonntag to drive a team of the surviving dogs in search of fresh animals. They took twelve days’ provisions and no tent, for it appeared an easy task for Hans to reach the nearest community. But as the days went by with no word from the pair, Hayes began to worry.

  Christmas passed and New Year’s. Hayes recalled a disturbing dream he’d had the night they left that he could not shake from his mind. He had been standing, in the dream, with Sonntag on the frozen sea when a crack opened between him and his comrade, bearing Sonntag off to a distant horizon. Was this an omen?

  On January 20, with no word yet from the missing pair, the first wan signs of light appeared on the horizon, nothing more than a faint flush but enough to signal the future return of the sun. In his concern, Hayes was moved to contemplate the mysteries of the Arctic night: the dreadful solitude that “oppresses the understanding, [and] the desolation, which everywhere reigns, haunts the imagination; the silence – dark, dreary and profound – becomes a terror.”

  It was the brooding silence, “an endless and fathomless quiet,” that bore down on him. “Silence has ceased to be negative.… I seem to hear and see and feel it. It stands forth as a frightful spectre, filling the mind with the overpowering consciousness of universal death.… Its presence is unendurable … I plant my feet heavily in the snow to banish its awful presence – and the sound rolls through the night and drives away the phantom. I have seen no expression on the face of Nature so filled with terror as THE SILENCE OF THE ARCTIC NIGHT.”

  This gloomy introspection was accompanied by his growing dismay over the absence of Hans and Sonntag. On January 27, Hayes tried to send out a search party; a storm prevented it. The following morning two strange Eskimos appeared suddenly out of the darkness. Hayes sent Jensen to interpret, and a moment later, watching the Dane’s face, he knew the worst. Sonntag was dead.

  The natives, who had arrived on a single sled drawn by five dogs, were covered from head to foot in snow and frost. Hayes didn’t get the full story until Hans arrived two days later with his wife’s younger brother. He was in a bad state physically; his dogs had broken down and so had his wife’s parents, who were travelling to the ship with him. He had been forced to leave the older people curled up in a cave in a snowbank near a glacier. A search party found them and brought them back to the ship. Only then was Hans able to tell Hayes what had happened to Sonntag.

  The pair could not find the village they were seeking and so pushed on for Northumberland Island. Sonntag sprang off the sled to warm himself, got ahead of the dogs, wandered onto some thin ice, and was plunged into the freezing water. Hans rescued him and dashed for the snow house they’d abandoned that morning. But by the time they reached it, Sonntag was stiff and speechless. Hans put him in a sleeping bag and tried to warm him with brandy, but Sonntag never recovered and died the following day.

  Hans went on to a village on Whale Sound where he distributed presents and sent some of the villagers to Cape York to get dogs. Hayes suspected Hans’s real intention was to bring back his in-laws and take them to the ship.

  The gloom caused by this sad news was softened when the sun finally reappeared on February 18. Hayes was determined to continue his explorations even if his men had to haul their own sledges. But with the sudden and welcome arrival of his old friend Kalutunah, this was not necessary. Kalutunah had become a chief since Elisha Kane’s time, a title that had only an honorary meaning among the individualistic Arctic Highlanders. He reported that Sip-su, who had wanted to murder Hayes and his party, was long dead, having been stabbed one night by an enemy. Hayes, following Kane’s example, negotiated a formal treaty of friendship with Kalutunah under which the natives would furnish dogs and Hayes would feed their families. To impress on the Eskimos that he was a great magician who could read their minds, Hayes produced a pack of cards and entertained them with some sleight-of-hand. Kalutunah also brought tragic news of the runaway, Peter; his body had been found in a hut in a deserted village.

  On April 3, having established caches and depots, Hayes set off for the Open Polar Sea with twelve men, two dogsleds, and one manhauled sledge carrying the twenty-foot metal lifeboat in which he hoped to navigate the ice-choked waters of Smith Sound. That he soon abandoned; a hundred men, he said, couldn’t have got it across those narrows. Only at this point did he realize the magnitude of the task that faced him. The great floes breaking from the glaciers and permanent pack to the north had been driven south by the winds into Kane Basin and were now being squeezed into the confines of Smith Sound, creating a traffic jam of terrifying proportions. Hayes measured one floe that covered twenty-four square miles, rose twenty feet above the sea, and reached an estimated depth of 160 feet. He guessed its weight at six thousand million tons – a floating glacier, growing and expanding year by year as the ancient ice, hundreds of years old, remained unmelted and fresh snow accumulated and congealed into new ice above it. Why did the sea not freeze solid to the ocean floor? Because, Hayes realized, the downward growth of the floating mass was arrested by a natural law: the ice itself was the sea’s protection, acting as a blanket to prevent the waters below from losing their heat.

  As the sledge crews worked their way through this appalling tangle, making no more than three miles a day, Hayes began to lose heart. By April 24, with the peaks of Grinnell Land (Ellesmere Island) still distant, with his men “completely used up, broken down, dejected,” he was at the end of his rope. The following day a sledge broke down and he felt himself defeated. “I was never in all my life so disheartened.” The entire expedition had been a series of disasters: the crippled ship driven into an early refuge, dogs lost, his closest assistant dead, and now, here in the middle of the sound, “stuck fast and powerless.”

  He made his decision. He would send all but three of his strongest men back to repair the ship. He and Jensen, with two others – Knorr and McDonald – would push on with fourteen dogs. “Away with despondency!” Hayes exclaimed. When the quartet set off on April 28, the men were too weak to cheer – “there was not a squeak left in them.” That day they made a mile and a half of forward travel but actually covered twelve miles to achieve it.

  Hayes realized that humans could not possibly have brought their sledge through it all. The dogs climbed the ice hummocks like mountain goats and, being lighter than the men, didn’t break through the crusted snow. But the ravenous animals would eat their own harness if they weren’t watched. One night Jensen forgot to cover his sled; the dogs tore it apart to consume the lashings.

  The bold, mountainous coast of Grinnell Land lay ahead. To the north Hayes could see the immense bulk of Cape Louis Napoleon, rising fifteen hundred feet above the sea. Directly ahead was another gigantic rock “to which Gibraltar is a pygmy.” He named it Cape Hawks. They reached it May 11; they had taken fourteen days to move forty miles.

  Hayes’s food was running out. The dogs were gobbling up spare shoes, socks, even a bar of soap. The sleds were falling apart. Jensen’s legs gave out; he was forced to ride. The other three shouldered traces and joined the dogs as beasts of burden.

  Area of Hayes’s explorations, 1860-61

  They moved into Kennedy Channel, a narrow strait where the ice pressure was even greater and every point of land was smothered under thirty to sixty feet of ice blocks. Great cliffs of sandstone and limestone rose above them. Jensen, now groaning in pain, could go no farther. Hayes left him in McDonald’s care and pushed on with Knorr. He had to find the Open Polar Sea, otherwise this dreadful journey would
have been endured for nothing. He was convinced he had got farther north than Morton, but his calculations were faulty, the product perhaps of wishful thinking as much as mathematical error.

  The two men set out through a winding gorge formed by a great wall of rock on their left and a ragged, fifty-foot ridge of crushed ice on their right. In this realm of “boundless sterility” with no evidence of any creature, bird or animal, Hayes once again felt “how puny indeed are all men’s works and efforts.” It seemed to him “as if the Almighty had frowned upon the hills and seas.”

  On their third day out they found their passage permanently blocked by rotten ice on one side and by an 800-foot cliff on the other. Peering into the distance, Hayes could see the dim outline of a headland, the most northerly known land on the globe. He judged it to be some 450 miles from the North Pole; it was actually closer to a thousand.

  The land in the distance veered off, or so he believed, leaving only the ocean, which would soon be clear of ice. Surely this was the Open Polar Sea! “All the evidences showed that I stood upon shores of the Polar Basin,” he wrote exultantly. He built a cairn, left a message in a glass bottle, planted a flag, and reluctantly headed back, buoyed up by the thought that “these ice-girdled waters might lash the shores of distant islands where dwell human beings of an unknown race.” He himself was determined to sail upon this mysterious sea, which generations of explorers had vainly sought. “I felt that I had within my grasp ‘the great and notable thing’ which had inspired the zeal of the sturdy Frobisher, and that I had achieved the hope of the matchless Parry.”