In fact, Hayes had achieved nothing. His calculations were so inaccurate that they were never taken seriously. The Open Polar Sea, the one goal that would have justified his painful journey, was a myth. In later years he would be accused of faking his observations. At the very least, he fooled himself by the desperation of his ambition. But he fooled few others. He returned with Knorr to pick up Jensen and McDonald, and reached the ship on June 3 after an exhausting trip in which he had covered some 1,300 miles in two months, convinced that “a route to the Pole … free enough for steam navigation is open every summer.”
He could not follow up the object of his desire. The ship had been so badly damaged that if she were to try to go farther into the ice, she would certainly sink. The ice broke in July, and Hayes set his course for home on the thirteenth. First, he made a final visit to his native friends without whose help he would never have crossed the sound. He shook hands for the last time with Kalutunah, whose eyes filled with tears at the parting, not only because he was seeing the last of the white men but also because he alone of the Eskimos realized that his people could not survive much longer under the harsh conditions of the North Greenland coast. The tribe now numbered no more than one hundred souls, a serious depletion since Kane’s day.
“Come back and save us,” Kalutunah implored, and Hayes promised that he would. There had been a time when he had seen Kalutunah as his enemy; now he realized that he was a “singular being – a mixture of seriousness, good nature and intelligence – seems truly to take pride in the traditions of his race, and to be really pained at the prospect of their downfall.”
On August 12, the United States reached Upernavik. An old Dane dressed in sealskins climbed aboard. Knorr met him at the gangway and asked if there was any news from home.
“Oh! dere’s plenty news.”
“Out with it man! What is it?”
“Oh! de Sout’ States dey go agin de Nort’ States and dere’s plenty fight.”
Hayes dismissed this report as news of a war between two European states; civil war in America was unthinkable! Only when he received a package of mail from Copenhagen did Hayes learn the truth, and he did not get full details until he reached Halifax.
The news hung like a pall over the crew. When they reached Boston, nobody wanted to go ashore, each anticipating some personal misfortune and wishing to postpone the shock. Hayes had never seen a ship’s company so lifeless.
Wending his way alone in the fog towards a friend’s house, the doctor “felt like a stranger in a strange land.” He turned back to the familiar surroundings of the ship, realizing now that he would not be going north again in the foreseeable future. “In the face of the duty which every man owes in his own person to his country when his country is in peril, I could not hesitate.”
He joined the Union army and rose to the rank of brevet-colonel in command of an army hospital. He had one consolation: he was convinced that he had proved the existence of an Open Polar Sea, and nothing could dissuade him from that belief. He went to his death twenty years later, never knowing or understanding that in spite of all his exhausting efforts he was wrong.
3 Frobisher Bay
On August 9, 1861, as Isaac Hayes was heading home down the Greenland coast, Charles Francis Hall left Cumberland Sound with six Eskimos to trace an Elizabethan expedition that had first explored the vicinity nine generations before. Thus Hall became the first white man to travel in the Arctic with only Eskimos as his companions.
Joe could not go; he was too ill. Hannah stayed behind to look after her husband. Hall told Joe that he prayed when he returned to find him well but added that it was possible they might never meet again. He might die; Joe might die. If so, he hoped they would meet in heaven. By the end of this gloomy recital the tears were streaming down the cheeks of all three.
Hall’s objective was an island, Niountelik, in Frobisher’s “Countess of Warwick Sound.” It was there, Joe’s grandmother had told him, that relics of a white man’s voyage would be found. And relics there certainly were. “Great God!” Hall cried out to himself. “Thou hast rewarded me in my search!” For scattered before him on this bald and inhospitable islet was the sea coal that Frobisher had brought from England. It had lain there, furred a little with black moss, for almost three centuries. The three women who accompanied Hall confirmed that their people had used the black stones for cooking and that the coal was there because “a great many years ago, white men with big ship came here.”
At these words Hall became ecstatic. He started to laugh, to leap up and down, to dance for joy. He even performed a somersault on a pile of old coal. He had confirmed for himself the value of oral testimony among the Eskimos. Frobisher’s account of his landfall had remained in doubt for nearly three hundred years. The guesses as to its exact location had been mere approximations. Now Hall had identified historic ground.
As he moved along the shore, other Eskimos told him stories of coal, brick, even iron having been found from the old days. “I felt,” he said, “as if suddenly taken back into ages that were past.” In the days that followed, he reached the head of Frobisher Bay to prove with the evidence of his own eyes that it was not a strait. “‘Frobisher’s Strait’ is a myth,” he wrote, emphasizing the point. “It only exists in the minds of the civilized world – not in fact.”
By this time he was ill and not as “free” as he had expected, for he realized that his life was in the hands of Koojeese, the leading Innuit, who stopped when he pleased and often ignored Hall’s orders to examine a cove or an island. “You stop, I go,” was Koojeese’s curt, almost savage response to Hall’s requests. The explorer smothered his anger and submitted “to the mortification of being obliged to yield to these untamed children of the icy north.” He could not blame them; after all, they were born free with no one to check or control them, able to roam as they wished. “And while they have to find subsistence as best they can, it would be almost too much to expect any subservience from them to a stranger, especially when he is alone.”
More relics turned up on a neighbouring island – pieces of tile, glass, and pottery, wood chips, excavations, foundations of lime and sand, a deep trench – all confirming, in Hall’s view, the Eskimo folk memory of white men who had once tried to build a ship here to escape from the Arctic and failed, an account he felt squared with Frobisher’s own reports of five crewmen who vanished, never to be seen again. On a tongue of land, Hall found more coal – five tons. Again the presence of old moss convinced him that this, too, was a relic of one of the Elizabethan expeditions. There was more scattered on adjacent islands and in coves, and there was also a large piece of iron that Hall was certain was a “gold proof” made by one of the miners brought by Frobisher, who thought, wrongly, that what he had discovered was real treasure, not iron pyrites.
On the island, which the natives called Kodlunarn (“White Men’s Island”), Hall filled old stockings, mittens, hats, and everything that would hold relics and carefully labelled each article, which would eventually be presented to the British government. Then, with ice forming in the sea, he headed back to his starting point, Rescue Bay on Cumberland Sound.
He reached it on September 27 to find the George Henry at anchor. Her captain and crew had given him up for lost. When on the following day he visited his friends, Hannah was overcome, for she, too, had believed him dead. The tears coursed down her cheeks and her hands trembled as she embraced him. For days, she told him, she had regularly climbed a nearby hill, hoping and praying to see some sign of his boat. In the midst of this tearful greeting, Hall heard a tiny cry and turned to see a baby, only twenty-four days old, wrapped in furs. This was Joe and Hannah’s first child, a son, Tukerliktu, “Little Butterfly.”
The captain of the George Henry, Sidney Budington, had planned to leave for the south on October 20. But the sound was full of ice by the seventeenth and the pack in Davis Strait was solid. “Our fate is sealed!” Budington told Hall. “Another winter here! We are already imprisoned!” By Octobe
r 25, all chance of escape was gone. The effect on the crew, Hall noted, was painful. He himself was bitterly disappointed: another year lost! Yet he wrote: “I confidently believe it is all for the best.”
Hall spent the early winter months visiting his Eskimo friends and questioning them further about the distant past. “I am convinced,” he wrote in his journal on December 13, “that were I on King William’s Land … I could gather facts relative to Sir John Franklin’s expedition – gather facts from the Innuits – that would astonish the civilized world!”
As the dark, depressing winter dragged on, the men cooped up aboard ship grew testy. There were quarrels, fights, small pilferings. Hall felt estranged from the whalers who were treating him as a pariah, he thought, jealous of the food he was consuming. Well, he would show them! He would go on a hunger strike and, if necessary, starve himself to death! Budington reasoned with him and brought him round. Then, in hopes of shaking his men out of their apathy, the whaling captain sent them off to live with the Eskimos. It was not a successful experiment. Unlike Hall, they couldn’t stand the native way of life and came traipsing back to the ship. “They all be same as small boys,” was the way Joe Ebierbing put it to Hall.
In March, Hall began to prepare for a sledge trip to Frobisher Bay. He set off on April 1 with four of the whaling crew, four natives, and nineteen dogs, disappointed that Hannah hadn’t turned up to see him off. He had travelled the best part of a mile when he was astonished to see another Eskimo far behind him in the distance, struggling to catch up. At first he thought he had left one of his party behind but realized, as she came nearer, that it was Hannah herself. He turned back and met her as she made her way laboriously across the ice hummocks, so exhausted that at first she could not speak.
“I wanted to see you before you left to bid you goodbye,” she gasped. Hall asked what she had done with the baby. In answer, she rolled down the hood of her parka, and there, nestled at her back, was the sleeping child.
For the next fifty days Hall explored and mapped the country in the neighbourhood of Frobisher Bay. On May 1 he discovered and named the Grinnell Glacier, a vast wall of crystal that stretched for one hundred miles, sprawling down from 3,500-foot peaks to the water’s edge. As he gazed with admiration and awe at this mountainous ice field he accosted it grandiloquently, as if it were a living monster: “Tell us, time-aged crystal mount, have you locked in your mirror chambers any image of white men’s ships, that sailed up these waters near three centuries ago?” Then he climbed the ice field to its peak, following the natural steps cut into it by a polar bear, whose great weight had impacted a fresh fall of snow into depressions of solid ice.
By this time he was living entirely on native food, which few explorers to that time had been able to stomach. “One has to make up his mind, if he would live among that people, to submit to their customs, and to be entirely one of them,” he later wrote. “When a white man for the first time enters one of their tupies [tents] or igloos, he is nauseated by everything he sees and smells – even disgusted with the looks of the innocent natives, who extend to him the best hospitality their means afford.” A white newcomer first peering into an Eskimo dwelling would only see “a dirty set of human beings, mixed up among masses of nasty, uneatable flesh, skins, blood and bones scattered all about.… He would see, hanging over a long, low flame, the oo-koo-sin (stone kettle) black with soot and oil of great age, and filled to its utmost capacity with black meat, swimming in a thick, dark, smoking fluid, as if made by boiling down the dirty scrapings of a butcher’s stall. He would see men, women, and children – my humble self included – engaged in devouring the contents of that kettle, and he would pity the human beings who could be reduced to such necessity as to eat the horrid stuff. The dishes out of which the soup is taken would turn his stomach especially when he should see dogs wash them out with their long pliant tongues previous to our using them.” For Hall such conditions had long since become the norm.
The restless adventurer returned to the ship on May 21, paused for a few days, and was soon out again. In mid-June 1862, he made another two-month journey, living almost entirely off the land. Accompanied only by natives, including the faithful Joe, he resumed his quest for Frobisher relics. By the time he returned on August 9, he had assembled 136 parcels.
Hall invited Joe and Hannah to return with him to the United States – an invitation Hannah accepted with alacrity, for Joe’s uncle, who had had twenty wives (three living at one time), was urging him to change spouses for the sake of his health! That she would not countenance. When Hall extended his invitation, Hannah was packed and ready to leave within an hour. Hall did not plan to linger long in civilization. His intention was a second expedition, this time to King William Island, taking the Eskimos with him.
The ship left its harbour on August 9, 1862, and reached St. John’s, Newfoundland, on the twenty-second. When the pilot came aboard the following morning, Hall, who was starved for news, demanded to know who had been elected president in 1860. The Newfoundlander couldn’t tell him, and it was some hours before Hall learned that civil war was raging in the United States. He was so shocked he refused at first to believe it. The joy he might have felt at coming home turned to gloom. He reached New York on September 7, with his country immersed in bloody conflict. The Second Battle of Bull Run had just ended in defeat for the Union.
Unlike Hayes, he had little taste for war. In a gesture to Salmon P. Chase, a member of Lincoln’s Cabinet, he wrote, “I offer my heart’s blood with a cheerful devotion to my country,” and when that produced no reply, he all but ignored the conflict. He desperately needed money for a new expedition. Joe, Hannah, and little Tukerliktu appeared in native dress in P.T. Barnum’s museum in New York for a two-week engagement and caused a sensation, from which Hall profited. Although he denied Barnum a second engagement on the grounds that further exposure would ruin the Eskimos’ health, he had no compunction about including the couple on his own lecture tour that followed that winter.
The New York Times, reporting the appearance of the family of Ebierbing before the American Geographical Society, marvelled that “the bitter air … which made the teeth of all Gotham chatter last night, was a rather sultry sort of temperament for these children of the glaciers.…” The paper saw the pair as noble savages. It described Joe as looking “for all the world like a South Italian in North Pole uniform” and remarked on Hannah’s “mild, amiable, and even ladylike expression.… When she turned her small but sparkling black eyes upon her Arctic flower – the baby on her breast – the beholder began to discover a very pretty and engaging woman, on whose clear, broad brow innocence and goodness sat enthroned.…”
The tour had a tragic conclusion. Joe and Hannah were exhausted; the baby grew ill, and on February 28, 1863, he died. Overwhelmed by her loss, Hannah remained unconscious for days. When she awoke, she cried piteously but vainly for her lost child.
Hall was too busy trying to raise funds for his next expedition to pay much attention to his own family. He spent two weeks with his wife, Mary, and the children, then returned to New York where his reception was cool. Washington was occupied with the war and Horace Greeley of the Tribune, when Hall approached him for help, was bluntly unsympathetic. There ought to be a law, the great editor declared, against Americans leaving their country in time of peril. “Away with politics,” Hall wrote to Sidney Budington. He intended to go north in spite of them all, “where Peace reigns and noble people live.”
Unfortunately, he was broke. When his old friend Budington decided to leave him and take Joe and Hannah with him, Hall was furious, and a bitter quarrel resulted. At the same time, Hall was working on a book about his expedition with the help of that curious adventurer William Parker Snow, who had been aboard Lady Franklin’s Prince Albert in 1850. It was inevitable that the two men – eccentric, slightly paranoid, intolerant, tactless – would quarrel also, and quarrel they did. When the book was finally finished, Snow insisted that he had written most
of it – an exaggeration, since it faithfully quoted Hall’s journals. Meanwhile, Hall, with Joe and Hannah, managed to get free passage to the Arctic on another whaler, Monticello. Before he left, Hall had to face a lawsuit from Snow demanding money he claimed was owing him for his work on the book. The court threw it out and Hall embarked on July 1, 1864, intending to spend three years in the Arctic. It would be 1869 before he finally returned.
4 Execution
The work that Hall contemplated might, he wrote to Henry Grinnell, “make some men shudder to undertake.” He had planned to land at Repulse Bay – Rae’s old wintering spot, off the Melville Peninsula. Unfortunately, by an error of the captain of the Monticello, he was dropped off in the wrong place, at Depot Island in Roes Welcome Sound, many miles to the south. Hall was plagued by this sort of bad luck; the delay cost him a year. The season was so late he could not hope to reach Repulse Bay that winter.
Although five whalers were wintering a few miles away from Depot Island, he seldom visited them. Instead, he spent his time in a cheerless snow house in an Eskimo village, living on putrid caribou meat and grasping at any rumour with which the natives regaled him. The elders remembered Parry from forty years back and also Crozier, who had been with him as a junior on that voyage to the Melville Peninsula. Their stories convinced Hall that Crozier and three others were still alive. The natives had a habit of telling white men what they wanted to hear. Hall, in his turn, was prepared to believe what he wanted to believe.
In February, Hall visited the whaling fleet, congratulating himself that he still knew how to use a knife and fork. He had been 135 days without any contact with civilization. But after a few days he returned to the snow house, where slices of frozen ink had to be chopped from their parent blocks and warmed over a tiny blubber stove before he could complete his nightly journal. By mid-March, with the blubber oil running low and the lamp wick reduced to a tiny point, he was writing in despair of the dismal gloom and the total darkness. But then he rallied: “Away, away thou fiend of DESPAIR! This is no home for you. We are the children of Hope, Prayer and Work. God is our father and better times will come.” Unlike Kane and others before him, he cast no thoughts toward home; as far as his journal is concerned, his family had all but ceased to exist.
The Arctic Grail Page 42