Hall sails north to his death, 1871; Tyson drifts south on an ice floe, 1872-73
Tyson said he would never forget the scenes that followed “while the heart beats or the brain throbs.” Budington, in a panic, ordered everything thrown overboard. Barrels of flour and rice, tins of pemmican, boxes of preserved meats, and some five tons of coal, all of which had been gathered on deck for just such an emergency, were flung onto the ice below. Much of this was swept under the heaving vessel and lost.
Tyson and two or three others dropped onto the ice to save what they could. More followed in the raging storm. With the help of Hannah and Joe, Tyson loaded the natives’ sledge with food and clothing and pushed it back onto the main floe to prevent it being sucked underneath the ship.
By eleven that night, the pressure ceased, and Tyson discovered to his disgust that the vessel wasn’t in as bad shape as he’d been told. The pumps were doing their job. Schumann and the captain had panicked unnecessarily.
The men on deck were still flinging goods off the ship. Tyson, the only officer on the ice, felt it begin to crack under his feet. He warned Budington that the two whaleboats and the human beings on the floe should be taken back on board as quickly as possible. Instead, Budington ordered Tyson to move the boats farther from the ship.
As Tyson turned to obey, the floe to which the ship was tethered burst into fragments and the vessel parted from her fastenings. Some of the men on the ice vainly rushed to climb on board. In a few minutes the Polaris drifted off and was lost to sight, leaving nineteen men, women, and children alone on the ice.
Tyson with a few men was standing on one of the broken fragments. The others were trapped on a smaller piece. As Tyson made haste to haul up one of the boats to save them, he noticed a bundle of skins stretched across a widening crack. He retrieved it and found Hans’s four young children wrapped up inside. In another instant they would have been lost.
He managed to get everybody back onto the main floe, away from the crumbling edges. But he salvaged only a few sledge-loads of the goods that the indefatigable Hannah had helped haul well back onto the ice. The men had saved their guns, pistols, clothes bags, and ammunition. Tyson had only the clothes he stood in, a three-year-old pair of tattered sealskin breeches, an undershirt, overshirt, cotton jumper, and Russian cap. So, while the others slept, covered by a deepening blanket of snow, he walked the floe all night, watching the ice. As morning came the gale blew itself out; the snowfall diminished; a full moon revealed the snow-capped mountains and vast glaciers of Greenland in the distance. With the dawn, Tyson could look about and see that the floe on which they were huddled was enormous – a mile across and at least five miles in circumference. It was, as it turned out, to be their home for the next five months.
All next day they kept a sharp lookout for the Polaris. At last the ship appeared around a point of land eight or ten miles away. Tyson raised a mast with a piece of cloth fluttering from it but received no answering signal. The floe was already starting to drift south. Tyson climbed on a frozen hummock and saw to his dismay that the Polaris had anchored off an island in the sound. Surely, he reasoned, “this black mass of humans could have been seen at twice the distance.” They had been abandoned! He blamed Budington, all of whose “villainous acts” flashed across his mind. But there was no sinister intent expressed in the explanations that the crew of the Polaris gave the naval inquiry months later. In truth, they had searched that vast expanse of ice for their missing comrades and found nothing.
Tyson’s immediate plan was to take the two boats and try to reach land. But the men were exhausted and dejected. They made a halfhearted attempt to drag one boat across the floe, but when a gale burst upon them like a thunderbolt, filling the air with flying snow, they gave up. Tyson felt his command slipping away as several of the crew refused to haul the boat back to a secure spot. They slept, that night, exhausted, some crowded into the little canvas tent, the others under the second, upturned, boat. But their long ordeal had only begun.
It was mid-October, 1872. Now this ill-assorted group – nine white men, a black cook, four adult Eskimos, and five children – would make a voyage that has no parallel in polar history, drifting south for two thousand miles on windswept ice floes until the following April. Tyson was only nominally in command. He had no weapons. The crewmen, seven of whom were Germans, were armed with pistols. Tyson, in fact, had more in common with the Eskimos who built the snow hut in which he was sheltered. It was as well, perhaps, that he wasn’t armed. There were times when he would almost certainly have murdered one of the men who opposed him.
His impotence was established at the outset. In the morning, a corner of the floe broke off, bearing away one of the boats and six precious bags of bread. Tyson pleaded with the men to launch the remaining boat and help retrieve the floe with its vital burden. Stupefied with exhaustion and horror, they refused.
Tyson realized that the fate of the party depended entirely on the natives, the only members of the group trained to hunt, especially for seals. To the irritation of both Joe and Hans, the sailors insisted on peppering away at the seals, hitting nothing but frightening them off. Tyson reckoned he had 1,900 pounds of food on the floe, since 500 pounds had been lost with the boat. He tried to ration it equally, but as soon as he turned to hand a portion to one man, another had his hand in the bread bag, stealing more than his share.
In her snow house, the loyal and dependable Hannah somehow managed to cook two hot meals a day for the entire party, using an Eskimo lamp and cooking pots made from discarded pemmican tins. Then, on October 23, as if by a miracle, the floe containing the lost boat and food drifted past and was rescued, together with a canvas hut and several half-starved dogs that had also drifted away. Within a few weeks the two Eskimo families had eaten all the animals.
But Tyson faced another problem. He could not convince the men that the ice had carried them to the west or Canadian side of Baffin Bay. Frederick Meyer, the German scientist, had persuaded them that they were on the east or Greenland side and would soon be within an easy haul of Disco Island. As a result they rejected Tyson’s tight plan of conservation – to make a set of scales and ration everyone to an intake of eleven ounces a day.
Suspicious that Tyson might steal their food or give too much to his native companions, they appointed J.W.C. Kruger, the worst of the malcontents, as cook. In spite of the obvious need to conserve every ounce of supplies, they went on a wild orgy one night in early November, thawing and eating can after can of meat, most of which they vomited onto the snow. Tyson turned away in disgust. He and the two native families could easily have escaped by boat to land and thence, presumably, to the ship, but Tyson had refused to leave the others behind. And this, he thought bitterly, was the way they repaid him!
Without the Eskimos they were lost. The natives built them a new snow hut and every day were out on the ice seeking the seal, which supplied not only antiscorbutic sustenance but also blubber for the heating lamps. Yet the men whose lives they were sustaining begrudged them a share of their rations. Joe and Hans, the only hunters, felt they should have a larger share of the meat they shot, especially as they were exerting themselves, using up far more energy than anyone else. But as soon as they brought in a seal, the white men seized it, and there was nothing that Tyson could do.
He preferred to live with Joe and Hannah, both of whom, as well as the eldest child, Punny, spoke English. It was possible to converse with them, to communicate his plans intelligibly, and to listen to their ideas. The Germans, who lived separately, refused to speak anything but their own language, which Tyson did not understand.
The worst aspect of these long dark days was not hunger or cold; it was the sheer boredom that almost drove Tyson mad. There was nothing to do, nothing to read, and scarcely anybody to talk to. He could no longer write daily notes in his journal – it would take too much paper. Somebody had stolen the notes he had laid aside for future use. “Some of these men seize hold of anything the
y can lay hands on and secrete it. But no wonder; they were taught that on board the Polaris; they saw so much of pilfering going on there. It would have demoralized worse men than these.”
On New Year’s Day, 1873, he committed a wan note to his journal: “We cannot join in the glad shout at the birth of another year. I have dined today on about two feet of frozen seal’s entrails and a small piece of congealed blubber.…”
He was the only man on the ice who had no change of clothes. The Eskimos were well off in their fur garments, the crew less so in their civilized attire. But at least they could change out of a wet and frozen suit, since many had three sets of shirts, drawers, and pants, and several had two coats. Tyson couldn’t. The bag in which he had saved a few scraps of clothing had been stolen. He was condemned to wear the same clothes, wet or dry, day and night, month after month, while he waited for rescue.
Meanwhile, he had obtained a weapon. Joe let him have his pistol because, he said, he didn’t like the look in the eyes of some of the men. He was terrified that in their hunger they might kill and eat the natives, especially the children. As Tyson remarked, it would be killing the goose that laid the golden egg, but he did not dismiss the possibility. The men, especially the Germans, were organized and determined to be in control. They swaggered about with their pistols and rifles, and Tyson knew he must be wary as well as firm. A quarrel would be fatal.
The crewmen’s attitude to the Innuit was short-sighted. “They think the natives a burden … and they would gladly rid themselves of them. They think there would be fewer to consume the provisions, and if they moved closer to the shore there would not be children to lug.…” But without the two Eskimo hunters, Joe, and to a lesser extent Hans, there would have been precious little food and no fresh meat. Years later, Ebierbing was asked why he hadn’t packed up his family and left on his own. He replied that he had promised Hall that he would hunt for the party. “Cap’n Hall good man; good man. If Cap’n Hall alive, he not run away. I not run away neither.” For if he ran away, he knew the party could not survive. Joe brought in nine-tenths of the game that was shot; Hans Hendrik brought in the rest.
Since they confidently believed they would reach Disco early in February, the “poor deluded wretches,” as Tyson called them, gave little thought to an extended stay on the floe. Their stock of prepared food was fast disappearing, since several crewmen were pilfering bread. Not deigning to adopt the native seal-blubber lamp, they broke up a sledge and one of the boats for fuel, thus lessening their chances of escape. Meanwhile, in Tyson’s description, “some are continually crying out that they cannot exist on their present allowance.”
In his journal on January 9, Tyson uttered a stifled lament: “I have nobody to cooperate with me. I am entirely alone.” And so he was. Among that polyglot company, a black cook, an English steward, and seven recalcitrant Germans, his only trustworthy companions were the two native families.
Day after day, sometimes with the thermometer at fifty below, Joe went out to hunt, remaining for hours in the darkness and sometimes in a driving blizzard, waiting beside a hole in the ice for the appearance of a seal. Failure did not discourage him, nor the long hours of waiting. Nine times out of ten he returned empty-handed, but the following day he would set off again. On January 15 when he returned with a seal, Tyson told the men to take it into Joe’s snow hut, to skin and divide. But, led by Kruger, they seized the carcass and carried it off. At that moment, Tyson realized, if he’d had Joe’s pistol in his hand, he would have murdered Kruger on the spot.
A few days later Kruger invaded Tyson’s quarters to abuse him, and the two almost came to blows. Now some of the crew began to suspect Kruger of pilfering, and a new man, Frederick Jamka, was chosen as their cook. In the bitter January cold, the thinly clad Tyson could not venture outside. “The monotony,” he wrote, “is fearfully wearisome.” But he was trapped. He could not break it with either exercise or hunting.
“The German count,” as the men were beginning to call Meyer, was still insisting that they were close to the eastern shore and an easy jump to Disco. Tyson, who was more familiar with that coastline, knew better. The rocky promontory could be spotted easily from a distance of eighty miles. But there was no sign of the village on the horizon.
If he could keep the Germans quiet until the temperature rose, he told himself, they might yet be saved. “But should they break camp in Feb, they are lost. No water to drink. Frozen skins to sleep upon. The party must perish.”
“Oh, it is depressing in the extreme to sit crouched up all day with nothing to do but keep from freezing,” Tyson wrote. There was no proper place to sit and absolutely nothing to read in the soft Arctic twilight. “It is now one hundred and seven days since I have seen printed words!”
Another problem faced them: Hans’s six-year-old son, Tobias, took sick and couldn’t eat his allowance of pemmican. There was nothing else for him but dry bread. “We are I fear all but surely starving, though slowly,” Tyson noted on February 4. Hans’s four-year-old, Succi, uttered “a chronic hunger wail.” Tyson was terrified that the men, egged on by Meyer, who continued to believe the Disco shore was close by, would gobble all the provisions before the weather made sealing possible. At last it became clear that Disco had been passed – a realization that angered the men who had depended on the scientist.
Tyson continued to be a prisoner of the weather. He had now lived for four months in his original clothes, all stained and rendered filthy by greasy blubber. He had no handkerchief, could not even wash his hands. When he tried to clean a piece of deerskin in the hope of making a pair of socks, a horrified Hannah stopped him. She explained that her people had a tradition that if anyone tried to clean a deer on the ice, the ice would crumble. She herself was terrified the floe might split beneath them at any time; a number of cracks were already appearing in the old ice.
Hannah and Joe amused themselves by playing checkers, using buttons on a piece of ragged canvas that had been laid out with a pencil. Little Punny, wrapped in a muskox skin, cried out to her mother every few minutes, “I am so hungry!” In Hans’s snow hut, Merkut tried to pick a few scraps of old blubber from the lamp to give to the wailing children. Augustina, her twelve-year-old, once naturally plump, looked peaked. The babies had no clothing of any kind, living in their mothers’ hoods like kangaroos in pouches. Tyson, who must have felt almost as naked as the infants, was confined to a three-foot-square space of snow. His only surcease from the appalling boredom was his journal, in which he scrawled brief imprecations about “the treachery played by the villain Budington.” It was as well that he had no mirror. One day Punny looked at him gravely and said, “You are nothing but bone.”
He contemplated suicide but could not face what “God had forbid.” By March, the group was down to one meal a day, subsisting entirely on the tiny dovekies the Eskimos were shooting. By the second, Hannah had blubber for the lamp for only two more days, Hans only enough for one. And then, at five in the afternoon, to the unspeakable joy of all, Joe shot a gigantic seal, the largest anyone had ever seen. It weighed more than six hundred pounds and required the strength of all hands to drag it to the hut. The men danced and sang for joy. “Praise the Lord,” exclaimed Tyson, “for all his mercies.” An orgy of gluttony followed, the men scooping up the warm blood in tin cans and drinking it like milk, others tearing at the raw flesh until their faces and hands were slathered with it. Several were sick, and the hut itself looked like a slaughterhouse, with meat, blood, entrails, and dirt covering the floor.
Now another peril faced the party. The ice beneath them was beginning to snap with the sound of distant thunder. On March 11, in the midst of a howling gale, a piece of the floe was torn away, no more than twenty yards from the Eskimo igloos. Three days of horror followed, then calm. These periods of relative quiet were interspersed by nights of crashing, grinding uproar, as great bergs pushed their way south with the current through a tangle of shattered floes. Fortunately there were more seals avail
able and, on March 28, a polar bear.
Two days later Tyson looked out from the filthy snow house and saw a gigantic berg towering above the floe that had been their home for five months. It was now no more than twenty yards across and separated from the rest of the pack, a flat, frozen slab drifting alone among hundreds of icebergs – slow-moving mountains of crystal ploughing through the glassy sea. On the western horizon, Tyson could see the white line of solid pack ice and knew that his party must try to reach it.
They set off on April 1 – towing Hans’s skin kayak – nineteen souls crammed into a boat built to hold six or seven, so crowded that Tyson could scarcely move his arms to handle the tiller ropes without knocking over one of the frightened, crying children. Hans scarcely had room enough to bail – and bail he must, for even though they had jettisoned most of their meat, equipment, ammunition, and weapons, the boat was close to foundering.
Tyson could not leave the tiller, even to eat. Hannah fed him morsels of raw bear meat while the seamen moaned and complained. “The boat is sinking! The boat is sinking!” they cried over and over again as Hans bailed furiously with an old meat tin. But the boat did not sink. On April 3, Tyson gained the overnight safety of an old ice floe and the following morning embarked again. After a strenuous day, they reached the eastern fringe of the ice pack. By then everybody was soaked, freezing, and fighting a raging thirst.
They were too close to the edge of the pack. They set off westward again the following morning through a mass of seething ice until they reached a stronger floe. They scarcely had their tent up before the ice opened beneath it. They clung to a fragment as the gale increased and the frozen platform on which they were huddled pitched and tossed, rising and falling in the trough of the sea. They were scudding south before the gale at about three miles an hour when, at midnight on April 7, the ice split again, leaving Meyer marooned on a small floe with the boat and the kayak. The boat was too heavy for him to handle, and he had no experience with an Eskimo skin craft.
The Arctic Grail Page 46