Joe and Hans immediately seized a paddle and worked their way across the floes until they reached the stricken man. Some of the others flung themselves on the ice, crying out “Oh, my God, boys, we are all goners!” and blaming Tyson for having got them into the predicament. Tyson ignored them, kept watch through the night, and at first light called for volunteers to go with him across the half-frozen sea to pick up the three men on the other floe. Only the sullen Kruger volunteered. When he and Tyson joined the other three, the five men managed to lower the boat and steer it through the ice to the main party, but they were too weak to haul it onto the floe. At last a few others pitched in to help, and the entire company was reunited.
With great waves rolling over the tent, Tyson put the women and children in the boat for protection. The remainder, all huddled together, could only wait and hope. There was no fresh ice to suck on, no fuel to thaw it anyway. “We not only starve with hunger, freeze with cold, but we burn with thirst,” Tyson wrote.
On April 11, they spotted their first raven, a sure sign that land was near. Tyson knew they must reach it soon. Hans’s little boy was much improved, but Meyer was in a bad way, his toes and fingers frostbitten after his ordeal; he could not last more than a few days. Tyson had other fears: unless they got a seal soon he suspected again that some of the men might resort to cannibalism. On April 13, he recorded his suspicions: “The poor Esquimaux feel there [sic] situation dreadfully. They think the first to go will be the children. The white man will not starve they think, as long as there is a child to eat.”
He impressed upon Joe and Hannah the need to keep their rifles loaded and handy. Having borrowed Hans’s six-shooter, he was prepared to kill the first man who proposed cannibalism and took the two non-Germans – John Herron, the English steward, and William Jackson, the black cook – into his confidence. Herron had already caught Kruger stealing food, but there was nothing Tyson could do about it. Fortunately, on April 17 Joe shot another big seal, enough for three meals for the entire party.
The floe on which they were settled was becoming more and more unstable. Tyson wanted to move to a stronger one, but by the time the men had finished arguing about it, the opportunity was lost. They were now moving through a porridge of ice. Their own precarious platform, wearing away beneath them, was, Tyson knew, about to turn turtle.
On the night of April 20, a great wave rolled over the floe, swamping the tent and sweeping its contents into the sea. Tyson ordered the children into the boat. Even as they scrambled to safety, a second breaker knocked the tent over. The others clung to the boat to prevent it being washed into the ocean, then tried to haul it to the weather edge of the floe. Then a third wave rolled over them, raising the boat waist high and flinging everything – boat, children, and adults, like so many shuttlecocks – fifty yards across the ice. All that night they clung to the boat and battled the ice-cold sea, as wave after wave washed them back and forth across the floe. By morning they were all exhausted.
Tyson spotted a more stable floe about twenty yards away and urged the men to push the boat into the water and make for it. The usual argument followed, and they almost missed their chance. Finally, they went for it. The cook, Jackson, missed the boat, tumbled into the water, but managed to grasp a gunwale. Tyson hauled him out. They rowed hard for their quarry and reached it. For the moment they were safe.
They were huddled now without food or shelter on an icy raft just six inches above the foaming sea. Tyson was driven to desperation by the German seamen, who clustered at some distance from the others. They continued moaning and grumbling that he was to blame for their predicament. Tyson found himself hoping that Kruger, the leader, would provoke him to the point where he’d have an excuse to shoot him.
They were reduced to gnawing on dried sealskin. If necessary, Tyson was prepared to eat the kayak, but fortunately, on April 22, with the help of Joe and Hans, he managed to track and kill a polar bear. Four days later the two native hunters shot three seals. The following day they quit the floe and moved to another, killing seals en route and slaking their thirst by drinking the blood. Then, later that day, they saw in the distance a column of smoke. A ship! Tyson had raised a small flag, which he had hoarded all these months for just such a moment. But the ship vanished.
Two days later, on April 28, 1873, they saw more smoke. The entire company fired pistols and rifles, trying to attract attention. Again it vanished, but then another ship appeared briefly and Tyson began to breathe more easily. They had reached the Labrador sealing grounds; the rock-ribbed coast could be seen emerging from the mist about thirty-five miles to the west.
That night they set seal-blubber fires as signals, but the fog closed in, blotting out all vision. Then, on the morning of April 30, at five o’clock, Tyson, rising from his sleep and throwing off the wet and tattered coat that was his only blanket, heard a cry: “There’s a steamer!” A ship appeared out of the fog a scant five hundred yards from their floe. Everybody began to fire off weapons, and a moment later the vessel turned toward them.
Hans was in his kayak in an instant, paddling toward the ship. Tyson waved his old Russian cap. The entire company gave three weak cheers. A hundred throats aboard the steamer answered. The castaways replied with three more cheers and a tiger. Boats were lowered to the floe, and a few minutes later the bedraggled company of nineteen stood on the deck of the sealer Tigress, a barquentine out of Newfoundland.
A horde of curious whalers surrounded them uttering gasps of amazement when Tyson told them they’d been on the ice for six months. “And you on it night and day?” one of the Newfoundlanders asked. At this naivety, Tyson could not suppress a laugh. It was his first in more than half a year. In Labrador Tyson was able to cable the first news of his rescue to the American consul at St. John’s. The ship arrived at the Newfoundland capital on May 13, when a more complete story was wired to the New York press. At the outset, Tyson’s statements were not believed. Words like “impossible” and “ridiculous” were used by more than one Arctic expert. But the wealth of detail reported at length in the New York papers made it obvious that the impossible had occurred: almost a score of men, women, and children had drifted from Smith Sound to Labrador without the loss of a single life.
In Tyson’s account, which detailed the miracle of the six-month drift, scarcely any attention was paid to the role of the Eskimos in keeping the party alive. Not a word was written in the press about Joe, the hunter; indeed, neither he nor any of the others was named, except in the list of survivors. He was simply “one of the natives.” A good deal of space was accorded to the building of snow huts and the shooting of seals, bears, and dovekies, but none of the credit for these accomplishments went to Joe or Hans. In fact, anyone reading the early New York newspaper accounts might have suspected that the natives, with their horde of children, were a drag on the party.
The American government immediately dispatched the uss Frolic to St. John’s to bring the party to Washington. They arrived on June 5. Hall’s widow left Cincinnati for the capital, hoping to get a first-hand account of her husband’s death from Joe and Hannah. But in death he proved as elusive as in life. By the time she arrived, the Eskimo pair had already been sent to Maine. She herself had been subsisting on Hall’s government pay of seventy-five dollars a month. That would stop, the Secretary of the Navy announced, “as soon as the sad news of Captain Hall’s death was confirmed.” He found it necessary to add that the government would probably not try to seek a return from the widow of any overpayment.
Meanwhile, the Tigress, a Canadian vessel, was purchased and outfitted as a rescue ship. She left New York on July 14 for the Greenland coast to seek the rest of the missing Polaris party. The faithful Ebierbing joined Tyson in the rescue ship; so did Hans Hendrik and his family. Sympathetic Americans had given Hans’s children a large supply of clothes; obviously delighted at the gift they insisted on wearing every shred. As the ship sailed away in the hot July weather, all were swathed in numberless dresses a
nd shawls. That same month, Captain Budington and the rest of the Polaris survivors were plucked from the ice by the Dundee whaler, Ravenscraig.
Hannah remained behind with Punny. Joe, who had signed on as interpreter, was put to work on the Tigress as an ordinary seaman. Hans, who would not be returning from Greenland, was listed as a passenger. That didn’t sit well with Joe, who took advantage of Hans’s lack of English to turn him into his drudge, gravely informing him that both were expected to work.
In Greenland, the searchers learned that the Polaris had been abandoned the day after the Tyson party was carried away and that the crew had lived on land before the entire winter before taking to the ship’s boats and eventual rescue. At the abandoned Polaris camp some of the logbooks and journals were found and retrieved. Perhaps significantly, the pages dealing with Hall’s death and with the abandonment of the party on the ice floe had been torn out, a discovery that bears on the murder theory. Of Hall’s personal papers there was no sign. Apparently they had been lost in the storm that drove the floe and its occupants away from the ship. It was fortunate that Hall had left the journals of his second voyage at Godhavn. These formed the basis of a published narrative.
Hans Hendrik and his family remained in Greenland, but Joe returned to the United States, where he and his family attempted to adapt themselves to civilized life. Joe worked as a farmer, a carpenter, and a fisherman. Hannah made fur clothing for purchasers in Groton and New London. Punny, whom Hannah re-christened Sylvia, after Sylvia Grinnell (Henry’s daughter), attended school at Groton and showed herself to be an intelligent student.
But the family was not able to adapt. Joe went off to the Arctic again with Allen Young, M’Clintock’s former officer. Sylvia died in 1875, followed a year later by Hannah, mourning her loss and her husband’s absence, exhausted by her ordeal on the ice, and broken down with tuberculosis. “Come, Lord Jesus, and take thy poor creature home,” she whispered on December 31, 1876. Before the New Year dawned, she was dead, at the age of thirty-nine.
Joe returned to visit her grave and weed away the tall grass. “Tookolito’s gone, Punny’s gone,” he said. “I’m going back to King William Island.” In 1878 he sailed with Frederick Schwatka’s expedition to seek more relics. That they managed to do so was in large part due to Ebierbing’s experience.
A long and tedious naval inquiry followed the rescue of the two Polaris parties. There, all the dissensions among the crew, the details of Charles Hall’s death, and the heavy drinking among the officers – including George Tyson – before the division of the group were paraded before the public. The testimony was often conflicting, but it was clear that Budington had not intentionally left the nineteen castaways to their fate; he had simply been unable to find them in the storm and the following day had been forced to abandon his ship, which drifted off and eventually sank. But his lack of self-discipline and his uninspired leadership told against him. His career was over.
The naval board concluded that Hall had died of natural causes, probably apoplexy. That verdict held until Loomis disinterred the mummified body with the telltale signs of arsenic poisoning. By that time, there were graves of other explorers not far from Hall’s last resting place. For the long search for the North Pole was by no means ended; it would continue for almost four decades.
Chapter Ten
1
“The navy needs some action”
2
The seeds of scurvy
3
The scapegoat
One of Nares’s sledge crews (illustration credit 10.1)
1 “The navy needs some action”
For all this time, while Hall was scouring King William Island and reconnoitring his proposed journey to the Pole, while Tyson and his surly companions were drifting slowly southward on their raft of ice, and while the U.S. Navy was examining the circumstances of Hall’s death, two veterans of the Franklin search were agitating for another British scientific expedition to the Arctic.
Clements Markham and Sherard Osborn spent nine years pursuing that unpopular cause. The public had turned against Arctic exploration after the Franklin tragedy was revealed and so had the government and the Admiralty, both of which were totally opposed to any further dangerous and expensive forays into the frozen world.
Markham and Osborn had once been shipmates. They served again in 1850-51 with Austin’s squadron during the Great Search, Osborn as a lieutenant commanding the steam tender Pioneer and Markham as a midshipman on the Assistance. Both had literary pretensions; their baroque style had, in fact, helped turn several polar explorers into mythic figures.
Markham, who returned to civilian life, was made honorary secretary of the Royal Geographical Society in 1863. Osborn by then had risen to the rank of rear admiral. The two launched their campaign in January 1865, when Charles Francis Hall was in the first year of his five-year exile in the Arctic. It began with a speech by Osborn entitled “A Project of an Expedition to Reach the North Pole and Examine the Polar Regions.” Osborn declared proudly that he and his fellow explorers did not belong to the new “rest-and-be-thankful school” and “were no more prepared to turn their backs on Arctic discovery because a Franklin had lost his life … than they would be to do so to an enemy’s fleet because Nelson fell at Trafalgar.”
Osborn was careful to stress the scientific aspects of such a venture, but he relied on the mystique of the Pole to catch the imagination of his listeners. He reinforced this by quoting a letter from John Ross’s old adversary, Edward Sabine, now an army general and also president of the Royal Society. “To reach the Pole,” Sabine had written, “is the greatest geographical achievement which can be attempted, and I own I should grieve if it should be first accomplished by any other than an Englishman.”
Over the next several months, the proponents of a new polar expedition were locked in an argument over the best possible route. Some, including both Markham and Osborn, favoured Smith Sound; others, including Edward Inglefield and Allen Young, opted for Spitzbergen. It all came to nothing. The public was not ready for any more Arctic ventures, and the press reflected that mood. The Times treated the proposal with what the RGS called “ribald buffoonery.” The paper attacked Osborn’s scheme as impolitic, sneered at “this bootless curiosity,” which could produce no practical benefit, and declared, “… we must protest in the name of common sense and humanity.… We trust that not a single life may be adventured in another attempt to reach the North Pole.”
For the next nine years, the two naval comrades struggled to turn public opinion around. By 1873, they had advanced to the point where Markham could publish the case for another polar effort in a popular book titled The Threshold of the Unknown. A best seller, it ran to four editions. In it, Markham quoted Osborn’s original declaration that “the navy needs some action to wake it from the sloth of routine and save it from the canker of prolonged peace.” He shrugged off the hazards of Arctic service, insisting that on eight expeditions only 32 men out of a total of 1,878 had died. But he omitted the Franklin expedition, a disaster that would have raised the death rate to close to 9 per cent.
“There is no undue danger in Arctic service,” Markham wrote. All the Arctic experts, he said, were agreed on that, “provided that the expedition is under naval discipline and Government control” – a back-handed slap at the Americans. Scurvy he dismissed. It was, he said, “but little known now.” In fact, he managed to suggest that scarcely any scurvy had occurred on previous expeditions, and then only in the third year. John Ross’s fortunate 1829-33 experience – in a land where fresh meat was plentiful – had clouded the unhappy memory of other expeditions. Nonetheless, during the Franklin search, John Ross had commanded poorly equipped ships whose crews contracted scurvy within four months of leaving England, as Markham’s friend Osborn well knew. For it had been Osborn who had helped battle the disease among Ross’s crew by issuing them antiscorbutics.
Now Markham quoted Osborn on the subject of scurvy: “It is to the adva
nced state of knowledge in naval hygiene; to the attention paid to the cleanliness, warmth and ventilation of the ships, to the good quality of provisions, and especially to the preservation of cheerfulness among the crews, that this immunity from scurvy is due and so rare has it become that the naval surgeons who possess any knowledge of this disease, derived from actual observation … may be counted upon one’s fingers.” In the light of what was to come, it is hard to imagine a more fatuous statement. Almost every Arctic expedition since the days of Parry had encountered scurvy. The sledge parties, which carried no lemon juice, were especially susceptible to it.
Markham apologized to his readers for dwelling so long on the supposed risks – “this disgraceful objection to Arctic exploration,” as he called it. Were there really people in England who held these views? “To such men, if they really exist, the answer is, that even if the dangers were such as they describe, Englishmen have faced them before, and will do so again and again.”
To shame the “danger mongers,” as Markham called them, he published an old letter from Jane Franklin, now aged eighty-one and a living icon, a symbol of all that was gallant and British in the Arctic quest. In 1865 she had written to Sir Roderick Murchison that “for the credit and honour of England, the exploration of the North Pole should not be left to any other country.…”
It was this kind of patriotic appeal that helped to turn the tide of public opinion, spurred also by explorers from rival nations – Germans, Austrians, Scandinavians, Americans – who were poaching on Great Britain’s frozen preserves. In 1873, a foreign flag, Austria’s, was planted in the permafrost of Franz Josef Land. It would never do, in this age of exploration, to drop behind in the race for the Pole.
The Arctic Grail Page 47