The Arctic Grail

by Pierre Berton

  Since the days of the Great Search, the eyes of the nation had been turned towards Africa and the exploits of British explorers on the Dark Continent. Another geographical puzzle, the source of the White Nile, was on the verge of solution. By 1874, Henry Morton Stanley, Welsh-born in spite of his American residence, was about to set off for the mysterious Congo while Sir Samuel White Baker was back from his adventures in central Africa. The austere Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone had been succeeded by an Imperial expansionist, Benjamin Disraeli. The compass needle of exploration was swinging back to the North. As Markham wrote: “A healthy interest in the glorious achievement of the Arctic worthies of former days was taking the place of sneering and indifference, and Englishmen were once more becoming alive to the importance of maritime enterprise.”

  A joint committee of the Royal Society and the Royal Geographical Society urged Disraeli to consider a new expedition. Most of the living “Arctic worthies” were represented – Back, Collinson, Rae, Osborn, and Markham. In November, Disraeli agreed that his government would organize an expedition not only for its scientific value but also to encourage “that spirit of maritime enterprise that has ever distinguished the English People.” In those words, said The Times, reflecting the changed attitude of the country, “there is the true ring of national feeling.”

  The official emphasis had been entirely on scientific discoveries. The Arctic Committee of the Admiralty, which put its stamp on the enterprise, hadn’t even mentioned the words “North Pole.” But it was the Pole that caught the imagination of press and public. As far as the average Englishman was concerned, this was to be a polar expedition, and a successful one. The Union Jack was about to be planted at the top of the world! The Pole had replaced the Passage as the new British goal. As soon as the government gave its consent, the Committee appointed by the Admiralty to consider the purposes of the voyage made it clear that “the scope and primary object of the Expedition should be to attain the highest Northern latitude, and, if possible, to reach the North Pole.…” In the Admiralty’s sailing orders, scientific matters were relegated to Paragraph 26.

  No other English expedition – not even Franklin’s – had been mounted with such an outpouring of national feeling. At that time the popular press was beginning to emerge. As the time for embarkation drew closer, the Illustrated London News and the Graphic devoted page after page to details of the forthcoming voyage. The new commander, George Nares, a veteran of the Franklin search, was front-page news. He and his officers were pictured in the engraved illustrations. Drawings of the two ships – the seventeen-gun steam sloop Alert and the steam whaler Discovery – were familiar to every literate Englishman. All the particulars of Arctic life were examined in detail. In more than one sense, the Nares expedition was to nineteenth-century England what the space program was to twentieth-century America. And, then as later, the public was oversold on the possibilities and undersold on the dangers.

  If the Nares expedition proved anything it proved that the Royal Navy, after more than half a century of Arctic exploration, had learned very little. The crews that left Portsmouth on May 29, 1875, were no better equipped than those who had gone off to their deaths with John Franklin thirty years before. In almost every area, the Navy failed to profit from the experience of the North American travellers – men like Rae, Kennedy, Kane, Hall, and Hayes. Rae’s advice, which was by far the best available, was generally ignored. Rae had, for instance, advised a friend who was going on the expedition, to take snowshoes. His friend reluctantly complied, although “he had been told by some of the great Arctic authorities they were no use.” When the snowshoes were brought on board, there “was a shout of laughter and derision from the gallant but very inexperienced officers.” But after the expedition returned, Rae’s friend sought him out to express his gratitude “for many a long and pleasant walk.” He told Rae that “without them, I should not have gone half a mile from the ship without much discomfort and labour.”

  Nor did the Navy profit from Rae’s experience with snow houses. A skilled traveller, Rae found, could in one hour throw up a snow house big enough to hold five men. But the Navy wanted nothing to do with native techniques, although the advantages of the snow house should have been obvious. It meant that sledging parties would not have to carry and put up heavy tents or take them down and pack them each morning, stiff as they always were with condensed and frozen vapour. The snow house could be re-used on the return journey and was so warm that much less bedding was required. As Rae said, “When you use snow as a shelter your breath instead of condensing on your bedding gets condensed on the walls of the snow house, and therefore your bedding is relieved from nearly the whole of this.”

  Rae discounted Nares’s excuse that the snow wasn’t packed hard enough in the High Arctic to build an igloo. He himself had encountered all kinds of snow. In any snow, he said, a shelter could be built by digging out a three-foot basement, piling the snow into walls, and covering it with sheeting. On the other hand, there were no native peoples on Ellesmere Island, nobody to show Nares and his men – as Rae had been shown – how to construct a comfortable dwelling, or how to exist in a savage environment. Ellesmere was as barren of humankind as it was of trees.

  Again, the cumbersome naval sledges with high runners were unsuitable for both heavy snow and hummocky ice. Rae had perfected a broader, lighter sledge with three runners, based on an Indian design, that ran equally well over snow or hard ice. It sank less than three-quarters of an inch in snow and did not get stuck when it came down off a hummock. But the Navy didn’t listen to Rae. The major details were overseen by its own man, Leopold M’Clintock, the so-called master of Arctic sledging. Nares had been his sledgemate during the Franklin search.

  Nares took along fifty-five Greenland dogs and several dog drivers including Hans Hendrik from the Kane, Hayes, and Hall expeditions. Astonishingly, he made no serious attempt to use them. The dogs were treated more as playthings than as beasts of burden by the Navy men, whose distaste for putting them in harness died hard. In the sledge journeys that followed, men, not dogs, would be in the traces. Nares, who clearly did not take dogteams seriously, described his crew of amateurs trying their hands at dog driving during an anchorage off Ellesmere Island: “With each dog pulling in a different direction, the starting was a ludicrous sight, and was seldom effected without the aid of a friend enticing the dogs on with a piece of meat. After struggling for about half a mile, they invariably obtained their own way, dragging their would-be guiders through many water pools in spite of the frequent application of the long whip, which, in inexperienced hands, was more frequently felt by the riders than the dogs.”

  As usual, the Navy paid no attention to the experience of the Eskimos. The natives, of course, wore the loosest possible clothing, usually made of doubled sealskin or other hide, with one side of the fur facing out, the other against the body. Nares’s crew were issued tight woollen suits and flannel or duck overalls so clinging that the men had great difficulty stripping them off when wet. Nares felt that each man should have been separately fitted, but this was impossible because some of their clothing was still being sewn the day before they sailed. Nor was there enough emergency clothing to allow the men a change when their garments became soaked. Even worse was the lack of attached hoods. Again, the Navy never considered copying the hooded Eskimo parka, which protects the neck, the part of the body where the heat loss can be greatest.

  The tents were more confining than on any previous Arctic expedition. Nares discovered too late that there had been “a steady & continuous reduction in space allotted since Arctic travelling was first undertaken.” The Navy, in short, was continuing to pinch pennies. The nine-foot-long tents held eight men, each wedged into a space less than fourteen inches wide – or twenty-eight inches to a pair lying head to foot. On the last government expedition, each man had been allotted sixteen and a half inches. Nares was forced to order an increase in the size of his tents, which meant adding an addi
tional twelve-pound weight to each sledge.

  The blanket bags in which the men slept were too short and open at the neck. That meant that each man had to wear his duffle coat as well. To Rae, who had adopted the Eskimos’ sensible method of sleeping some thirty years before, all this made no sense. In his evidence before the committee that was eventually appointed to look into the problems faced by the Nares expedition, he had this to say:

  “I consider also the mode of sleeping in the blanket bag a very bad one, because it separates the men from each other, and they cannot communicate the heat from one body to another … we never slept cold in the snow house, except once, although we only had one single blanket over us. Instead of putting on a coat to sleep in, we always took our coats off, simply for this reason, that if you have a great thick coat on, it keeps your arm from your body and you have not any heat communicated from the body to the arm. The Esquimau, who is a very knowing man, takes off both his coats and he has nothing on his upper parts at all, and therefore he lies with his arm close to his body, and as near his neighbour as possible, that the heat may communicate from one to the other. If you have got an immense duffle blanket separating you from your neighbour, and if you have got an immense duffle coat put on yourself, separating your arm from your body, and you lie with both coats impregnated with snow, the result must be most injurious.…”

  In the ordeals they were about to face, Nares and his men would be forced to haul loads that were too heavy while subsisting on inadequate rations of three quarters of a pound of salt meat a day, which Nares later had to increase to one pound. Even that wasn’t enough. Rae, a notoriously lean eater, consumed between three and four pounds a day while pulling sledges and carrying loads only half as heavy as the ones these inexperienced seamen would be forced to drag or tote. On the Saskatchewan, the regular daily ration was eight pounds of meat in addition to potatoes and other vegetables. Rae knew of some voyageurs who thought nothing of consuming ten or twelve pounds of meat a day. At Fort Confidence, Thomas Simpson had encountered one French Canadian who would eat sixteen pounds of meat a day “if he could get it.”

  Yet the sledge hauling required of naval men in the Arctic was harder and more debilitating than anything the Canadian fur-trading companies expected from tireless paddlers; nor were the sailors accustomed to the exertion, as the voyageurs were. Before leaving England, Nares did his best to prepare them for it. He warned his crew “that if they could ever imagine the hardest work they had ever been called upon to perform in their lives intensified to the utmost degree, it would only be as child’s play in comparison with the work they would have to perform whilst sledging.” Within a few months, the men of the Alert and the Discovery would learn that this was no overstatement.

  As food and fuel were used up, the sledges would become lighter, but there was a basic weight – tents, bedding, equipment – that would never decrease. On the Nares expedition, where each man pulled more than two hundred pounds, the basic weight was eighty pounds. Rae, by using native techniques, had kept his basic weight to forty.

  Again, as in previous British expeditions, the ships provided were too big and too cumbersome for men exhausted by hard work and disease to handle. Nares himself confided to his journal, “I always considered that our ships were too heavy for the crews and also for Arctic service. Now with our weakened men we find it very heavy work. Everything has to be done with the help of the capstan or windlass. Even the strong men appear to be weakened.”

  All of this might have been bearable – it had been bearable before – had it not been for one other problem: diet. A careful study of the journals of Arctic explorers, especially those of the Arctic veterans who were pushing so hard for a polar expedition, should have made it obvious that fresh meat and fresh vegetables were the best antiscorbutics. Yet Nares and his men were expected to survive almost entirely on salt meat. The Navy considered that the usual ration of lemon juice, plus the availability of muskoxen, would be enough to protect the crews against the disease. It forgot that men on sledging parties could not depend on the hunt for their food, even if game existed, and also that lemon juice freezes and so could not be carried on sledge trips. No one had yet thought of lacing the juice with rum or creating a lemon-juice lozenge. And, through one final ludicrous mistake, the Nares expedition was provisioned not with lemon juice but with lime juice. Because the Navy generally referred to lemon juice as “lime juice” (hence the nickname “Limey” for the British tar), someone substituted Caribbean limes for Mediterranean lemons, not realizing that the juice of the lemons was four times more effective in warding off scurvy.

  Thus the Nares expedition set out under sentence of disaster. Over-publicized, it would never live up to the expectations of a nation convinced that these gallant young men would soon be planting a Union Jack on the Pole. Badly and hastily organized with a smugness and an arrogance that in hindsight seem almost criminal, this band of amateurs set off blithely, as so many had before it, without any real idea of what they were facing. None of Nares’s officers had ever seen an iceberg, and as the leader was to complain in his journal, they didn’t even know how to take care of their men. But England expected each of them to do his duty, trained or not, and to give them their due, they did it to the best of their ability.

  2 The seeds of scurvy

  At Portsmouth Harbour, May 29, 1875, the piers and foreshore were crammed with spectators, the masts of the harbour aflutter with flags. Cannons roared, bands played, soldiers in scarlet marched and wheeled. So great was the excitement in this spring month that the special trains from London had to be cancelled; the crowds climbing aboard the two Arctic ships were interfering with the work of the artificers. By the time the expedition was ready to sail, some 200,000 people were swarming around the harbour.

  It was one of those spontaneous moments of mass enthusiasm that marked the zenith of Empire. Disraeli was about to buy the Suez Canal and treat it as if it were the Queen’s personal toy. (“You have it, Madame,” he would tell Victoria). Her plump and popular heir, Bertie, Prince of Wales, was on the point of visiting India’s coral strand, and she herself, on her birthday, had sent a warm and congratulatory message to the men planning to venture far beyond Greenland’s icy mountains.

  As the two ships left the harbour at four that afternoon, the Telegraph’s correspondent was already composing the fulsome phrases that would ornament the next morning’s edition: “As we lose sight of the good ships and crews to whose despatch so many hopes, so much sympathy, and such careful preparations have gone, who is not conscious that the mere fact of their departure amid such testimonies of pride and love and enthusiasm does England great good? The feelings which were uttered in those ringing, repeated, hearty cheers along the Southsea shore and out into the dancing waves, are shared by all over the country and no man needs to know personally Captain Nares and his associates to call them ‘friends.’ Friends they are to every household.…

  “The Admiralty could have filled twenty Arctic ships with volunteers … for the island realm is still rich in the old valorous breed, so little is it true that wealth and peace have corrupted English blood … the Government … has rightly interpreted the desire of the people not to see another flag other than that of England anticipate us in the crowning feat of maritime discovery.… England is not too rich to be bold, too luxurious to be simple, too cynical to be pious, too genteel to believe in honour and glory and the sweetness of self devotion. The England that History knows about … was down along the Channel shores on Saturday … watching her mariners set sail to plant the Jack on the top of the globe, if manhood and love of duty can find a way thither.…”

  The explorer who was expected to plant the flag upon the Pole was a career naval officer in his forty-fifth year, unpretentious, matter-of-fact, and accustomed to following orders. George Strong Nares’s forebears had served the realm in one war or another since his great-grandfather’s day. The son of a naval commander, Nares had been in the service since the age
of fourteen. His likeness in the National Portrait Gallery shows a handsome, clear-eyed man with a high, balding forehead and a full beard. His journal is devoid of passion but full of common sense, suggesting a man who took things as they came and accepted both triumphs and setbacks with an inner response that kept his temper in check and his enthusiasms suitably curtailed. He did not look on the polar quest with the romantic vision of a Kane (whose descriptions he considered highly coloured) or a Hall. He had no great longing to go north, as Franklin had had. Indeed, he once referred to the Arctic as “a wretched place but … still healthy,” an even-handed description that suggests the temperament of the man.

  He went north because he was told to go north and also because he knew, or at least hoped, that doing so would further his career. He was one of the last of the functioning officers who had taken part in the Franklin search, having served as second mate on the Resolute under Kellett in 1852-54. He was a member of the sledging party that had discovered McClure’s message on Melville Island. Where sledging was concerned, he was M’Clintock’s disciple. He had served as a gunnery officer in the Crimean War and more recently as an accomplished oceanographer in the South Pacific. He had the reputation of being energetic, skilful, and thorough – in short, the best man the Navy could muster to preside over the latest attempt to reach the Pole.

  Nares gave scant credence to the fantasy of an Open Polar Sea. As his two ships forced their way up the west coast of the Kennedy Channel, past the colourless world of Grinnell Land (black headlands riven by glacier-filled valleys), he was convinced that it was an illusion. And he was aware that Isaac Hayes’s geographical calculations were so far off the mark as to be useless.