Nares left the Discovery under its captain, Henry Stephenson, to set up permanent winter quarters below the precipitous cliffs of Lady Franklin Bay off Hall Basin. Then, with the Alert, he entered the Robeson Channel, whose coastline was blocked by a jagged thirty-five-foot wall of ice floes. Only Nares had seen ice like this before – the ancient rock-ribbed ice of the Beaufort Sea, eight hundred miles to the west. These century-old blocks, tumbling down from the north, were eighty feet thick. When Nares reached the mouth of the channel at Lincoln Bay, he saw that they stretched off as far as the eye could see – a labyrinth of broken masses and hillocks unlike anything that had yet been faced. He searched about to find a suitable name for this ancient ice and hit on the adjective “paleocrystic.” To Nares, it represented defeat.
He had taken his ship to the highest latitude that any sea-going vessel had so far attained. He knew he was on the rim of the polar sea. But he could not believe that the heavy naval sledges he had brought could ever manage to thread their way through the dreadful icescape that confronted him. The Polaris expedition had hinted at a land mass leading north, or perhaps an open-water channel. Nares now bluntly dismissed these suggestions as myths.
He managed to make his way to the northwest around Capes Union and Sheridan at the tip of Grant Land, as it was then known – all part of Ellesmere Island – until on August 31 he found a small bay in which the Alert could winter. Racing against time, he reached the shelter of the inlet just ahead of the advancing ice, then looked back in “wonder and awe” at the power exerted by the ice blocks, some of them weighing 30,000 tons, which congealed into a fifty-foot ram-part, two hundred yards thick, locking in the ship but also protecting it from the danger of the pack beyond.
The Nares expedition, 1875-76
Nares’s first mate, Albert Hastings Markham, a distant cousin of Sir Clements Markham, described the scene that September: “Nothing but ice, tight and impassable, was to be seen – a solid, impenetrable mass that no amount of imagination or theoretical belief could ever twist into an ‘Open Polar Sea.’
“We were reluctantly compelled to come to the conclusion that we had in reality arrived on the shore of the Polar Ocean; a frozen sea of such a character as utterly to preclude the possibility of its being navigated by a ship; a wide expanse of ice and snow, whose impenetrable fastnesses seemed to defy the puny efforts of mortal men to invade and expose their hitherto sealed and hidden mysteries.”
Their only hope – a slim one – was that a gale might open a channel that could lead to more land to the north, if, indeed, such land existed. Nares was more than sceptical; he was already convinced that his expedition could not reach the North Pole. He would have preferred to devote his efforts to a sensible survey of the land that did exist; but his orders were to try to reach the Pole, and he was a man who conscientiously followed orders. The main object of his sledging parties, then, would be to try to seek land to the north. That September a series of depots must be laid out for such an effort the following spring.
These were man-killing trips. Lieutenant Pelham Aldrich, who commanded one sledge, set a new record by passing Parry’s 1827 Farthest North – but only after a journey that left his men exhausted. The snow was the softest yet encountered; at each step they sank up to their knees. Without snowshoes, travel became a nightmare. Another sledge captain, Lieutenant William May, a future Admiral of the Fleet, later wrote, “… our sufferings from thirst … were almost beyond belief.” He tried, with limited success, to dissuade his men from eating snow, which induced terrible cramps and heat loss. Markham, who took the largest party – twenty-one men and three officers – returned with a third of his crew incapacitated from frostbite. Three men suffered amputation of fingers or toes and were out of action for the winter. The lack of fresh food caused slow healing of their wounds; some of May’s took five months to heal.
The sledgers faced another problem – one that Rae had predicted. The tents and bedding became moisture soaked and frozen so that the basic weight that had to be hauled, over and above that of fuel and food, increased, on Markham’s journey, from 107 pounds to an impossible 216.
Nares planned several sledge trips for the spring. Aldrich, with another officer and fifteen men, would explore the coast of Grant Land. Markham, with a similar crew, would try to reach the Pole. Other sledge parties would go out from the Discovery in Lady Franklin Bay to explore the bay, which Nares thought might be an inlet leading into the Arctic Archipelago, and to examine Petermann Fiord on the Greenland shore opposite.
For safety’s sake, each party would take a boat. That would raise the basic weight each man hauled to more than two hundred pounds – an impossibility if anything like two weeks’ supply of food and fuel was also to be carried. The result was that the crews would have to drag the boat forward in stages and then go back for their sledge, so that the workload was doubled and the daily mileage halved.
The winter passed wearily, relieved by the usual lectures and entertainments in the naval tradition. (Nares reopened “The Royal Arctic Theatre,” after two decades.) The men built an observatory and several snow houses to hold equipment and meat and shot enough muskoxen to supply fresh meat twice every three weeks. By the time the light began to return in late January, the faces of the men were almost as white as the snow around them. “We were all in excellent spirits,” Albert Markham recalled, “and supposed ourselves to be in perfect health.…” That supposition would be cruelly dashed within a few weeks, but even in March, when Nares told his men that they would be spending a second winter in the Arctic, there was no hint of trouble. Indeed, they seemed to receive that news with satisfaction.
Nares made two attempts that March to reach the Discovery by dogsled. The first was aborted when Niels Christian Petersen, his Danish dog driver and interpreter, developed stomach cramps. Petersen lingered for three months and then died. The second trip was more successful, but Nares became convinced that dogs were not effective on the kind of hummocky ice the teams had encountered on the two-week journey. This was directly contrary to Isaac Hayes’s experience with dogs in similar ice conditions in Smith Sound, but given the nature of the Navy sledges and the inexperience of the drivers, the experiment with the teams was not repeated.
On the morning of April 3, 1876 (the year Bell introduced the telephone), the two sledging expeditions set out from the Alert – seven sledges and two boats, all drawn up in line, heraldic pennants flapping in the stiff Arctic breeze, and the entire ship’s company of fifty-three men and officers singing the Church of England Doxology (“Praise God, from whom all blessings flow”). At eleven o’clock the sledge crews picked up the drag ropes and, to the traditional three hearty cheers, set off across the ice in different directions. The temperature stood at minus 33° F. Thus began an ordeal whose arduousness few could have foreseen, in spite of the warnings that Nares himself had issued at the beginning of the voyage.
Nares was well aware of the toil involved, for he had endured it before. “Very few,” he had written, “can possibly realize the utter wretchedness endured by young men in the utmost health & strength & full of life when imprisoned in a heavy gale of wind within a small light tent made of no thicker material than an ordinary cricketing tent.”
It was bad enough to be confined for several days in a comfortable bed with plenty of kicking room but far worse to be “compelled to remain lying down at full length cramped up in a compacted space between 28 to 32 inches across for yourself and companion for one or two and even three consecutive days – packed in order to economize space, heads & tails alternating like preserved sardines … where, if your blanket bag allows you to kick it must necessarily be at the risk of striking your next neighbour’s nose. Inside the tightly closed blanket bag it is too dark to read and woe betide anyone who leaves the mouth open. For the whole interior of the tent is filled with snow drift … so fine & light … as to be likened to the motes of a sunbeam … forever shifting gradually downwards and forming a thick & ever incre
asing deposit on the upper canvas covering stretched over the cramped men.”
Struggling through soft snow sometimes up to their waists, hauling weights that in one case exceeded 240 pounds per man, the sledgers perspired in their tight clothing, which began to freeze until their duffle trousers could not be buttoned and their duffle coats became as stiff as strait jackets. These wet and freezing garments in turn dampened the interior of the tight-fitting blanket bags, which also froze, adding to the discomfort of the occupants and the weight that had to be dragged.
The combined sledge parties moved at a turtle’s pace, west toward Cape Joseph Henry, hacking a road with pickaxes through hummocks as high as fifty feet. Then, on April 6, came the first hint of a more insidious factor to compound the stress of sledge travel. Two of Markham’s men complained of feeling “seedy.” At almost exactly the same time, two marines in Aldrich’s party complained of illness. One, in fact, had to be sent back to the ship. This was hardly coincidence. The seeds of scurvy had been sown weeks before; now the disease was starting to take command. On April 10, at Cape Joseph Henry, the three supporting sledge crews returned to the ship and the two main parties separated, Aldrich moving west along the coast of Grant Land, Markham’s two sledges heading due north.
On April 14, another of Markham’s sledge crew, John Shirley, complained of pains and swelling in his ankles and knees. But scurvy was the last thing on Markham’s mind. He had been told there was not the slightest chance of his crews being attacked. Like Aldrich, he attributed the symptoms to fatigue. Within three days, however, two of his men were so incapacitated they had to be carried on the sledges.
By April 19, Markham was forced to abandon the larger of his two boats to make up for the weight of the invalids. Already, however, another man had fallen sick. Markham suspected scurvy but kept his thoughts to himself in order not to panic his crews. On April 24, with more men complaining of stiffness in the joints, he knew his crew was in trouble. On that day the party reached the 83rd parallel of latitude – the farthest north that white men had ever gone. When within the next fortnight a third of the sledgers had fallen out of action, Markham had to concede that they were the victims of scurvy. He had reached a latitude of 83° 20′. The Pole was still four hundred nautical miles away. He allowed his crews two days’ rest and then, bitterly disappointed, planted the Union Jack and prepared to retrace his steps.
Now began a race with scurvy as more and more men succumbed, leaving fewer and fewer to haul the sledges. By May 27, the situation was critical. Five men couldn’t move; five more could only hobble behind the sledges, lying down in the snow to rest every thirty or forty yards. Three more were in the early stages of scurvy. Only two officers and two men could be considered effective. Markham was forced to abandon his remaining boat and cast off all superfluous weight. On June 5, to his great relief, he reached solid land. But he knew that at the speed he was making, he could not reach the ship for another three weeks. By then, he feared, all would be dead.
He realized that somebody would have to make for the ship, forty miles away, over floes covered with deep snow and heavy hummocks. The only man in the party strong enough for the ordeal was Lieutenant A.A.C. Parr, who volunteered for the task. Parr left on his rescue mission on June 7. The following day, George Porter, a Marine artilleryman, “one of the finest men we had in the crew,” died of scurvy.
Parr’s journey saved the others. Travelling light, stumbling over the loose rubble-ice and circling round the huge pressure ridges, he managed to reach the Alert in less than twenty-three hours, so exhausted that when he knocked on Nares’s door, his captain at first failed to recognize him.
Nares at once sent an advance party out by dogteam. They reached Markham’s crew on June 9. A larger rescue party arrived the following day. By the time the survivors reached the ship, only three of Markham’s original fifteen men were still able to walk.
Aldrich, who had already sent one sledge back, was also facing a race with death; Nares realized that when he saw the condition of Markham’s party. He shot off another team to the west, where they found only Aldrich and three others capable of working. Two men were hobbling along behind the sledges that carried the remaining four. The snow was so deep that the rescuers, without the assistance of snowshoes, were forced to crawl through it on their hands and knees.
The Alert itself had not escaped the disease. By late June, only nine of fifty-three crew members were fit for work. The rest were either coming down with scurvy or recovering from it. “How is it,” Nares asked in his journal, “that the curse of the Arctic regions … has not been properly reported on by any captain on his return, and so by drawing the attention of the authorities to the fact, obtain a change of diet? No Arctic ships should have an ounce of salt meat on board.”
He noticed that the officers suffered less from scurvy than the men, undoubtedly because the officers’ mess was supplied with food they had bought privately – butter, milk, eggs, cheese, jams, rice, hams, tongues, and vegetables. Nares, realizing this, turned over his own personal supplies to the worst of the sufferers.
To the south, Lieutenant Lewis Beaumont’s Greenland sledging party from the Discovery was suffering exactly the same fate as those of Aldrich and Markham. Beaumont had read something about scurvy in M’Clintock’s account of Hobson’s sufferings during the voyage of the Fox, and the diet aboard the Nares ships should have alerted him to the danger. During Nares’s seventeen-month voyage, his crew would have only thirty-four days of fresh provisions; for one three-month period they had none. But even when one of his men, J.S. Hand, began to show serious symptoms of the disease a fortnight after the departure, Beaumont waited another three days before he was convinced that Hand was scorbutic – a truth that he too kept from his sledgemates.
Reluctantly, Beaumont sent Hand and half the party back to the ship. Hand died on June 3 before they reached it. By then, with the remaining crew members also in the throes of the disease, a “mournful and disappointed” Beaumont was already heading back, fearful that he would be unable to reach help in time.
Beaumont’s journey was the most remarkable of all the sledging trips undertaken by the British Arctic Expedition that spring. The men became so exhausted that even Beaumont, the strongest of the group, was forced to throw away his belt and knife because he found them too heavy to carry. Forty-five years later, another Arctic explorer, the ethnologist Knud Rasmussen, was to write of Beaumont’s secondary sledge party under Lieutenant Reginald Fulford, which trekked from Repulse Haven to Petermann Fiord: “How they managed to pull the sledges up Gap Valley … is a perfect riddle to all of us who have looked at the stony pass.… We others can only bow our heads to those who did it.” Others who followed in Beaumont’s tracks in later years were amazed at the Royal Navy’s refusal to use dogs. Beaumont took thirty-two days to reach Sherard Osborn Fiord in Greenland from the tip of Ellesmere using manhauled sledges. Three decades later, George Borup, a young college graduate on the Peary North Pole expedition, made the same trip by dogteam in just eight days.
At the very last moment, on June 22, Beaumont was saved by a relief party that included the ship’s doctor and Hans Hendrik. Beaumont credited Hans’s skill as a dog driver with getting the invalids to Polaris Bay. Here, at Hall’s old wintering spot (Thank God Harbor), a makeshift hospital had been set up, and here one more man died. Several of the others were close to death but recovered, again because of the fresh meat provided by Hans, the hunter.
Although he was expected to remain in the Arctic until 1877, Nares realized that his exhausted, scurvy-ridden crews couldn’t survive another winter. At the end of July, he blasted a channel through the ice with torpedoes loaded with gunpowder and headed south to a rendezvous with the Discovery. There the wisdom of his decision to return to England was confirmed by news of more scurvy. As soon as Beaumont’s crews returned, the two ships started south.
On September 9, at Cape Isabella, they discovered a cache of letters left by Sir Alle
n Young, who had made two attempts to communicate with them. Young’s main purpose was to try to get through the North West Passage in his yacht Pandora by way of Peel Sound and also to find any overlooked relics of the Franklin expedition. His two journeys in 1875 and 1876, the first partially funded by Lady Franklin, were failures. In 1875, he was blocked, as so many others had been, by the ice in Peel Sound. The following year he was diverted from his goal by an Admiralty request to bring back news of the Nares expedition. He found one of Nares’s records on the Cary Islands in 1875 and another at Littleton Island on his second trip. By the time the two expeditions came together on October 6, 1876, in Davis Strait, all three ships were headed for home, each having failed to accomplish its objective. No one had yet taken a ship through the Passage, and no one had yet planted his country’s flag on the North Pole.
3 The scapegoat
The Nares Expedition reached England on November 2, 1876, to learn that Lady Franklin had died at the age of eighty-three, less than two months after its departure from Portsmouth. She had not lived to see the monument to her husband she had commissioned; it was unveiled in Westminster Abbey a fortnight after her death. It was, as the inscription said, “erected by Jane, his widow, who, after long waiting, and sending many in search of him, herself departed to seek and to find him in the realms of light.…”
It was truly the end of an era. Allen Young, the last British navigator to attempt the North West Passage, was back in England, and so was George Nares, the last of the Royal Navy’s Arctic adventurers. Nares returned to what he described as “a warm and hearty reception … notwithstanding the somewhat natural disappointment that the North Pole had not been reached.” The Queen herself sent the ship’s company an immediate note of congratulation in which she extended sympathy for “the hardships and sufferings they have endured,” and lamented “the loss of life which has occurred.” The usual round of banquets followed. Nares was awarded the Founder’s Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society and presented with a gold watch for achieving his farthest north. A special Arctic medal was struck for the crews. All the officers but one were promoted. Only the commander himself failed to receive the broad stripe of a flag officer. For in spite of all the shouts of approval, the expedition had been a disappointment. The public had been oversold on the North Pole – an indication that the world was entering an era when the power of the press to sense and then swing public opinion had become a fact of life. In England, the periodicals and newspapers had first echoed the general distaste for further polar adventures and then, when attitudes changed, had inflated the general desire for an Imperial triumph until the government was forced to act. Now it swung the other way. The Admiralty, the RGS, and the press were all at fault, but it was George Nares who got most of the blame.
The Arctic Grail Page 49