The Arctic Grail

by Pierre Berton

  The attitude of the magazine Navy was typical. In 1875 it had bubbled with enthusiasm for the venture: “As we hope, so we believe that they will end their northward advance only at the northernmost meeting of the meridians; that they will return in safety to receive well-won applause and reward for their achievements; and that they will have very much to tell of the circum-polar region, as well as of their hoisting the Union Jack upon the Pole.”

  In December 1876, the same journal launched a savage attack on both the Admiralty and George Nares: “… the nation has cause to blush at the manner in which the very best of opportunities of reaching the North Pole has been frittered away, and at the ridiculous figure which the First Lord of the Admiralty must cut in the eyes of foreign nations.” In the magazine’s view, the expedition was a glaring failure. It urged a searching inquiry “into the manner in which the management of the Expedition has been conducted,” and it called for a court-martial of Nares himself for, among other misdeeds, an “absence of zeal and determination in abandoning the object of the Expedition,” and for declaring the “Pole ‘impracticable’ without sufficient cause.”

  There was no court-martial, but there was a long and exhaustive public inquiry by the Admiralty into the causes of scurvy. The five-man committee included Richard Collinson and Edward Inglefield, both of whom by this time had achieved flag rank. The inquiry began on January 10, 1877, and continued until February 28. It subpoenaed fifty witnesses, twenty-one of whom had been members of the expedition. It was looking for a scapegoat, and it found one in Nares, who was censured for not providing his sledging crews with fresh lime juice. Yet the sworn evidence made it clear that Nares had never been ordered to make that provision; that sledging parties on previous expeditions, including M’Clintock’s, hadn’t carried lime (or lemon) juice; and that the director general of the Navy’s own medical department, Sir Alexander Armstrong, hadn’t recommended it. Armstrong had, in fact, declared at the outset that there would be no possibility of scurvy during the first winter and no widespread scurvy unless the expedition remained in the Arctic for a third winter. It was also made clear that there was no way to carry bottles of lime juice on an open sledge; it had never been done because in freezing, the juice expanded and broke the containers.

  Then why had so many of the previous sledging expeditions been freer, apparently, of the disease? In Nares’s view, they hadn’t been; it was simply that the expedition leaders in those days confused the signs of scurvy with physical exhaustion. The expression used in the published journals was that the men were greatly “debilitated.”

  “I am certain,” Nares told the committee, “that what is reported in the official papers as being an attack of debility was most decidedly the same as our attack by a more advanced form of scurvy, and had our men returned after about thirty days’ travelling we should probably have officially reported that merely a slight attack of debility had been experienced.” In 1854, for example, Kellett had reported to Belcher that only thirty of his ninety men were fit for service, together with only half his officers.

  The great puzzle of the Nares fiasco is the dearth of knowledge about scurvy among the naval hierarchy. It is hard to believe that in a century that saw an explosion of scientific research and discovery, no one was inquisitive enough to sort through the mass of available information about the disease and come up with some useful findings. Scurvy had been known for centuries. The Laurentian Indians of Canada were familiar with it and had saved Jacques Cartier’s life in 1536 with an infusion of white cedar bark. John Ross and others had testified before the middle of the century to the value of fresh meat, but the Royal Navy went on providing salt meat to its crews.

  It was not then known, nor did it come out in the evidence, that the lime juice used as an antiscorbutic was far less effective than the lemon juice with which the earlier expeditions had been provided. As for potatoes, another known antiscorbutic, there had not been a proper storage room aboard ship for them. The officers’ private stocks had delayed or prevented the affliction.

  Modern research shows that scurvy is brought on by a lack of Vitamin C, which cannot be stored in the body but must be ingested regularly. The daily minimum needed to saturate the body and thus prevent or cure the disease runs between seventy and one hundred milligrams. If antiscorbutics are not taken regularly after the body is saturated, it will quickly lose its Vitamin C content, and the first symptoms of scurvy will appear in twenty-five to thirty weeks. On the Alert and the Discovery, the daily intake of Vitamin C per man is estimated at between 3.2 and 5.5 milligrams a day – an ineffectual dosage. Thus scurvy was present long before the sledge crews set out on journeys of seventy days or more. When no antiscorbutics were available and the workload was killing, the ravages quickly became apparent.

  The committee looked into other aspects of the Nares fiasco. John Rae’s evidence on dogs, snow houses, snowshoes, and native clothing was especially revealing, although later events suggest it went unheeded.

  The expedition was ultimately judged a failure because it did not do the impossible. One of the inquiry’s chief findings was negative: the Smith Sound route, Nares claimed (wrongly, as it turned out), was not the best route to the Pole. Yet, unlike Hall and Kane, Nares had brought all his collections and notes safely home. His scientific observations – astronomical, geological, and botanical – were immensely valuable and resulted in no fewer than forty articles and published reports in the years that followed. Aldrich’s charts of the northern Ellesmere coast were the only ones available for fifty years until aerial photography came into its own.

  The Nares expedition established an abiding territorial claim, one that was to prove significant in a later century when two major powers would face each other across the polar wastes. Because of its explorations, British and ultimately Canadian sovereignty in the High Arctic was eventually established. In spite of later American and Scandinavian expeditions that built on Nares’s discoveries, Ellesmere Island is part of Canada today. The British flag placed on the very tip of the island by scurvy-ridden men gave the mother country, and ultimately her dominion, unquestioned ownership of that forbidding and perilous terrain.

  This was the last Royal Navy expedition to the Arctic. Not until the winter of 1934-35 did the British return to the High North. Instead, the Admiralty focused its attention on another frozen world – and with even more tragic results when “Scott of the Antarctic,” ignoring the value of dogs, manhauled his sledges towards another Pole, only to be beaten by a thorough professional who survived in an environment where amateurs, no matter how enthusiastic, sicken and sometimes die.

  Chapter Eleven

  1

  The polar virus

  2

  Abandoned

  3

  No turning back

  4

  Starvation winter

  5

  The eleventh hour

  Rescue of the Greely survivors in their collapsed tent (illustration credit 11.1)

  1 The polar virus

  As the Nares expedition was setting off for Smith Sound in the summer of 1875, a young Austrian scientist and naval lieutenant, Karl Weyprecht, fresh from his discovery of Franz Josef Land off northern Russia, began a campaign of his own. Simply put, Weyprecht’s scheme was to strip the glamour and romance from polar exploration and concentrate exclusively on scientific matters.

  It was, of course, an ingenuous idea. Explorers, almost by definition, are romantics; it is the very glamour of the quest that lures them on, not the laborious collection of geological or botanical data. The mass of scientific evidence collected since Parry’s day was merely a byproduct of the ardent pursuit of the Unknown. Not only the explorers but even the hardest-headed of the scientists who accompanied the polar sorties were seduced by the spell of the Arctic and the need to move deeper and deeper into that mysterious and often magical realm. Weyprecht was right when he argued that the race for new discoveries – the search for the Passage and the Pole – had
taken precedence over solid research.

  His plan, which he proposed to a meeting of the German Scientific and Medical Association at Graz, was to forget matters of national prestige and personal ambition and to organize a carefully integrated international program of observation and analysis during the polar night of the Arctic and Antarctic that might lead to discoveries that would benefit mankind. This laudable proposal met with some opposition, but Weyprecht persisted over the next four years. He had history on his side, for this was, in a real sense, a golden age of applied scientific development. In those four years, the telephone, the typewriter, the electric light bulb, and the phonograph all came into their own. The world was dazzled by a burst of technical accomplishment – from the player piano to the carpet sweeper, from dryplate photography to the four-cycle gasoline engine. Science was seen to work; it was obvious now that it could improve the quality of life. Who could tell what new wonders might emerge from the laboratories of America or even from the makeshift observatories set up on the naked tundra of a remote Arctic island?

  In 1879, Weyprecht’s ideas were adopted by the International Polar Conference in Hamburg. That led, in 1882-83, to the establishment of the first International Polar Year, in which eleven nations were pledged to establish fifteen new observation stations in the Arctic and Antarctic.

  The remotest station of all would be at Lady Franklin Bay, where George Nares’s second ship, Discovery, had wintered in 1875-76. This would be the United States’ contribution to the great international undertaking. On those barren shores, twenty-four men and two Eskimos, all under U.S. Army command, would carry out scientific observations for the good of humanity. There was, of course, another, less publicized purpose. In spite of Karl Weyprecht’s high-minded pursuit of science, the expedition’s task was to try to reach the Pole, or, at the very least, to beat the British record and plant the Stars and Stripes on a new Farthest North. Thus the stage was set for the most appalling tragedy since the loss of John Franklin and his men.

  At the same time another polar tragedy was in the making. On July 8, 1879, the 420-ton barque-rigged coal burner, Jeannette, steamed out of San Francisco Bay under the command of a thirty-five-year-old naval veteran, Lieutenant George Washington De Long, who had taken part in the search for Charles Hall’s Polaris. De Long was convinced that he could reach the North Pole by way of the Bering Sea. McClure’s and Collinson’s explorations should have convinced him that the permanent pack they had encountered off the Beaufort Sea would make such an excursion dubious. But De Long had been seduced by the theories of the noted German geographer August Petermann, the so-called “sage of Gotha,” an armchair scientist who was convinced that a current of warm water from the Pacific led north through Bering Strait to a tepid basin – another version of the Open Polar Sea theory.

  The expedition was under naval discipline but was financed by the flamboyant New York Herald publisher, James Gordon Bennett, who hoped that the impetuous De Long would do for him in the Arctic what an earlier explorer had done for him in Africa: De Long would become another Stanley; his Livingstone would be the Pole itself. As De Long’s wife, Emma, put it, “the polar virus was in his blood and would not let him rest.”

  The Jeannette had last been seen by the homebound Pacific whaling fleet east of Wrangel Land – a mysterious realm that some thought stretched like a bridge to the Pole itself. (It was actually an island.) That was in September 1879. Now it was June 1881, and nothing had been heard or seen of the missing ship for twenty-two months. Some doubts, in fact, had been cast on her seaworthiness.

  Before it left, the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition, as it was officially named, was given a secondary task – to search for any clues to the Jeannette in the ice-bound waters north of Ellesmere Island. There was an element of unofficial competition here: both the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Army had mounted expeditions to seek the Pole. Now the Army had been ordered to search out and perhaps rescue the missing naval vessel. The bluecoats of the senior service would have been less than human if that had not rankled.

  The Army officer selected to take charge of this ambitious undertaking was a studious, straight-backed New England puritan named Adolphus Washington Greely, who, characteristically, preferred to use his initials “A. W.” He was thirty-eight years old, a wiry, six-foot-one-inch veteran of the Civil War, bearded and bespectacled, well read but humourless, and a stickler for military discipline. Indeed, he was something of a martinet, an indication, perhaps, of an inner insecurity that would make itself felt in the ordeal to come. His creed was the work ethic. He did not countenance gambling for money; he allowed no frivolity on Sunday; he permitted no profane language among his men.

  He was brave – he had shown that during his Civil War service; but he could also be irritable, and he didn’t like to be crossed. He had a strong sense of his position as a commissioned officer and of the importance of maintaining a gap between himself and his enlisted men. Although he was not imaginative, he was ambitious. He wanted the Arctic posting badly, and he got it through the help of Captain Henry Howgate, a fellow officer in the Signal Corps, who had also been infected by the polar virus. Howgate, in fact, had tried unsuccessfully to mount an Arctic expedition of his own, with Greely’s help. Neither man had ever been to the Arctic – nor had any of the officers and soldiers who would accompany Greely north – but Greely had devoured every book and journal he could find that dealt with the polar regions. He felt he had some useful experience, for he had survived a devastating three-day blizzard in the Sioux country of the American West. Clearly, the Army felt he was the best they could supply to establish a scientific station on Lady Franklin Bay. Of Greely’s twenty-four followers, half were officers or non-commissioned officers, an indication of the importance the Army placed on the expedition.

  The ship that would take this party north and deposit it on the inhospitable shores of Ellesmere Island was a 467-ton sealer, the Proteus, a rugged steamer built of oak and ironwood. Early in July, 1881, she reached St. John’s, where the native Newfoundlanders, long since accustomed to polar parties shifting back and forth through their capital, showed a marked lack of interest in her departure. She crossed the treacherous Melville Bay in a record thirty-six hours – a remarkable feat – and reached her destination on August 11.

  Greely had already written a last letter to his wife, Henrietta, which the Proteus would carry back: “I think of you always and most continually. I wonder what you and the darling babes are doing. I desire continually you and your society, our home and its comforts. I am content at being here only that I hope from and through it the future may be made brighter and happier for you and the children. Will it? We will so hope and trust. There seems so little outside of you and the babes that is of any real and true value to me.…”

  Now here he was, as far from civilization as it was possible to get, almost a thousand miles north of the Arctic Circle, six hundred miles south of the Pole, living with two dozen followers in a barren hut named Fort Conger and facing, on that very first night, the same tensions that Hall and Kane had encountered and that the American government had hoped to forestall.

  Both of his lieutenants, James B. Lockwood and Frederick Kislingbury, had been in the habit of lying in bed long after breakfast call when the enlisted men were up and about. Greely resented this and gave both men a dressing down. When Lockwood admitted his delinquency and promised to reform, Greely forgave him, although the promised reform took several weeks. But the other lie-abed, Kislingbury, took Greely’s words in bad part, and that Greely couldn’t abide. When Kislingbury continued to sleep in, Greely, nervous about his command, brought matters to a head in an acrimonious encounter that ended when Kislingbury asked to be recalled.

  Obviously, there was more to it than that. Kislingbury, a veteran of fifteen years’ Army service, eight on the frontier, had been the first to volunteer. He had lost two wives in three years and was now the single father of four small boys. The trip, he said, was “a Godsend … a wonde
rful chance to wear out my second terrible sorrow.” Now he was throwing it all away. Obviously he felt he could not get along with his commander.

  But Kislingbury had left his decision too late. The Proteus had unloaded her stores and was ready to leave as soon as the ice blocking the harbour cleared. On August 26, noticing that the way to the sea was open, the captain, in ignorance of Kislingbury’s resignation, steamed off, leaving Kislingbury making his way across the ice toward the ship.

  It was an unfortunate turn of events. Greely now had a supernumerary on his hands, a man who had resigned his command, who could be given no work of any kind, and who actively despised him. The feeling was mutual, aggravated by the close conditions under which all would suffer. It was one of those foolish standoffs that sometimes make grown men act like small boys. Greely needed Kislingbury. Kislingbury needed to be an active member of the company; all he had to do was swallow his pride and apply for reinstatement. Greely clearly expected this, but it didn’t happen. All Greely had to do was offer reinstatement and Kislingbury would have jumped at it. Many months later, when both men were at the end of their tether, Greely relented. But for most of that long time of troubles, neither would unbend.