The Arctic Grail

by Pierre Berton

  Pavy’s contract terminated on July 20. He announced he did not intend to renew it but would continue to attend to the men’s medical needs free of charge until the expedition returned to the United States. Greely was outraged. He ordered the doctor to turn over all his official observations and memoranda to be sealed and kept for the Chief Signal Officer, as the original instructions provided. Pavy bluntly refused. He claimed his journal had no scientific value and contained only “personal and intimate thoughts … of an entirely private character.” That wasn’t entirely true, but there were some personal and intimate thoughts – those that criticized Greely and some of the others.

  Greely put Pavy under arrest. Pavy blustered. Greely remained firm. He would not confine him, he said – the party needed a doctor – but he was determined to charge him with disobedience to orders and place him before a court-martial when the expedition returned.

  He had a more pressing concern. What if the relief ship should again be blocked by ice? Before sailing, he had worked out a careful plan for that eventuality. If the relief ship didn’t get through in 1882, she was to deposit supplies on the western shores of Kennedy Channel. These he could pick up if he was forced to retreat down the eastern coastline of Grinnell Land. He had laid out similarly detailed instructions for the failure of a second relief expedition in 1883, fully expecting that additional caches would be left at specific points both at Cape Sabine and farther north in the area of Cape Bache. In addition, the relief ship was to leave a depot of provisions at Littleton Island on the Greenland side, directly across the twenty-three-mile channel from Cape Sabine. Here a winter station would be established. Men with telescopes would search the shoreline of Ellesmere daily looking for the Greely party as it made its way south.

  Greely had no real worries about supplies. With the depots he himself had established on the way north, he expected to find seven caches along the coastline. His orders were to leave Fort Conger by September 1, 1883, if the relief ship failed to appear. If necessary he could winter near the depot at Cape Sabine – a rock island 245 miles to the south, just off the Ellesmere coast at the head of Smith Sound. The relief party in winter quarters at Littleton Island would be able to cross the channel to help them, or, if the weather was right, his own party could make its way to the island by open boat and steam launch.

  Greely didn’t intend to wait until the September deadline. He had long since decided to leave for the south in early August if no ship appeared. He was convinced he would meet it somewhere along the Ellesmere coast, probably only a few miles south of Fort Conger.

  Hindsight suggests that it would have been better to stay put. Game was plentiful in the area of Lady Franklin Bay, but conditions were quite different farther south. Adolphus Greely of course had no way of knowing the tragedy that was being forced on him by events over which he had no control. And so, on August 9, 1883, in two open boats and the steam launch, the party set off through the jostling ice pack on the second stage of its long ordeal.

  2 Abandoned

  The two attempts that were made to reach the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition in the summers of 1882 and 1883 were characterized by bureaucratic bungling, vague and often contradictory orders, and flawed planning.

  The supply ship Neptune set off for the North in the summer of 1882, carrying more than eight tons of provisions for Greely and his party. The man in charge of the expedition – but not of the ship – was Private William Beebe, private secretary to General William Babcock Hazen, the Chief Signal Officer and Greely’s superior. Beebe had asked for a promotion to sergeant “or better still … lieutenant,” but that request was denied. (He was later damned in the press as a man that Hazen “knew to be an habitual drunkard.”)

  The Neptune deposited two small caches of 250 rations, one on the Ellesmere coastline, the other at Littleton Island off Greenland. It struggled for forty days to get through the pack at Kane Basin and then returned to St. John’s with a ton of canned meats, an equal amount of fruit, and some six tons of seal meat, all of which might have been left for the retreating Greely party. Poor Beebe could not be blamed; he was following the general’s orders to bring back the rest of the supplies if the ship couldn’t get through. A more experienced officer with a higher rank might have acted on his own. Private Beebe did as he was told.

  Henrietta Greely, the explorer’s young wife, did her best to “simulate calmness,” as she told James Lockwood’s mother, after she learned that the Neptune had failed to reach the party. After all, her husband’s expedition was provisioned for three years and, with the fresh game available and with careful rationing, could probably hold out for four. As far as she knew there would be no debilitating sledge journeys toward the Pole; these men were to remain at Fort Conger doing scientific work. All the same, with the help of the senior Lockwood – he was, after all, a general – she was doing some lobbying behind the scenes in Washington for a better-equipped and better-led expedition in 1883.

  Mrs. Greely had long since come to terms with her husband’s obsession with the Arctic. It had been an obstacle to their marriage in 1878, when Dolph Greely was trying vainly to help his friend Howgate set up a North Pole expedition. “I could not think of going without you were my wife,” he had written to her. “I should suffer untold agony while gone in thinking of you … I could not endure it! You must say that we will have a few months of happiness and of each other.”

  She had been torn, then. “Are not your ambition and pride guiding you to the exclusion of all other thought?” she asked him. She would rather be his wife than the widow of a dead hero, she declared. “I am not Lady Franklin. My spirit may be willing but my flesh is weak.” Fortunately for her, the Howgate expedition came to nothing. They were married in June 1878. She bore him two children, made her peace with his ambitions, and, in the finest tradition of Arctic exploration, presented him when he left with a silk flag she had personally embroidered, to be placed on lands unknown.

  Now, in the winter of 1882-83, she began to read the journals of Kane, Hayes, and other Arctic explorers until, like Lady Franklin, she became as knowledgeable about the frozen world as those who had dispatched her husband to examine it.

  Her efforts and those of the Lockwood family bore fruit. They had chosen the Proteus as the best possible vessel to reach the expedition. Its skipper, Captain Pike, was a veteran of forty years in the sealing fields. Two years earlier he had taken the Proteus to Lady Franklin Bay. Now, under the same master, the sealer and its crew of Newfoundlanders were the Army’s ideal choice to repeat the voyage. The Navy supplied an escort vessel, the Yantic, to accompany her. The Yantic wasn’t strong enough to invade the main pack, but she could act as a supply ship and, if necessary, an auxiliary rescue vessel.

  The Secretary of War, Robert Todd Lincoln, son of the murdered president, wanted to clear up the whole embarrassing mess as quickly as possible. He had always been lukewarm to Arctic exploration. Now he was being harried by the press not only for the failure of the Neptune but also for his inability to bring Greely’s old comrade, the would-be Arctic explorer Captain Henry Howgate, to justice. Shortly after Greely left for the North, Howgate was discovered to have embezzled $200,000 in Army funds, which he squandered on a paramour. Unfortunately, he had managed to escape custody and was now at large with a covey of Pinkerton detectives vainly trying to find him.

  Even worse was the sobering news that trickled in from the Jeannette expedition, a tragic failure that had cost the lives of a dozen men, including its commander, George De Long. Early in the fall of 1879, the vessel had been trapped and held in thrall by the ice pack beyond Wrangel Island, an experience that convinced De Long the theory of a warm gateway to the Arctic was “a delusion and a snare.” For the next twenty-two months, the ship remained in the grip of the ice, which bore it slowly north and west along the Siberian coast until it was finally crushed and destroyed. The crew of thirty-three left the foundering vessel in three open boats and set off on a dreadful Odyssey through the i
ce-choked Eastern Passage, the mainland several hundred miles away. After two months the boats became separated. One was lost in a gale; the other two landed at separate points in the bewildering maze of the Lena Delta in central Siberia. One party managed to find a native village and was eventually rescued. The other, led by De Long, perished on the tundra from starvation and exhaustion.

  The subsequent naval inquiry in the winter and spring of 1882-83 (to be followed by a congressional inquiry) had turned up the usual stories of dissension, insubordination, rival cliques, plotted mutiny, and threats of court-martial – “a spirit of turmoil,” one survivor called it – that were familiar to Arctic veterans but served to tarnish the glamour that had once captured the public. Small wonder, then, that Secretary Lincoln, and indeed the president himself, had little stomach for further Arctic adventure. All they wanted to do was get the whole imbroglio over as quickly as possible.

  This time, the man in charge of the Greely relief expedition would be no office clerk but a career Army officer. Lieutenant Ernest A. Garlington was a thirty-year-old West Point graduate, “sober, persistent and able,” in General Hazen’s estimation. Hazen was positively ebullient about the success of the expedition. “Everything that the most careful study and close attention could devise has been attended to and will be availed of,” he told the press. And to Henrietta Greely, he declared, “I am confident everything will go right.”

  Everything, in fact, went wrong. The Proteus was to be loaded with enough provisions to last forty men fifteen months, but Garlington and his crew were not on hand to supervise loading of these supplies onto the relief ship when she reached St. John’s. Instead, they were shipped out of New York on the Alhambra on June 7 in charge of a young, newly married sergeant named Wall. Garlington and the rest of his men did not leave until four days later on the Yantic. Garlington had urged that they travel with the provisions, but that request was turned down on the grounds that discipline would be easier to maintain aboard a naval vessel.

  When the Alhambra reached Halifax, Wall quit, having, it was said, been “injured by an accident”; a more believable suggestion was that he was eager to be back with his bride. Since no one from Garlington’s crew was present when the supplies were unloaded from the Alhambra at St. John’s and stowed aboard the Proteus, nobody knew exactly where anything was. To reach the meteorological instruments, for instance, the stores had to be broken into. The location of the guns and ammunition was never pinpointed, a delinquency that was to have serious consequences.

  General Hazen appeared to harbour the belief that Greely was running short of supplies at Fort Conger. His orders to Garlington stressed haste. “Lieutenant Greely’s supplies will be exhausted during the coming fall, and unless the relief ship can reach him he will be forced, with his party, to retreat southward by land before the winter sets in.”

  Actually, Greely had gone north with enough provisions to last three years and enough coffee, beans, sugar, and salt to last four and a half years. In addition he had, at the outset, three months’ supply of fresh muskox meat, which could certainly be added to by the hunters in his party. The expedition could easily have remained at Fort Conger for another year in relative comfort and reasonably good health if Greely had not been ordered specifically to get out by September 1; and Greely was the kind of man who was a stickler for orders.

  “… no effort must be spared to push the vessel through to Lady Franklin Bay,” was Hazen’s written order to Garlington. He took this to mean that he shouldn’t stop for anything – not for the slower Yantic, not to unload supplies at Littleton Island, not to pause on the way north to unload more supplies, not even to replenish existing caches on the coast of Ellesmere Island.

  There was ambiguity here. For one thing, Garlington was told that the Proteus and the Yantic must stick together as far as Littleton Island, where the Yantic was to await his return – that would force him to wait for the slower vessel. And, though he wasn’t told to stop on the way – the orders suggested the opposite – if he did stop, then he was to examine the depots for damage and, if necessary, replenish them. But the emphasis was on haste. If he couldn’t get through, the orders read, he was to return to Littleton Island, unload his supplies, and search the opposite coastline for signs of Greely’s party.

  To add to the confusion, Garlington found included in the envelope that contained his orders a second memorandum that seemed to contradict Hazen’s instructions. This one told him he should unload supplies at Littleton Island en route north and also at the various coastal depots. If the Proteus foundered, the Yantic was to bring the survivors back to Littleton Island. But the Yantic was given more leeway to go her own way if the ice conditions became too dangerous. This sensible memorandum, the result of some equally sensible afterthought – none of it officially approved – had been tacked onto Garlington’s instructions as the result of a clerical error. Garlington questioned it: was it part of the official order? he asked. He was told it was not. That helped save Garlington’s skin in the inquiry that followed.

  He did not wait for the Yantic. He left St. John’s on June 29 and pushed directly on to Godhavn on Disco Island off the Greenland coast. The Yantic limped along far in the wake of Proteus – as well adapted for the ice, in the words of one observer, “as a Brooklyn ferry boat” – and then, with her boilers giving out, stopped at Upernavik for a week of repairs.

  Garlington, in the Proteus, blocked by the ice pack in Kane Basin, crossed Smith Sound and entered Payer Harbour off Cape Sabine on July 22. Here were two caches, one left by Beebe near the point of the cape the previous year and, on a small island about half a mile from the Proteus’s anchorage, another left by the Nares expedition in 1875. The Beebe cache was found and repaired, but in the four and a half hours that the Proteus stayed at Cape Sabine, no extra provisions were landed, even though these were easily available, having been stowed on board at Godhavn in separate packages especially for this purpose. Garlington’s almost frantic insistence on getting under way frustrated any chance of leaving a substantial cache of food and fuel for the Greely party, which would, within a fortnight, begin its long struggle with the ice down the Ellesmere coastline.

  From the shore, the impetuous Garlington thought he saw an open lane of water leading north. He hurried aboard the ship and ordered Captain Pike to get moving. Pike demurred. It was too early in the season, he insisted: what Garlington had seen was no more than the ice shifting with the tide. Garlington was stubborn. Unless the Proteus moved, he insisted, “he should not consider himself as performing his duty to the people at Lady Franklin Bay or the United States Government.” And so a veteran of forty years of Arctic service was overruled by a thirty-year-old landlubber. The Proteus weighed anchor and headed out of the harbour. Fifteen minutes later she entered the loose pack.

  She was a sturdy ship, built for the ice, but a decade in the sealing grounds had taken its toll. Her boilers were defective, two of her lifeboats unseaworthy, her rigging old, and her compass untrustworthy. The captain’s twenty-one-year-old son was first mate; it was his first time in the Arctic. The second mate was the captain’s cousin. The chief engineer had just been promoted to that post when the ship sailed. But even a new ship with an experienced crew could not have survived the beating the Proteus took the following afternoon.

  She had tried to bull her way through a barrier of pack ice toward an open lane without success. Heavy floes, some ten feet thick, were pouring south through the narrow passage of Smith Sound. In the nip that followed at three o’clock, the sealer was in the worst possible position, headed east-west, so that the ice caught her amidships. Gripped in a hammer-lock between the pressure of the advancing ice and the unyielding barrier of the shore pack, she had no chance. Her starboard rail was crushed to matchwood at 4:30 p.m.

  By this time Garlington and some of his men were desperately trying to untangle the jumble of stores in her hold. Another party at the forepeak was trying to save the parcels of prepared rations taken
on in Greenland. These they hurled overboard onto the encroaching floes. A third of them tumbled into the sea and were lost.

  Suddenly, the ship’s sides burst open as a flood of ice and seawater poured into the bunkers and the hold. The ship stayed afloat, caught and held by the pressure of the ice against her, until 7:30, when the tide turned and she began to sink. By then the scene on the floes was chaotic.

  Everything had to be abandoned, including the sledges and the dogs that were to have been used to succour the Greely party. There had been no boat drill; it was every man for himself. The Newfoundland sealers were interested only in saving themselves and their kits. With the ship foundering, their contracts came to an end, and they had no further responsibility to any but themselves. Now they began to plunder the relief expedition’s supplies, rifling open boxes on the ice for clothing and food. There was nothing Garlington could do, for his fourteen soldiers were weaponless. All the guns and ammunition had been stowed heiter skelter in the hold in St. John’s.

  Pike could not control his own crew. “You’ve got a lot of men,” he told Garlington ruefully. “But I’ve got a lot of dirty dogs who are too mean to live.” All Garlington could do was to try to prevent a confrontation by keeping his group at a distance from the “pirates and scoundrels” on the ice.