A worse concern faced him. He realized that Greely would arrive at Cape Sabine to find that the promised provisions had not been placed in the cache. With Pike’s help he persuaded four seamen to go with some of his men in a whaleboat and deposit five hundred individual rations on the nearest point of land, about three miles west of the Cape. These would last Greely’s party of twenty-five no more than three weeks.
What was he to do? The previous spring, the young cavalry officer had been out in the Dakotas. Now here he was, a man with no experience at sea, caught in the centre of the ice-choked channel, responsible not only for the men under his immediate command but also for the beleaguered party threading its way down the Ellesmere coast.
He had several choices. He could stay at Cape Sabine and wait for Greely, meanwhile eating up the supplies. He could head north, looking for Greely, a foolhardy course that he immediately dismissed. Or he could seek out the Yantic, which had plenty of provisions, leave two or three men with the Yantic’s supplies at Littleton Island to maintain a lookout for the lost party, and hustle back to St. John’s with the others to arrange for a new ship and more provisions.
He opted for the last course, but with apprehension. Although his orders were to rendezvous with the Yantic at Littleton Island, Garlington couldn’t believe that the little ship could make it across Melville Bay, that notoriously dangerous stretch of water that had once cost Leopold M’Clintock a year’s delay. It would make more sense, Garlington thought, to go in search of the Yantic. Thus was set in motion a series of mischances that might be called a comedy of errors had the results not been so tragic.
The shipwrecked party crossed Smith Sound – the Proteus’s crew in three of the ship’s lifeboats, the soldiers in two whaleboats – and reached Littleton Island on the morning of July 26. The Yantic had not yet arrived, and Garlington didn’t believe it would. With only his own rations saved from the Proteus, he could leave nothing for Greely but a message. That done, he hurried south seeking his consort.
Contrary to Garlington’s supposition, the Yantic had crossed the unpredictable Melville Bay without difficulty and was steaming steadily north. A series of rendezvous points had been arranged along the Greenland coast. One of these was the Cary Islands, some twenty miles west of the mainland. Garlington, who knew nothing of navigation, decided to by-pass this meeting place because he felt the approaches were too hazardous to make a safe landing. In doing so he overruled his more experienced second-in-command, Lieutenant J.C. Colwell. Thus he missed the Yantic, which that very day was putting in to the same rendezvous point. Not finding any message, her commander continued to steam north, passing Garlington’s party in the fog. That mischance finally doomed the Greely party to a winter of starvation.
The near-misses continued. The Yantic reached Littleton Island where its commander, Frank Wildes, learned that Garlington had left for the south. He steamed after him, neglecting to leave any supplies or message for Greely. When he landed at the Cary Islands he found no trace of Garlington and so went back north again, still seeking his elusive quarry. At one point, the Yantic was within four hours’ steaming distance of Garlington’s five boats, but the two parties failed to meet.
At Northumberland Island, Wildes found the remains of Garlington’s camp – the first clue as to his current whereabouts. He decided to turn south again to Cape York, another of the rendezvous points, but as his fuel was low and the situation looked treacherous, when he reached Cape York he decided not to land. The date was August 10; by a maddening coincidence, Garlington’s party had just arrived at that meeting place. But even as they beached their boats and set up camp, the Yantic was heading south toward Upernavik. Wildes reached it on August 12, hoping that Garlington would soon turn up.
Garlington, however, with his shipwrecked crew of sailors and soldiers, was still at Cape York. On August 16, he decided to send the experienced Colwell and a few men in one of the whaleboats to attempt a dash south across the treacherous waters of Melville Bay. He and the others, in the remaining four boats, would creep around the shoreline.
In a remarkable feat of navigation, Colwell reached Upernavik on August 23, only to find that the Yantic, having waited for ten days, had departed. Pausing only long enough to snatch some food and a few hours’ sleep, Colwell borrowed an open launch from the governor and, with his exhausted men straining at the oars, headed south for Godhavn, the Yantic’s next port of call. He reached it and found the Yantic on August 31, having spent fifteen days in an open boat and covered close to nine hundred miles of some of the most treacherous water in the Arctic. Wildes took him and his men aboard the Yantic and returned to Upernavik, where Garlington’s company and the crew of the Proteus were waiting. Thus, after more than a month of cat-and-mouse chase, the two search parties were reunited.
Area of the Greely relief attempts, 1882-84
The survivors of the wrecked ship had come through without the loss of a man; but the relief mission that had brought them to the Kane Basin was a disaster. As General Hazen wrote to Henrietta Greely, it was too late in the season to mount another rescue attempt, but “no effort will be spared to set on foot another expedition at the earliest moment possible.” Somehow Greely and his men would have to try to survive the winter on their own resources. “I hope,” the general told Henrietta, “you will not be needlessly alarmed.”
3 No turning back
On August 9, 1883, just as Garlington and his shipwrecked crew were vainly attempting a rendezvous at Cape York, Adolphus Greely and his men left the barren shores of Lady Franklin Bay and started on their long trek south. They left their dogs behind but did not kill them; they would be needed if the party were forced to return. They also left a winter’s supply of food, albeit a meagre one. Each man was allowed to take no more than eight pounds of clothing and equipment, the officers sixteen. But Greely took more.
In addition to his scientific data, he insisted on bringing his dress uniform, sword, scabbard, and epaulettes, “an emblem of authority,” as he told Lockwood. It was a significant remark, for had Greely been in firm command he would have needed no symbols. But in his attempts to hide his own uncertainties and irresolution he became a different man – imperious, irritable, unbalanced. On the second day out, he attacked the faithful Brainard with an undeserved tirade that astonished the stolid sergeant, who did not believe his commander capable of such profanity.
Like Garlington, Greely, the cavalryman and signal officer, had no idea of how to operate a boat in the ice, nor did any of his men. Only two had any sea training – Private Roderick Schneider, who had once been a seaman, and Sergeant Rice, the photographer, who had been raised on Cape Breton Island. Rice quickly became the hero of the journey. When the yacht, Lady Greely, steamed off into the ice-choked channel, towing three open boats, Rice, perched on the foredeck of the jolly boat Valorous, developed an uncanny ability to spot lanes of open water. For his pains he suffered a series of duckings, which he took with good humour.
Even the gloomy Kislingbury thought the world of Rice, reserving his harshest condemnation for Greely. “Lt. G. controlling things,” he wrote in his diary on August 13. “Poor man he knows nothing about the business, has not sense enough to put a good man like Rice as ice navigator … Lockwood could run things better than he does. We lose more distance, time and coal by his nonsense.”
Kislingbury’s comments might be taken as biased, but there were similar remarks in the diaries of others on that long journey. In order to establish authority, Greely tried to run things himself, refusing to listen to the counsel of others. Even Sergeant Joseph Elison, a more dispassionate observer, was vitriolic, referring to his commander as a “lunatic,” a “miserable fool,” “a fraud [and] a humbug.”
Greely’s temper did not improve when he discovered that Cross, the engineer aboard the yacht, was again getting blind drunk on fuel alcohol filched from the engine room. Greely’s hands were tied: Cross, like Pavy, was essential to the expedition. Then, on August 15, he co
uld stand it no longer; Cross was drunk again and insubordinate to the commander, whom he considered “a shirt tail navigator.” In the bitter altercation that followed, Greely drew his pistol. “Shut up!” he shouted, “or else I put a bullet through you.” At that Cross replied, “Go ahead!” Greely didn’t shoot, but he suspended Cross and replaced him with Julius Frederick.
That same day an extraordinary incident took place that was not revealed until many years later. Everyone in the party was concerned because Greely was insisting on abandoning the launch, hoisting the boats onto an ice floe, and trying to drift nearly three hundred miles south to Littleton Island – an act that Brainard, for one, considered “little short of madness.” On the day of the Cross incident, Pavy, Kislingbury, and Rice came to Brainard with a proposition. Pavy volunteered to examine Greely and pronounce him insane. It would not be difficult, he explained, because the commander’s frequent outbursts without provocation established a prima facie case of dementia.
Pavy said he was prepared to establish the legitimacy of his diagnosis before any later court of inquiry. Once Greely was shown to be incapable of maintaining leadership, he would be deposed and Kislingbury would assume control of the expedition. The party would at once turn about and go back to Fort Conger, spend the winter there, and then sledge south in the spring. If Lockwood refused to acknowledge Kislingbury’s authority, he was to be placed under arrest. But the plotters had to have Brainard on their side. The men respected the senior sergeant and would follow his lead. Without him the plan was doomed.
Brainard was, by this time, almost certain that disaster was inevitable. He, too, thought the party’s best chance was to return to Fort Conger. But Brainard was all Army, and this was mutiny. He was having no part of it. In fact, he said, he would resist any such attempt with his life. Nonetheless, he did not tell Greely, for he knew his obstinate nature and was convinced the commander would immediately put into practice the very plan they were resisting – to drift helplessly south with the polar pack. Brainard disclosed the plot only in 1890 and in doing so made it clear that he was not in any way condemning the plotters, who, he felt, were “impelled by a spirit of devotion to the expedition.” Indeed, he wrote that had the plan been consummated, “it is not at all improbable that every man would have escaped with his life.”
But the plan was abandoned. By August 22, the party had reached the halfway point between Fort Conger and Littleton Island. Now there was no turning back. By August 26, when they arrived at a depot that Nares had left at Cape Hawks, they had only sixty days of provisions left, augmented by 250 pounds of mouldy bread and 165 pounds of potatoes left by the English.
Greely could not understand why there was no sign of the relief vessel. More and more he despaired of reaching Littleton Island. If Cross and Kislingbury are to be believed, he had become benumbed, spending more and more time in his sleeping bag. The flotilla, now trapped in the ice, was drifting helplessly with the pack – a perilous position in which the boats could be crushed or destroyed at any moment. When he overheard Kislingbury discussing this with the men and publicly chafing at the inactivity of his superior, Greely upbraided him for undermining his authority. But on September 9 he did call a council of his officers and senior sergeants and turned the navigation over to Rice.
Their progress had been maddeningly slow. Beset in the ice for fifteen days, they had moved only twenty-two miles. The council decided to abandon the yacht and the jolly boat and haul the other boats and supplies across the ice to the Ellesmere shore, eleven miles to the west. Remarkably, the men unanimously agreed not to jettison the hundred-pound pendulum whose observations, taken at Fort Conger, would have no value unless they could be subsequently repeated with the same instrument. Off the party went – twenty-five men hauling sixty-five hundred pounds across the broken surface of the frozen sea. It was more than they could handle. Two days later the whaleboat also was abandoned.
To move everything one mile the men had to haul for five, shuttling the supplies forward bit by bit. The situation grew more dangerous. Even Brainard was shaken by the roar of the grinding pack to the east, “so terrible that even the bravest cannot appear unconcerned.” The floe they were crossing was not connected to land but drifted helplessly about in the basin. When the wind suddenly shifted, the weary men realized they were being blown back north. By the afternoon of September 15, they had lost fifteen miles and were down to forty days’ rations, together with whatever seal meat the two Eskimo hunters could shoot for them.
In order to prevent a further decline in morale, Greely forbade his meteorologist, young Sergeant Edward Israel, to disclose to the others any observations of latitude. Pavy, meanwhile, was bitterly denouncing his commander, claiming that had his advice been taken the party would have remained safely at Fort Conger. A nasty row ensued, but since the doctor was irreplaceable Greely again could take no action.
The wind changed. The floe spun about and began to drift south again. On September 19, land was spotted no more than three miles away. But where was the relief ship? There was no sign of human movement on the Ellesmere shore.
Again the wind shifted. The floe was driven back into the Kane Basin until they were farther north and east of land than before – a good twenty miles. Brainard was heartsick. “Misfortune and calamity, hand in hand, have clung to us along the entire line of this retreat.… To cross the floes over this distance seems a hopeless undertaking when we can average only about a mile and a quarter per day. And now we have been shown what child’s play the wind can make of our struggles. How can we put our heart and strength into hauling the sledges!” That night the wind abated and Greely called a council, urging that an attempt be made to cross to the Greenland shore by abandoning everything except twenty days’ provisions, records, boat, and sledge. To Brainard that was madness.
The floe had become their prison. As long as it whirled about precariously in the moving pack – the ice grinding, crumbling, and piling up about the edges – there was no opportunity to reach land. The pressure on it increased until on September 25 the floe broke apart and the corner on which the party was camped fell away, leaving them marooned on a tiny chunk, the plaything of the winds, tides, and current. That afternoon the wind shifted again. To their dismay, they found that after thirty-two days adrift, they had passed Cape Sabine, where the food caches were supposedly waiting for them, and also the first point on the Ellesmere coast where the relief ship would have stopped.
Following another wild night the floe broke again, leaving them scarcely room enough to stand beside the boats. They were moving farther and farther south of their original destination at alarming speed in a violent ocean that seethed and foamed and could swamp them at any moment. “I see nothing but starvation and death,” Lieutenant Lockwood wrote in his journal.
Two days later the floe slammed against a grounded iceberg, “an act of Providence,” in Brainard’s grateful words, that saved them from being driven into Baffin Bay. Now two lanes of water opened up through which they ferried the sledges and provisions to the Ellesmere shore, four miles away. By this time a third of the party was ill and Cross, the engineer, so hopelessly drunk on alcohol that he couldn’t work the drag ropes on the sledges. But at least, after more than six weeks of exposure, hardship, and terror, they were on solid ground.
They realized they could not possibly cross the strait to Littleton Island. They would have to winter at this spot. The indefatigable Rice volunteered to trek north to Cape Sabine to find the cache. He and Jens, the Eskimo hunter, set off on October 1 with four days’ rations while the others built three hovels on the barren, snow-covered rocks at the base of a conical hill, using the debris from some old Eskimo huts and the oars from the two boats.
Greely estimated the party had enough food to last thirty-five days; in a pinch, that could be stretched to fifty. He showed that he intended to maintain discipline when he broke Sergeant Maurice Connell to private for complaining about his leadership and reprimanded the norma
lly mild Edward Israel for flaring up at Brainard. Israel’s outburst suggests the strained nerves among the company. At twenty-one, the meteorologist was the youngest member of the expedition and the only Jew, a great favourite with everyone – cheerful, good humoured, innocent. He had accused Brainard of grabbing the best material for his hut but quickly regretted that outburst, apologizing profusely to Brainard, charging that others in the party had goaded him into it.
By the time Rice and Jens returned from Cape Sabine on October 9, Greely and his men were worn ragged from digging the heavy stones out of the ice with their bare hands. Greely’s own hands were torn and bleeding, his joints stiff and sore, his clothing tattered, his footgear full of holes, and his back so lame he could not stand erect. “The work,” he wrote, “has taxed to the utmost limit my physical powers, already worn by mental anxiety and responsibility.”
Rice brought terrible news. He had found Garlington’s note reporting the loss of the Proteus but discovered that the three caches in the area – Nares’s, Beebe’s, and Garlington’s – contained only enough rations to last for forty or fifty days.
Garlington’s note had suggested that the Yantic would leave more rations at Littleton Island, just twenty-three miles across the strait from these caches. At this, some of the party, Greely included, cheered up. Surely a rescue party in sledges could make its way there from Cape Sabine once the sea froze! Hadn’t Garlington written that “everything within the power of man” would be done to rescue them? Even Lockwood brightened at the prospect. “We all feel now in excellent spirits by the news,” he wrote.
Greely decided to move north to Cape Sabine at once. Garlington’s note, he thought, made their fate “seem somewhat brighter.” Privately, however, he expected to see to “privation, partial starvation, and possible death for a few of the weakest.” Brainard was even gloomier. Rice’s news, he noted, had brought them “face to face with our situation as it really is. It could hardly be much worse.”
The Arctic Grail Page 53