Here they were, six hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle, on a rocky, windswept islet off Ellesmere – a spot rarely visited by ships, a land that had scarcely been mapped – subjected to the intense cold and deathly blizzards of the High Arctic, without shelter or fuel and with very little food. With the long Arctic night about to close in, the only glimmer of light was the hope that men were waiting across the strait to rescue and feed them. It was this belief, and this alone, that sustained them. Had they known they had been abandoned, Greely said later, he would have attempted to cross the ice-choked channel to Littleton Island, a foolhardy act that would certainly have doomed them all.
4 Starvation winter
The move to Cape Sabine began on October 12, 1883, and for the next several weeks Greely and his men shuffled back and forth, hauling supplies to the new camp. The weather was dreadful; October 15 was, in Brainard’s words, “the worst night of our lives.” That same day Greely examined the cache left by Garlington and discovered to his bitter disappointment that it held much less than he had anticipated. Instead of five hundred rations of meat, for instance, there were only one hundred. Meanwhile, Rice, who had been sent to examine the Nares cache, returned to report that it contained only 144 pounds of preserved meat.
Starvation faced them, but the party was in more immediate danger of freezing to death. In spite of the cold they laboured to build a hut with stone walls and a roof made of the whaleboat supported by spars made from oars. It was soon buried in snow and so cramped, being but three feet high, that even in a sitting position the taller men found their heads scraping the ceiling. They named it Camp Clay, after their erstwhile shipmate who had left the expedition because of the quarrel with Pavy.
Clay’s name turned up in some scraps of old newspapers, used for wrapping lemons, that were found in the Proteus cache. In the dim light of an Eskimo lamp, the marooned company devoured the few fragments of news from the outside world. The president, James Garfield, had been shot and replaced by Chester Arthur. And an article by Clay, written the previous May, condemned as inadequate a government plan for relief. Clay had urged that two ships be sent north; otherwise, he predicted disaster for the Greely party if it was forced to exist entirely on the provisions left by Beebe at Cape Sabine.
“The cache of 240 rations,” Clay had written, “if it can be found, will prolong their misery for a few days. When that is exhausted they will be past all earthly succor. Like poor De Long, they will then lie down on the cold ground, under the quiet stars.”
Obviously Clay’s letter had had some effect. But it was also clear that the Jeannette expedition, for which Greely had been ordered to search, had ended in tragedy. Now at last he learned that De Long had perished. It was not a cheerful piece of news.
By the end of October everybody was ravenous. When a hundred pounds of dog biscuits were opened, Greely was dismayed to discover that all were mouldy and half had been reduced to a filthy green slime. At the doctor’s urging, these were thrown away as inedible. Later, he discovered that some of his people had searched for them and gobbled them up. Lockwood was one who found himself “scratching like a dog in the place where moldy dog biscuit [sic] were emptied.” He found a few crumbs and devoured them, mould and all.
The party was already subsisting on reduced rations. Now Greely realized he must reduce rations again if they were to survive the winter. Over Dr. Pavy’s objections he cut the total daily quantities to a lean fourteen ounces per man. That, he figured, would make supplies last until March 1, when they could cross the strait with the few ounces of pemmican, bread, and tea left.
“Whether we can live on such a driblet of food remains to be seen,” Lockwood wrote. “We are now constantly hungry and the constant thought and talk run on food, dishes of all kinds, and what we have eaten, and what we hope to eat when we reach civilization. I have a constant longing for food. Anything to fill me up. God! what a life. A few crumbs of hard bread taste delicious.”
In spite of the bad weather and the darkness, Greely knew he would have to send a party to Cape Isabella to bring back the 144 pounds of preserved meat from the Nares cache. He chose Rice to lead a party of four: Private Julius Frederick, Sergeant Joseph Elison, and David Linn, the latter newly promoted to sergeant to fill the demoted Connell’s position. The party, having been fed extra rations for several days, left on November 2. They took with them additional clothing borrowed from other members of the party.
A week passed with no word. Then at two o’clock on the morning of November 10, Rice stumbled into the hut, broken, exhausted, unable to speak. At last he managed to blurt out a single sentence: “Elison is dying at Ross Bay.”
As Greely made hasty plans for a rescue attempt, Rice recovered enough to give a few details of the party’s ordeal. In the third day, Elison’s thirst was so great that in spite of all warnings he was reduced to eating snow. In doing so he froze both hands and his nose. Worse, his body heat was drained off, as the snow he had devoured melted. By the time the party reached the cache on November 7, he was in a bad way. By the morning of the ninth, during the return trip, with both his hands and his feet frozen, he had to be carried on Frederick’s back. At that point the party was forced to abandon its precious supply of meat.
The nights were a horror. The four-man sleeping bag was frozen stiff because Elison, in dreadful pain, had become incontinent, and his urine froze. In order to thaw Elison’s limbs, Rice cut up Nares’s abandoned ice boat for fuel. The results, for Elison, were excruciating. In spite of that, his feet were so solidly frozen that by the time the group reached Ross Bay, he could no longer stand. Rice grabbed a chunk of frozen beef and set off at once for the main camp, sixteen miles away. He had already walked nine miles that day; by the time he reached the hut he had been on the trail without rest and scarcely any food for sixteen hours.
At 4:30 that morning, Brainard and Fred, the Eskimo hunter, set off as an advance party. A six-man sledge, under Lockwood, followed behind. Brainard reached the Ross Bay camp at noon to find Elison and his two comrades frozen into their sleeping bag. Brainard no longer had the strength to free them. All he could do was force some brandy down their throats. Elison uttered a strangled cry: “Please kill me, will you?” Linn was not much better; Elison’s nightly screams had unhinged his mind, and it was with difficulty that Frederick had prevented Linn from leaving the sleeping bag to encounter certain death.
Brainard immediately turned back into the howling gale to find Lockwood and hurry his party along. When he reached it, he took his place in the drag ropes, and the group reached the sufferers at 5:30 that afternoon. Exposed to the storm, the three men were still frozen into their sleeping bag. The bag was chopped apart and Elison, delirious from pain, was wrapped in a dogskin coverlet and placed on the sledge. The party then set off for Camp Clay, a sixteen-mile trek that Greely was to call “the most remarkable in the annals of Arctic sledging.” Seventeen hours later they reached their destination.
Elison’s condition was pitiful. His feet were shrunken, black, and lifeless, his ankle bones protruding through the emaciated flesh. Private Henry Biederbeck, the medical orderly, who spoon fed him, changed his bandages, and helped with his bodily functions, did not leave his side for sixteen waking hours.
Meanwhile, there were thefts. Somebody had broken into the commissary and stolen hard bread. Schneider was suspected, especially when it was found that a milk tin had been broken into with a knife that was traced to him. Schneider denied it; he had lent the knife to Private Charles B. Henry. Nobody then knew that Charles B. Henry was actually Charles Henry Buck, a convicted forger and thief who had once killed a Chinese in a barroom brawl in Deadwood and had served a prison term for the crime. He had been dishonourably discharged from the cavalry but re-enlisted under an assumed name. Greely had his suspicions about Henry, whom he had caught in several lies. But at this point the evidence against him was inconclusive.
On land, Greely was a better commander than he had been at sea. W
ith nine of his men under Pavy’s care, suffering from a variety of ailments – rupture, frostbite, rheumatism, infections, and incipient scurvy – he organized a series of two-hour morale-building lectures on the geography of the United States, covering one state at a time. Meanwhile, the two Eskimo hunters with Sergeant Francis Long set out to hunt for meat. They brought in an occasional fox or seal, but game was not as plentiful as Greely had supposed. By mid-November, he was again forced to reduce the daily ration to four ounces of meat and six of bread. The ravenous men grew more irritable, each eyeing and mentally weighing in his mind the rations doled out to the others. When the scanty meals were cooked, the entire hut was filled with the dense, choking smoke from the damp wood. Half suffocated, the men crawled into their sleeping bags. But the cooks could not protect themselves, suffering “such misery and discomfort,” in Brainard’s description, “as can scarcely be appreciated by others.”
“We are all more or less unreasonable, and I can only wonder that we are not all insane,” Brainard wrote. “All, including myself, are sullen, and at times very surly. If we are not mad, it should be a matter of surprise.”
To these burdens, another was added. One night in early December, Greely realized that Dr. Pavy was stealing from Elison’s bread can. What could he do? A confrontation would provoke a bitter fight. The doctor was the one indispensable man in camp. Greely confided in Lockwood and Brainard but took no further action.
The conversation at night centred exclusively on food. Each man made lists of the delicacies he intended to order on his return to civilization. Lockwood, who by December was obsessed by food to the point of dementia, listed a series of repasts he intended to organize with his fellows after relief came. He took to writing memoranda to himself as if the very act of committing the names of dishes to paper could somehow assuage his hunger. The result was a veritable lexicon of American regional cooking: Virginia Indian corn pone, turkey stuffed with oysters, chives with scrambled eggs, pumpkin butter, corn fritters, bacon in cornmeal, oatmeal muffins, sugar-house molasses, fig pie, coffee cake, apricot paste, Maryland biscuit, Boston pilot bread, smoked goose, spiced oysters, leaf dough biscuit, hot porter with nutmeg and sugar, hog’s marrow, blood pudding, cracked wheat with honey and milk, cranberry pie, corn pudding, bannock cake, green tomato pie, macaroni pudding, charlotte of apples – the list went on, day after day.
“Chewed up a foot of a fox this evening raw,” he wrote on November 23. “It was altogether bone and gristle.” He followed that sentence with another memorandum to himself: “Pie of orange and coconut.” Two days later in another obsessive entry he listed all the food he intended to keep in his room in Washington for midnight snacks. There were thirty-five items in all, enough to provision a medium-sized restaurant, ranging from smoked goose and eel to Virginia seedling wine and Maryland biscuit.
Christmas came. In the interests of morale Greely briefly relaxed his Spartan rationing. The men devoured a meal of seal stew with preserved potatoes and bread, followed by rice pudding, a little chocolate, and rum punch. They talked, laughed, cheered, sang songs, and exchanged with each other fanciful menus from happier Christmas days.
Elison was worse. The demarcation lines between his useless fingers and his hands, the feet and the ankles, became more pronounced each day. His fingers began to drop off. On January 2, the doctor severed the small piece of skin holding his left foot to his ankle, without Elison realizing what was happening. The following day he amputated another finger. Two days later Elison’s other foot dropped off.
By January both Lockwood and Cross were failing. Lockwood’s mind was wandering and he could not rise from his sleeping bag. It was discovered that he had hoarded his bread allowance and then eaten it all at once – twenty-four ounces. In his half-starved condition that orgy of gluttony caused him dreadful distress. He began to see double, but when Greely offered to let him have his own ration of beef, he gamely refused. Everyone was suffering from thirst by this time, chewing on old tea leaves to help fill their stomachs. Greely put some ice in a rubber bag and took it to bed with him; it melted and was used to help slake Lockwood’s raging thirst. In addition, he raised the bread ration by half an ounce a day. That was too late to save Cross, who died on January 18, a victim of both scurvy and starvation. Greely hid these causes from the others, though they no doubt understood the symptoms. Cross was buried in a gunny sack; Greely could not spare wood for a coffin.
Tempers continued to fray. Private William Whisler kept offering to take people outside to fight them, an invitation subject to fits of passion and insubordination. Kislingbury and Pavy came close to blows. “Better this than mental apathy,” Greely wrote philosophically.
On February 1, Rice and Jens attempted to cross Smith Sound to reach Littleton Island. Their passage was blocked by a lead of open water and they returned a week later, exhausted and frustrated. To counter the loss of morale Greely raised the rations for a week. He was struggling now to keep his party alive, doling out an extra ounce of meat here, an extra gill of rum there, whenever it became necessary. Brainard had told him that the party could hold out until April 1 if they could exist on four ounces of meat and eight ounces of bread a day. But the lack of game was distressing. This dismal land appeared to be destitute of life.
A kind of torpor was setting in. Sergeant Winfield Jewell spent twenty-two hours a day in his sleeping bag. Linn was gradually losing his mind. Schneider was so debilitated he refused to cook. Private William Ellis became fearful of his fellows and talked of cannibalism; later it was discovered he was stealing Israel’s tobacco. Henry, whose profanity increased each day, gloomily predicted all would be dead within five weeks. Lockwood was so obsessed with hunger he could talk of nothing but food. He complained bitterly of the meagreness of his rations, called Biederbeck “a miserable spy,” and quarrelled with Greely. Biederbeck himself was ill with fatigue brought on by caring for Lockwood and Elison. Greely doubled Elison’s rations; he could only hope to retain his own mental powers after his physical powers failed. “I am troubled by the many little matters as well as by our situation, that my temper is not as good perhaps as it should be,” he confided to his journal.
In mid-March the sun was back, but there was no sign of game. Francis Long and Fred Christiansen travelled for seventy-five miles and saw not so much as a track in the snow. Had they stayed at Fort Conger, they realized, they would now be feasting on muskox meat. As Greely put it, “we have been lured here to our destruction.” How could they attempt to cross Smith Sound – twenty-four weakened men, two unable to walk, half a dozen others incapacitated? “It drives me almost insane to face the future. It is not the end that afrights any one, but the road to be travelled to reach that goal. To die is easy … it is only hard to strive, to endure, to live.”
A freakish accident almost finished them. Fumes from the alcohol cooking lamp escaped into the hut, and the men began to topple. Biederbeck, acting as cook, succumbed first, then young Israel. Sergeant Hampden Gardiner got the door open and the others began to crawl from the hut, some fainting on the way. Greely saw Brainard stretched out on the snow. Whisler tottered in front of him, but before the commander could reach him he too lost all his strength and fell to the ground. Gardiner tried to get to him to put mittens on his fingers, but before he could do so, Gardiner himself succumbed. Nobody died, but many suffered frostbite. Greely could not use his hands to eat with for a week.
It was noticed that during the confusion one man, Private Charles B. Henry, had not tried to help anybody but himself. Little Jens reported that he had seen Henry hide half a pound of bacon in his shirt. Later that night, the culprit vomited up most of it. Greely relieved him of duty and confined him to his sleeping bag. There was little else he could do.
Meanwhile, the energetic Sergeant Rice was fishing for shrimps. He expected, he said, to rake in about a quart a day. It was little enough. The crustaceans were no bigger than a grain of wheat, and three quarters of their bulk was hard shell. Seven h
undred shrimps were needed to produce an ounce of meat. But it was nourishment of a sort, and so were the tiny dovekies that began to appear at the end of March.
Although Elison’s sufferings were truly terrible, he was remarkably patient. “My toes are burning dreadfully and the soles of my feet itch,” he told Dr. Pavy. “Can’t you do something for me?” But he had neither toes nor feet, a condition that had been kept from him since January. Pavy continued to steal his bread, as Israel reported to Greely, but Greely was impotent to act.
On April 4, Fred Christiansen, the Eskimo hunter, became delirious. By morning, he was dead. The following day Linn pleaded for water; there was none to give him and he died almost immediately. Rice and a fellow Signal Corps sergeant, David Ralston, slept soundly in the same sleeping bag with the corpse, preparing for the exertion of the following day’s burial. As Brainard wrote, death “has ceased to arouse our emotions.”
For some days, Rice had been pleading with Greely to be allowed to return to Cape Baird, where the Nares beef had been jettisoned the previous November during the Elison fiasco. Greely refused, not wishing to endanger his men further. Now, with two more of the party dead, he changed his mind. Rice had been ill, but he insisted on going. At midnight, April 6, he and Private Julius Frederick set off.
Three days later, the emaciated Lockwood died. Greely restored Kislingbury to duty as his second-in-command and eulogized him for his hard work during the desperate winter days. Young Sergeant Israel broke down the following day, and Sergeant Winfield Jewell lapsed into a delirium from which he did not recover in spite of the extra rations Greely allowed him. Only the fortunate capture of a bear prevented the others from starving to death. Had it not been for this miraculous supply of fresh meat, Brainard noted grimly, most would have died within a fortnight. Greely allowed Brainard and the other shrimp fishermen two ounces extra rations a day. It was scarcely enough.
The Arctic Grail Page 54