The day after Jewell’s death, Frederick returned alone with a terrible tale. He and Rice had jettisoned their sleeping bag and most of their rations at Eskimo Point in a final dash to find the English beef on the floe of Baird Inlet. To their bitter disappointment, there was no sign of it in the swirling snow. Rice was weakening badly, his feet frozen solid from trudging through pools of ice water. Dragging their light sledge, the pair started back to the point empty-handed, but Rice was soon too weak to continue. Frederick removed his own outer clothing to wrap around Rice’s feet and there, seated on the sledge, cradling the sergeant in his arms, he watched his partner die.
He described his situation in a report to the War Department: “Here I was left alone with the body of my friend in an ice-bound region, out of reach of help.… The death of my companion … made a deeper impression on my mind than any experience in my whole life. As here I stood, completely exhausted, by the remains of poor Rice, shivering with the cold, unable to bury the remains, hardly able to move, I knew that my chances to reach Eskimo Point … were very small indeed. I was completely disheartened; I felt more like remaining here and perishing by the side of my companion than to make another effort, but the sense of the duty which I owed my country and my companions and to my dead comrade to bear back the sad tidings of the disaster, sustained me in this trial.”
Frederick realized that if he didn’t return, another party would risk their lives trying to find him. He kissed Rice’s freezing face and, after seven hours of hard travel, reached his abandoned sleeping bag. It was frozen so hard he couldn’t unroll it, but he sustained himself by sniffing at a phial of ammonia. That revived him to the point where he could force his way into the bag. The following morning he went back to bury Rice’s body. Without a shovel or an axe, he was reduced to scraping away the loose ice with his hands and there, on a paleocrystic floe, he laid the dead sergeant in an icy grave. When he stumbled at last into the hut at Camp Clay, terribly worn down, he returned to Greely all of Rice’s unused rations. Despite his condition, the dedicated young cavalryman had refused to eat more than his share.
In spite of a small increase in rations – partly the result of Long’s capture of a sixty-pound seal – the state of the survivors continued to deteriorate. Kislingbury’s mind was wandering. “He talks at times like an infant,” Greely wrote. He was now concerned about the line of succession if he, the commander, expired. After some discussion with Biederbeck he agreed to increase his own ration slightly; Elison was already being allowed extra meat and so were the hunters, Brainard, Long, and Jens. Biederbeck was relieved. “Lt. G. has shown himself to be a man of more force of character & in every way greater than I believed him to be,” he wrote, “that I think it better that he & our records be saved than all of us together. I am very sorry not to have sooner found out his full worth & done him while at Conger & coming down, on the retreat, so often injustice in my thoughts.”
Greely, the martinet and arrogant amateur navigator had, under stress, become a patient and caring father-figure, sometimes even denying himself while secretly doling out extra rations to men so proud they would often refuse them. He himself was suffering from heart palpitations, convinced that his own end was near. But when Schneider broke down and refused to cook dinner, Greely left his bag and, in spite of the men’s entreaties, did the job himself.
Everyone was in poor spirits, in spite of a welcome increase in rations. Pavy had been caught by Long stealing Schneider’s rum ration. A day or two later he was found stealing Elison’s bacon. Yet in spite of these individual lapses, the party’s long trial was marked by other moments of selflessness. When Schneider spilled his tea and Ralston his stew, the others offered the two men part of their own meagre portions.
The strongest men were the two hunters, Long and Jens. Kislingbury’s mind was almost gone, and he was no longer fit to command. Brainard, who would take over if Greely and Kislingbury died, was too weak to cut up the frozen meat. When Henry stole some fuel alcohol and drank himself into intoxication, Gardiner wanted to throttle him, but was too frail to crawl toward the culprit’s sleeping bag.
Then, on April 29, Long came back from hunting with terrible news. Jens, the cheerful Eskimo, had ripped his kayak chasing a seal and drowned. Both the kayak and Jens’s Springfield rifle, the best weapon in the party, were also gone – a triple loss that cast everyone into further gloom. “I think that I am near my end,” Greely confessed to Brainard a few days later. That same morning – May 3, 1884 – Private Jacob Bender and Henry forced open the commissary door to steal rations. Whisler could not resist the temptation to seize a piece of bacon, whereupon the other two raised a cry, putting all the blame on Whisler. Whisler was contrite and offered to accept any punishment inflicted upon him, but no action was taken.
The glue of comradeship and discipline that had held the company together was coming unstuck. Pavy, ever the troublemaker, quarrelled with Greely over the distribution of rations. “If you were not the surgeon of this expedition I would shoot you!” Greely cried. When Bender tried to take the doctor’s side, Greely threatened to shoot him too. He seized Long’s rifle, but Brainard quietly took it from him and ordered Bender into his sleeping bag.
In the days that followed, Greely scribbled to Henrietta on a narrow slip of paper some final words that he expected would be found on his body: May 10: “Our chances are going fast – no game now in 27 days & only 3 days food remaining. I have cut off some hair for you …” May 12: “The whole party are prepared to die and I feel certain that they will face death quietly and decently …” May 16: “Our last regular rations … given out today … I think but one or two have any confidence in surviving. My heart troubles me & grows worse so my chances are very slim.…”
In a shaky hand he wrote some last instructions to his wife. He suggested she remain in their home in Newburyport, which “has many advantages. Cheap, good society, excellent schools, widows house not taxed, etc. etc.” His watch, he said, should go on loan to one of his daughters “with the understanding that it goes on his twenty-first birthday in perfect condition to the first male born of either daughter.” He knew a man in New York who could make excellent carbon pictures on a stretched canvas, and he urged his wife to have a dozen of his most striking photographs reproduced in that manner. It would, he scribbled weakly, be a good investment. “You can finish them off, and sell for from $50 to $100 or more according to your talent.…” A few more lines and he could write no more. He scrawled his initials “AWG” and put down his pencil.
He had already divided up the last of the rations to prevent further theft. On the seventeenth he distributed the last of the lard, which had been saved for medicinal purposes. Elison, in spite of his amputations, continued to live and even to thrive on his extra rations, while Dr. Pavy, in an unexpected burst of energy, paid several visits to the lake behind the ridge to chop ice for fresh water. But the weakest men began to die: Ellis first, on the nineteenth, followed by Ralston, four days later. And then Whisler, still begging forgiveness for stealing the bacon. According to Pavy he succumbed from fright. On May 27, Sergeant Israel, Greely’s bag companion and favourite, also died. His “cheerful and hopeful words during the long months,” Greely wrote, “… did much to … relieve my overtaxed brain.”
Those who were left existed on shreds of saxifrage, the occasional dovekie shot by Long, and the shrimp that Brainard continued to bring in. Bender, spotting a caterpillar, swallowed it whole, exclaiming, “This is too much meat to lose.” The fourteen survivors had to abandon the hut when melt water made it uninhabitable. They were now crowded into a tent pitched on a knoll 150 yards away. Brainard, returning exhausted from a shrimping trip on May 27, was forced to sleep outside in a storm because Pavy and Corporal Nicholas Salor, who shared his sleeping bag, refused to make room for him. Brainard was too weak to remonstrate. On June 1, Kislingbury died. Salor followed two days later. No one had the strength to bury the corpse, which was simply hidden behind a projection o
f ice.
That same day Long shot a dovekie and Greely ordered that it be given to the hunters to maintain their strength. Bender pleaded for a portion; Greely reluctantly allowed it, and that caused further trouble. Shortly afterward Henry was again caught stealing from the supply of shrimps. Bender and Schneider were also suspected of theft. “It will be necessary,” Greely confided to his journal, “to take some severe action, or the whole party will perish.”
The following day, June 5, Greely issued an order to his three sergeants, Brainard, Frederick, and Long. If Henry was again caught stealing, they were to shoot him at once. “Any other course would be a fatal leniency, the man being able to overpower any two of our present force.”
Next day, Frederick caught Henry stealing shrimp again. He had also taken part of the dovekie set aside for the hunters and had stolen and eaten sealskin lashings and boots taken from the expedition’s stores. Greely did not hesitate: “Private Henry will be shot today.… Decide the manner of his death by two ball and one blank cartridge. This order is imperative, and absolutely necessary for any chance of life.”
There was only one rifle left, however. The three sergeants drew lots and agreed never to reveal who fired the fatal shot. A brief struggle followed as Henry tried to fight with his executioners. He died with a bullet in his chest, another in his head. When his bag was opened it was found to contain various articles stolen from the stores.
A few hours later, unnerved, perhaps, by his comrade’s execution, Bender succumbed. Dr. Pavy died almost immediately after. That was a surprise, for he had seemed remarkably healthy. But he had been secretly dosing himself with the drug ergot, which, in his deranged state, he believed to be iron. In the pockets of both Bender and Pavy the survivors found stolen sealskin and thongs, which, in Schneider’s phrase, “showed how dishonest they was.”
The remaining nine men were reduced to eating lichens. On June 12, Gardiner died, a blow to the others because, as Greely put it, “he has appeared to live mainly by will power for the past two months,” an inspiration to all after the doctor had predicted his imminent death the previous April. He had been determined to return to his family and in the moments before his death had clutched an ambrotype of his wife and mother. “Mother! Wife!” he cried, and then expired.
By Sunday, June 15, the party was gnawing at the oilskin covers from Greely’s and Long’s sleeping bags. Schneider pleaded for opium pills to put him out of his misery. The shrimps had all but disappeared. Brainard worked for five hours in a high wind and got only two or three ounces. It was all he could do to crawl home with them. On June 19, Schneider died. The following day, Greely scribbled a gloomy note in his journal: “Six years ago today I was married and three years ago I left my wife for this Expedition. What contrast! When will this life in death end?”
For nearly eleven months none had washed or changed his clothes. Elison, ironically, was perhaps the strongest man in the tent. Biederbeck, who rarely left his side, strapped a spoon to one of his stumps so he could feed himself with stewed sealskin if the others perished before him.
By June 21, 1884 – the summer solstice – neither Greely nor Brainard was strong enough to hold a pencil to keep up their journals. Connell was close to death. Greely was too weak to read from his Bible. And so the seven survivors of the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition composed themselves for the end, paying only scant attention to an odd sound blowing faintly through the gale just before midnight on June 22. What had produced that mournful note? Was it the wind … or was it something else?
Greely, who could barely speak, asked whether Brainard or Long had the strength to investigate. Brainard crept out of the tent, crawled up a small knoll, and returned to report he could see nothing; it was only the wind howling across the barren rocks. He got back into his sleeping bag, resigned to death. But Long stayed out to raise the distress flag that had been blown down. A fruitless discussion followed as to the source of the sound. Suddenly, Greely sat bolt upright, his heart racing. Outside the tent he heard strange voices, calling his name.
5 The eleventh hour
In his annual report for 1883, Secretary of War Lincoln did his best to mask the mounting public anxiety about the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition. There would, he said, “be no reasonable apprehension for their safety” if it were known that they had remained at Lady Franklin Bay. It was possible, of course, that they had left Lady Franklin Bay. It was, in fact, more than “possible,” since Greely’s orders required him to do that very thing – and by September of that year. Lincoln made a clumsy attempt to explain away the probability that Greely would follow orders, go south, and find the caches all but empty. “Even in this case his condition would be by no means desperate,” he declared, for “it is thought that it would not be impossible for him to retrace his steps.” But old Arctic hands like Henry Clay and new Arctic experts, of whom Henrietta Greely was now one, knew that a trek north to Fort Conger in the winter of 1883-84 was quite impossible. Lincoln’s smooth words, however, served to allay concern. When the president, Chester A. Arthur, delivered his annual address to Congress in December, there was no hint of any money being set aside to rescue Greely.
Meanwhile, a lengthy inquiry into the Proteus disaster was still taking evidence. In January, after ten weeks of hearings, it lightly rapped the knuckles of Lieutenant Garlington and Commander Wildes. Garlington had “erred” in leaving Littleton Island without waiting for the Yantic, while it was “greatly to be regretted that in his earnest desire to succor the crew and party of the Proteus” Wildes had not delayed a few hours to unload his own supplies. The inquiry reserved a harsher criticism for General Hazen for his failure to organize a proper expedition and for his muddy instructions to Garlington. The New York Times had been baying all the fall of 1883 for Hazen’s resignation, but by the time the 575-page printed report was issued, the general was already sitting on a joint Army and Navy board contemplating another relief expedition. Nobody was court-martialled as a result of the summer’s botched mission.
On January 17, 1884, the Army and Navy board recommended to the president that up to three sturdy vessels – Dundee whalers or Newfoundland sealers – be purchased, fitted out, and provisioned for two years to seek out Greely. Every moment counted. The relief ships should be at Upernavik by May 15 at the latest if they were to get across Melville Bay and Smith Sound in time.
This sense of urgency did not communicate itself to the legislators in the House and Senate, who argued over the bill for weeks. The board had asked for unlimited funds; the politicians wanted to put a ceiling on the cost. Was this really a relief expedition, some asked, or was it yet another disastrous attempt to reach the North Pole? Congress, still investigating the Jeannette disaster, had had quite enough of the North Pole, and its members wanted to make sure that there would be no more publicly financed attempts to reach it.
Some worried about the dangers and tried to insist on a clause that would limit the expedition to volunteers. Several insisted that only American-built ships be sent north. (It turned out there were none suitable.) Others wrangled over procedural points and technical errors. There were discussions and behind-the-scenes conferences. General Lockwood himself was closeted with the president, on whom he made little impression. At one point, the senator in charge of the relief bill, Eugene Hale of Maine, was moved to cry out that “if Lieutenant Greely is to be left to perish with his followers, I hope they may die in a parliamentary manner, so that it shall be satisfactory, so that no question may be raised as to their violating any rule!”
At last, on February 13, the resolution was approved. It was very late in the day. Most available ships were spoken for as early as December. Fortunately, the two secretaries – War and Navy – acting on their own, took a chance. Before the congressional wrangling ended they bought the Proteus’s sister ship, Bear, considered the best vessel in the St. John’s fishing fleet, for $100,000. She arrived in New York harbour just two days after the appropriation was passed. By then the sho
rtage of suitable vessels had bumped up the price. A second ship, the Thetis, purchased in Dundee, cost the government $140,000. She reached New York on March 23.
Now, however, the bread cast upon the Atlantic waters many years before returned to save the American taxpayers further expense. The Admiralty had not forgotten the generosity of the United States in salvaging the Resolute and presenting her to Britain. The British government had the opportunity of replying in kind. It gave the United States Nares’s old vessel, the Alert, which had been lying dismantled at Chatham, England, and fitted her out in the country’s best shipyard, with Nares himself and some of his officers acting as advisers. She arrived in New York on April 22. Two days later, the Bear left for the Arctic. The Thetis followed a week afterward.
This was entirely a Navy show. The crews were made up of naval volunteers, and the overall command was in the hands of a naval officer, Winfield Scott Schley. This time there would be no ambiguous instructions. One man and one man only would be responsible for everything – from the recruiting of the crews and the strengthening of the ships to the sailing orders.
“I leave the dearest home ties in the earnest hope & with the sincerest purpose to return to you the noblest of husbands,” Schley wrote to Mrs. Greely just before he sailed. “May God bless our efforts and help you to be patient in the long hours between our sailing and return.”
The two whaling ships reached Upernavik at the end of May after a difficult passage. The Alert arrived a fortnight later. Melville Bay lay ahead. Greely had crossed it in thirty-six hours, Beebe in eighty, Garlington in seventy-six. But this was June, not July, and it took the two leading relief ships twenty days to reach Cape York. Beside them and behind them, strung out through the shifting ice, were eight commercial whalers, spurred on by the U.S. government’s promise of a reward of $25,000 to any private vessel that should save the Greely party.
The Arctic Grail Page 55