The Thetis reached Littleton Island on June 21. Schley immediately set his men combing the terrain. They found a pile of coal. They found a cache left by Beebe. They found traces of the Nares expedition. But there was no sign of Greely or his men.
When the Bear arrived the following day, Schley decided to cross Smith Sound at once and search the Cape Sabine area just in case Greely might be in the vicinity. He felt reasonably certain that the party had returned to Lady Franklin Bay. On the other hand, Greely might have reached the southern tip of Ellesmere. He knew it was a long shot: Greely simply didn’t have enough supplies to sustain him on that bleak promontory, but he had to make sure. The least he could do would be to examine the cairns there, leave a new cache of four thousand rations to fall back on, and then push on north.
The cape lay twenty-three miles away, hidden in the murk of an Arctic storm. Driven with the wind, the two ships reached it in just four hours. They anchored off the shore ice in Payer Harbour – a notch cut into the tip of the peninsula. Schley sent out four parties: one would search the Nares cairn, which could be seen plainly on Stalnecht Island, a low strip of land connected at low tide with the shore. One would try to find the cairn that Beebe had left in 1882 on nearby Brevoort Island. A third would take the steam tender Cub and look for the cairn that Garlington had left some three miles to the northwest after the Proteus wreck. A fourth would comb the shoreline of the harbour. No one expected to find living men.
But even as the Bear was lowering the Cub to seek out Garlington’s cache, a sailor was spotted returning from the Beebe cairn, carrying a bundle of papers and crying out that Greely was at Cape Sabine after all. Schley seized the papers and found that they gave details of the expedition and also the position of Greely’s camp. Then, to his dismay, he realized that they were dated October 21, 1883. How could these lightly clad men possibly have survived for eight months on this wind-swept promontory, with only forty days’ rations in the caches and very little fuel?
Even as Schley was pondering this news, a signal came from Stalnecht Island that more papers had been found in the Nares cairn. These consisted of the original records of the expedition together with Lockwood’s journals, a set of photographic records, and again the position of the expedition’s camp at Cape Sabine.
Schley at once dispatched Lieutenant Colwell, the veteran navigator of Garlington’s ill-fated relief attempt, in the Cub. Colwell, on an impulse, called for a flag, which he attached to a boat-hook. The Thetis sounded her steam whistle above the storm, recalling all shore parties, while Schley, in the Bear, set off behind Colwell’s launch, dreading what he would find.
Colwell’s cutter rounded the point of the cape that evening and moved up the rocky coast, which Colwell recognized from his previous visit. He found the site of the Proteus wreck cache and searched the shore with his spyglass but saw no sign of human habitation. The cutter moved on in the tossing sea and rounded another rocky point. As Colwell scanned the ridge above, he suddenly saw a figure limned against the grey sky. He called for his flag and waved it furiously. The man on the ridge stooped down painfully, picked up a flag lying on the rocks, and waved it back. Then he made his way slowly down the rocks, falling twice, and walked feebly toward Colwell, who was standing on the prow of the Cub.
“Who all are there left?” Colwell asked.
“Seven left,” said Sergeant Long.
Colwell jumped onto the shore, shocked at the scarecrow figure who approached him – hollow-cheeked, wild-eyed, ragged and filthy, hair and beard matted and straggly. Long mumbled something, twitching as he tried to speak. Then, on an impulse, he removed his tattered glove and shook Colwell’s hand.
“Where are they?” Colwell asked.
“In the tent. Over the hill. The tent is down.”
“Is Mr. Greely alive?”
“Yes, Greely’s alive.”
“Any other officers?”
“No. The tent is down.”
Colwell was already striding up the hill, his pockets bulging with bread and pemmican. He gained the crest and looked about him on a scene of desolation – a long expanse of rock sloping to the shore ice, a low range of hills behind, its steep face broken by a gorge through which the wind howled, and a small elevation in front of which lay the collapsed tent. Colwell, with his ice pilot, James Norman, and another seaman crossed the hollow just as a man emerged from the tent. It was Brainard.
The sergeant drew himself up at once and raised a hand to salute, but Colwell forestalled him and grasped it instead. Within the tent he heard a weak voice ask, “Who’s there?”
“It’s Norman – Norman who was in the Proteus,” the ice pilot answered. A feeble cheer followed.
One of the relief party began to weep as Colwell, calling for a knife, slit the cover of the fallen tent and looked in on a scene of horror.
One man, apparently dead, his eyes glassy, his jaw slack, lay close to the opening. Another, without hands or feet, a spoon tied to the stump of his right arm, lay opposite. Two others, seated in the middle, were trying to pour some liquid from a rubber bottle into a tin can. Directly across, on his hands and knees, was a pathetic figure with a long, matted beard, wearing a skullcap and a tattered dressing gown. His body was skeletal, his hands and face black with filth, his joints swollen, his eyes sunken and feverish. He stared at Colwell and then put on a pair of eyeglasses.
“Who are you?” Colwell asked.
Greely was unable to answer, but one of the others, in a weak voice, identified him.
Colwell crawled into the toppled tent and took him by the hand.
“Greely, is this you?”
“Yes,” Greely croaked. His voice was faint and hesitant as he managed a few faltering phrases: “Yes – seven of us left – here we are – dying – like men. Did what I came to do – beat the best record.” Thus did the commander of the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition reveal the true and secret purpose of the so-called scientific survey. He had got closer to the Pole than any other expedition; that was what mattered and, with what had been almost his dying breath, he made it clear. Having said that, he fell back, exhausted.
Colwell looked about him – at the filthy piles of cast-off clothing, at the ragged sleeping bags in which these men had spent most of their time for several months, at the tins of disgusting jelly made from boiling strips cut from sealskin clothing, and at the remnants of a bottle of brandy the men had been sharing when he entered.
Connell was close to death, unable to speak, his body cold, his heartbeat weak, all sensation gone. Biederbeck and Frederick were too weak to walk. Greely could not stand upright. Long and Brainard, both men of iron constitution, were in slightly better shape. Colwell sent a man to the Bear for a doctor and fed the survivors, bit by bit, from the biscuits and pemmican he’d brought in his pockets. When they cried and pleaded for more, he sensibly refused. Greely seized one of the tins of sealskin jelly, saying it was his and he had a right to eat it. Colwell took it away from him, but while he was trying to raise the tent, the others grabbed a half-empty pemmican tin, clawed out the contents with their hands, and devoured it. When Colwell told them rescue was at hand, they refused to believe it.
The doctor arrived, and little by little Greely and his comrades revived on small amounts of milk punch and beef tea. Even Connell began to recover; his rescue had come not one minute too soon. Six of the starving men were placed on stretchers and taken in the driving rain to the two rescue ships. Frederick insisted on trying to walk but had to be supported in this act of braggadocio by two seamen.
All of the bodies were exhumed, over Greely’s protests, identified, and brought to the ships. Schneider’s four-day-old corpse lay at the foot of the ridge facing the sea; his comrades had not had the strength even to cover it with a few shovelfuls of sand. Some distance away, Henry’s corpse was found, with the two bullet holes clearly visible. Schley’s men carefully sifted through the scattered piles of old clothing, notebooks, diaries, empty tins, cooking utensils, and
rubbish that lay scattered everywhere. Anything of value – including a fat roll of banknotes – was to be brought home, along with the scientific records and Greely’s precious pendulum. The following afternoon, both vessels were back at Littleton Island. They left for the south on the morning of June 24.
In sick bay, the survivors began to mend. On June 28, Greely, who, next to Connell, was the weakest, was able to dress and sit up briefly. He appeared on deck for the first time on July 1. But Elison’s condition began to deteriorate. When the relief vessels arrived at Disco Island on July 5, it was clear that the stumps of his ankles would have to be amputated or he would die of blood poisoning. His strength was so badly depleted that he did not survive the effects of the operation. He died on July 8.
Six men out of twenty-five had survived. When Greely learned of the bungled efforts to relieve him the previous summer, he was bitter. In his memoirs, he blamed Garlington for “taking every ounce of food he could carry when he turned southward,” and Wildes for his long delay in the Greenland ports and “his precipitate retreat” from Smith Sound. Nor could he understand why the government hadn’t sent another ship north immediately it received the news of the Proteus disaster. If a stout sealer had left St. John’s within ten days of the Yantic’s return, he believed, the entire company would have been saved.
Meanwhile, on July 18, 1884, the first news of the rescue hit the American newspapers and the country went wild. There was no room for any other news on the front page of the New York Times that morning. When the rescue ships arrived at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on August 1, they were greeted by a screaming mob who waved and shouted from the shores and from hundreds of pleasure craft. But nobody – not even Schley’s wife – was allowed on the Thetis until Henrietta Greely had been taken aboard for a quiet reunion with her husband, alone and unobserved in the commander’s cabin.
Fifteen thousand people poured into town that weekend for the parade on Monday, August 4. On doctor’s orders, the six survivors did not attend the welcome-home rally held that night in the Portsmouth Music Hall, when fifteen hundred of Greely’s New Hampshire neighbours lauded him to the skies. Only the Secretary of War was missing. He sent along a tepid telegram which contrasted starkly with the ebullience of the moment.
The ebullience was momentary. The press soon turned from celebrating the rescue of six men to ferreting out the most melodramatic details of the deaths of nineteen others. General Hazen had tried to contain the account of Henry’s execution within Army circles. He relieved Greely’s mind by reporting that Secretary Lincoln had agreed that his act in putting down a mutiny was “thoroughly legal and proper.” But the New York Times was busily investigating rumours flying around the hospital where some of the survivors were still patients. On August 12, the paper’s front page carried a sensational scoop. It disclosed not only the story of the bullet holes in Henry’s body but something much more horrifying – cannibalism. The government, it charged, was covering up the fact that “many of the seventeen men who are said to have perished by starvation had been eaten by their famished comrades.” (As usual, the Times appeared to ignore the existence of two Eskimos in the party.)
Based on gossip and innuendo, garbled and exaggerated in the telling, the Times story could scarcely be denied. Schley’s party had exhumed the bodies and discovered that six – Kislingbury, Jewell, Ralston, Henry, Whisler, and Ellis – had been mutilated. Strips of flesh had been cut from their limbs after their deaths. Because of this discovery, Schley had sent an urgent wire as soon as he reached St. John’s, asking permission to have the corpses sealed in metal caskets.
The story caused an uproar as other newspapers scrambled to catch up to the Times. The reports grew wilder and woollier, but no one could dispute the findings of the Rochester Post-Express, which persuaded Kislingbury’s three brothers to allow it to exhume the body and examine it medically. The medical finding was that large strips had been cut from the trunk and the thigh.
Greely was shocked. He issued an immediate statement denying any knowledge of cannibalism at Camp Clay. If it had occurred, he said, it had been done in secrecy. Each of the survivors had come to him to swear that they knew nothing about it. Schley helped to dampen the most outlandish rumours in the press by confirming, on August 22, that only six of the corpses had been mutilated.
The Times, in its interview with the Kislingbury brothers, reported that the flesh had been removed “by a hand skilled in dissection.” The flesh was not hacked but neatly cut in a systematic manner by a sharp knife or scalpel, with the flaps of the skin used to conceal the wounds. That and other evidence seemed to point to Dr. Pavy as one of the culprits, perhaps the only one. The deaths of the six men in question took place between April 12 and June 6 – the latter the day Henry was shot. Pavy himself expired a few hours later, somewhat to Greely’s surprise because he had appeared to be in better condition than the others. It was recalled that in May, he had frequently gone to the lake near Cemetery Ridge (as the survivors called it) to chop ice for fresh water, an exertion that was for him unusual. At that time he could easily have taken flesh from five of the bodies. But the doctor had died only a few hours after Henry. Did he have the strength in that extremity to crawl from the tent and mutilate the body of the executed private? Perhaps; it was, apparently, the doses of ergot that killed him, not the lack of food. But it may also be that someone else was a party to cannibalism. No one will ever know.
The furore died down eventually. A remarkably large number of people took Greely’s side in what the Times insisted on calling The Shame of the Nation. Thirty years had passed since an earlier generation had rejected the suggestion that Franklin’s men could have engaged in cannibalism. Now, the attitude of Americans and Britons alike seemed to be that starving men on the brink of death could be excused for wanting to stay alive.
More significant than these disclosures was a new trend in the American press, which reflected public disillusion by excoriating what the Philadelphia Inquirer called “the monstrous and murderous folly of so-called Arctic expeditions.” The president himself concurred. “The scientific information secured,” he declared, “could not compensate for the loss of human life.”
Reasonable as it was, this reaction overlooked Greely’s genuine accomplishments. He had triumphed over scurvy, thanks to his use of fresh muskox meat and pemmican treated with lemon juice. Although the medical secrets of the disease had not yet been unlocked, it was now clear that an expedition could exist in the High Arctic without danger from scurvy if it adopted the proper diet. And Greely’s voyage to the top of the world had amassed more than two years’ worth of systematic scientific and geographical records. His official two-volume report ran to thirteen hundred pages. It covered everything from the tide patterns of Arctic waters to the question of the insularity of Greenland. In every scientific field, from meteorology and astronomy to oceanography and biology, Greely’s facts, figures, charts, and photographs became the basis for future Arctic studies. But this substantial contribution was long overshadowed by the disclosure of cannibalism, the rigid temperament that prevented Greely from becoming a popular hero, and above all public revulsion against expeditions that sacrificed human lives to personal ambition and government goals. The New York Times thundered, “Let there be an end to this folly.”
Did Greely’s scientific discoveries justify the agony that his own misjudgements and rigid adherence to orders inflicted on his men? Like his admirable sergeant, David Brainard, he eventually rose to general’s rank, having long since subdued, at least publicly, any doubts about the worth of his expedition. By the time of his death, at ninety-one, he had become an authentic American hero not only because of his Arctic ordeal but also because of his work in organizing relief for the victims of the San Francisco earthquake. His published memoirs, written shortly after his return from Ellesmere Island, summed up his own blunt view of that ghastly winter of 1883-84. “I know of no law, human or divine,” he declared, “which was broken at Sabi
ne, and do not feel called on as an officer or as a man to dwell longer on such a painful topic.”
Chapter Twelve
1
Nansen’s drift
2
Andrée’s folly
3
Peary’s obsession
4
Amundsen’s triumph
Andrée’s balloon after foundering (illustration credit 12.1)
1 Nansen’s drift
By the mid-1890s, Brigadier General Adolphus Washington Greely had come to the conclusion that his Scandinavian counterparts were demented. One, a Swede named Salomon Andrée, was proposing to fly off to the North Pole in a balloon, of all things. Another, a Norwegian named Fridtjof Nansen, had already set out in a tub of a boat and was planning to get himself purposely stuck in the ice and drift – yes, drift – across the polar basin.
In 1890, when Nansen first unveiled his mad project, Greely had had his say. “It is doubtful,” he declared, “if any hydrographer would treat seriously his theory of polar currents, or if any Arctic travellers would endorse the whole scheme.… Arctic exploration is sufficiently credited with rashness and danger in its legitimate and sanctioned methods, without bearing the burden of Dr. Nansen’s illogical scheme of self destruction.”
By the summer of 1895, when Greely was turning his guns on Andrée, the balloonist, these words seemed to have been more than prescient. At that point Nansen had been out of touch with the world for almost two years; if he was not dead, he might as well be dead. But Greely was wrong. Nansen was very much alive in a kayak off Franz Josef Land, having made a daring if unsuccessful assault on the North Pole and reached a higher latitude than any explorer in history – 200 statute miles farther than Greely’s own expedition.
The Arctic Grail Page 56