The Ice Balloon

by Alec Wilkinson

  18

  For thirteen days they drifted among pack ice, “suffering horribly from the cold,” according to the naval report. When a lead opened, they had to wonder if it would stay open or close while they were in it and wreck them. Waves broke over them sometimes, and it snowed. The officers’ journals are full of bickering about Greely’s decisions. He wanted to abandon the boats and drift on the ice. While he slept, Pavy told Brainard and Rice that if Greely insisted, Pavy would pronounce him unstable and replace him. Greely’s “frequent outbursts of passion evinced insanity,” Pavy said. Under Kislingbury—whose position, if he hadn’t lost it, would have made him second in command—they would return to Fort Conger and try to leave again in the spring. Brainard realized that he was required to report the exchange to Greely, but he was concerned that if he did, Greely would act in such a way as to deliver himself into Pavy’s hands. Brainard was as close to an ally as Greely had, but he wrote, “All that ignorance, stupidity, and an egotistical mind without judgment can do in the injury of our cause is being done.”

  Pavy’s plan became unnecessary when Greely called the officers to a meeting in the launch. He told them that the circumstances being what they were, he had no right to act alone. “I am not infallible,” he said.

  To try to reach land, they left the launch and crossed the ice. A few times they came within two or three miles of shore, but a gale moved the ice and carried them off. In August, on a flyspeck piece of rock called Washington Irving Island, they found food left in 1875 by the British polar expedition led by George Nares. The cache was small and mostly rotten. Among it were tins of dog biscuits, which they opened. In all there were 110 pounds of biscuits, only 58 of which were preserved. The rest were “a mass of filthy green mould.” Greely ordered the spoiled ones thrown away, but the men found them and ate them until Greely forbade them to. A few days later, Lockwood wrote, “Occupied some time this morning in scraping, like a dog, in the place where the moulded dog-biscuits were emptied. Found a few crumbs of small pieces, and ate mould and all.”

  In the third week of September the worst storm they had seen sent waves washing over their floe, “the spray freezing to them and causing them intense suffering,” the report said. They waited for the waves to break up the floe and drown them. Instead another floe drifted close to theirs, and they climbed onto it and from there on September 29, after 51 days at sea, they arrived at Eskimo Point, about twenty miles south of Cape Sabine. While the party collected stones for a shelter, Sergeant Rice and Jens Edward walked to Cape Sabine, hoping to find either a ship or food one had left. In a cairn, they found a note telling them that the Proteus had sunk. It also told them where to find three small caches of food which were sufficient for less than a month. The report they brought Greely “sent a thrill of horror to every heart,” the naval officer wrote. “Every one knew that death must come to nearly all of the party long before the ship of rescue could force its way.”

  Greely decided to move to Cape Sabine. “It is not easy to give an idea of the desolate and horrible aspect of this bleak and barren spot,” Schley wrote when they reached it. “To the north is the sea, filled with ice,” and behind it were glaciers and mountains. All around was “barren rock, except where the snow still lay deep in the hollows.” From stones, they built a shelter twenty-five feet long and seventeen wide, which hardly held them all. The walls were four feet tall and three feet thick and were chinked with loose rocks and moss. To make a lodgepole, they stood their whaleboat on end and over it they stretched a canvas sail. Snow fell and covered it. They named their refuge Camp Clay, after Henry Clay.

  Among the food from the Proteus were some lemons wrapped in newspapers. From the newspapers the men learned that Chester Arthur had become president after Garfield had been shot. The papers, astonishingly, included Henry Clay’s letter, which also said, “The cache of 240 rations, if it can be found, will prolong their misery for a few days.”

  Within weeks everyone was desperately hungry. Some of the food had rotted and was buried, but a few of the soldiers dug it up and ate it anyway. Hoping to make what they had last the winter, Greely allowed each man fifteen ounces of food a day. These included six and a half ounces of bread and dog biscuits; four and a half ounces of meat and blubber; one and two-fifths ounces of canned vegetables and rice; one ounce of berries, pickles, raisins and milk; nine-tenths of an ounce of soup and beef-extract; and three-quarters of an ounce of butter and lard.

  In early November, Greely sent four soldiers—George Rice, Julius Frederick, Joseph Elison, and David Linn—to retrieve 144 pounds of meat he thought had been left forty miles away by the Nares expedition. Eight days later Rice returned at two in the morning, exhausted, and said, “Elison is dying at Ross Bay.”

  Thirst is a constant threat in the Arctic, and Elison had gotten so thirsty that he had eaten snow, which should never be done. To begin with, it is painful. According to Julius von Payer, an Austro-Hungarian explorer from what is now the Czech Republic, colder than thirty-seven degrees below zero, snow feels in the mouth, “like a hot iron.” It is also impossible to eat a sufficient amount to slake one’s thirst. Furthermore, eating snow was seen as a failure of character. “Snow-eaters during the march were regarded by us as weaklings much in the same way as opium-eaters are,” Payer wrote.

  The snow froze Elison’s hands and face. The others tried to warm his hands by placing them between their thighs. “The poor fellow cried all night from the pain,” Frederick wrote. In addition, his feet has frozen and he couldn’t stand. To carry him on the sledge they had to leave the meat behind. The next night they had to warm him again. The following day his face became frosted, and his eyelids froze shut. A gale arrived. Linn and Frederick got into the sleeping bag on either side of Elison, and Rice started for the camp, which was twenty-five miles away. To walk there took sixteen hours. In the meantime Frederick and Linn lay in the sleeping bag with Elison, whose lips were frozen together, so he couldn’t take any of the beef they tried to feed him. He merely lay groaning. His suffering was so difficult for Linn to bear that he tried to leave the bag, which would have meant dying from exposure, and Frederick had to hold him back. Elison wet himself and his urine soaked the bag and froze, so for eighteen hours they lay as if clamped in place.

  When the rescuers reached them, Elison said, “Please kill me, will you?” To get him out of the bag, they had to cut it apart. They wrapped him in a blanket and placed him on a sledge. His feet had turned black.

  Greely could think of no other way to divert the men’s attention from their suffering, so he began lecturing again, about geography and the states. “Talked for nearly two hours to-day on the State of Maine,” he wrote, “touching on its climate, its vegetable and mineral products, its river system, mountain ranges, principal cities, its most important resources and manufactures, its history and the famous men who have come from the State; and also as to its inducements to emigrants to settle within its limits. Subsequently I called upon Jewell, who has lived in Maine, to supplement my statements by any additional information he might possess; and, late, invited questions from any of the party on mooted or neglected points.” Private Henry, because he had the most penetrating voice, read aloud. On November 24, “Instead of the customary reading from the Bible, Dickens, and the Army Regulations,” Greely wrote, “this evening was given up to reminiscences pertaining to the past lives and domestic surroundings of the men.”

  Food began to disappear. “During last night someone, without doubt, took bread from Corporal Elison’s bread-can,” Greely wrote on December 4. “I was awake, and plainly heard it done.” A knife used to open a milk tin stolen from the storehouse belonged to a soldier named Schneider, who said he had lent the knife to Pvt. Charles B. Henry. Henry’s real name was Charles Henry Buck, but they didn’t know it. (A thief and a forger, he had also killed a man in a fight and gone to prison for it. After being kicked out of the cavalry, he had signed up with his new name.)

  Game was scarce
, and neither Greenlander had any luck hunting. By the middle of November, Greely lowered rations to four ounces a day. “We are all more or less unreasonable,” Brainard wrote in his journal, “and I can only wonder that we are not all insane.”

  Lockwood made lists of meals he planned to eat after being rescued. In the middle of other notations, he would sometimes insert references to food. “Oranges and pineapples cut up together, and eaten with grated cocoanut,” one of them says; then he went on to wonder whether his father was alive and if he would see him again. On another occasion he wrote, “Brainard is to come to supper at my home on reaching Washington, and I have promised him sally lun, stewed oysters, smearkase, and preserved strawberries with cake. After supper a smoke, and then wine and cake.” Also, “I have invited Fredericks and Long to come to the house and eat some preserved strawberries and black cake.”

  Cross died first. He had been splitting wood, then he fell into a coma and died two days later. Pavy thought scurvy had killed him. According to the naval report, however, he died “from the use of liquor. He would drink anything that had a suspicion of alcohol about it, even paint.” They sewed him up in canvas sacks, Greely read the burial service over him, then they hauled him on a sledge to a hill above a lake, which Greely named Cross Lake. “A ghostly procession of emaciated men moving slowly and silently away from their wretched ice prison in the uncertain light,” is how Brainard described them. Not having the tools they needed, they dug a grave with their hands and placed on it a ring of stones. Cross died the day before he would have been forty. They discovered that he had saved up bread and butter to celebrate.

  In his excellent Ghosts of Cape Sabine, Leonard Guttridge describes their routines in the days following the funeral. “The men kept mostly to their sleeping bags. Those who managed to leave the hut did so only from physical necessity. Few read. Frost and ice coated the interior walls. In the dim blubber-fueled lamplight, the commander strained weak eyes over psalms and poetry, his voice barely audible above buffeting wind gusts. Lieutenant Lockwood improvised a lecture on the St. Louis riots, and while smoking a blend of tobacco and tea leaves, he dreamed of a restaurant in that city named The Silver Moon, where fifty cents bought a dinner, and a nearby bakery offered ‘excellent bread and something fine in the way of tapioca and coconut pies.’ The lieutenant interrupted his soliloquy to hand Sergeant Ralston a piece of tobacco for plugging a painfully hollow tooth. This makeshift filling enabled Ralston to murmur memories of early days as an Iowa farmhand. Then he read from The Pickwick Papers. Brainard talked of Indian fighting; Pavy described a bullfight and a walking tour through Switzerland. Such efforts were to sustain morale.” Greely one day asked the men to help him make a “chronological table of all the principal events of the world.”

  They engaged in what Lockwood described as “several wordy disputes,” one involving “the differences between coons, opossums, etc.,” and they followed bird tracks in the snow, hoping to shoot the bird.

  Elison’s frostbitten fingers dropped off. Dr. Pavy cut through the small piece of skin at the ankle that held his foot. His other foot fell off two days later on its own.

  Lockwood was unable one day to rise from his sleeping bag, and was raving. “He can understand many things only after several repetitions,” Greely wrote. Lockwood had secretly saved his bread until he had a pound and a half, and then he had eaten it all and got sick. Private Whisler began challenging people to step outside and fight, and one day he fought in his sleeping bag with Private Bender, whom he shared the bag with.

  In March the sun returned, and Christiansen and Francis Long, looking for game, traveled seventy-five miles without crossing a track. Greely described the party as “twenty-four starved men, of whom two cannot walk and a half dozen cannot haul a pound.” Lockwood wrote, “The time draws near when our group comes to an end. We look on it with equanimity, and the spirits of the party, with this prospect of a miserable death, are certainly wonderful. I am glad as each day draws to an end. It puts us nearer the end of this life—whatever that end is to be.” Greely added, “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.” What was difficult was “to strive, to endure, to live.” It was “easier to think of death than to dare to live.”

  At the foot of a glacier about a mile from the camp was a tidal pool where Rice began setting nets for shrimps, using skins as bait, and sometimes seaweed until he grew too tired to collect it. The shrimp were almost entirely shell and very small—they were called sea flies, and eight hundred of them weighed an ounce. No one liked them, but they ate them.

  In March the Eskimo hunter Jens Edward said that he saw Private Henry steal bacon and hide it under his shirt. That night Henry threw up the bacon. At a meeting in the morning, others said that they had also known Henry to steal food. “A clamor for his life was raised, but repressed by me,” Greely wrote. Instead Henry was confined to his sleeping bag “except under the supervision of his comrades.” Two days later ten ounces of chocolate that had been saved for Elison were missing, and Henry was suspected, but no one could say anything definitely.

  Later Henry was discovered drunk on liquor stolen from the tiny store of rum on hand. “A second time his life was demanded, but again I spared him,” Greely wrote. He reminded Henry that unity was essential. Then, not trusting him, he wrote out an order that if Henry were caught stealing again, he was to be shot.

  At the beginning of April, the Eskimo, Fred Christiansen, began talking nonsense, and the next day he died. David Linn died the following day, pleading for water, of which there was none. Both were buried shallowly on the hill.

  Even though Sergeant Rice was not well, he and Julius Frederick volunteered to collect the beef that had been abandoned in the fall when Elison had been frozen. They had been asking to go for some time, but Greely had not let them, “foreseeing the great chances of a fatal result.” Having finally persuaded Greely that the errand was necessary, they asked that they not be given any extra rations so that no one would suffer any deprivation if they didn’t return. To rest before leaving, Rice shared a sleeping bag with Linn, who was dead. His own bag had been loaded on the sledge.

  They left at midnight on April 6. While they were away, Lockwood died early one morning, and—concerned that he might die himself—Greely restored Kislingbury to his rank, meaning, he said, that “in the event of my death the command of the expedition will devolve on you.”

  Half miraculously, the men killed a bear that came near the camp. Meanwhile Jewell lapsed into a delirium and died. The bear froze and had to be dressed with a handsaw, which hardly anyone had the strength for. One of the men noticed that Greely’s hands trembled, as if from a palsy, and he wrote, “I hardly think he knows how weak he is.”

  “Our condition grows more horrible every day,” Greely wrote. “No man knows when death is coming, and each has long since faced it unmoved. Each man who has died has passed into the preliminary stages of mental, but never violent, wandering without a suspicion that death has marked him. Only those who lived knew, and at the first wanderings we looked at each other, conscious that still another was about to pass away.”

  After three days Frederick and Rice reached the place where they thought they had left the cache, but they couldn’t find the rifle they had stood in the snow to mark it. They concluded that the ice had drifted and taken it. To search for the cache, they had left their sledge. Walking back to it, Rice’s feet froze, and then he became too weak to go farther. Frederick gave him spirits of ammonia in rum, and they walked half a mile to the sledge, and in the lee of an iceberg collapsed. Rice talked about his family and friends, his home, and the things he planned to eat when he got there. Frederick took off his jacket to try to warm Rice’s feet; then, on a “desolate piece of ice with the wind blowing a hurricane,” he held him until he died, which took a few hours. What Frederick wished he could do was lie down and die beside Rice, but he
knew Greely would send others to look for him, who might die in the effort. He kissed Rice, then walked seven miles to their camp where they had left the sleeping bag, which was “frozen stiff as cordwood.” After sniffing a vial of ammonia he was able to force the bag open. In the morning he walked back to bury Rice. “I had no shovel, only an axe, and the loose ice I had to remove with my hands,” he wrote.

  The death of his friend “made a deeper impression on my mind than any experience in my whole life,” Frederick wrote in a report. He walked for three days to reach Camp Clay and when he arrived he gave Greely the food that Rice hadn’t eaten.

  At the end of April, ice tore a hole in Jens Edward’s kayak while he was stalking a seal, and he drowned. Without the kayak they couldn’t hunt seals. Furthermore, Edward had gone under with their best rifle, a Springfield. “We are in the most abject misery,” Private Roderick Schneider wrote, “and those that are dead are surely the best off.”

  Brainard still walked to the shrimp ground, passing the graves on the hill. According to the navy report, after the last stored food was given out in the middle of May, “the party subsisted on lichens, moss, saxifrage, sealskin, both boiled and roasted, and a little tea.” Greely wrote to his wife, “The whole party are prepared to die and I feel certain that they will face death quietly and decently.”

  Pavy asked Greely to write a letter attesting that he had conducted himself as he should have. He wanted it for his wife, he said. Greely wrote it reluctantly, and gave copies to Brainard and Israel, because he feared that Pavy would alter it. Except for Pavy’s medical service, his record “has been mighty bad,” Greely wrote in his journal. “I say all this on the edge of the grave.”