The Ice Balloon

by Alec Wilkinson

  William Ellis, perhaps deranged, drew up a will leaving his pay to his mother and his son, although his son had died before the expedition had left, and then he died, apparently starved. Then Ralson, then Whisler, then Israel, whom Greely was especially fond of “died at 2 a.m., very hard,” Schneider wrote. “He struggled long for life.” Fourteen were left, and the bulk of them decided to abandon their hut because water from melting snow kept dripping into it so that “we are saturated to the skin and are in a wretched condition,” Greely wrote. Eleven of them moved a few hundred feet up the hill to a tent. Some were able to walk on their own, but others needed to be carried. The tent was crowded. One night Brainard had to sleep outside in a storm because the two men he shared his sleeping bag with, one of them Pavy, wouldn’t make room for him. Corporal Nicholas Salor died next, and no one had the strength to carry him up the hill and bury him. He was “put out of sight on the icefoot,” meaning where the ice met the shore. Pavy appeared to be the strongest man left. He would go to a ridge behind the tent and chop ice to melt for water, for which Greely was grateful.

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  On the first of June, Kislingbury sat up in his sleeping bag in the middle of a gale, and began singing a hymn. He died a few hours later. His body was taken out into the snow and the service said over him, but he was left where he lay. “Party will try to bury him tomorrow,” Greely wrote.

  The bay was now free of ice. “How easily we could be rescued,” Greely noted. Pavy prescribed medicine for Maurice Connell and for Bender, but Greely “forbade the issue,” Schneider wrote, “saying that the doctor was not in a way to order medicine.”

  Private Henry was suspected again of stealing food. He promised Greely he would stop, but Greely didn’t believe him. His order to his three sergeants said that in light of the party’s “perishing slowly by starvation,” it was essential that if Henry were “detected either eating food or appropriating any article of provisions,” he be shot. “Any other course would be a fatal leniency, the man being able to overcome any two of our present force.”

  The next morning Henry “not only stole shrimps for our breakfast, but visiting unauthorized our winter camp, stole certain sealskins for food.” Greely confronted Henry as he returned from the hut, and Henry admitted the theft. “He was bold in his admission, and showed neither fear nor contrition,” Greely noted. In his tent, he wrote,

  Near Cape Sabine, June 4, 1884

  Sergeants Brainard, Long and Frederick

  Notwithstanding promises given by Private C. B. Henry yesterday, he has since, as acknowledged to me, tampered with seal-thongs, if not other food at the old camp. This pertinacity and audacity is the destruction of the party, if not at once ended. Private Henry will be shot to-day, all care being taken to prevent his injuring anyone, as his physical strength is greater than that of any two men. 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.

  The sergeants were not sure how to perform the task—whether it was proper to tell Henry and allow him time to settle himself, or if they should simply shoot him without warning. Early in the afternoon they went down the hill to the hut. About half an hour later Frederick came back and told Henry he was needed, and Henry went down the hill with him. The others heard three shots. Months later Frederick described what had happened: “He did not know that we were about to kill him, but he had been warned,” Frederick said. “We walked to within twenty yards of him” to read him Greely’s order. “There was no missing him at that range,” Frederick said. “Without a word the man dropped dead.” They agreed not to disclose whose bullet had killed him. Hidden among his belongings were twelve pounds of sealskin.

  A few hours later Private Bender, who had also stolen food, died “very cowardly for a man who has said so much about meeting death,” Schneider wrote, then Dr. Pavy, who drank extract of ergot from the medicine chest, possibly thinking it was iron and that he was fortifying himself. When sealskin was found among Pavy’s belongings, too, Schneider felt vindicated, since he had also been accused of stealing. His remarks form one of the most haunting declarations in the history of Arctic service. “Although I am a dying man, I deny the assertion,” he wrote. “I ate only my own boots and part of an old pair of pants I received from Lieutenant Kislingbury.” Then he added, “I feel myself going fast, but I wish it would go yet faster.”

  Seven men were left. “Every one of us much used up,” Schneider wrote. Strangely the strongest appeared to be Elison, who had lost his feet and hands but had been given extra food. Biederbeck, who looked after him closely, had fashioned a spoon to fit one of his stumps.

  Brainard continued to walk to the bay for shrimp, but on the tenth of June he wrote that his nets were lost and his bait gone also. On the twelfth he walked to the top of a hill about a hundred feet above the water and put up a flag made from rags, hoping that a whaler might see it. The wind blew it down, and the next day he climbed the hill again to put it back up.

  Sitting in his sleeping bag, a soldier named Hampdon Gardiner held a portrait of his mother and another of his wife, whom he had married only two months before he had boarded the Proteus. While talking to them, he died. Two days later he was left on the ice foot, where Pavy and Bender had also been left. The wind had partly uncovered the corpses on the hill, enough so that the buttons on their clothes could be seen. On the seventeenth Schneider wrote, “I am unable to use my legs,” and on the eighteenth, begging for opium, he died. The others managed to get him halfway to the ice foot but could go no farther and left him.

  Remembering that it was approximately “the average date of whalers reaching the north water,” Greely said, they began to look for ships. He stayed mostly in his sleeping bag and lapsed in and out of consciousness. Early in the third week of June, a gale blew down the tent, and no one had the strength to put it back up. They lay as if under a shroud.

  On the twentieth Greely wrote, “Six years ago to-day I was married and three years ago I left my wife for this Expedition, what contrast! When will this life in death end?”

  Just before midnight on June 21, 1884, through a gale, Greely heard a whistling sound, which no one else heard, and when he asked Brainard and Long if they could manage to see what it was, “they thought it only the impression of a disturbed imagination,” Schley wrote in “The Rescue of Greely,” published in 1885. Brainard returned without Long and said the noise had been made by the wind. He got back into his sleeping bag.

  One of Schley’s crew, on an island called Brevoort Island, not far from Camp Clay, had found a cairn that Greely had built in the fall. In it were papers that he brought back to the ship. To recall the rest of the searchers, Schley had the ship’s whistle blown, and this is the sound Greely heard. The papers, which were read aloud, described the expedition’s stay at Fort Conger and the retreat. “As one paper after another was quickly turned over,” Schley wrote, “it was discovered with horror that the latest date borne by any of them was October 21, 1883, and that but forty days’ complete rations were left to live upon. Eight months had lapsed since then.”

  In the next-to-last entry, for October 6, Greely had written, “My party is now permanently encamped on the ‘west side of a small neck of land,’ ” which he went on to say was “about equally distant from Cape Sabine and Cocked Hat Island. All well.”

  With the wind “driving in bitter gusts,” Schley wrote, the mission’s navigator, Lieutenant Colwell, piloted their steam cutter into the cove off Cape Sabine. It was eight o’clock on a Sunday night, broad daylight but overcast—“the daylight of a dull winter afternoon,” Schley wrote. Rounding a point, the men saw a figure at the top of a low hill. They waved a flag at him, and Long bent over and picked up a flag and waved it. Then he walked slowly and carefully toward the boat, falling down twice before reaching the shore. “He was a ghastly sight,” Schley wrote. “His cheeks were hollow, his eyes wild, his hair and beard long and matted. His army blouse, cove
ring several thicknesses of shirts and jackets, was ragged and dirty. He wore a little fur cap and rough moccasins of untanned leather tied around the leg. As he spoke, his utterances were thick and mumbling, and in his agitation his jaws worked in convulsive twitches.”

  Lieutenant Colwell led a party up the hill, arriving at the tent just as Brainard was stepping from it. Brainard was about to salute, but Colwell reached for his hand. “Meanwhile one of the relief party, who in his agitation and excitement was crying like a child, was down on his hands and knees trying to roll away the stones that held down the flapping tent cloth,” Schley wrote. With a knife Colwell slit the tent cover. What he saw “was a sight of horror. On one side, close to the opening, with his head towards the outside, lay what was apparently a dead man. His jaw had dropped, his eyes were open, but fixed and glassy, his limbs were motionless.” This was Connell, who was, however, still alive. “On the opposite side was a poor fellow, alive to be sure, but without hands or feet, and with a spoon tied to the stump of his right arm.” Two men were trying to pour something from a bottle into a can—“the pitiful ration of tanned oil, sealskin, and lichens that they called their meal,” the navy report says, but Schley says it was brandy, the last few teaspoons left, which they were giving to Connell, “of whom all hope had been given up.” A third, also on “hands and knees, was a dark man with a long, matted beard, in a dirty and tattered dressing gown. The man wore “a little red skull cap” above “brilliant, staring eyes.” He raised himself slightly and put on wire-framed glasses. Colwell asked, “Who are you?” The man only stared at him. When Colwell asked again, one of the others said, “That’s the Major—Major Greely.” Colwell crawled into the tent and took his hand. He said, “Greely, is this you?”

  Greely said, “Yes. Seven of us left. Here we are, dying like men. Did what we came to do. Beat the best record.” Then he collapsed.

  Colwell gave them some biscuits and shavings of pemmican, a substance made from dried meat, fat, and berries. Since they couldn’t stand, they knelt, and held out their hands. After each had had two servings, Colwell told them that they had eaten all they could safely ingest, “but their hunger had come back full force and they begged piteously.” Their hunger returned, Schley wrote, “like a drunkard’s craving for rum.” When Greely was refused more, he produced a can of “boiled sealksin, which had been carefully husbanded, and which he said he had a right to eat, as it was his own.” Colwell threw away the pemmican can, but while he was trying to raise the tent, one of the men found it and scraped from it what was left.

  Colwell built a small fire and every ten minutes for two hours fed them milk punch and beef extract while he waited for the doctor to arrive and tell him it was safe to move them. Except for Greely, none of them seemed especially affected by their rescue. “The weaker ones were like children,” Schley wrote, “petulant, rambling and fitful in their talk, absent and sometimes a little incoherent.” To cheer them Colwell told them that more people were coming and that relief was at hand, but they “could not realize it and refused to believe it.” Schley went on to speculate that “their year of privation and hopelessness had blunted or deadened their recollection of the world, as they had known it, and the feelings to which the recollections gave rise.”

  Schley had two ships and the men were carried to them on stretchers. Frederick said that he was strong enough to walk, but a man had to stand on either side of him. “Leaning on their shoulders, he followed the slow procession as it wound its way around the rocks and through the snow-fill hollows to the sea,” Schley wrote.

  The gale had become a hurricane. Crossing the hundred yards to the ships, Greely and the others got “a severe wetting.” Having been taken below, Greely fainted but was revived with spirits of ammonia.

  When Brainard was undressed, calluses more than half an inch thick were found on his knees. “After so many months in the desolate Arctic regions, after so much suffering, and passing through such scenes of horror, it was seldom that the men stood upright,” the report says. “They crawled about on their hands and knees over the rock and ice.”

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  Once the men were aboard, the party retrieved the dead men from graves out of which some of their hands and feet protruded. The five men who had been left on the ice foot had disappeared, apparently taken by the tide. The officers who dug up the corpses called for blankets and rolled up the bodies without letting anyone see them. In the hurricane they were loaded aboard the ships, which had difficulty staying head to the wind. Two of the bodies went into the water, but were “recovered by one of the seamen before they could sink,” Schley wrote. Still wrapped in blankets, they were put into coffins and then the lids were riveted into place.

  Some of the sailors who had handled the remains thought that they seemed very light, and that some of the blankets seemed to contain only half a body. “Giving the allowance for the imagination of the sailors,” the naval report said, “the hard facts of the few who saw the remains and related what they saw to others before silence was enjoined show that terrible scenes must have been enacted by the famishing men in the Greely camp during the many long months that famine was with them.”

  On the way home they stopped at Disko to bury the Greenlander, Fred Christiansen, Eskimo Fred. In the pastor’s remarks one can hear the cadence of the nineteenth century. “No man knows the thought of God concerning us,” he said. “He whose soulless body we are today to bury, and the other, his companion, who perished in a kayak in the northern regions, did not think their days were numbered when they took leave of the wives they loved and of the children who were to be their support in old age.”

  Two days passed before Greely could sit up in bed for a few hours, and for his hunger to begin to leave him. Elison, who had lost his fingers and feet, died aboard his ship when his wounds turned septic. Apparently in the cold the bacteria they contained had been dormant. “He passed away quietly without apparent suffering,” Schley wrote.

  The navy ordered Schley’s crew not to speak to anyone about the rescue, but someone must have. In August the New York Times printed a story with the headline, “Horrors of Cape Sabine,” saying that some of the bodies had been clumsily mutilated and the others skillfully. The skillful ones had been done apparently by Dr. Pavy. When he died, the other cuts were made. Pavy and the men who died after him were the ones who had washed away, and the circumstance was seen as being meant to conceal the cannibalism. Lieutenant Kislingbury’s three brothers were persuaded by a newspaper in Rochester, New York, to have his remains examined, and they discovered that flesh had been cut from him. Then Private William Whisler’s parents, who lived in Indiana, had his body examined. What was left of him was hardly more than a skeleton.

  Greely said he had been unaware of what the others had been doing. “I can give no stronger denial,” he wrote, but he said that he could not answer for anyone else. Three Years of Arctic Service was published in 1886. He retired from the army in 1907 as a major general and was the first president of the Explorers Club in New York City. Brainard was eventually promoted to general. Every June, on the anniversary of their rescue, he and Greely would together eat one of the meals they had planned in the Arctic.

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  Andrée didn’t ride in a balloon until he was thirty-eight, in 1892. He went up with Captain Francesco Cetti, a Norwegian. In addition to being a balloon pilot specializing in demonstrations, Cetti was a mind reader and a starvation artist. In 1885 he had performed for the Swedish royal family a display of “mind-reading and thought transmission.” Two years later, at the Aquarium Theatre in London, he conducted a starvation performance that lasted thirty days, during which he was allowed only water, but as much as he wanted. He ate his last meal, some raw meat with champagne, in front of a thousand people. He began flying balloons in 1890.

  Cetti described Andrée aloft as “disagreeably calm.” Andrée wrote in his journal, “I observed myself as closely as possible in order to learn whether I was afraid or not. I discov
ered that I was not conscious of any feeling of fear, but that I probably was influenced by it unconsciously. However I could not note any other signs of it than that I surprised myself holding fast to the stay ropes, although these were the part of the entire outfit in which from the beginning I felt the least confidence. Later I remembered that I had thought them weak and then caught hold of something else. It took a few seconds before this reasoning seeped through. As I let go of the ropes I thought: ‘I must have been afraid.’ But I felt no sense of dizziness, not even when I leaned over the railing at the highest point of our flight and looked right down into the deep.”

  After two flights with Cetti, Andrée decided that he needed his own balloon. With money from a fund created to further science and the public welfare, he bought one he called Svea, after the thistle that is the Swedish national emblem. He made nine flights in Svea, all of them alone, sometimes carrying a mirror in order to see whether his face turned different colors at different altitudes.

  On his first flight, on July 15, 1893, the balloon rose quickly, then fell and hit the ground, then rose again. The flight lasted about two and a half hours and covered twenty-six miles. At 13,500 feet he could hear dogs barking. Descending, he noticed that as gas escaped, the bottom of the balloon flattened and became like a parachute. After landing he wrote that three seemed the ideal number of people to take part in a balloon trip devoted to science—one person to manage the balloon, one to observe, and one to record the observations.

  Andrée’s second flight, in August, lasted seven hours and covered sixty miles, during which he rose as high as 11,800 feet. He recorded the temperature and took photographs that were used to correct a map. He also noticed that the balloon fell faster when under the shadow of a cloud.