Tyson assuaged the gnawing hunger in his belly by warming a few strips of frozen seal entrails over a guttering lamp before he gobbled them down.
“No doubt many of my friends who read this will exclaim, would rather die than eat such stuff!' “he penciled in his journal.” You think so, no doubt; but people can't die when they want to; and when one is in full life and vigor, and only suffering from hunger, he don't want to die. Neither would you,” he added philosophically.
Hardship only widened the gulf between the various factions instead of fostering cohesion. Old loyalties, already formed aboard the Polaris and never submerged very deeply, resurfaced with a vengeance. The instrument of hunger hammered the wedge of discontent deeper into the marooned group.
Meyer and Tyson, essentially the only officers, grated on each other's nerves worse than when they were aboard ship and refused to suppon each other. The German crew reverted to speaking only their native tongue. Tyson moved in with Ebierbing and Tookoo-lito, where he could at least understand them when they spoke English. The navigator complained that in the men's hut, only German was spoken and he could understand not a single word of it.
Responding in kind, the Germans lined the floor of their igloo with canvas yet refused to help drag similar tent scraps to Tyson's hut. Only the two Scandinavians, Lindquist and Johnson, and the cook and the steward helped Tyson to floor his igloo.
Darkly Tyson worried about his lack of firearms. Still puzzled by Buddirtgton's arming of the crew after Hall's death, the navigator lamented that he had neither rifle nor pistol while every other member of the crew had both. Sourly he blamed his commitment to duty for his “unpleasant situation.” “While I was looking after the ship's property,” he wrote, “the men secured their guns and pistols.” Had he selfishly gathered his possessions and armed himself the night of separation as the crew did, he told himself, he would be far better off. “I am the worst off of all,” he bemoaned, “for I have neither gun nor pistol of my own, and can only make a shot by borrowing o Joe. This is a disadvantage in other respects; the men know it; they are all armed, and I am not.”
Craftily Tyson tried to inveigle a firearm out of Ebierbing, but the savvy Inuit refused to part with any of his weapons. “Joe,” the navigator scribbled in his diary, “has both a shot-gun and a pistol; but he didn't seem to care to give either up, and I will not force him to.”
Deepening cold layered atop the oppressive darkness that December brought. The Arctic winter swallowed any distinction between da / and night. Mocking the prolonged starvation of those clustered on the drifting ice, the skies overhead unleashed a spectacular show of lights. Streamers of blue and violet danced and coiled across the heavens, unfolding their beauty to anyone with the energv to appreciate it.
A form of rheumatism struck down Hans at the very time his hunting skills were most needed. Ebierbing doubled his efforts with no success. Without light the seals spent only scant minutes with their noses pressed to their breathing holes before diving away. Without seals no polar bears appeared. Without bears no foxes followed to scavenge scraps from their kills. The delicate food chain shifted brutally into reverse. Absolutely nothing edible inhabited the stranded men's domain.
“The darkness is on us,” Tyson wrote heavily. While the navigator gave vent to his blackest thoughts in his notebooks, Meyer limited his writing to sterile notations like “colder today; wind blowing from the southwest.”
Rations now were reduced to a few ounces. Food occupied the waking thoughts of all. Insidiously their starvation worked to perpetuate itself. Lack of the proper nutrients robbed them of the energy needed to drag their boat and supplies to safety if the opportunity to reach land had presented itself. The white men huddled listlessly inside their igloos and dreamed of feasts long past.
Other thoughts, far more foul and unspeakable, crept along the corners of the hungry men's minds, ideas that surpassed the limits of humanity.
One day Ebierbing handed his coveted revolver to the startled Tyson. Looking over his shoulder at the sullen sailors watching them, Ebierbing placed his pistol firmly into Tyson's hands as his eyes drifted back to the Inuit families sitting outside their igloo. Ebierbing's gaze rested on the children playing in the snow. Then the Inuit looked back at the seamen.
“I don't like the look out of the men's eyes,” Ebierbing whispered darkly.
A cold shiver shot down Tyson's spine as he fingered the pistol. He thinks they will first kill and eat Hans and his family, the navigator thought. And then he knows Hannah's, Puney's, and his turn will be next!
Cannibalism The very idea jarred the captain. Tyson looked at Tookoolito. The fear and worry in her eyes confirmed that she felt as her husband did. The Inuit sensed that the sailors, driven by the pains of hunger, would eat them.
They had good cause to worry. The cracked long bones and knife marks on the skulls of the Franklin expedition's skeletons told of cannibalism. Inuit all along the coast knew of this. If the ordered British wDuld resort to eating their own, what could be expected from this lawless bunch? A tender young child would make their starving mouths water. Even the solid John Herron wrote in his diary: “The only thing that troubles us is hunger; that is very severe. We feel sometimes as though we could eat each other.”
Adde i to this was the general feeling among the party that the Inuit were less than human. The Natives' strange customs, lack of bathing, and habit of eating their meat raw fostered that perception. On more than one occasion, the Inuit's cabins aboard the Polaris had had to be cleaned and deloused by the crew when the smell anc offal inside grew too much even for the rank seamen. It was all relative, however. The sailors themselves were no paragons of cleanliness. But seeing the Natives turn their rooms into what the white men considered a pigsty contributed to the seamen's view that the Inuit were animals.
Tyson slipped the revolver into his pocket and nodded to his friend. An unspoken bond was established between them. In exchange for the pistol, the captain would guard the Inuit with his life. Late Tyson scribbled in his diary, “God forbid that any of this company should be tempted to such a crime! However, I have the pistol now, and it will go hard with any one who harms even the smallest child on this God-made raft.”
Frorr a practical standpoint, eating the Natives would deprive the men of their only effective hunters. Tyson recognized this. While he doesn't mention it in his diary, most likely he circulated among the crew and expressed that idea. He wrote:
Setting aside the crime of cannibalismfor if it is God's will that we should die by starvation, why, let us die like men, not like brutes, tearing each other to piecesit would be the worst possible policy to kill the poor natives. They are our best, and some may say only, hunters; no white man can c atch a seal like an Eskimo, who has practiced all his life, [t would indeed be “killing the goose which lays the golden egg.”
Fortunately two things averted such an unthinkable event. First, Hans recovered, adding his strength to the opposition once more. Second, he caught a fox, which the men devoured down to the last bone. For the time being, the thoughts of eating the Inuit receded.
Looking for ways to divert their thoughts from food, the Germans seized upon the reward given the crew of the Hansa who had experienced a similar situation. For surviving their drift on the ice, their government awarded each man a gift of one thousand talers. Animated by their greed, the Teutonic contingent swaggered about the ice with their rifles and pistols and boasted that Congress would likely double their pay. The sailors forgot that they had no control over their destiny. No one would collect a cent if they never returned.
Christmas arrived with strong winds raking the ice floe. Even though it meant using the last of their ham and dried apples, the event called for some sort of celebration. “Our Christmas dinner was gorgeous,” Tyson wrote. “We each had a small piece of frozen ham, two whole biscuits of hard bread, a few mouthfuls of dried apples, and also a few swallows of seal's blood!”
John Herron, the stew
ard, had balked at eating sealskin on the first of December because “the hair is too thick, and we have no means of getting it off.” By Christmas hunger had erased his doubts about eating anything. Of the banquet, he wrote, “We had soup made from a pound of seal blood, which we had saved for a month.” After adding that to their mulligan stew, he remarked, “the whole was boiled to a thick soup, which, I think, was the sweetest meat I ever ate.”
With that feast went the last of the apples and the one surviving canned ham. Taking stock of their remaining food, Meyer and Tyson found six bags of dried bread and nine cans of pemmican. The cold and darkness continually conspired to thwart the Inuit's search for game. With the open leads sealed under thin ice, neither man could paddle the one kayak far in search of seals, nor could they spot the dark heads, for there was no open water. By the end of December, Tyson's hunger forced him to gnaw on cooked scraps of dried sealskin that Tookoolito had saved for repairing their clothes. E/en the strips of seal blubber that had been burned dry of all their residual oil in the stone lamps were fished out of the sooty bowls anc wolfed down.
By this time the daily intake of those on the ice was, at best guess, less than five hundred calories. Nazi nutritionists calculated that their slave laborers would need a minimum of eight hundred calories a day to perform useful labor for a period of four to six months before they starved to death. While the men on the ice floe reduced their activity whenever possible, the weather was also considerably :older for them, requiring more calories to keep warm.
So, like the unfortunate captives of the Third Reich, the company of the Polaris was also starving. Their symptoms included listlessness, weakness, and constant thoughts of food as their shrunken stomachs groaned and knotted in emptiness. Their hair, nails, and teeth became brittle as the body dissolved itself in search of essential nutrients. Scurvy attacked them all, loosening their teeth and causing their feet to swell. Stocky individuals with more muscle ar d body fat would last longer than the thin ones, but all suffered f “om lack of vitamin C.
To make matters worse, Nature conspired to starve them over prolonged periods before tossing a few mouthfuls of food at them just when they were on the verge of collapse. Then the agonizing cycle repeated itself. Tyson and his party were experiencing firsthand Buddington's fears of starving on the ice.
On the twenty-eighth, a lead opened in the ice. Hans shot a seal, which sank before they could retrieve it. The next day Ebierbing shot another Greenland seal, and anxious moments followed as the men laced to launch the kayak while the dying animal drifted away. Fortune, however, smiled that day, and the animal was caught and dragged ashore.
What followed was an orgy of gruesome proportions. The entire skin, with its blubber so vital for the lamps, was stripped off. Then the carcass was rolled onto its back, and the abdomen carefully Dpened to retain all the blood inside the cavity. The clotted blood was swallowed whole, while cupfuls of the steaming blood were drunk before it cooled. Liver, brain, heart, and meat disappeared uncooked into the shrunken stomachs of the nineteen people. In deference to the Inuit custom, the eyeballs were given to the youngest in the party, baby Charlie Polaris. Even the entrails were wiped clean on the snow and set aside for later.
Normally sinew and strips of skin would be saved for harness, rope, and clothing, but not that day. The men even ate the membranes the Inuit saved for covering the windows in their igloos. What good was having windows when the transparent tissue would ease the hunger pains that racked the men's stomachs? they reasoned.
New Year's dinner brought the usual watery soup made by floating a minute square of dried pemmican in a cup of warm water. Some men sarcastically referred to the broth as “pemmican tea.” This night the seal intestine added a second course. Tyson dined on two feet of frozen gut with relish. Smacking his lips, he scribbled, “and I only wish we had plenty of that, but we have not.”
Persistently the ice erased its openings and sealed the watery leads. Hunger preoccupied everyone's thoughts, entertaining their dreams along with every waking moment. Pilfering of the food supplies resumed. “The provisions are disappearing very fastfaster than the distribution of rations will account for,” the navigator noted. With tongue in cheek, he added, “there must be some leak.” Yet little could be done to prevent it. The thin clothing and weakened state of all precluded posting a watch. Anyone left outside for long would freeze to death.
With hunger came hallucinations and fanciful thoughts. Having satisfied themselves that their suffering would reap them great financial rewards from Washington, the men fantasized that they could reach shore and walk overland to Disko. Despite Tyson's warnings that the ice floe was drifting inexorably west, several of the crew insisted that a run to the east would get them ashore. Their delusions infected Ebierbing, who considered making the trek with his family. Certainly if anyone could do it, the Inuit stood the best chance.
Shaken by his stalwart Inuit's admission, Tyson worried even more about the stronger men splitting apart from the company, taking the last of the food, and making a dash to the east. Among the enfeebled party, a handful of men stood out as far healthier and stronger than the rest. They acted as ringleaders, and Tyson judged these sailors to be the thieves who had pilfered the stores. How else could they have retained their energy and strength when all the rest crawled feebly about for want of nourishment? he reasoned.
Without a doubt, if the group divided, everyone would be lost, Tyson argued. Even the fittest among them lacked the strength to cover the distance. And it was suicidal to try to reach land by going east. No one could carry enough to survive. The dogs were all eaten, and the unruly men had burned the sled for fuel. The last remaining whaleboat was far too heavy to drag any distance, and it was needed intact in case their floating base should break apart. If there were those who doubted this would eventually happen, they had only to listen to the growing grinding and creaking that arose from the ce beneath their feet.
More Dver, Disko was still a long way off, not only to the south but to thi east. Meyer's last sextant sighting had placed them at 72°N, neir the middle of Davis Strait and far to the west of the shores of Greenland. The party on the ice floe had drifted to a spot more than three hundred miles from their point of separation from the Polans and nearly six hundred miles south of the lonely mound of shale and stones that covered the half-buried coffin of their late leader, Charles Francis Hall.
ON THE BEACH
It would be very desirable indeed if the men could acquire the taste for Greenland food; since all experience has shown the large use of oil and fat meats is the true secret of life in these frozen countries.
—SIR JOHN ROSS, 1832
The condition of those men lining the shore beside the dying Polaris was little better than that of George Tyson's group, nor would their lives improve. Unlike their compatriots, they had reached land, but that was all. The cold, darkness, and famine extended their fingers across both ground and water.
Buddington, Chester, and Bessel crowded together on the shore as the sled approached. The rest of the crew rushed to the edge of the ice and waved their hands wildly. Loping across the snow, the dog team and its riders came on, advancing with measured pace, until the bone-tipped runners of the sled flashed in the reflected light. The cries of joy died in the men's throats, and disappointment filled their hearts.
The new arrivals were Inuit.
Through sign language the Natives indicated they had smelled smoke from the ship's fires and followed their noses overland to the cove. They were from the village of Etah, they said. By chance both Inuit, Miouk and Awahtok, had lived with Dr. Kane during his last polar expedition. In fact, the two men recognized the aging Morton and remembered a few words of English. Since fate and the currents had driven the Polaris close to Life Boat Cove, where Kane's ship died, the coincidence is not too remarkable.
The bundle of steel knives stacked amid the ship's stores attracted the Inuit's attention. A metal knife was far superior to the bone devic
es fashioned by the Inuit and impossible to obtain except in trade from the white man. Since they had little food, the two men offered their services in unloading the ship. In exchange for a shiny new knife, each Inuit would help move supplies from the Polaris to the safety of land.
Over the next four days, the Inuit worked hard ferrying goods from the sinking Polaris to the beach. The lighter sleds with their bone runners proved invaluable in crossing the crevasses and twisting paths among the piled ice. Coffin had built a heavy sled with its iron-edged runners to carry the whaleboats. Without sled dogs it proved next to useless. Even sawing the ponderous sledge in half did no good. The divided parts were still too heavy to use.
On the shore overlooking the bay, Chester erected the framework for the company's house. The salvaged spars and scraps of lumber became the ridgepole and rafters. With the help of Sieman and Booth, the first mate raised a structure twenty-two feet by sixteen feet. When they ran out of sufficient wood to roof the house, Chester si retched two of the ship's sails over the rafters.
While in the act of transferring his possessions ashore, Dr. Bessel broke through the ice on two occasions. To avoid frostbite, the doctcr had to suffer the humiliation of crouching beside the ship's stove like a boy with wet pants while the men continued working. It must have especially galled that educated man that all his training went for naught on the ice, and he could not emulate the skill of the two illiterate savages, who jumped nimbly from floe to floe with effortless agility.
Wherever the German scientist left the security of his observatory or the ship, the Arctic dealt with him harshly. Clearly one of the causes of friction between the late Captain Hall and Bessel arose fron the physician's attempts to take over the exploratory part of the expedition. Bitterly he refused to admit that for all his degrees, he did not qualify as an Arctic explorer. His stiff neck brought him nothing but the grief and pain of snow blindness and frostbite.
Trial by Ice Page 26