Ice Ship: The Epic Voyages of the Polar Adventurer Fram

by Charles W. Johnson

  Nares’s tradition-bound approach caught up with him. The crew were weakened and worn down by enduring cold; overexertion from hauling too-heavy sledges and boats over impossible ice, with inexperienced men driving too-few dogs; inappropriate clothing; and, most of all, insufficient food of the right kind. The men suffered and then failed. Sixty of the 120 came down with scurvy, the disease most dreaded by sailors on long-distance voyages. Of those sixty, four already had died when Nares wisely decided to abort the expedition before another winter set in and returned to England.

  Now, twenty-two years later, here was Sverdrup on Littleton Island, looking for the cairn Allen Young had set up to let Nares know the whereabouts of his ship Pandora and dropping off cherished letters and newspapers for them. They never rendezvoused until after the Alert and Discovery made it back to Disko Island, as the ice prevented Young from getting past Smith Sound.

  Among the crew of the Pandora that year was an Inuk named Joe, who had ridden the ice floe for those six months with Tyson and the forsaken members of the Hall expedition, and who helped keep them all alive. In time, Young would sell the Pandora. The new owner would rename it Jeannette.

  FIGURE 54

  Fram snug in its first winter home, 1898–99. Fram’s Haven, in a small bay in Rice Strait, between Pim Island and Ellesmere. American Adolphus Greely and his men spent a disastrous winter on Pim Island in 1883–84 (see text).

  ››› As the Fram lay at anchor just north of Pim Island, Sverdrup and some of his men searched its northern shore for signs of where members of the Greely expedition had spent the winter of 1883–84, a place called Camp Clay.

  Adolphus Greely, an American army officer with no prior Arctic experience, was the impetuous, detail-obsessed, and often unsure leader of a planned three-year venture for the first “international year of polar exploration,” to conduct observations, gather scientific data, and map lands bordering the Arctic. It was also to look for the lost Jeannette and, though it was not so stated on the official charge, to make a run for the pole while he was at it, for Old Glory’s sake. Greely, twenty-five men, and twenty-six dogs left the United States in August 1881 aboard the chartered vessel Proteus, arriving in Lady Franklin Bay, Ellesmere, later that summer, where they were dropped off at Discovery Harbor, the very place Nares’s Discovery had overwintered in 1875–76. Greely promptly ordered his men to erect a building on land, naming it Fort Conger (a would-be “fort” against the elements and animals, we presume), as a base for their work and a refuge from the upcoming winter. Soon, sledging parties went out to establish depots for a planned run at the pole in the spring.

  Things went wrong from the beginning, actually before the beginning. They arrived too late and set up in an area poor in wildlife, and thus had little time to prepare adequately for the winter, especially gathering and storing fresh meat. The disgruntled crew bickered and tried to manipulate Greely. Many of the dogs became ill and died, leaving too few to do the work of hauling sledges. (Yet with all that, one sledging party did set a new record of 83°24’ north.) The much-anticipated resupply ship did not show up the following summer.

  They experienced another long winter of squabbling and fighting, and a second summer without the appearance of a resupply ship (two had been sent, the Proteus again and the more frail Yantic). In August 1883, according to orders if no ship showed up by then, Greely bailed out, abandoned Fort Conger, and headed to Cape Sabine, on the outer shore of Pim Island, where the relief ship was to have dropped off a large food depot. Greely departed with the crew in four lifeboats that the Proteus had left behind, and for two months they drifted haphazardly and haltingly south, wherever the wind and currents took them, and ice allowed, living off what rations they brought with them.

  By the end of September, having lost three of the four boats in storms and everyone crammed into the remaining one, and low on food and fuel, they made it to land twenty-five miles south of Pim Island, at a place Greely named Eskimo Point for the ancient stone rings of long-ago departed natives. Greely sent two men north to scout Cape Sabine for the hoped-for cache of food and supplies, but they brought back grim news: within the depot was a note from the captain of the Proteus, saying that the ship had been crushed in the ice and sank in Kane Basin, along with most of the food and supplies. The good news was that all hands survived and were aboard the Yantic, and they would do all they could to rescue them.

  But the note did not say what had really happened after the Proteus sank, information that, had Greely known of it, might have helped save the lives of his men. The crew of the Proteus had loaded their lifeboats with as much food as they could carry and, fleeing south, had encountered the Yantic on its way to Littleton Island, to stockpile food there. Soon after picking up the crew of the Proteus, the Yantic turned south and sailed to Newfoundland, without depositing anything on Littleton Island, or anywhere else.

  Greely had four choices before winter caught them in its grip: stay at Eskimo Point, living off what food they could hunt or fish; move south into more open water and where they might find other caches; go east to Littleton Island and the cache that was supposed to be there; or go north to Pim Island (Cape Sabine), as the official order stipulated, where they would be more certain of being found by rescuers. Being an obedient army officer, he followed orders and went to Pim Island.

  It was the wrong choice, coming as it did out of his crippling self-doubt, stubborn adherence to irrelevant military protocol, and in effect, abandonment by those he counted on. A more desolate, windswept, and deadly place they could not have found if they tried. On the north side of Pim Island they set up for the winter, building a shelter for all twenty-five men with walls of stone and packed ice, and a roof of the overturned lifeboat. They called it Camp Clay, but it came to be known later by another name, more poignant and descriptive of what happened there, Starvation Camp.

  Light within came from one small, dim lamp, and because there was not enough oil, it remained off and dark much of the time. Food was scant and rationed from the meager stores they brought or caches they found and the rare animal they managed to kill. When that ran out, they ate nauseating, unpalatable crustaceans they scooped in dredges. After that, they chewed on boiled leather or lichens scraped from the rocks. Heat, what there was of it inside with the deep, subzero winter outside, came only from themselves, at least of those still alive.

  One by one they died, most of scurvy, exposure, gangrene, and starvation. The one person who might have been able to keep them alive through his hunting abilities, an Inuk named Jens, drowned when his kayak capsized. Another, the doctor, committed suicide by taking poison. Greely had one man executed, ostensibly for stealing food, but possibly for the cannibalism that had been occurring. The dead were dragged by the living to a place above Camp Clay called Cemetery Ridge, where they were laid out in a macabre, frozen, and growing assembly.

  When rescuers finally did arrive, on June 22, 1884, they found only seven emaciated men barely alive in a tent where they had moved when melting ice flooded the boat shelter. Some were so weak they were unable to walk, just barely alive. Greely was one of them. Nearby at Cemetery Ridge were the dead men’s bodies, partially eaten not by bears or foxes but by some of the men. On the ship that saved Greely and the others was George Melville who, a few short years earlier, had been a survivor himself—one of the few from the doomed Jeannette.

  FIGURE 55

  Fram’s Haven, 1899. Fram still sits in its protected harbor in spring, after overwintering, with the dogs’ igloo kennels nearby. From here sledging parties headed out up the fjords and overland to begin to explore western Ellesmere.

  On a clear day the residents of Starvation Camp would have been able to see Littleton Island thirty-five miles across the sound. In their distress they surely craved the great stores of food they imagined waiting there and agonized at not being able to reach them. They did not know there was no food there, at least not left by others from the ships. But there was food, lots of it, in the thou
sands upon thousands of birds that nested there and in the musk oxen, caribou, polar bears, walruses, seals, and hares in Foulke Fjord not far away. They did not know, either, that had Greely decided to go that way, the Inuit of Etah would have looked after them, as they had looked after the men of the Polaris more than a decade earlier.

  ››› As Sverdrup touched upon this history, both physically in the Fram and in his imagination, it might have crossed his mind that of the three leaders—Hall, Nares, and Greely—it was Hall who was most like him and Fridtjof Nansen in his approach to Arctic exploration. Hall had lived with the Inuit and loved their way of life. He fully embraced their techniques for living off the land and sea, dressed in furs and skins, and used dogs and sledges for traveling. Like Nansen, he kept his expeditionary forces small and did not defy a force more powerful than himself or fight an enemy that could never be defeated. Nares and Greely, on the other hand, with their starchy military backgrounds, one British and one American, had brought with them rigid, preconceived ideas, and tried to force the Arctic into submission.

  Surely Sverdrup recognized the sad irony that Hall was the one who died (though not by the Arctic but at the hands of his own men), while Nares and Greely lived on, to gather accolades and honors and reach ripe old ages, lived on to be Nansen’s most prominent critics when he put forth his plan for the Fram. But Hall, had he lived, would have been standing up and cheering loudly for what Nansen and Sverdrup proposed, and did.

  13 ›CHANCE ENCOUNTERS

  After searching without success for remnants of Adolphus Greely’s Starvation Camp on Pim Island, Otto Sverdrup and the shore party returned to the Fram, intending to take it north into Kane Basin and further, if possible. However, the drift ice—massive, widespread, and pressing down there—drove them back into Rice Strait (the narrow passage between Pim Island and the “mainland” of Ellesmere to the west, named for one of the bravest of the doomed men on Greely’s expedition, George Rice). Sverdrup, rather than pushing on and risking entrapment, wisely decided that the Fram should spend the winter, protected and close to land and game, in a quiet little bay on Ellesmere, across Rice Strait and in the lee of wind-lashed Pim Island to the east. They called it Frams Havn (Fram’s Haven or Harbor). It was already late August, with the Arctic winter approaching, so they wasted no time before going out to hunt and to begin reconnoitering the hidden mysteries of this land before the dark and cold locked it all away.

  By boat they harpooned and shot walruses by the score, whose ample blubber and meat would fuel both dogs and men. For later sledge transportation to the ship, they piled the carcasses on the north shore of Pim Island, on the “Meat Heap,” perhaps ignorant of the morbid coincidence of what happened at nearby Cemetery Ridge. On land, Sverdrup was the first to encounter, then kill, the stout and shaggy musk oxen he had heard about but never seen.

  They proved easy to hunt, sometimes pathetically so, as they bunched up in a tight circle when approached and threatened, with the bulls and older cows facing outward to protect the heifers and calves. Later, Sverdrup would self-reflect on this defensive strategy, wondering how it came to be when the only enemy of the oxen seemed to be wolves, which, being few, attacked only one or two at a time. He speculated that the collective posture evolved when wolves were once more prevalent and would attack in large packs, from all sides. He often felt badly, even remorseful, about how easy they were to kill when bunched up this way. Sverdrup wrote in New Land,

  There were four fine oxen. Two of them were veterans with broken horns, testifying to past victories; but they had never yet had to do with the worst among beasts of prey[:] man. I am glad I was not the shooter on this occasion, and that Bay so willingly undertook the deed of slaughter, as I should not like to shoot down peaceable animals which defend themselves in such a marvelous manner. It is not sport: it is simply butchery; it requires little skill, and causes one no excitement. Anybody can set a team of dogs on the trail and then quietly follow them with his gun, walk up to the animals, and shoot down the whole herd. . . . But what was to be done? Meat we must have, and necessity knows no laws.

  FIGURE 56

  Summer. With the ice gone, the Fram is briefly free to roam and the men can row and sail small boats to explore the vicinity. Sverdrup contemplated going north again, to explore northern Greenland, but the ice outside made him change plans.

  Musk-ox meat became a favorite of the men, especially when Adolf Henrik Lindstrøm came up with special recipes, with none of the musky taste that other explorers had complained about, probably because they were skinned immediately, removing the musk-producing glands in the process. In fact, Sverdrup, at first jesting with the naïve men that they were mammoths, substituted the adjective “polar” for “musk,” trying to dispel the stigma of the name.

  While the weather and ice conditions allowed, they went exploring by boat north and west, around Rutherford Cape, across the entrance to Alexandra Fjord, and into Hayes Sound (erroneously named in 1861 by discoverer Isaac Israel Hayes; it is a dead-end fjord). When the ice stopped the boats, they took to land and continued exploring by foot, always with an eye to hunting to build up the winter larder. Despite the pressing work, they were often in open admiration, and awe, of this territory.

  In the occasional, and to the reader welcome, break from his usual lumbering narrative in New Land, Sverdrup lifts his prose into beautiful, evocative lyricism. This description of south of Alexandra Fjord is an example:

  It was a very beautiful night, so deep and large and still. There were high mountains around us, but we could only just discern them in the twilight. On the black fjord floated iceblocks, lighting it up, and looking as if they had come from fairyland. When we turned our gaze heavenwards, the air was inky-blue and warm, and the stars were deep-set in it. Now and then we heard the chirp of a snow-bunting, or an eider-duck, twittering in its sleep; and once the lowing of a walrus in Alexandra Fjord, wild and sad; then several more took up the sound, and it rose to a many-voiced, unearthly bellowing, which by degrees sank to discontented grunts and snorts. It must have been a stranger to the herd which had ascended the floe, and been given his due chastisement before he was permitted a night’s lodging with the others. Then everything became again as still as death.

  FIGURE 57

  Fort Juliana, on Hayes Sound. An important staging area north of Fram’s Haven for sledge trips in the fall of 1898 and spring of 1899. Sverdrup had a brief, tense meeting with Robert Peary here, and this was the site of a tragedy the first summer.

  They set up a secondary base camp thirty-five miles up the coast from the ship, on the north side of Hayes Sound. Fort Juliana they called it, named for the first dinner they had there, musk-ox Julienne soup, mispronounced by the one who made it, Per Schei. From there they ventured forth into the hinterlands and fjords, to get a better sense of the lay of the land and map it as best they could, as well as scout for wildlife. On the latter they hit it right, quite by chance. The region was relatively game rich, by Arctic standards, particularly in musk oxen and hares. Periodically, they would transport the replenished piles of meat back to the Fram, or men from the ship would come to fetch it.

  On October 6, there was a break in this routine, brief but notable. Edvard Bay and Sverdrup were alone preparing dinner at Fort Juliana in the afternoon when they saw, coming up Hayes Sound toward them, a sledge with two men sitting on it and hauled by eight dogs. They were not from the Fram, so who were they? Sverdrup guessed who it must be “in these latitudes”: Robert Peary, famed American explorer.

  Sverdrup went down to greet the strangers, to find his guess was right (the other man was the Inuit dog driver). Peary had also guessed Sverdrup’s identity. The two men walked up to the tent at Fort Juliana, where Sverdrup introduced him to Bay and invited him to have a cup of coffee. In a surprising rebuff of hospitality, especially in this setting and under these circumstances, Peary said no, that he had to get back to his ship, the Windward, for dinner, two hours drive away. Sverdrup noticed
that Peary seemed nervous and tried to hide worn-out places on his pants, as if a leader such as he should not be seen in such a condition. Peary and his driver left after only a few minutes, “so short,” Sverdrup wrote in New Land bemusedly, “that we hardly had time to pull off our mittens.”

  Peary’s urgency and edginess had a reason, at least to himself. After several expeditions to northern Greenland, from which he earned his deserved reputation as a driven, intrepid Arctic explorer, he set his sights on the North Pole, and in his near obsession with being the first to reach it became proprietary of this passageway between Greenland and Ellesmere, calling it the “American route to the pole” (because of the pioneering advances there of Kane, Hayes, Hall, and Greely). Just as he was preparing his Windward expedition in the United States, he heard that Sverdrup was getting the Fram ready in Norway. Though Sverdrup had been quite clear that bagging the pole was not his intention, a suspicious Peary worried that this was just a smokescreen for Sverdrup to beat him to the pole.

  So Peary hustled his departure, arriving in Smith Sound before the Fram, and headed up Kane Basin as far as he could. His October sledge trip south from the locked-in Windward, no doubt to check on the whereabouts of the Fram, did nothing to allay his fears. His imagined competitor was hard at his heels. Thus, he was in haste to get away from Sverdrup, with no time for false pleasantries—or even the time to drink a cup of coffee—with a would-be usurper of his throne.