Trial by Ice

by Richard Parry

  Congress agreed. Those who pressed past their fears to disappear into the ice fogmen like Frobisher, Hudson, Franklin, and Parryneeded a special madness. Reaching the Pole demanded someone like Hall, someone with fire in his belly.

  Hall's argument saved his job as head of the exploration, but it cost him the role of chief scientist. Congress hedged its bets. Only someone with letters after his name would do for that. Despite Hall's love for science, another would oversee that task, someone with the necessary credentials. Hall's place was to discover the North Pole; it would be left to someone else to subject to scientific analysis what was found there.

  With animal cunning, Hall moved to block the appointment of Dr. Hayes as chief scientist. Having his adversary within the ranks would be intolerable. He suggested Dr. David Walker for the post. Walker, young and well conditioned, had served aboard the Fox on its trip to the Arctic in 1857 and gained considerable expertise during the voyage. A combination of surgeon and naturalist, Walker served in the medical corps of the army with experience fighting Indians as well as the Arctic ice pack. Still on active duty in the army, Walker could be reassigned by order of President Grant, Hall suggested, and his salary still paid out of army funds. To sweeten the deal, Hall slyly hinted at donating the trove of relics and artifacts he had amassed on his Arctic tours if Walker were selected.

  Spencer Baird, secretary of the Smithsonian, liked the idea. As he was always battling with Congress for funds, not having to pay for Walker appealed to the tightfisted Baird. Besides, an exhibition of the last fragments of Franklin's doomed party would draw packed crowds. Morbid curiosity was as strong then as it is today.

  George Robeson, secretary of the navy, and Joseph Henry, president of the National Academy of Sciences, agreed. So did the surgeon general of the army. Walker was the right man to go.

  Elated, Hall directed his attention back to the Polaris itself, basking in his newfound glory. While in Washington, his spirits soared when President Grant recognized him in a crowd and made it a special point to shake his hand and inquire about the progress of the expedition. Hall should have watched his back during this tranquil period.

  Unknown to Captain Hall, the fates were conspiring against him. A letter arrived from August Petermann, a highly noted geographer residing in Gotha, Germany. During the summer of 1868, Petermann had completed a successful scientific expedition north of Spitsbergen aboard the vessel Albert, which belonged to a walrus hunter named Rosenthal. Petermann's assistant during that trip was a young man named Emil Bessel. In his letter Petermann extolled the virtues of Bessel and urged that he be appointed as chief scientist instead of Walker.

  Emil Bessel's credentials were impressive. From the wealthy upper class, Bessel obtained his doctorate of medicine from Heidelberg and then went on to study zoology and entomology at Stuttgart and Jena. Letters attesting to Bessel's skill as a surgeon flowed to the selection committee, but it was the fact that he was primarily a scientist that impressed Spencer Baird and Joseph Henry. Dr. Walker was essentially a physician with a scientific bent. And Bessel had all those credentials after his name that everyone loved.

  The committee did an about-face. Emil Bessel replaced Walker.

  At twenty-four, Emil Bessel would have been called handsome by his contemporaries. Thick, wavy brown hair rose to an extravagant pompadour that added inches to his short stature and framed a broad, flat forehead and low-set ears. His sideburns blended with a trim, square-cut beard. Dark, deep-set eyes stared imperiously from beneath straight, even brows. A small hump marred the bridge of his otherwise straight nose. Slightly flaring nostrils overrode a trim mustache. On close inspection the downward curl of the right side of his lower lip hinted of cruelty.

  Size was Bessel's main problem. A contemporary description of him states that he “would pass for a handsome man, built on rather too small a scale.” Strange praise, indeed. Quick, nervous in temperament, or high-strung, Bessel moved about in short, twitching steps, while his eyes darted and flashed. If Charles Francis Hall might be described as a bear of a man, Bessel was a bantam rooster. Definitely not a “people person,” Bessel loved to study insects.

  To further complicate matters, Bessel was not even in the United States at the time. He was serving as a surgeon in the German army.

  The impulsive shift from Walker to a German to head the first American polar exploration might seem strange until one considers the times. Germany was regarded as the foremost home of modern scientific knowledge. Anyone who wished to establish his credentials went to Germany to study. With Theodor Bilroth and Emil Theodor Kocher advancing the field of surgery, the Allemagnkran-kenhaus was deemed the finest hospital in the world. America's dean of modern surgery, William Stewart Halsted, studied in Germany before establishing the department of surgery at Johns Hopkins. Scientific degrees from a Teutonic university inspired awe.

  Besides, the flood of thousands of Germans to the United States had changed the mix of the American people from one of mainly Scots-English descent to one with many German and Irish additions. Arriving in the early sixties, both Irish and Germans had earned their rights by shedding their blood in the Civil War. More than two hundred thousand Germans had fought for the North, mainly due to the recruiting genius of Lincoln's friend Carl Schurz. Whole regiments of blue-coated Germans marched into battle with no one speaking English.

  A major difference separated those German emigrants from Dr. Emil Bessel. They came to America to escape the tyranny of Otto von Bismarck and to make America their new home. Bessel came for other reasons.

  Germany had a spidery relationship with Greenland and possibly with the undiscovered lands to the north. Greenland belonged to Denmark, and Prussia had just defeated the Danes in 1864 in a war over the troublesome areas of Schleswig and Holstein. In another year Bismarck would complete his unification of Prussia and the German States into a single country. The Danes still seethed over the loss of North Schleswig, an area where the population was predominantly composed of Danes. Anything to keep Denmark off balance suited Bismarck's purpose.

  Already Germany was shifting from a rural nation to one whose industrial growth threatened Great Britain. The United States, too, had just emerged from its own war of unification. Rapidly industrializing as well, Germany and the United States progressed along remarkably parallel courses. Did the wily Bismarck worry about rising alliances between Denmark and the United States? Certainly Germany had an interest in the North Sea and the North regions. Its ships and commerce flowed through that area, and its fishing fleet worked the Greenland coast.

  In 1869 Germany had mounted another polar exploration on the heels of the Petermann trip. A screw-fitted steamer named the Germania and a supply brig, the Hansa, departed Bremen on June 15, 1869, to the sounds of a brass band. No less a personage than Kaiser Wilhelm himself saw the ships off. Captain Koldewey, who piloted Petermann's ship, led the expedition. The Hansa soon lost sight of its sister ship, got caught in the ice, and was crushed. The unfortunate crew spent the winter drifting south on an ice floe. Eleven hundred miles later they were rescued by a Moravian mission station close to Cape Farewell in Greenland. The Germania fared better, with its crew wintering over, mounting land explorations, and naming their farthest point north, a barren cape, after Bismarck.

  Even as late as the Second World War, German influence in that region was evident. Iceland, although commandeered by the Allies, still maintained a pro-German attitude.

  Petermann's letter was all it took to convince the selection committee. Its members should have looked more closely at their choice. The Germania and Hansa expedition shipped with “several eminent men of science, provided with every requisite necessary for the successful performance of their duties.” Obviously the Germans were still interested in examining the nature of the Arctic region. Why, then, was Emil Bessel not included in their list of “eminent men of science”? He would seem the ideal choice. He had just been there. He knew the land, the material, and had the scientific tool
s.

  If his bona fides were so stellar as to woo the Americans, why weren't they good enough for his own country? It cannot be assumed that Bessel wanted a break from Arctic studies, for the Polaris expedition followed close behind the German one. Was there something that the Germans knew about Bessel that made him undesirable to them? Or was there an entirely different reason Peter-mann placed Emil Bessel among the Americans?

  Like any large bureaucracy, the German army, although known for its efficiency on the battlefield, had its own paper-trail nightmares. Yet Bessel's release from the German army came remarkably quickly, possibly with the army's encouragement. President Grant had to approve Dr. Walker's transfer. Did Bismarck himself give his blessing to Bessel's assignment? To add to the mystery, another interesting thing happened. Oelrichs & Company, a German steamship firm, transported Emil Bessel to New York free of charge.

  So Emil Bessel arrived as surgeon and chief of the scientific corps, barely speaking any English. He was arriving, not as an immigrant with dreams of a new home, but as an expert from afar, casting his pearls among the swine. He arrived as a German, and he remained a German. Despite the fact that he received a salary as chief scientific officer and served aboard a commissioned United States naval vessel, he took no oath of loyalty to either the United States or the U.S. Navy. Mystery still shrouds this man. Upon his arrival, the composition of the crew began to change.

  Hall personally had asked for Hubbard Chester as first mate. A native of Noank, Connecticut, Chester was a longtime whaler with years of cold-water experience. The two men had met aboard the Monticello. With large, wide-set eyes, arrow-straight nose, and an exuberant mustache that ran from the corner of one cheek to the next, Chester bore a passing resemblance to the writer Robert Louis Stevenson. The other man Hall requested was William Morton. With more than thirty years in the navy, Morton was trustworthy, solid, and ever-enduring, like the oak planks that now covered the hull of the Polaris. Morton had accompanied Hall's idol Dr. Elisha Kent Kane on both of his Arctic explorations more than twenty years before. Gray-haired and bearded, Morton would prove a rock.

  R.W.D. Bryan, an enthusiastic graduate of Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, was appointed to the dual position of chaplain and astronomer for the scientific corps. To the ever practical and penny-wise navy, both positions dealt with heavenly subjects and so could wisely be combined.

  But Frederick Meyer, a native of Prussia, secured the position of meteorologist. In fact, Meyer had graduated from the Prussian military academy and served in the Prussian army as a lieutenant. Crossing the Atlantic with an appointment to Maximilian's army in Mexico, he found himself unemployed when the emperor was overthrown. He then enlisted in the United States Army, eventually ending up in the signal corps. Suddenly Germans dominated the scientific staff, holding two of the three positions.

  Emil Schuman, another German with drafting skills, was appointed chief engineer. Schuman, sporting full muttonchops and a waxed mustache, looked the proper burgher. To the day the ship sailed, Schuman spoke less than a handful of words in English.

  Herman Sieman, Frederick Anthing, J. W. Kruger, Joseph Mauch, Frederick Jamkaone after another, Germans signed aboard the Polaris. After the roster of ten ordinary seamen was filled, only one man, Noah Hayes, was born in the United States.

  Other than asking for Buddington, Tyson, Chester, and Morton, Captain Hall appears to have had little input as to the rest of the crew. The army may have pushed Meyer in order to have a hand in any glory, and the academics picked Bessel and Bryan.

  The first American polar expedition would have difficulty calling upon Yankee patriotism to advance the flag, because half the crew were Germans. As problems later developed, trouble mounted when the crew divided along lines of nationality.

  It is easy to suggest that rapid migration to the newly opened West occupied the minds of most Americans at the time and that it seriously reduced the pool of mariners from which to choose. But the preponderance of Germans is truly puzzling. Why were there so many? Only one Dane and one Swede signed aboard. And where were those hardy seafaring souls of other seagoing nations? Where were the Norwegians? Where were the Portuguese?

  Another equally serious division grew as the time to sail approached. Was the primary goal of the expedition to reach the North Pole or to study every conceivable aspect of the far North? Joseph Henry appointed a committee to detail the scientific instructions. Besides himself, he selected Spencer Baird and other prominent scientists like Louis Agassiz. In their exuberance they produced a list of instructions almost impossible to complete. Every known field of study filled their catalog.

  Scientific study threatened to sink the exploratory aspect. Even at first glance, the two goals were diverse and conflicting. Reaching the North Pole meant dashing northward through a narrow window of opportunity before weather, sea conditions, and the Arctic winter slammed that window shut. To study all that the committee requested meant careful, time-consuming measurements and observations, the kind best done from a static observatory. One goal demanded risk and gambling; the other required restrained contemplation. To accomplish both tasks meant dangerously dividing the thinking and actions of the party in half.

  To Hall, reaching the North Pole was paramount. Quickly he wrote to Henry stressing that. But Henry remained adamant: science first. Hall resisted. “Science must be subordinate,” he underlined that phrase in his orders. “The primary object of our Expedition is Geographical discovery,” the captain wrote, “and to this, as the main end, our energies will be bent.”

  Then Henry, fearing conflict, appealed to Hall's kindness. “I doubt not that you will give every facility and render every assistance in your power to Dr. Bessel, who, though a sensitive man, is of a very kind heart.” How could Henry make this pronouncement about Bessel? He hardly knew the man. Still, he persisted. “As I have said, Dr. Bessel is a sensitive man; I beg, therefore, you will deal gently with him.”

  The last thing any dangerous mission needs is a thin-skinned chief scientist.

  Misgivings flooded over Hall. To an old friend in Cincinnati, Judge Joseph Cox, he expressed fears his mission would fail, primarily because of insubordination among the officers and crew. He complained bitterly about the makeup of the scientific side of his party to Dr. Robert Newton. Darkly he hinted that strong-arm tactics compelled him to accept the scientists. Refuse the present arrangements and you will not command this expedition, he was told. To Hall this was his best chance to reach the Pole, perhaps his only chance. At fifty he was already old for such rigorous pursuits. For him this truly was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Another command might never come his way. Besides, he could never face the humiliation of being replaced, and he was too proud to accept a subordinate role.

  Once before he had refused when Lady Franklin suggested that Hall share command of an expedition in search of her husband with Francis McClintock. He might be marginal in the civilized world, but in that harsh, white world he loved so dearly, command was his strong point. There he had the will, the strength, and the flexibility to succeed. He could endure the mind-numbing boredom of sitting cross-legged for days in a darkened igloo while waiting for a whiteout to blow through. He could stand the gnawing hunger that forced him to chew on blackened strips of sealskin, and he could press on while his vision burned from the thousand tiny flashes of sunlight-fired ice crystals suspended in the air.

  Command he could, but he forgot that prior to this he had commanded only himself and a few Inuit, mainly Tookoolito and Ebier-bing. Captain Hall had no experience leading larger parties.

  In the end he bowed to the bureaucrats. Unknown to him, he was right in one respect. This was to be his final passage to the North.

  All persons attached to the expedition are under your command, and shall, under every circumstance and condition, be subject to the rules, regulations, and laws governing the discipline of the Navy, to be modified, but not increased, by you as the circumstances may in your judgement require.


  Geo. M. Robeson, Secretary of the Navy, Instructions to Capt. C. F. Hall, June 9, 1871

  In theory, Congress had passed a bill authorizing funding for the expedition and the use of a naval vessel and “public service” officers where available. In theory, those military men were ultimately under the command of President Grant, the commander in chief. In reality, only Morton and Meyer were in service. The rest of the crew and officers were civilians to be paid at the end of the journey. Hall was ordered to assume command of mainly foreign whalers and a haughty duo of German scientists who themselves had separate instructions from the American scientific community. Never having held a naval commission, Charles Francis Hall had no idea what the “rules, regulations, and laws governing the discipline of the Navy” were. Neither did the scientists and seamen he was expected to command. No better recipe for a confused command could be devised.

  Even the mission's top priority remained unresolved. What was the primary goal to be: exploration or science? On the day it sailed, the Polaris carried a divided crew on a divided mission.

  FLAGS AND FANFARE

  Wishing you and your brave comrades health, happiness, and success in your daring enterprise, and commending you and them to the protecting care of the God who rules the universe.

  —GEO. M. ROBESON, SECRETARY OF THE NAVY

  On June 10, 1871, the Polaris, sporting a fresh coat of paint and festive bunting, slipped its moorings, steamed out of the Washington Navy Yard, and made its way down the Potomac River. Crowds of women in bright crinolines and men sporting top hats and broadcloth coats lined the banks, cheering and waving American flags while the navy band played “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The smell of fresh grass and magnolias mingled with the tang of pitch and coal smoke blown back upon the foredeck by the following wind.