Trial by Ice

by Richard Parry

  The whole exercise is akin to trying to align the reflection of two swinging lightbulbs in a saucer of water while balancing on your elbows. Only your life may depend on your accuracy.

  Years later Robert Peary, with better chronographs and sextants, would still struggle with this difficult means of measurement. Even today his readings that prove he reached the North Pole trouble some historians.

  To solve these problems, Hall planned to use Polaris, the North Star, as his guiding light. When asked by members of the academy how he intended to tell when he reached the North Pole, he blithely answered that he would look overhead at Polaris. When the star no longer moved southward as he trekked north but stayed constantly overhead in the firmaments, he would be directly beneath the Pole Star and standing on the exact North Pole. The scientists accepted his logic, for everyone knew the Polar Star hung in the sky directly over the Pole and never wavered. Had Hall actually reached the North Pole, he would have been puzzled by his findings. To the observer standing beneath it, Polaris oscillates back and forth in a small ellipse while the earth wobbles on its axis.

  Whatever misfortune Captain Hall suffered with his officers and crew, good fortune favored his advance up the narrow straits. The floating bergs parted, and no pack ice blocked their way. On the evening of August 27, the Polaris steamed past the highest point that Hall's nemesis Dr. Hayes had reached. In 1860 gales and ice had forced Hayes's schooner the United States to winter over at a place Hayes named Port Foulke near Hartstene Bay. Dr. Kane's exploration aboard the Advance in 1853 nearly met disaster when a sudden storm forced ice around the ship, causing it to take refuge in that harbor. Both Hayes and Kane pressed northward by sled while their ships wintered over. Eventually Kane was forced to abandon the Advance and retreat south. Within three more hours the Polaris continued past Rensselaer Harbor.

  A jubilant Hall paced the decks as the sightings confirmed they had reached 78°5V N, where Kane had grounded his ship and made his winter camp. Dawn found them passing through the narrowing of Kennedy Channel. Beyond this the channel widened again.

  William Morton and Hans pointed and laughed as the ship beat through the water. Here was the place they had reached seventeen years before and reported on only to be ridiculed when Hayes later found it frozen. Kane's Open Polar Sea, they called it, and their enthusiasm brought them only reproach. Now the Polaris cruised where Hayes had declared sea travel was impossible. They were vindicated.

  Ahead in the swirling mists, the Open Polar Sea narrowed. It was not a sea after all but another of the basins that populate the passage like a string of misshapen pearls. Expansively, Hall renamed the place after himself, calling it Hall Basin. He could hardly wait to see the look on Hayes's face when the man learned the Polaris had sailed where Hayes said no ship could.

  Exiting the northern end of the basin, the ship brushed aside slabs of floating ice and entered another channel. Now it sailed where no ship had gone before. With mounting exuberance, Charles Hall began naming everything in sight. The channel became Robe-son Channel, after the secretary of the navy; an indentation along its eastern side became Polaris Bay. Ahead another, larger bay was named Newman's Bay, after the good reverend. Headlands rising from the southern edge of Newman's Bay became Sumner Headlands, after the senator from Massachusetts. For all his excitement, Hall covered all bases, political patrons along with ecclesiastic supporters. A sealed brass cylinder noting their northern progress was thrown overboard on August 27.

  While Hall, Morton, and Hans congratulated themselves and laughed like schoolboys, the master of sail failed to share their glee. Each nautical mile the ship sailed north weighed like a pound of lead on Sidney Buddington's mind. Not in his wildest nightmares had he expected to sail this far. When they reached Port Foulke, Kane's winter quarters, he strongly urged Hall to put in. There was a snug harbor where the ship could winter over in relative comfort, and he could raid the pantry and sample his drink while Hall could sled north to his heart's content. If that madman and his allies wished to freeze to death on the ice, so be it. That was not Buddington's cup of tea. He was sailing master, and his responsibility began and ended with the safety of the ship. Port Foulke was a very nice, safe spot. They should put in there and prepare for winter. That was what all prudent whaling captains did when faced with ice.

  Yet Hall was no prudent whaling captainin fact, no sea captain at all. He brushed aside Buddington's pleas and persisted in sailing on. No doubt that recklessness rankled Buddington. No one but a landsman would endanger the vessel and all aboard, especially in these unknown waters. If he wrecked the ship, they would all be lost. The ship was their only means of returning to safety.

  But Hall continued his perilous course, and George Tyson encouraged him. Tyson climbed the mast, waved his arms from the crow's nest, and shouted down to Hall and the helmsman that he could see more open water ahead.

  Tyson's assistant navigator commission did little to clarify his function. Tyson's acting like another captain must have been a thorn in Buddington's side more than a help. The whaler could only imagine that Hall had brought Tyson along because he didn't trust Buddington. In truth, Tyson had been Hall's first choice to skipper the ship. Probably every man aboard, including Buddington, knew that by now. Buddington would later describe Tyson as a malcontent, always criticizing his handling of the ship while toadying up to Hall.

  But the crew knew who had the sea experience, and so did Hubbard Chester, the first mate. Like Buddington, they were mariners with little taste for sinking their home just to climb a few more degrees of latitude north. Every Jack Tar of them knew shipmates who had frozen to death or simply vanished with their ships in these waters, and they were not anxious to join the long list of missing sailors posted on the walls of the Whaleman's Chapel in New Bedford. The ghastly white faces and clawlike frozen fingers of seamen who had died on the ice surely haunted their nightly dreams.

  Buddington recruited them to his side whenever he could. Not openly, of course, but with subtle gestures and snide remarks, and always behind Hall's back. Direct insubordination could lead to losing one's master's papers, something Buddington feared. He had to admire the craftiness of the German, Emil Bessel. The chief scientist bested Hall at every turn. Disdainful, aloof, almost imperial in his actions, Bessel unnerved Hall with a combination of ridicule and contempt.

  Tyson's shout caused the helmsman to spin the wheel and head the ship back across the channel to where Tyson pointed. Ahead Buddington saw only forests of floating bergs, shifting and grinding against one another in the failing light.

  Even if George Tyson realized that his exuberance nettled Captain Buddington, he couldn't have cared less. Hall's passion to reach the North Pole had infected him. While Buddington fretted, Tyson enjoyed the danger of zigzagging up the channel. Every nautical mile they made brought them closer to their goal and spared them sledding an equal mile over the rugged sastrugi. When Mr. Chester informed him just before midnight that an impassable barrier of ice lay ahead, Tyson went aloft and proved him wrong. Spending his entire watch in the rigging, Tyson piloted the Polaris through a narrow lee and along that channel until open water reappeared.

  By now they had sailed farther north than any white man had ever gone. Here the differences between Buddington and Tyson grew obvious. Like Hall, George Tyson enjoyed the unmarked chart, the undiscovered land. And especially like their commander, Tyson had adapted to dogsled travel with the Inuit. For him the fields of unbroken ice and barren, snow-covered land held no special terror. Other than Hall, no one else aboard felt that way. To the rest, the ship meant safety. To Hall, Tyson, and the Inuit, the ship was only a means to move them higher before they took to their sleds.

  Carried along on the ship's rolls in a position that ill suited his rank as captain in his own right, Tyson felt like a fish out of water. Buddington, Chester, and even old Morton fit neatly into the ship's chain of command. But he did not. What exactly did an assistant navigator do if the navigator was so
und?

  However, as master of the sledges, he had a role, albeit a role off the ship. Like Hall and quite unlike Chester, Buddington, or Bessel, Tyson felt comfortable driving a dogsled over the crackling ice. His heart did not leap into his throat when his sled skated across water overflowing on the ice or hurdled across opened cracks in the floes. He could handle a team almost as well as Hall, a tall accomplishment for a white man. Hans Christian, Ebierbing, and even Tookoolito had run sled dogs from the day they could walk, and Hans handled the teams like the master he was. But Hall and Tyson could steer and control the dogs and eagerly anticipated venturing away from the Polaris on sledding explorations. In that they were quite different from the rest of the crew.

  To most mariners, their ship is their home, their substitute wife, their mother, and at most times their strong-willed mistress. Demanding, unforgiving, but always supportive, each vessel has its own personality. Ships are always referred to as “she” or “her” and described as “tender” or “forgiving,” terms applied to women. In a faceless, heartless ocean, a sailor's vessel provides food, warmth, shelter, and his only means of survival.

  For these reasons most seamen are reluctant to step off their vessel except in port. Even in dire emergencies with the ship afire or sinking, many refuse to abandon the only security they know even if staying aboard means certain death.

  Extrapolate that mind-set to the Polaris: a well-found ship, strong and modified with the latest modern equipment to survive in the Arctic. What sailor in his right mind would exchange that security for the shifting ice fields and wind-whipped whiteout conditions surrounding them? There a man might vanish in a second into a crevasse, and shelter meant a cold, dark igloo heated by a single, sputtering seal-oil lamp.

  So in the end three divergent groups rode aboard the Polaris as the ship beat northward. Buddington, Chester, and the English-speaking seamen saw their future in the safety of the vessel. The scientific corps with Emil Bessel, Frederick Meyer, and the German crew believed they could study the Arctic from the ship or nearby land. No need for them to risk life and limb in lengthy forays away from the Polaris. Only Charles Francis Hall with George Tyson, a few exuberant sailors like Noah Hayes, and the Inuit desired to leave the ship once the ice locked around it. Tyson ridiculed the others' fears. “I see some rueful countenances,” he noted in his diary. “I believe some of them think we are going to sail off the edge of the world, or into ‘Symme's Hole,’” he wrote, referring to a mythical whirlpoollike aberration in the ocean that sailors feared could suck down an entire ship, leaving no trace.

  Hall had crossed his Rubicon. He could not turn back. He would rather die than forgo his quest to reach the North Pole, he had told his crew. His unbending ambition and goal threatened the safety of two of the three groups. Unwittingly, by pressuring them, Hall put his own life in jeopardy. In the back of his mind, the leader of this flawed party must have realized this. Grave foreboding crept into his thoughts.

  One evening Tyson found Hall working at his writing desk. Already an author of one book on his first Arctic travels, Hall had shown Tyson the notes and drafts of his attempt to find the lost Franklin expedition. Hall brought them aboard when the ship left New York. What better place to finish a manuscript than during the idle hours aboard the ship, both men realized.

  “Are you writing up your Franklin search book?” Tyson asked.

  Hall stopped writing. For a minute he regarded the papers before him. “No,” he said flatly. “No,” he sighed, “I left those papers in Disco.”

  In Disko! The reply shocked Tyson. In New York all Hall could talk about besides reaching the North Pole was his unfinished manuscript. With drawings, detailed notes, maps, and etchings of the varied artifacts recovered from Franklin's trail of death and disaster, Hall's work held valued insights and poignant relics. The public eagerly awaited his book. Now it might be two to three years before he could work on it again.

  And leaving it in Disko in the hands of the Danish governor made no sense. An uneasy knot turned in Tyson's stomach.

  “Why?” he blurted out.

  A mask of gloom spread over Hall's face. Even in the pale light of the guttering oil lamp, Tyson watched the shadow of darkness settle across his leader's features and the ruddy color drain away. The depression and anguish reflected in the man's face made Tyson truly uncomfortable. He would later record his feelings that night in his diary.

  Without raising his head, Hall whispered, “I left them there for safety. …”

  Feeling as if he had accidentally stepped on his companion's soul, Tyson backed out of the cabin. Hall never raised his head, never made eye contact. Instead, he returned to writing his journal.

  Back on deck Tyson shivered, but not from the cold. What was Captain Hall thinking? What safer place could there be for the man's manuscript than by his side? Was there something bad that Hall sensed? Did he believe disaster lay ahead for the ship? Did he fear someone aboard might maliciously destroy his precious notes … or even do him harm?

  “I saw the subject was not pleasant, and I made no further remark,” Tyson wrote that night of their discussion, “but I could not help thinking it over.”

  NIPPED

  The ice had got us, we were frozen in for the winter, ‘glued up’…

  —ELISHA KENT KANE, 1850

  On August 29, 1871, the Polarises run of luck ended. Geometric slabs of ice forty feet thick drifted down Robeson Channel to fill the gaps between the heavier bergs. Birthed amid overhanging ledges and wrenched from the shallows by tides and winds, these blocks cascaded into the narrowing channel. Floating slush and brash ice the ship could brush aside, and its reinforced beak could ram past inches of newly formed sea ice. This liberated land ice was another matter. Weighing tons apiece, these miniature icebergs could easily ram through the hull planking. To make matters worse, a thick fog settled over this shifting minefield just as the sun slipped below the peaks to the west.

  Engineer Emil Schuman looked up from his gauges at the first clang of the ship's communicator. The lever spun to all stop with a final ring. He wiped the sweat from his eyes with the back of his hand and signaled to John Booth and Walter Campbell, the firemen, who were blackened from head to foot with coal dust. Their eyes shining like agate stones from their dusted faces, they wearily set their shovels aside and settled atop the piles of coal.

  Spinning the bypass valves, Schuman diverted the steam from the pistons that drove the ship's screw. Warily, he watched the needles on the pressure dials rise. This was always a tense moment. Any weakness in the boiler's plating could lead to disaster. Even the tiniest pinhole might bathe them in superheated steam. Vapors that hot would boil the skin right off a person in the blink of an eye.

  Boiler explosions occurred frequently. Only six years before, the paddle wheeler Sultana had exploded on the Mississippi with the loss of seventeen hundred lives. Schuman must have considered the irony of cooking to death while the temperature outside the hull remained below freezing.

  The screech of ice grinding along the length of the hull filled the close chambers. With the engine quiet, every contact with the solid water reverberated through the engine room. More ice raked the sides, one block after another. If the seams split, freezing water would pour inside. Then the boilers would explode. Death by fire and iceneither one a pleasant way to die, as Robert Frost would later note.

  On deck seamen cast grappling hooks to an adjacent floe and made the ship fast while they waited for an opening. The wind freshened, then backed. A gale was brewing.

  By 7:30 p.m. a lead opened near the eastern shore. Like a shadow amid the shimmering ice fields, the channel challenged them. At Hall's urging Buddington reluctantly steered the ship up the gauntlet until the stem grounded against the ice. Ahead jumbled blocks and shards packed the channel amid mountainous icebergs. The way ahead was impassable.

  They had gone as far as possible by ship. The ice made this decision for them; neither Hall's exuberance nor Buddington
's reluctance played a part. The wind rose again, swirling down the passage and pressing heavy ice against both sides of the Polaris. Within minutes thick ice hemmed in the sides of the vessel.

  Hall checked his calculations against Tyson's and got 82°29' N. They had sailed farther north than anyone before them. Still, he wanted more, if possible. Launching a whaleboat, the two men rowed to the Greenland side. From the deck of the Polaris, a notch in the land looked inviting. If the ship could winter there, Hall thought, so much the better.

  What looked like a harbor turned out to be a shallow bight, nothing more than a subtle curve in the coastline, without protection from wind or icebergs sweeping along the shallow bay. Hall waded ashore and raised an American flag. With little thought that this wind-scoured spit might belong to Greenland, the explorer claimed this northern land for the United States. When the harbor proved unsuitable, he ironically named it Repulse Harbor.

  Dejectedly the two men struggled with the boat back through the howling wind to find the Polaris tightly caught in the icy jaws. A full-fledged storm fell upon them now. Driven by the gale-force winds, the shore ice ground and compressed the hull like a vise. Planking groaned and seams opened until streams of water sprayed into the bilges.