Trial by Ice
Page 16
Many nights Coffin lay awake, cowering in fear from that anticipated sound of a wood bore. He changed sleeping places nightly, hiding in lockers and behind bulkheads. Other times he would pretend to sleep in one place only to move to another site while the others slept. Gaunt and hollow-eyed from lack of sleep, the carpenter stalked about below decks like a wraith. His madness served as a constant reminder to the crew of Captain Hall's sudden, suspicious death.
In the face of the ship's crumbling discipline, Captain Budding-ton did a curious and unexplained thing: he issued revolvers and rifles to the crew. What purpose this served is unknown. No external threat from Natives or animals existed. Hunting parties had need of firearms, and armed guards could be posted against the occasional marauding polar bear, but arming the crew during peacetime is unusual. Tyson would later surmise in his diary that Buddington armed the crew to curry their favor, intimating that Buddington might have feared that Tyson would snatch command away from him. But Tyson was no great favorite of the men either.
On December 6 the Arctic almost snatched Emil Bessel. Showing the same general contempt for the North Country that he had showered upon Captain Hall nearly cost him his life. Without carefully checking the weather one night, he departed the ship for his observatory. Normally the walk over the ice took half an hour, with the hut always within sight. The distance was a mere 1,307 feet, roughly a quarter of a mile. The onset of a sudden storm caught the doctor in the open. Pressing onward instead of turning back in the whiteout conditions, he missed the shack. Disoriented in the blowing snow, he could neither find the house nor locate the Polaris,
Forced to shelter behind an outcropping of ice, Bessel spent the night trying to keep warm. Undoubtedly his Inuit clothing and boots kept him from freezing in temperatures close to 30° below zero. Duiing that time he no doubt realized that a guide rope from ship to shore would have prevented his problem. Four hours later the snow diminished enough for him to find the observatory. Alarmed when he heard he had almost lost his chief scientist and ally, Buddington ordered a hastily constructed line of rubber-coated wire struig between the two points.
The lemainder of December passed with little note. “Nothing occurring that is pleasant or profitable to record,” Tyson wrote. The oppiessive darkness continued to exert increasing pressure on all, and the North showed its total disregard for these interlopers. Alternating periods of misery and elation washed over the crew like irregular waves. The northern lights flashed brighter and clearer with each passing day, taunting the men, while frost and ice infested the sleeping quarters.
When the Polaris broke free and drifted against Providence Berg, the ship had lost the insulating layers of snow so carefully banked along its sides. With the ship rocking up and down on its keel with each rise and fall of the tide, no amount of work could keep a new layer of snow in place. Without proper insulation, frost and cold crept quickly through the wooden walls. The dark interiors of the berths soon sported crystal layers of hoarfrost and ice. Water vapor from the stoves and human breath condensed everywhere. Showers of snow and icy crystal flakes fluttered down with every movement when the stoves were unlit. Lighting the heaters made matters only worse. The heat melted the rime and filled the quarters with a dripping, soggy haze of fog and dew that penetrated wool clothing and chilled everyone. When the stoves died out, the frost reformed, and the cycle repeated itself.
Christmas arrived to elaborate preparations but once again without any religious services being held. As at Thanksgiving, the table groaned under the weight of food and drink.
The divisiveness that set the crew at odds with one another raised its head briefly over the celebration. Since Christmas Eve was on a Sunday, some of the crew objected to celebrating on the Sabbath, preferring to have the party on Christmas night. The Germans absolutely refused to go along with that idea, wanting their party. Being the majority, they flexed their muscle. Rear Adm. C. H. Davis, in his Narrative of the North Polar Expedition, wrote of this incident that “the others cheerfully yielded.” That they did seems unlikely. One does not usually give up religious preferences “cheerfully.” Davis's work under the direction of Navy Secretary Robeson paints a rosy picture of every aspect of the expedition.
A drawing distributed Christmas packages to the crew, and everyone opened theirs at exactly ten o'clock. The presents turned out to be toys and trinkets bought by Captain Hall as gifts for any Eskimo children they might encounter. In a macabre twist, the dead explorer's specter rose over the occasion. Few noticed, and most were too drunk to care.
All the while the onshore wind continually stacked additional pack ice against the outside of their protective iceberg. The growing weight levered the shelter farther onto its side, and that, in turn, raised Polaris ever higher out of the water. Cracks developed in the stem and along the keel. One worrisome leak opened near the bow, where ice had staved in the planking. Located near the six-foot watermark, the shattered beam teetered tantalizingly just out of reach as the bow dipped in and out of the water.
And just as the wind and water wore away at the ship, the cold, isolation, and Arctic night worked to divide the crew. Buddington and Bessel soon quarreled over control of the dogsleds. Robeson's orders directed Bessel to conduct the sled trips, but the Prussian's lack of Arctic experience left him open to question. His frostbitten ear and recent fiasco while attempting to reach his hut highlighted his inexperience. To Buddington the haughty foreigner acted too proud to admit his ignorance. To Bessel the ship's captain, on the other hard, was no more than a drunken lout. While neither man openly confronted the other, animosity radiated out from each like light from the oil lanterns.
While Bessel and Buddington jockeyed for overall command, neither could muster a constant group of supporters to his cause. George Tvson, brooding about his lost chances for promotion under Hall, loathed them both and refused to back one or the other. Frederick Mever took the side of his fellow Prussian in arguments with Buddington but in private argued with Bessel. First Mate Hubbard Chester disliked George Tyson. Tyson returned the compliment. Buddington cared little for his chief engineer, Schuman, and all four American officers viewed Meyer and Bessel with suspicion. Only Mr. Bryan appeared above the petty differences, which steadily grew out of proportion.
Natually the attitude of the officers spilled over to the enlisted men. Mei who had prospered under Captain Hall felt they were punished for their loyalty to their dead leader. Joseph Mauch, elevated to the role of secretary to Captain Hall, found himself returned to the forecastle. Having more education than the other sailors, h-3 lavished sarcasm on his fellow shipmates. He developed a special dislike for Emil Bessel, accusing the doctor of being a “damned imposter,” of being too lazy to do his job properly, and of making up false data to cover that fact. Later, Captain Buddington reappoimed Mauch to act as his scribe.
Noah Hayes struggled under the harsh control of Walter Campbell, the fireman. Hayes had hoped Captain Hall would promote him out of the black gang, but the commander's death left the cheerful neophyte trapped in the boiler rooms with the bad-tempered Campbell and the martinet Schuman. In time Hayes's spleen would vent itself in his diary, filling page after page with invectives.
And so it went, round and round, slight piled upon slight, anger added to anger. This splintering of loyalties and introspected resentment frequently infects groups subjected to the long Arctic winter.
When the sun disappears from October 17 to February 28 and a crew lacks strong direction, the results are predictable. Loss of orientation, isolation, and constant discomfort unhinge even the best of intentions. Strong leadership, well-defined goals, and motivation are the antidotes. None of that remained in the Polaris expedition.
Add to this the physiology of light deprivation. Unknown to anyone at that time, the effects are striking on susceptible individuals. Without a certain quantity of daylight hitting the human retina, the brain stops producing melatonin. This hormone, besides stimulating pigment production, aids in sleep
regulation and mood elevation. Lowered levels lead to loss of energy, listlessness, and depression in some people. Overeating and heavy drinking occur in others. Modern medicine has coined a term for the problem, seasonal affective disorder, spawning a whole line of treatments. Some people are highly sensitive to changes in sunlight, whereas others are not. Staring at light boxes emitting the same spectrum of light as daylight helps the problem. One enterprising Alaskan cured his own disorder by staring into his car's headlights for twenty minutes a day during the winter, although this treatment is not recommended. Perhaps Captain Buddington was afflicted by this disorder instead of alcoholism.
The Arctic winter is an equal-opportunity destroyer. All that affected the Polaris crew had touched those who went before them and those who would follow. Some reacted better to the stress; others reacted worse. Henry Hudson's crew mutinied. Royal Navy discipline held Sir John Franklin's expedition together until the bitter end, as it did with Robert Scott's small band in the Antarctic. Even Charles Francis Hall, who adapted well to the Arctic, had grown moody and troublesome on his previous explorations. How well or how poorly the men of the Polaris rate in dealing with the stress of the Arctic winter is open to discussion.
December ended with a whimper. Tantalizingly the sea opened a distance from the stranded ship, but three to four miles of ice still lay between them. To compound matters, a new fear arose. The status of the steering was uncertain. Encased in ice, the rudder stock and its chains could neither be examined for damage nor repaired.
Many feared that the rudder had snapped off when the Polaris heeled ov tr.
Buddington filled his personal journal with excuses, emphasizing the constant danger to the ship and lamenting that Hall had not followed his advice about a more secure anchorage. With remarkably selective recall, he forgot his desire to sail south to Port Foulke and remembered wanting to anchor in Newman Bay. There would be no drifting ice pack, no daily rocking on the ice spur, no danger from anyihing had he been listened to, he postulated.
Two days before and two days after the New Year, attempts to free the s lip ended in dismal failure. The men chiseled holes in the surround ng ice and placed four bottles of black powder. Their first effort failed to split off the spur of ice that lifted the keel. Their last attempt r early broke the ship's ribs. The four feet of solid ice entrapping he vessel remained unaffected.
Captc.in Buddington now fastened on a new excuse for failure. During E>ecember the ship had burned close to one ton of coal more than in November. Characteristically Buddington blamed Hall's previous estimate of the available coal in the coal bunkers. Only eighty tons actually remained, Buddington claimed, not the one hundred tons that Hall had estimated. “If the consumption of this fuel i > continued at the same rate, a stoppage of which, without endanger ng our health is not possible, we will hardly have enough for two winters, to say nothing of using steam on our return,” Buddington carefully noted, adding, “The idea of piloting the vessel through Smith Sound with the aid of sails is an absurdity.”
Again he carefully painted himself into a corner, limiting his options. Despite Hall's careful efforts to outfit the expedition for at least twc years, the new commander deemed there were barely enough provisions to get them to the next sailing season. And what could he do differently? His hands were tied by circumstances beyond Pis control. Surely the men in Washington would understand that he must see to the welfare of his men before that of the mission.
Drunk almost daily since Hall's death, S. O. Buddington no doubt increasingly worried about covering his failings. In his mind he had no intention of spending another dreary winter in the Arctic if he could help it. His journal writings resound with reasons he could not complete the mission. Rather than constituting a journal, his entries shifted to a preparation for his defense.
Faced with a similar decision, Captain Hall would have cut back the coal usage, perhaps looked for alternative fuels to burn. But C. F. Hall was dead, and the special boiler designed to burn whale oil or seal blubber was gone as well, mysteriously thrown over the side back at Disko.
While Bessel and Buddington languished in their separate commands, the other men moved about aimlessly. At long last, whether through boredom or through rising courage, the officers and crew began to mount dogsled forays away from the ship without the help of Hans or Ebierbing. The sailors' lack of skill in handling dogs soon became painfully apparent. While the Inuit made it look easy, controlling the fractious animals over broken ice proved tricky for the neophytes. Few of the mariners' trips achieved more than a dozen miles. Nothing new was discovered, and each team returned with conflicting reports of the sea to the west. The shifting condition of the water and ice, which appeared open to some and closed to others, stymied any coordinated plan to move the ship. Of course, that suited Buddington's strategy of inaction.
January ended much as December had. Everything submerged beneath the gray mantle of the long Arctic night. Tasks and days blurred into one protracted period of depressing darkness. The strain of taking nightly meteorology readings finally exhausted Frederick Meyer, so Mauch gratefully assumed the task. Working in the observation hut freed him from having to act as Buddington's secretary. On a positive note, the more careful burning of coal paid off, saving 798 pounds over that burned the prior month.
By February shimmering glimpses of twilight crept back into the days, increasing with each passing hour. February 28 saw the sun peek over the rim of the Greenland mountains to the east. One hundred and thirty-five days of darkness had passed. The arrival of the sun reenergized the expedition, or at least some of its members. What is interesting is that Dr. Bessel, who had frustrated Captain Hall's attempts to reach the North Pole, now seemed bent on reaching the top of the world himself. Emil Bessel sent a note to Captain Buddington:
Sir:
As with the return of the sun the further operations of the e> pedition must be begun, and as, in regard to all these, a corsultation between us should take place, I forward herevv ith to you a sketch of a plan by means of which, as I think, we may best fulfill the mission upon which we are sent.
Very respectfully,
Emil Bessel
Whereupon the chief scientist enclosed five pages of detailed instructions for mounting further probes northward. March or April would be a good time to start, Bessel imagined, and the chance o:' the Polarises breaking loose from its iceberg's grip by then seerred unlikely. Therefore, exploring by small boat or sled offered the best option. Here the German physician was proceeding on faith instead of experience. If the Polaris could not break free of the ice, how did he expect his small boat teams to progress northward?
Besse] suggested that Buddington should wait until conditions permitted to steam the ship northward to Newman Bay to rendezvous with the advance party. Since the primary purpose was to discover the North Pole, a geographical goal, Bessel reasoned that land travel best suited that purpose. Bessel then outlined a plan approaching, the Normandy invasion in complexity. He has boat teams and sled groups crisscrossing north and south before meeting with ihe Polaris. Boats and shore supply depots would be left if the parties missed one anothera highly likely event given the vagaries of the Arctic weather and the difficult terrain. If the Polaris broke free before the teams returned, it was to sail north to Newman Bay and await the others. If the ice pack drifted south with the ship still entrapped, Buddington should cache “documents of the further route they intend to take” near the observatory. Presumably the men on the boats or dog teams would read the notes and race down the coast after the drifting Polaris to reunite with her.
Bessel continued to detail his attack. However, his ignorance of Arctic exploration revealed itself. He wrote:
It cannot be denied that it is a great advantage to use dogs for draught, but as we are compelled to travel over a poor country and make large distances the dogs will prove hindrances rather than help. We must, then, as the English expeditions have done, almost exclusively use man for draught.
If a man could do a better job pulling a sled, why did the Inuit use dogs? A thousand years of experience backed their decision to use canines. Generations of Natives had spent their lives refining sled design and breeding dogs to yield the most efficient combination for hauling goods over the ice, and the Eskimo's survival in the Arctic attested to the success of their methods. High spirits notwithstanding, a man cannot pull a two-hundred-pound sled for long in the Arctic. The expenditure of energy is just too great.
Furthermore, Bessel intended his sled journey to be a one-way affair. Expecting the ice pack to break up before the men could pull their sleds back, the Prussian planned to camp along the shoreline and wait for the Polaris to find them. “They will keep up a continued watch and signalize by flags and smoke, while the vessel fires a gun several times a day,” he proudly wrote. Somehow, the scientist believed the blinding snow squalls and smothering fog that harassed them would go away. It is not hard to imagine the ship and land parties' never connecting.
The complexity of Bessel's planning would have scattered the expedition's men and limited resources widely along the coastline of Greenland, overextending their lines of supply and communication, a further prescription for disaster. An axiom of Arctic travel is to keep needed supplies as close at hand as possible. The Hfesaving cache is always the one too far away, the one that is never reached, as Scott would later reaffirm. He and his men died less than eleven miles from all the food and supplies they would have needed.
Not content merely to trample over centuries of Inuit wisdom, Bessel went on to tell Captain Buddington how to sail his ship. “Now, a few remarks upon the operation of the vessel,” he wrote. “I: would undoubtedly be best to use as little as possible of our coal, and to proceed north by sail.” Ironically Bessel had replaced Captain Hall in attempting to micromanage Buddington.