Thres hundred shots were fired. The female eventually dropped down and died of her wounds, and only then did the injured male and his offspring abandon her and retreat. Having exhausted all their carrridges, Sieman and Kruger could only watch. A party of sailors fi lished off the rest of the family the next day and retrieved the meat of the female. The supply of fresh meat now surpassed the capacity of the ship's icebox. While Bessel oversaw the skinning of the unfortunate musk ox family so they could later be stuffed, the animals' flesh found its way into a hole cut in the side of Providence Berg.
In their blood lust the officers, scientific corps, and crew forgot all tr ought of proceeding north to discover new land and plant the flag t the North Pole. Perhaps this was what Captain Budding-ton wan :ed. His deadline of the first of May came and went withnothing happening. Chester and Jamka suffered snow blindness while hunting musk oxen that day. Sleds and men rushed about along the foothills and through the low plains behind the coastal bluffs, but always in search of animals to shoot. None of the trips made more than twenty miles or lasted longer than a week.
Ice still gripped the bay while leads of dark water opened and closed in Kennedy Channel at the whim of the currents. Despite the sealed surface of the bay, strong water forces swept below it and drove blocks of ice capable of crushing a longboat along any open channel. Hopes of launching the two whaleboats dimmed. Now was the time to explore by sled when the ice was still thick, but that window of opportunity was rapidly closing while the men hunted. Clearly inertia was bogging down the polar exploration, tying the men to the uncertain safety of their ship. All this might have been expected with the loss of Captain Hall. Only hewith Tyson, Morton, and the two Inuit menwere the land explorers. All the rest were sailors or laboratory scientists.
There was simply no one to lead. Now that Hall was dead, Tyson had no authority, since he had derived his strange position from the late commander's pleasure. Thirty years in the navy had conditioned Morton to follow commands, not give them, and the Inuit withdrew to their usual defensive posture of being passive when dealing with white men. To their credit, they had come along only for their friend Captain Hall, and he was dead. No one else aboard the Polaris had earned their friendship and respect.
CALAMITY
We were weary for want of occupation, for want of variety, for want of the means of mental exertion, for want of thought, and (why should I not say it?) for want of society.
—SIR JOHN ROSS, 1831
By the end of May, three feet of water filled the ship's hold, but Bessel preferred to turn his attentions to the impending expeditions and other things closer to his heart. The men had captured two flies near the observatory, the first seen since the winter, and the physician indulged his passion of studying the insects.
Budclington did order a halfhearted repair. The split along the starboard bow was caulked and tarred over and the iron plating replaced, lesulting in some improvement. Work could be performed only at iour-hour intervals because of the rising tide. Moreover, at the next high tide, the leak returned unabated. At that time the carpenter discovered a similar set of cracks extending eight feet aft from the port side and leaking copious amounts of seawater. For all his nighrly troubles, Coffin still managed to function as the ship's carpenter. There was nothing he could do, however, to make repairs to the o itside of the ship's hull. Because of the ice spur on which the Polcris sat, the ship had rolled and the port side remained underwater.
The weight of the water trapped within the hold placed an added strain on the ship's keel, so Buddington ordered the pumps used. Obstinate like its name, the donkey pump refused to start just then, so the men worked a smaller pump, nicknamed the “handy billy.” Four hours of pumping cleared the hold.
Distressingly, water continued to accumulate aft whenever the pumping stopped. A survey of the hold failed to pinpoint any leaks in the stern. Someone suggested the rising water might be from ice melting in the coal bunkers and running aft. The crew accepted this explanation and happily returned to their new prioritymaking beer.
Buddington wholly supported this endeavor, at the expense of repairing his ship, stating that the brewing “would do them good.” Three days of concerted effort produced a barrel filled to the brim with the sour brew. The cask occupied the center of the galley with a sign stating north pole lager beer saloon, no trust, cash.
The men quaffed their beer anxiously and watched June arrive while the water in the hold rose to five inches. The sound of water dripping into the forward hold during high tide joined the chorus of groans and creaks from the teetering hull, probably prompting the crew to drink all the more. The water contributed to the rot attacking the spare sails stored in the hold, but so far the foodstuffs and coal remained safe.
Tantalizingly, signs of summer appeared about the ship while ice still blocked the men's use of their longboats. The temperature rose daily. Pools of melted water covered the ice, melting streams cascaded from the bluffs, and rough patches of earth poked shyly through their white mantle. Moss, lichen, and ground willow stirred into life, creeping across the barren shale. All about the ship, the land was stirring. Summer is short in the Arctic. Life that depends on sunlight and warmth must rise to the occasion or be left behind.
On a visit to Captain Hall's grave, George Tyson found ground willow rooted among the piled rocks and extending interlocking fingers across the mounded dirt.
Ironically Buddington noted the changes in his journal, too, and the expedition's inaction crept into his words:
The plain is full of fine streamlets of water that give moisture to the ground. Saxifrages are blooming, and are distributed all over the plain. Insects are getting numerous. Flies and mosquitoes are met with. This single warm day has called many into life.
On the sixth of June, the Arctic cast a lure that no one aboard the ship could ignore: open sea appeared along the spur of land just north of t he observatory that they called Cape Lupton. Shining water lay dancing before them. Quickly the two whaleboats were slid over the ce to the edge of the open lead at Cape Lupton the next day. The vvay north by whaleboat beckoned.
Mr. Chester jumped at the chance. Euphoria abounded as by eight p.m. the evening of the seventh, he sped off with his whaleboat crew and a sled loaded with extra provisions. All winter long, plans for reaching the North Pole had circulated around the mess and throughout the forecastle. Combined with the months of inaction and dark less, the mission grew in many minds until it became not only a Holy Grail of sorts but an easy grail to achieve.
Naive te, lack of experience, and alcohol compounded to simplify this daunting task in their minds to little more than a short row up the channel instead of a six-hundred-mile, life-threatening struggle. Rear Adm. C. H. Davis, in his official report of the Polaris expedition, did his best to whitewash this almost unbelievable gullibility:
Durirg the whole winter the boat journeys had been talked about, and it had been shown over and over again how comparatively easy it was to go to the Pole. No difficulties were allowed to stand in the way, and the route was as clearly marked out as if it were a well-known channel. Undoubtedly the warm glow of the cabin stove had much to do w th the coloring thrown around this boat journey. So completely had the self-deception been effected, that people now looked with confidence to the result.
Exactly what occupied these men's minds that day is hard to fathom. Since late summer of the previous year, the expedition had stumbled and faltered whenever the Arctic showed its power. Sudden storms, cold, darkness, and ice buffeted them constantly and brushed aside their attempts at progress with uncaring force. Yet here they rushed forth eagerly to subdue the far North in fragile whaleboats where their stout sailing ship could do nothing.
Chester's crew vanished into the twilight a full day ahead of Tyson. On the eighth, Tyson dispatched his men to their boat as he and Bessel gathered last-minute odds and ends. All the while the assistant navigator fretted that Chester might beat him to the prize.
While
Tyson stewed over his delayed departure and his crew waited by their boat, Chester and his crew launched theirs, the Grant, from Cape Lupton on the morning of the eighth. Ahead of them the slate-gray water stretched around the turn of the headlands. Pulling together, the men put their backs into the oars, and the heavily laden whaleboat knifed across the open water. Spirits soared as they rowed onward. A mile passed.
Two miles into their journey, an enormous ice floe rose out of the sunlit mists directly ahead. The white island slid silently toward the opening to which the men rowed. Driven by the onshore winds, the island would block their path unless the whale-boat reached the opening first. A desperate race ensued, the men of the Grant straining and cursing as they rowed while the frozen wall moved inexorably closer. Chester urged his men on, and the sharp prow of the skiff shot forward. Mere yards ahead the channel remained open.
Then a gust of wind spun the floe around, and ice met ice, closing the passage with a dull crunch. The longboat crashed into the sealed opening, and its prow rode onto the hard surface with a start.
Exhausted but hardly discouraged, Chester and his crew dragged the boat onto the floe and hauled the craft across the flat surface. Supplies spilled onto the ice, filling the grooves left in the melting surface by the boat's passage. Hastily Chester sent someone to retrieve the articles. Once across the ice, they again launched the boat and paddled on. Another mile passed.
Ahead jagged islands of ice choked the passage. Jostling, colliding, and capsizing under the wind and current, these impediments posed a serious concern. Unlike the field they had just crossed, these islands crumbled and tipped and turned and provided no level place to transit. Worse still, the heat of the summer sun, raising the temperature above freezing, attacked the floating islands until huge blocks of rotten ice sheared from their surfaces to tumble into a twisted rubble of melted slush.
Two grounded icebergs loomed ahead with a flat ice floe separating them. Amid the grinding islands, this tranquil spot beckoned. With no Inuit along to recognize the impending trap, Chester ordered his men to pull for that floe just as more ice slid into place behind them. The open channel had lured them into the ice field, but the abrupt change in the sea state and the advancing tide now blocked 11 hope of advance or retreat.
Chesier calculated that the turning tide would draw the pack ice back out to sea and ordered camp made to wait out the rising tide. The men pitched tents, preparing to stay the night, and lit fires. Soon tea boiled over the portable tin stoves. Worn out by their efforts, the men ate a hasty meal and turned in.
Frederick Anthing, the seaman who described himself as “born in Russia, on the Prussian border,” took the first watch atop a saddle of ice facing west. Chester and Meyer stretched out on India rubber sheets about twenty yards from the whaleboat. The other three sail 3rs crawled into a tent pitched beside the Grant.
No sooner had Chester closed his eyes than a warning shout jarred him awake.
“The ice is coming!” Anthing cried in alarm.
Chesier sprang to his feet and his crew spilled out of their tent to see an advancing wall of pack ice rising above them so high that it appeared to block out the sky. The crowded wedge struck the iceberg sheltering them from the sea with a deafening roar.
The Inuit call this rapid and deadly attack of pack ice evu, and they fear it above all else. Sudden storms, rising tides, and current shifts will drive hundreds of tons of pack ice ashore with awesome powerand no warning. Tumbling like dominoes, twisting, and sliding o^er one another, enormously dense plates advance like an army. Nothing at sea level is safe from destruction. Even camps atop the windswept bluffs lining the coast fall prey to ice rafted and stacked until it towers more than one hundred feet high. Like colossal shears, the slabs scythe and crush everything standing before them.
The ground beneath Chester's feet buckled as the evu struck their iceberg, and the mate struggled to regain his footing. The force shattered the berg and sundered their campsite. Frozen boulders rained down from the fractured iceberg, crushing boxes and supply bags. The floe cracked into pieces. Dark open water splashed up from the sudden fissures, and the broken plates tilted and spun as more slabs showered upon them.
The three men by the boat jumped for their lives as their floor split apart. The Grant danced away in the second half. Before they could rescue their boat, a mountain of ice fell upon the craft, crushing it to splinters.
For endless minutes a deadly dance ensued as men sprang from one floating chip to the next. Keeping alive meant moving, but one slip or misstep would plunge a man through the cracks into the boiling sea. Opening and closing like a living net, the cracks proved as threatening as the ice attack. Anyone falling into a fissure would be crushed to death or drowned as the ice closed over him. All the while tons of ice from the shattered iceberg and the evu bombarded the hapless crew and sent their slippery footholds jumping and spinning.
Abruptly the attack ended. As quickly and as silently as it had begun, the evu passed on. Shocked and stunned by the violent event, the men could only stand and stare at their shattered world. Miraculously all survived.
Their material goods had not. The Grant had vanished into a pile of matchstick-size splinters drifting out to sea. Three rifles, a boxed chronometer, and Mr. Meyer's journal were all that survived. In its fury and whimsy, the ice attack had taken all else and left these random, unrelated items.
Hours ago they had rowed northward with high hopes of conquering the North Pole, and in the blink of an eye, the Arctic had dashed their hopes. Shaken, they huddled together on broken rafts of ice, stripped of all their possessions and with no alternative but to drag themselves back to their ship.
Ironically among the goods Mr. Chester lost was the Jonah American flag that the ill-fated Wilkes expedition had carried and that Grinnell later presented to Captain Hall.
A chastened Chester and his crew slogged the seven miles back, arriving aching and footsore from climbing over the shore ice piled along the bay. Instead of receiving sympathy for their misfortune, the rest of the crew treated them with the disdain they probably deserved: c irelessness lay at the root of the second boat team's disaster. Only Tyson's delay had saved his men from a similar fate, yet they acte d superior to the other boat crew.
Again the divisive spirit that pervaded the ship raised its ugly head. Tyson recorded the loss with ill-concealed glee: “Chester's party ha/e all returned, having had the misfortune to lose their boat, and nearly their lives.” He continued, “I called the cape near which th sy lost their boat Cape Disaster, and the bay they were on, beyond Cape Lupton, Folly Bay, which I believe was rather displeasing :o Mr. Chester.” Here Tyson sounds more like a schoolboy reveling n a classmate's failure than an adult who recognized that teamwork was essential to the success of their mission as well as their survival.
Perversely the Arctic fostered this division. Wind and water combine« 1 to once more offer an ice-free channel of open water. Smugly Tyson, Dr. Bessel, and four men launched their boat on the evening of the tenth.
Stunj; by the unfair criticism, Chester begged for another boat. Camping between the two grounded icebergs had been an error, he realized low. The structural strength of a summer iceberg, weakened anc fissured by melting water, differed greatly from that of a winter berg. Rotten to the core and capable of breaking apart and capsizing at any time, summer icebergs offered dangerous sanctuary. Nevertheless, the floe between was the only spot suitable to land.
Chester's pleas brought mixed results. Buddington refused to release a lother longboat, fearing that all remaining boats might be needed ct home. With the Polaris sinking lower into the sea as Providence Berg's spur melted, each day found new cracks in the hull and rising water in the holds. Running the steam pumps for fifteen minutes every four hours cleared the bilges of water, but that required the steam donkey to maintain six to ten pounds of steam pressure at all times. Firing the boiler constantly consumed precious coal. The dead Hall's foresight in scrimping on fuel and
the special boiler sabotaged in Disko must have haunted the men's thoughts. Burning seal oil in that unique steamer would have resolved tbeir mounting coal problem.
For all his efforts Chester finally got the Heggleman, the patented folding canvas boat. Assembling the portable craft proved challenging, so another day passed before Chester launched the canvas craft on June 12. Paddling after Tyson and Bessel, the men were described as in good spirits and singing “We're going to the Pole” as they rowed away.
Their enthusiasm soon soured and turned to glum determination as the poor design of the Heggleman revealed itself. Square-tipped on bow and stern, the puntlike craft, which might have been ideal for a summer outing on a placid lake, proved agonizingly slow and unwieldy. Its flat nose wedged solidly into any ice floe it encountered instead of pushing the ice aside as the sharp-prowed whaleboats did. Furthermore, the high sides and flat nose caught the wind like a sail. Nose on, the wind blew the boat backward, and a beam breeze left the stern man constantly fighting the tiller to keep on course. Added to all this was the boat's flimsy construction. Hickory and ash thwarts supporting stretched canvas made the boat look fragile as an eggshell compared to the massive blocks of floating ice threatening it. For sailors used to rowing a wooden-planked whaleboat, bobbing along in a cloth contraption must have proved nerve-racking.
The Heggleman's crew battled for a whole week to reach the same spot Tyson had achieved in two days. Weather and the awkward folding boat conspired against them. After a day and a half of hard rowing, the exhausted men collapsed on another floe for the night. A strong northerly wind rose while they slept and blew their floating island back down the channel. In the morning they awoke to find themselves south of their starting point the day before at Cape Lupton.
Trial by Ice Page 18
