Off the Map

by Fergus Fleming

  By 1902, thanks largely to the pundits’ efforts, Britain had annexed Tibet. The men who had made this territorial gain possible were appreciated by their employers and by the Royal Geographical Society, which awarded Nain Singh its gold medal, for adding ‘a greater amount of positive knowledge to the map of Asia than any other individual in our time’. The RGS also gave Kishen Singh a gold watch (it was stolen during one of his many absences). But, as mere Indians, the pundits were never properly rewarded for their services. They were paid little for time in the field and received meagre pensions when they were no longer needed. William Rockhill, an American traveller, wrote in 1891: ‘If any British explorer had done one third of what Nain Singh [or others] accomplished, medals and decorations, lucrative offices and professional promotion, freedom of cities, and every form of lionisation would have been his. As for those native explorers, a small pecuniary award and obscurity are all to which they can look forward.’

  Kishen Singh was the longest-lived of this extraordinary band. He survived, in constant ill-health as a result of his ordeals, until 1921. The last Briton to have given the pundits their orders died in 1967. Neither man left any clue as to what motivated the pundits to do what they so bravely but thanklessly did.

  MAROONED OFF GREENLAND

  Paul Hegemann and Karl Koldewey (1869–70)

  Of all the theories as to how the North Pole could be attained, that of the German geographer August Petermann was perhaps the most radical. Looking at how effectively the Gulf Stream warmed the coasts of Western Europe and Scandinavia, he saw no reason why its influence should suddenly vanish when it reached the Arctic seas. It was surely wrong to imagine that such a great body of water should, in some vague fashion, just disappear once it had passed Norway. No, he said, it did not disappear but continued into the Arctic where, encountering a body of land (of whose existence he had no proof), it looped west to emerge above the east coast of Greenland. Along its course, which perhaps appropriately he envisaged as being in the shape of a vast aquatic question mark, the sea would be ice-free. Therefore, rather than struggle through Smith Sound to the west of Greenland as every navigator had done to date, it was more sensible to follow nature’s own path to the Pole – to enter, as Petermann put it, the ‘thermometric gateways’.

  On 15 June 1869 that year two ships sailed from Bremerhaven to put his theory to the test. The larger, the Germania, was a sturdy, newly built, ironsheathed steamer under the command of Karl Koldewey. The smaller, the Hansa, was an unreinforced sailing ship under Paul Hegemann. Their destination was the east coast of Greenland. It was not anticipated that they would reach the Pole – the voyage was more of an exploratory probe than an outright attempt – but they carried a heavy burden of expectation. This was Germany’s first Arctic expedition and, as Koldewey wrote, ‘[we will] show that German sailors are as qualified, as bold, and as persevering as other nations’.

  Koldewey’s brave words belied an understandable nervousness. Few crew-members on either ship had experience of the ice. The scientists who accompanied the expedition had never been on a ship before, let alone been to the Arctic, and some of them had never even seen the sea. But by the time they reached Greenland in July their fear had been replaced by excitement. ‘We stood and felt that we were at the entrance to a new world,’ Koldewey wrote, ‘whose whole enchantment had thus burst upon us.’ His optimism was premature. On 19 July Koldewey flagged Hegemann to come aboard to discuss how they should proceed. Hegemann, however, misunderstood the signal and sailed the Hansa straight for Greenland, where it was rapidly swallowed by fog. Koldewey stared in incredulity: both he and Hegemann knew the Hansa was not sturdy enough for a battle with the ice; it was intended merely as a supply ship, while the Germania was to do all the rough work. Still, it had been agreed that if the slower, weaker Hansa became separated from its partner the two vessels were to rendezvous at nearby Sabine Island, so Koldewey set up camp there and steamed for Greenland. He reached the coast on 5 August at a latitude of 74° 18’ N.

  For the next 12 months Koldewey’s men investigated this unknown stretch of land. Under his second-in-command, Julius von Payer, they sledged as far north as 77° 1’ N, discovering herds of musk-ox, seams of coal and the remains of Inuit settlements, all of which made East Greenland seem an eminently rewarding place in terms of polar exploration. Their equipment was not of the finest, and they were hampered by lack of experience. But their enthusiasm inured them to all discomforts: when one of the scientists, a Dr Borgen, was attacked by a polar bear, which sank its teeth into his head and dragged him for several hundred yards before being frightened off, he declared the experience to have been absolutely painless. Sailing for home on 22 July 1870, Koldewey congratulated himself on a successful mission. True, the Hansa had not reappeared, but he was not too worried: Hegemann was a capable officer and, after his first brush with the floes, would almost certainly have sailed back to Bremerhaven.

  Nothing would have pleased Hegemann more. However, he had not just brushed the floes but become entangled in them. Realizing his mistake, he made valiant efforts to regain Sabine Island, but by 25 August 1869 the Hansa was imprisoned in the ice and being carried south. Without steam power, Hegemann was unable to break free. All he could do was watch as his ship drifted at the mercy of the current. That it was a southward flowing current, as Petermann had predicted, was not a great comfort.

  Inexperienced the Germans may have been, but they knew that being ‘nipped’ was the worst hazard of Arctic navigation: once a ship was frozen in place it had a limited chance of survival. If, by a miracle, there were no storms, and the floes remained stable, the Hansa might – just might – be carried to the safety of warmer waters. If, however, a gale blew, the jostling ice would smash it. Standard procedure in these circumstances was to abandon ship, build a shelter on the ice and hope that, if the worst came to the worst, the crew could make an escape in their boats. Hegemann did just that.

  Being a supply ship, the Hansa was replete with all the necessaries for survival. Using coal bricks intended for the Germania’s boilers, Hegemann’s men constructed a miniature chalet (complete with stove, chimney and dormer windows) on the floe in which they were embedded. They decorated its walls with barometers and a gilt mirror from Hegemann’s cabin. The boats were dragged alongside and a separate shed was erected for their stores. Thus ensconced, they waited while the ice floated slowly south. For almost two months nothing happened, and then, on 19 October, they were hit by a storm. As the floes ground and squeezed against each other, the Hansa rose on its rudder, twisted around and then snapped. The crew just had time to remove its masts (for firewood), its galley ranges and a quantity of redundant scientific instruments before their ship disappeared beneath the waves. There was little to mark its passing, save a horde of rats who limped feebly over the floe and died. The temperature was – 41° F.

  Re-marooned, the castaways bumped down Greenland on their island of ice. As the weeks passed, Hegemann did his best to keep his men occupied, lest they succumb to Arctic winter madness. He had them maintain shipboard discipline and ordered them to perform countless meaningless tasks to prevent them dwelling on their circumstances. Come Christmas he opened two crates of presents that had been packed before they left Germany. Out fell a collection of gewgaws and tiny musical instruments. The trinkets kept them amused for a while, but they were not enough for one of Hegemann’s scientists, Dr Bucholz, who went mad and had to be confined to quarters.

  On 2 January they heard a strange noise – ‘a scraping, blustering, crackling, sawing, grating and jarring sound, as if a ghost was wandering under the floe,’ wrote Hegemann. It was a mystery until they pressed their ears (briefly) to the ice. The floe was grounding in shallow waters and breaking up from below. Then, on 3 January, came a second storm that raged for more than a week. As the ice buckled and heaved, their floe, which had been measured in thousands of yards at the outset, became steadily smaller. By 11 January their coal-brick hut sat on a piece of
ice measuring only 150 feet in diameter. Three days later another eruption tore the floe in half, cutting through the middle of the hut and forcing its occupants into the open.

  They rebuilt the hut and took stock of their supplies. The inventory was promising: they had adequate provisions and stacks of inessentials such as gunpowder and books. But their main worry was the floe, now so small that it would disintegrate as soon as it met the warmer waters of the Atlantic. They devoured the food with abandon and built bonfires out of the books. When the books ran low they threw Hegemann’s gilt mirror onto the pyre. They lit a few piles of gunpowder to see what would happen. A few enterprising men detonated rudimentary fireworks that exploded with an unsatisfactory thud. As the months passed, the expedition’s reserves were consumed in an orgy of despair.

  On 6 May Hegemann took their position and discovered they were at 61° 4’ N – they had travelled 840 nautical miles since being separated from the Germania. On the 7th, however, he found they had drifted to the north. The southward current had petered out. If they stayed where they were they would circle gently until their ever-decreasing chunk of ice finally melted and tipped them into the ocean. They could not sail to freedom because although their floe was shrinking it was still surrounded by a mass of similar floes that made navigation impossible. Their only recourse was to haul their boats from floe to floe in the hope of meeting open water. They left at 4.00 p.m. on 7 May and did not stop dragging until 6 June when at last they met a strip of clear sea. They launched the boats, raised sail, and by 13 June were being treated to buttered rusks, cigars and Greenland beer by Moravian missionaries at the outpost of Friedrichstahl.

  From Friedrichstahl it was a mere 80 miles to the port of Julianehaab, where the Danish governor steadfastly refused to believe their story and where they were able to catch a lift home. They arrived at Bremerhaven in early August. Few people were there to greet them – France having declared war on Germany, the nation had lost interest in its first Arctic explorers – but Hegemann was proud of his achievement even if no one else was. While Koldewey spoke bombastically about patriotism, flags and the discovery of unknown regions, Hegemann remarked drily: ‘We cannot flatter ourselves that we have greatly increased the knowledge of Greenland; but we have shown what man’s strength and perseverance can accomplish.’ Those same qualities would be in even greater demand three years later, when once again a Petermann-inspired expedition sailed for the so-called ‘thermometric gateway’ to the Pole.

  AN ARCTIC DRIFT

  Charles Hall, George Tyson and the Polaris (1871–3)

  Charles Francis Hall, ex-blacksmith, ex-engraver, school drop-out and Godfearing editor of the Cincinnati News, had never been to the Arctic in his life. In fact, he had never been to sea. He could not tell an Eskimo from a Chinaman. He had never been on an expedition and knew very little about life in the wild. Nonetheless, he saw no reason why any this should disqualify him from becoming an explorer. He was certain that his faith would compensate for his lack of experience. And so, in 1860, he left his job and went to the Arctic in search of Sir John Franklin, whose disappearance in 1845 along with more than a hundred crewmen, remained one of the North’s great mysteries.

  Hall showed a remarkable aptitude for the task. Completely ill-equipped, he strode through the tundra in a broken-crowned hat, with a pair of opera glasses hung round his neck, relying for his survival solely on the goodwill of the Inuit. On his first expedition, to Baffin Island, he learned nothing about Franklin but unearthed several piles of coal left by Martin Frobisher, a discovery that had him somersaulting with joy. He also discovered that the Inuit’s oral tradition was so strong that they still spoke of Frobisher’s visit of the 1570S as if it had happened yesterday. It occurred to him that if the Inuit of Baffin Island could remember events four centuries in the past, those around King William Island would surely have something to say about any Franklin survivors. He returned to America in 1862 to show the world his findings – he had packed some of Frobisher’s coal in a spare pair of socks – and to raise funds for a second voyage. In 1863 he was back in the Arctic, this time landing at Repulse Bay, to the north of Hudson Bay, from where he travelled inland and heard tales suggesting that Franklin’s men had walked south from King William Island, dying one by one, the last to go being his second-in-command, Crozier, and one other, unnamed man. This problem solved, Hall arrived in New York in 1869 and said he was ready to tackle a second one: the North Pole. By dint of perseverance and an absolute refusal to admit that God would allow him to be thwarted, he raised the necessary dollars and in July 1871 sailed for Smith Sound on a reinforced steam tug, once called the Periwinkle but now more glamorously christened Polaris.

  Hall was proud of the Polaris’s complement. No fewer than three experienced captains were on the roster: George Tyson, assistant navigator; Chester Hubbard, first mate; and Sidney Budington, sailing master. There was a three-man scientific team led by a German doctor named Emil Bessels. There were two Inuit from his previous expeditions, Tookolito and Ebierbing (later to be augmented by a third, Hans Hendrik, who came aboard at Etah with his wife). And there were eight hard-working German seamen. Hall ignored the potential for disputes implicit in having four separate captains (including himself) and a crew that was half German, half American. With God’s help all would be well. ‘Though we may be surrounded by innumerable icebergs,’ he wrote, ‘and though our vessel may be crushed like an egg-shell, I believe they will stand by me to the last.’ They were, it was, and they didn’t.

  The Polaris steamed through Smith Sound, and by September had reached virgin territory. Beyond Kane Basin it entered a narrow stretch of sea that Hall called Robeson Channel, flanked to the east by a portion of Greenland that he named Hall Land after himself, and to the west by what he christened Grant Land (now part of Ellesmere Island). At 81° 38’ N the Polaris made its winter anchorage in Hall Land, the furthest north any ship had penetrated via Smith Sound. In recognition of his debt to the Almighty, who had allowed him to proceed so far and so successfully, Hall named the bay Thank God Harbour.

  Already, however, the crew had begun to fall apart. The Germans squabbled with the Americans; Bessels threatened to resign unless extra personnel were allocated to scientific duties; Budington, who had no interest in the North Pole, stole food and drink from the officers’ mess; Hubbard and Tyson, meanwhile, chafed under his command, considering him incompetent and cowardly. Hall was helpless in the face of such divisions. All he could do was promise to care for them ‘as a prudent father cares for his faithful children’, and dissipate the personality clashes by sending sledge expeditions to the north. He himself led one of these expeditions, returning on 24 October with good news: ‘I can go to the Pole, I think, on this shore.’ He drank a cup of coffee and was immediately sick.

  Nobody thought anything of it. They assumed it was a reaction to the stress of sledging and the sudden transition from cold to warmth. Hall was sent to bed. But the following morning he felt worse, and as the days passed he began to rave deliriously. When Bessels tried to medicate him Hall said he was a poisoner: he could see noxious blue fumes emanating from his body. It was agreed that he must have suffered a stroke. ‘He begins a thing, and don’t finish it,’ Tyson wrote in dismay. ‘He begins to talk about one thing then goes off on another.’ Hall continued to protest that he was being poisoned. On the night of 8 November they found him sitting up, trying to spell the word ‘murder’. He died at 3.30 the following morning.

  With Hall’s death, the expedition was leaderless. Nobody knew what to do or who to follow. Budington was nominally in charge, but he was often drunk and the crews’ allegiance vacillated between Tyson, Hubbard, Bessels and one of Bessels’s subordinates, a German scientist named Frederick Meyer. During the course of the winter discipline collapsed. Budington issued each man with a gun, prized open the medicine locker and allowed them free access to the spirits within. There was vague talk of sledge journeys in the spring, but nothing much came of it.
‘Whoever wants to go North, let them go, but I won’t,’ Budington announced. All he wanted was to be free of the ice. On 12 August 1872 his wish came true: the ice broke and the Polaris escaped into Robeson Channel. On the same day, to everyone’s surprise, Hans Hendrik’s wife gave birth to a baby boy. Seeing his birth as a good omen, the crew christened him Charlie Polaris.