Off the Map

by Fergus Fleming

  The ship was not free for long. Three days after leaving Thank God Harbour it was once again in the ice, drifting helplessly south at the centre of a large floe. The ship began to leak, necessitating constant use of steam pumps, but while this used up valuable coal, they were in no immediate danger. At the portal of Smith Sound, however, in the treacherous strait between Capes Isabella and Alexander, the floe began to fragment. Nuggets of ice began to jostle and crash against the Polaris, and then, at 6.00 p.m. on 15 October, it was struck by a massive berg. The ship was squeezed hard against a floe, and as it heeled over the engineer ran on deck, yelling that water was coming in fast. Budington ordered an immediate evacuation. The Inuit were among the first to be taken off. Then, in the teeth of a heavy storm, barrels and boxes were hurled over the side, where Tyson and a working party dragged them to the centre of the floe. For four hours the unloading continued, the men hauling food and fuel from the hold before it filled with water. But at 10.00 p.m. Tyson noticed that the Polaris was no lower in the water than it had been when they started. On investigation he discovered that it was not sinking at all and the whole business had been a false alarm. Irritated, he ordered his men to carry everything back to the ship. At that moment the floe cracked. The Polaris righted itself and vanished into the night, leaving Tyson and his men alone on the ice, drifting through one of the Arctic’s most hazardous waterways.

  Tyson spent the night rowing from fragment to fragment of the constantly splintering floe, rescuing what people and supplies he could. Come morning, when the blizzard died down, he spotted the Polaris at a distance of about ten miles, and flagged for it to come to his assistance. But Budington either did not see, or ignored, his signal. A sudden storm prevented Tyson from rowing for assistance, and when the weather cleared the Polaris had vanished. Their one consolation was that the storm had blown them past Capes Isabella and Alexander into the relative safety of Baffin Bay. Tyson took stock: he had under his command nine white men, predominantly Germans, led by Frederick Meyer; one black cook; four adult Inuit and their five children. To feed them he had 14 cans of pemmican, 14 hams, a can of apples and eleven and a half bags of ship’s biscuit. The floe was four miles in circumference, dotted with hillocks and small lakes of fresh water. Everyone had a bag of spare clothes, plus a rifle and ammunition – except for Tyson, who had been too busy to grab any firearms for himself and possessed only the clothes he wore plus a few garments he had bagged up just in time. They had three boats and one compass, and were surrounded by thousands of other ice-blocks that, like their own, were floating placidly towards ultimate disintegration in the Atlantic. This was Tyson’s situation at the start of a journey that would continue for nine months and 2,000 miles.

  Life on the floe was as anarchic as it had been aboard the Polaris. When a seal was shot (the Inuit showed them how) it was eaten on the spot. When rations fell low Meyer made a show of weighing out portions, but no sooner had he put his scales away than the men rifled the stores. One night they ate so much pemmican that they were sick. On another, feeling cold, they burned one of their boats. Grotesquely, they hoped that they would not be rescued too soon, on the grounds that they were still part of the expedition and would therefore be entitled to overtime. Tyson was unable to keep order: he couldn’t speak German and didn’t have a rifle. After a few months he found he no longer had any spare clothes either: they had been stolen. Clammy and dispirited, he sought refuge with the Inuit, their igloo being the only place he could be certain of hearing English. By Christmas they had consumed the last of their supplies. On New Year’s Day Tyson recorded: ‘I have dined today on about two feet of frozen entrails and a little blubber.’ Throughout the winter they shot seals and the occasional bird, which was enough to keep the company alive but not to satisfy their appetites. Soon they began to eye the Inuit’s children.

  Cannibalism was averted by the advent of spring. Game multiplied and was theirs for the taking. But the Germans had started to strip and reassemble their rifles in the hope of improving them. As a result, few of the weapons now functioned, and the only effective hunters were the Inuit. Apart from fresh meat, spring also brought warm seas and bad weather. On 11 March 1873 an exceptionally fierce gale tore the floe to shreds. When the wind subsided their once substantial ice island had been reduced to a paltry strip measuring 75 by 100 yards. Two and a half weeks later, on 1 April, Tyson decided they were near enough to Greenland to risk an evacuation in their last remaining boat.

  The embarkation was typically disorganized. Food, ammunition and other essentials were flung into the sea, as 19 people crammed themselves into a vessel that had been designed to hold eight. When they left, the boat was so low that water lapped over the edge and Hans Hendrik had to crawl between people’s knees with a baling tin. The journey, through monstrous bergs and floes, was so frightful that the Germans cried aloud in terror – though they were not so terrified as to stop filching the stores when they felt hungry. Some days they rowed, others they dragged the boat onto floes so weak that they split under their weight and so small that there was standing room only. Their faces and bodies began to swell – not through scurvy but from another ailment that Tyson could not fathom. (It might have been kidney malfunction, due to lack of carbohydrates.)

  On the night of the 19th, while resting on a floe, they were hit by yet another storm. Placing the children in the boat, they hung on as the waves knocked them to and fro and the wind battered them with lumps of ice. When they were ankle-deep in water, and it became apparent that the floe could no longer hold their weight, Tyson ordered them into the boat. ‘This was the greatest fight for life we had had yet,’ he wrote. ‘How we held out I know not.’ Twelve hours later, having hauled continually at the oars, they were in calm seas, exhausted, bruised, but alive. ‘Man can never believe, nor pen describe, the scene we passed through,’ Tyson marvelled. ‘Surely we are saved by the will of God alone, and I suppose for some good purpose of his own ... Half-drowned we are, and cold enough in our wet clothes, without shelter, and not sun enough to dry us even on the outside. We have nothing to eat: everything is finished and gone. The prospect looks bad.’ Fortunately, they were now in whaling waters and it could be only a question of time before they met a ship. Whether they could survive that long, however, was another matter. They rowed south from floe to floe until on the evening of 28 April they spotted a steamer flying the Stars and Stripes. But despite lighting their remaining seal blubber as a beacon, and discharging volleys of rifle-fire, they went unnoticed. It was another two days before they were finally rescued by the Tigress, a Newfoundland sealer, which brought them back to civilization on 9 May.

  The men on the Polaris, meanwhile, had had almost as dreadful a time as those on the floe. Since the two parties separated, the ship had sprung a serious leak, and Budington had landed the crew on the west coast of Smith Sound. Taking to their boats, they had rowed south until they, like Tyson, reached the safety of the whaling grounds and were rescued by a Scottish whaler, the Ravenscraig. They were brought home not long after Tyson.

  The American Arctic establishment was appalled by the disaster: but for luck, and the bravery of those involved, it might now be facing a tragedy as comprehensive and mysterious as Franklin’s. True, Hall had been somewhat of an amateur, but even so there was no excuse for such a shambles. A Board of Inquiry was convened, whose members were ruthless in their examination of the expedition’s failure: the incompetence, the drunkenness, the weakness of command, the insubordination, the ineffectualness of the sledge parties – every flaw, large or small, was brought to light. The Board was particularly rigorous when it came to the subject of Hall’s death. It had the officers’ verbal description of his demise and the conditions leading up to it, but there should also have been supporting paperwork. A ship had since visited the site of Budington’s beaching in Smith Sound and had retrieved some of the officers’ journals, but the relevant pages had been cut out. Where was the evidence to prove that he had not been poisoned, as h
e had claimed at the time? Where, in fact, was Hall’s journal? Here there came a shuffling of feet. Somebody recalled a sealed trunk that had been thrown overboard. Or had it had been left on the ice? No, it had been with them for some time but had been mislaid. Helpfully, one man remembered using some old papers to start a fire. In the absence of proof to the contrary, the Board concluded that Hall must have died of a stroke. But it was a reluctant conclusion, and although nobody was accused, neither were they completely exonerated.

  The strange tale of the Polaris had an even stranger ending. In 1968 an American author named Chauncey Loomis was working on a biography of Hall and secured permission to exhume the body. On opening the grave he noted that Hall had decayed somewhat from water seepage, but the Arctic cold had mummified him so effectively that he was still recognizable from photographs taken in the 1860s. His hair and beard were intact; so (more or less) were his skin and his fingernails. Loomis snipped a few slivers of nail, reinterred the corpse, then brought the samples home for analysis. Laboratory tests showed that Hall’s body contained toxic amounts of arsenic. Two possibilities could be inferred from this. The first was that Hall had dosed himself with arsenic, as many Victorians did to settle an uneven stomach. (Hall was prone to indigestion.) The second was that someone had poisoned him because they did not want to go further north. (From the many conflicting testimonies that the Inquiry heard there was one consistent theme: had Hall not died, he would have taken them to the Pole.) Several people had stated, on record, that they thought his voyage a delusion and the goal unattainable. But who among them could have given him the arsenic? Bessels? Budington? A rogue crewman? Maybe Tyson? No single person had both the motive and the opportunity. Hall’s death, like the Pole itself, remained a mystery.

  TOP Life in the tent: Julius von Payer’s exploration of Franz Josef Land, 1874.

  ABOVE The wintering of HMS Alert at Floeberg Beach, 1875.

  TOP LEFT Adolphus Greely, leader of the US expedition to Ellesmere Island. (1881–4).

  TOP RIGHT Fridtjof Nansen at Cape Flora, 1895.

  ABOVE Salomon Andrée’s Eagle fails to reach the North Pole, 1897.

  OPPOSITE Fernand Foureau, conqueror of the Sahara. (1899–1900).

  OPPOSITE The Stella Polare caught by an ice ridge, 1899.

  ABOVE Robert Peary and Francis Cook dispute their right to the North Pole, 1909.

  TOP Robert Falcon Scott (centre) and party at the South Pole, January 1912.

  ABOVE LEFT Roald Amundsen, who reached the South Pole before Scott on 14 December 1911.

  ABOVE RIGHT Douglas Mawson, leader of another expedition to Antartica, 1911–13.

  TOP Ernest Shackleton’s men hack a passage through the Weddell Sea, 1915.

  ABOVE The Italia before the start to the North Pole, 23 May 1928.

  OVERLEAF George Mallory and Edward Norton on Everest in 1922.

  ACROSS THE DARK CONTINENT

  David Livingstone and H. M. Stanley (1871–7)

  By the mid-1860s Britain’s foremost African explorer was, without doubt, the Scottish missionary David Livingstone. A dogged man, studious if not scholarly, somewhat humourless and of a solitary bent, with little time for fools, Livingstone had been tramping through the continent for the past two decades. His avowed aim was to open its dark interior to the light of Christianity – in which he was successful to a certain degree – but it was for his discoveries rather than his proselytizing that he became famous. Studying his career it is hard not to conclude that he was as much interested in Africa’s geographical mysteries as he was in the souls of its inhabitants. If there was a lake, river or mountain to be found, Livingstone was the one to find it – and he liked it to be known that he had done so for, despite having chosen such a lonely path, he coveted fame.

  In June 1849, while stationed just over the border of South Africa’s Cape Colony, Livingstone departed in search of a legendary Lake Ngami that was supposed to lie more than 500 miles to the north across the Kalahari Desert. Even the locals, with their experience of life in a semi-arid climate, had never been there. In July, after a month’s journey through baked ground where the grass crumbled to dust between his fingers, Livingstone found the lake. Encouraged, he then decided he should also find a ruler who was rumoured to live some 200 miles further on and who might be receptive to Christianity. Two years later, in 1851, he succeeded in this too. And while finding the ruler (who died shortly after his arrival), he found the upper stretches of the Zambezi. He returned in 1853 and followed the river west until it petered out in a marsh that marked the watershed between it and the Congo, whereupon he marched more than 1,000 miles overland to the Portuguese-controlled port of Luanda. In 1855 he was back at the Zambezi, this time searching in an easterly direction. He followed the river to its mouth and found, as well as a number of warlike tribes, an astonishing natural feature that he named Victoria Falls.

  On his return to London in December 1856 he was greeted as a hero. The President of the Royal Geographical Society announced that Livingstone had achieved ‘The greatest triumph in geographical research... in our times’. He made countless appearances before learned bodies and gave lecture after lecture, wearing always the squab, peaked hat that was his trademark. His journal was snapped up as soon as it left the press. (In 1857 the public had to make do with Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa; they did not get Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambezi and its Tributaries until 1865.) So enormous was his fame that when the London Missionary Society complained that his travels were ‘only remotely connected with the spread of the gospel’, he did not bother to argue but simply resigned his membership. And when the British government offered him the post of Consul for the East Coast of Africa, with responsibility for extending Britain’s knowledge of the interior and advancing thereby the dual causes of Christianity and commerce, Livingstone accepted without hesitation.

  By 1858 he was back in Africa, accompanied by his brother and five other Europeans, among them the famous artist Thomas Baines. After a short time the party was swelled by a band of six missionaries who had such high hopes of Livingstone that their number included a full-blown bishop. And later on Livingstone’s wife came out to join them. The expectations of the missionaries were soon dashed, however, for Livingstone seemed interested only in discovery – this time of a lake to the north of the Zambezi of which he had heard tell. By 1862 he had found and charted the lake – Lake Nyasa – but the discovery came at a cost. On the way north he and his white companions were attacked by hostile tribesmen and felt obliged to respond. Of the bloodshed Livingstone wrote in his diary: ‘People will not approve of men coming out to convert people shooting them. I am sorry I am mixed up in it, as they will not care what view of my character is given at home.’ His wife died of fever, as did the bishop, and the missionaries returned to Zanzibar. Livingstone continued to chart Lake Nyasa regardless, driving the column so harshly that one man wrote: ‘the Doctor daily becomes more incapable of self-control. A catastrophe, or tragedy, I fear, is not far off.’ Another Briton died and two others went home. Undeterred, Livingstone pressed on, uncovering as he did so instances of the slave trade that was still being plied by the Portuguese. However, reports of his mania had already filtered back to London, and in 1863 he received a letter demanding his immediate return. When he got home in 1864 it was to official coolness. It was felt that he had overstepped the mark; and although there was no absolute censure, it was noted that he had done little to promote British interests and, if anything, had left the region less stable than when he arrived. Moreover, his outspoken comments about Portugal’s involvement in slavery did not please the royal family: Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, was the cousin of King Pedro of Portugal.

  Yet there were some who still saw Livingstone as the most capable explorer the nation possessed – the man best placed to answer a question that in 1864 burned brighter than ever: where was the source of the Nile? Livingstone thought little of Baker, Burton, Grant and Speke
and scoffed at the idea of the Nile originating either in Victoria Nyanza or Lake Tanganyika. His own theory, far more Ptolemaic, was that an as yet undiscovered lake lay far to the south and was connected via Tanganyika to Albert Nyanza and thence to the Nile. The Royal Geographical Society and a well-to-do industrial chemist named James Young donated £1,500 to help him prove his point. In 1865 Livingstone left once again for Africa. It was, primarily, a journey of discovery, but he also stated his intention to uncover the truth about the slave trade.

  For the next five years silence reigned, and by 1871 the world was wondering what had happened to him. Had he died of fever? Had he been murdered by some slave trader in the employ of the Portuguese? Or was he still alive, in need of rescue? The image of a brave missionary risking his life to save the heathen was irresistible – a fact that did not escape the attention of James Gordon Bennett, proprietor of the New York Herald. One of the most astute newspapermen of the age, Bennett knew very well what big news Livingstone’s return or rescue would be. He decided, therefore, to make it happen. Summoning one of his correspondents, he told him to raise an expedition to East Africa. He could have as much money as he needed – one thousand, two thousand, three thousand, whatever it took – but he was not to return without having found Livingstone. The reporter’s name was Henry Morton Stanley.

  A moustachioed 27-year-old, Stanley had led an adventurous life. Born the illegitimate son of a Welshwoman, he had worked variously as teacher, shop assistant and errand boy before running away to sea. Jumping ship in America, he served on both sides in the American Civil War before joining the US Navy, from which he subsequently deserted to become a journalist. It was his successful reporting of a war in Abyssinia that drew him to the attention of Bennett, who saw in this socially insecure but undeniably tough and capable man the very person who might best find Livingstone.