Off the Map

by Fergus Fleming

  BRITAIN’S FIGHT FOR THE NORTH POLE

  George Nares (1875–6)

  Following the huge amount of money it had spent on the Franklin search – not to mention the loss of men and equipment that had occasioned that search – the British government had declared a moratorium on Arctic exploration. Neither it nor the public could see the point in risking further lives in what seemed a futile pursuit. A North-West Passage, of sorts, had been discovered by McClure and found to be unnavigable; the Canadian Arctic had been all but completely mapped with no sign of there being an alternative sea route to the Pacific; and such further scientific and geographical findings as were to be had seemed not worth the expense. As for the North Pole, standard wisdom declared that it was probably unreachable and, even if it wasn’t, there was little to be gained by going there.

  Some, however, urged strenuously that the Admiralty should take the process to its logical conclusion. Among them was an officer named Clements Markham, who had been involved in the Franklin search and who was convinced that Britain’s reputation depended upon it finding the North Pole. He thought it outrageous that the world’s greatest naval power, with its unequalled knowledge of Arctic conditions, should stand by while others stole a lead. Markham and his supporters battered away throughout the 1860s, garnering public support with blatantly one-sided propaganda – Markham, for example, published a number of popular accounts to prove that polar exploration was the safest, healthiest and most congenial pursuit imaginable to humankind – until, in the end, the government succumbed. In November 1874 Prime Minister Disraeli announced that a new expedition would be sent north the following spring. It would comprise two of the Royal Navy’s strongest steam-powered ice-ships – the Alert under Captain George Nares and the Discovery under Commander Henry Stephenson. It would be equipped with sledges and Inuit hunters, and its provisions would be such as to obviate any possibility of scurvy. (In one of his books Clements Markham had announced scurvy to be a disease of the past.) Nares’s orders were to make copious scientific observations, but above all to find the North Pole – or, failing that, to go further north than anyone yet.

  When Nares and Stephenson left Portsmouth on 29 May 1875 Markham was certain that they would beat all records. And they did. Nares steamed through Smith Sound, recharted the coasts on either side, then smashed his way into the ice to reach the top of Robeson Channel. Here, at 82° 27’ N, the furthest north anyone had yet travelled by ship, he dropped anchor at a spot he named Floeberg Beach. Against the possibility of his becoming stuck and having to evacuate overland, he ordered the Discovery to winter in Lady Franklin Bay, to the south of Robeson Channel. Throughout that first winter the crews of both ships were in high spirits. They did not succumb to the depression that plagued most Arctic expeditions, thanks largely to a constant round of entertainments: skating, boxing matches, concerts and plays. They also made a number of sledge journeys to prepare themselves for the big push the following spring. They had come with dogs, but the only people who knew how to handle them were their Inuit hunters, Hans, and a Greenlander named Petersen; moreover, Nares was a man-hauler at heart (he, like Markham, had taken part in the Franklin search and had accompanied McClintock on his sledging forays), so the men went draped in harness. It was an experience for which they were unprepared. A junior lieutenant, Wyatt Rawson, recorded Nares’s warning before they set out: ‘[He said] the hardest days work we had ever imagined, let alone had, would not hold a patch on the work we should have sledging.’ When they returned, shattered and so badly frostbitten that several men underwent amputations (one officer’s wounds did not heal for five months), Rawson commented, ‘Captain Nares was right... he was perfectly right.’

  The going was no easier in the spring. On a preliminary trip to the Discovery Petersen lost both feet to frostbite and died not long after his return. The two officers who accompanied him were also badly frostbitten in the hands – simply from having tried to chafe Petersen’s feet back to life. Nevertheless, Nares’s men remained optimistic. And with good reason, for they belonged to the largest, best equipped and best provisioned Arctic expedition the world had ever seen. It is often tempting to regard Victorian explorers as bearded, pipe-smoking desperadoes, semi-primitives clad in unsuitable garments, who struggled ignorantly against the forces of nature. But the photos of the Nares expedition tell a different story. They show fit, healthy men, wearing clothes that would be instantly recognizable to their compatriots even 50 years later. These men lounge insouciantly against their sledges, with numbers on their clothes to indicate which sledge team they belong to. One or two of them wear white, cowboy-style hats. Their sledges look lightweight and efficient, the loads expertly wrapped. The images are of order, purpose and determination. They are startlingly modern.

  Nares had planned three sledge parties: one, under Lieutenant Albert Markham (a cousin of Clements) and Lieutenant Alfred Parr, would head for the Pole, carrying two boats in case they met the open polar sea; a second, under Lieutenant Pelham Aldrich, would chart the north coast of Ellesmere Island; and a third, under Lieutenant Lewis Beaumont from the Discovery, would head over the frozen sea to investigate the glaciers and mountains of Greenland. When they assembled for the grand departure on 2 April 1876, heraldic emblems flying from their sledges, they had no reason to fear the coming ordeal. They had food, they had fuel to melt water, they had concentrated lemon juice to counteract scurvy, and there was safety in numbers: the combined roster came to 53 officers and men.

  Of the three parties, Markham’s faced the hardest grind. Their route led north through the jumbled hillocks and ridges of the polar pack. Sometimes they raised sail on their sledges and let the wind blow them along. But mostly they had to clear a path with picks and shovels. Their woollen clothes, which looked so splendid in the photographs, soon showed their limitations, absorbing perspiration and then freezing hard as boards. In the mornings they had to beat their trousers with axe-heads to make them bend at the knees. Blizzards confined them for days inside their communal sleeping bags – which, like their tents, had been built to the lightest specification for ease of transport. As their occupants thawed, the sleeping bags became saturated; and when they were packed onto the sledges they froze. Soon the entire outfit was hauling and sleeping in material as rigid as iron. The pack, meanwhile, was unrelenting: the tortuous icescape sent them on long diversions; for every real mile north they travelled at least another three; on one occasion they chopped through a hillock more than a quarter of a mile wide; on 7 May they took a whole day to cross 100 yards; typically the snow was knee-deep; sometimes the boats they were hauling sank from sight. Added to their discomfort was a worrying plague of ‘seediness’. It manifested itself first on 6 March and then spread until, on 12 May, two thirds of Markham’s men were feeling ‘seedy’. Their legs tightened up, their gums swelled, and their limbs bled for no obvious reason. It was painful for most of them to walk, and some of the worst affected had to be dragged on the sledges. Reluctantly, Markham had to admit that the ‘seediness’ was scurvy. How this could have happened he did not understand. They had been taking regular sips from their bottles of lemon juice; by rights they should be perfectly healthy.

  Markham planted the Union Jack at 83° 20’ N. It was the furthest north any human being had travelled, and with this he was satisfied. In fact, after the past months’ torture, he declared it ‘a higher latitude, I predict, than will ever be attained’. The Pole was ‘totally and utterly impracticable, and the open polar sea was such a ludicrous concept that ‘its existence can only be in the brain of a few insane theorists’. He gave his men a day’s rest, during which they broached a magnum of champagne and toasted their victory amidst jagged lumps of ice. Then he took them home as fast as they could go.

  The track they had built on the way north allowed them to haul faster than they had on their way towards the Pole. But by 7 April only Markham, Parr and two others were still capable of hauling. The rest were either on the sledges or stumbling a
longside. Markham threw out every inessential item and heaped the casualties and all his supplies on a single sledge, with which he led his party home. ‘Every day, every hour, is important to us,’ he wrote in his journal, ‘as we know not when we might, one and all, be attacked and rendered useless.’

  On 7 June they collapsed. They were 30 miles from the Alert, with no hope of covering that distance on their own before the summer thaw made sledge travel impossible. If, however, they received assistance from the Alert they might yet make it. Parr volunteered to fetch help. He covered the 30 miles in 24 hours, and on the evening of 8 June staggered aboard the Alert. He was so blackened with filth that at first nobody recognized him. Smoothly, Nares’s men went into action, and by 14 June Markham’s contingent was home. One man died before the rescuers arrived. Of the remaining 13 only three were still capable of walking.

  Aldrich’s party fared little better. They reached 82° 16’ N, 85° 33’ Won Ellesmere Island before they too were hit by scurvy. Their return journey, over disintegrating ice, was as horrific as Markham’s. When men from the Alert came to their rescue (marching though snow so thick that sometimes they had to crawl) they discovered Aldrich and one other man trying valiantly to haul both their sledges, on which, apart from their supplies, were strapped four casualties. Two others, incapable of hauling, limped after them.

  By mid-June practically every man aboard the Alert was suffering from scurvy. Realizing that they might all die before the thaw released them, Nares laid gunpowder charges and blew the Alert out of the ice. Then he steamed south to join the Discovery, where they would surely find relief. But conditions were little better in Lady Franklin Bay. Like the Alert, the Discovery had been hit by scurvy. But they could not leave, because Beaumont and his Greenland party had yet to return.

  Of all Nares’s sledge parties, that under Beaumont suffered the most. They traversed glaciers so steep that their sledge runners buckled. They trudged through drifts that swamped the sledge and where, with each step, their legs sank thigh-deep. In four feet of snow they had to climb out of each step they took. Sometimes they hauled their sledges over open rock. At best they made two miles per day. And, like the others, they began to show signs of scurvy. They halted on 23 May, having reached a place that Beaumont christened Sherard Osborn Fjord. The following day he climbed a 3,700-foot hill to scan the terrain, then led his men home. It had taken them 32 days to reach that spot. Three decades later the same distance would be covered by dog sled in eight days. Future explorers could only marvel at what Beaumont’s men had done. ‘How they managed to pull their sledges up Gap Valley,’ Knud Rasmussen wrote in 1921, ‘is a perfect riddle to all of us who have looked at the stony pass ... We others can only bow our heads to those who did it.’

  The journey back was even ghastlier than the journey out. To the uncompromising nature of the landscape was added gales that confined them to their thin, inadequate tents for days on end. One by one, the seven-strong team succumbed to scurvy. By 24 June Beaumont was the only man capable of walking, let alone hauling. Alone, he set out for the Discovery to find help. Fortunately, a rescue party was already on its way. It intercepted Beaumont, collected the remainder of his men, and helped them back to the coast of Greenland. By the end of their journey two men had died and, thanks to the thaw, the sledge-bound remainder were being dragged across bare shingle.

  Beaumont and his party were taken aboard the Discovery on 15 August 1876, whereupon both ships fled the Arctic as swiftly as they could. It had been a horrendous and puzzling experience. Why should they have contracted scurvy when they had not only lemon juice but the best provisions the Royal Navy could offer? Nares did not know the answer. But he did know that he had done his best to fulfil his orders, and if anyone wanted to better him they were welcome to try. He had no expectation that they would succeed. On reaching Ireland he sent a terse, three-word telegram to his superiors: ‘NORTH POLE IMPRACTICABLE.’

  The message went down badly. The expedition’s failure was a blow to the Royal Navy’s reputation – indeed, a blow to the whole Empire. Some suggested that the Pole was impracticable only because Nares had been incompetent. Others wanted him court-martialled for lack of patriotic spirit. On his return to London he sat through a lengthy inquiry whose main object was to ascertain why his men had caught scurvy when every authority (i.e. Clements Markham) had said it was impossible. That his inquirers – and science – had no idea what caused scurvy was considered irrelevant. Some people linked it to the direction of the wind in Borneo, others said it derived from a lack of eggs, and others put it down to ‘general filth’. In fact, the outbreak had sprung directly from the Navy’s attempts to prevent it. Nares’s lemon juice had been issued in concentrated form, so that when it froze it did not crack the bottles in which it was stored. The concentrating process involved boiling the juice in copper containers. Heat destroys Vitamin C and copper leaches it. But nobody knew that lack of Vitamin C was responsible for the disease; indeed, they did not even know that Vitamin C existed. The inquiry concluded that Nares had been guilty of inadequate provisioning and non-specific unsuitability for the job. It was all his fault.

  The Nares expedition marked the end of the Royal Navy’s long involvement with the Arctic. With its many commitments elsewhere, it had no desire to waste more time on North Polar exploration. Clements Markham tried his hardest to change the Admiralty’s mind, publishing article after pamphlet to explain why Nares had not been at fault and why his failure should be considered only a temporary setback. When his pleading produced no results he eventually gave up. But he never forgot what he saw as Britain’s destiny – to be first to the world’s axis. For several decades he remained quiet, and then, at the turn of the century, by which time he was President of the Royal Geographical Society, he returned to his bone. If Britain was unwilling to take the North Pole it could surely make an attempt on the South. This time people listened, thereby sealing the fate of a young torpedo officer named Robert Falcon Scott.

  A SIBERIAN DISASTER

  George De Long (1879–82)

  If there was one man who was satisfied by the failure of the Nares expedition it was Dr August Petermann. After the calamitous outcomes of the last two forays he had sponsored into the Arctic he had become the butt of British derision. Britain, like the US, favoured attacking the Pole via Greenland; Petermann’s so-called ‘thermometric gateways’ were ridiculous. Humiliatingly, Petermann had been forced to make a semi-retraction. But now, as Britain itself was forced to retract, Petermann belaboured his antagonists with glee. They were wrong and he was right. The German and Austrian expeditions had merely proved his point: that the Gulf Stream exited on the east coast of Greenland was indisputable; what other current could have carried the Hansa south? That it entered the ice above Novaya Zemlya with power was equally certain: look how the pack had been concertina’d into a mass so impenetrable that the Tegetthoff had been unable to break through it.

  Polar explorers, said Petermann, would never succeed unless they adopted his theories. If the Gulf Stream was too weak to melt a thermometric gateway off the east coast of Greenland, and too strong to create one at Novaya Zemlya, he had discovered another current that was just right. The Kuro Siwo flowed from the Pacific, past Japan, and through the Bering Strait to the Arctic. It was as warm as the Gulf Stream, but not as overwhelming. Navigators should therefore take their ships through the Bering Strait, whereupon they would be crowned with success. Unfortunately, governments in Europe and America no longer cared about the North Pole. It had caused them considerable misfortune and great expense; if it had defeated even the Royal Navy then why bother trying? Others could seek it if they liked, and good luck to them. They themselves were done with it.

  One man listened to Petermann. He was James Gordon Bennett, a ruinous, alcoholic playboy and one of the richest men in America. He was also the owner of the New York Herald, a newspaper that had the largest circulation in the world. Like Petermann, he too had theories concerning the
North Pole. Unlike Petermann, however, his theories were based on fact: the discovery of the Pole would be news; news sold copies; and if the Herald discovered the Pole it would be an unprecedented scoop. After a brief interview with the ‘Sage of Gotha’ – as Petermann was known – he set matters in motion. A ship was purchased from Britain, the US government was cajoled into strengthening it for the ice, and a crew was selected. Some were experienced sailors; most, however, were not; and the obligatory scientist was the Herald’s weather correspondent. (He was ordered to study Arctic meteorology and was put in charge of the onboard telephonic and lighting systems which, purchased from Bell and Edison, were untested but newsworthy novelties.) Their commander was an ex-naval officer named George Washington De Long, who had been once, briefly, to the Arctic.

  Petermann committed suicide in September 1878, which might have been considered a bad omen by anyone other than Bennett. The proprietor of the Herald did not care. If the expedition came to grief he would move heaven and earth to save it. That was what he told De Long. What he did not tell him was that his rescue would sell as many copies as his success. Either way, circulation would rise.

  The ship, christened Jeannette after Bennett’s sister, left San Francisco on 8 July 1879. Stopping at an Alaskan port, De Long was discouraged by veterans who told him that scores of ships had vanished in the sea he was entering and that although there were polynyas, or stretches of open water, there was unlikely to be an ice-free passage to the Pole. A grizzled whaling captain by the name of Nye gave an honest assessment of his prospects: ‘Put her into the ice and let her drift, and you may get through or you may go to the devil, and the chances are about equal.’ Actually, Nye was being over-generous with his odds. There was no chance whatsoever of De Long getting through. That winter the US Coast and Geodetic Survey reported that: ‘The [Bering] Strait is incapable of carrying a current of warm water of sufficient magnitude to have any marked effect on the condition of the Polar basin ... Nothing in the least tends to support the widely spread but unphilosophical notion that in any part of the Polar Sea we may look for large areas free from ice.’ De Long, however, knew nothing of their findings. By the time they were delivered he was already in the ice. ‘Do not give me up for I shall one day or another come back,’ he wrote in a final letter to his wife.