Off the Map

by Fergus Fleming

  On his way to the Pole, De Long had hoped to investigate Wrangel and Herald Islands, two lumps of rock that had been sighted some decades earlier by the Russian navigator Baron von Wrangel and had yet to be properly surveyed. They lay north-west of Bering Strait in roughly the same latitude as Novaya Zemlya, and should theoretically have presented no problem. But even this relatively simple goal was beyond De Long. Thanks to a series of time-wasting orders from Bennett, he arrived too late in the season. Barely had he sighted Herald Island when he found himself trapped in the floes. Like the Tegetthoff in 1872, the Jeannette was now a prisoner of the Arctic pack.

  De Long expected constantly that the shifting pack would carry the ship into warmer water. But it did not happen. The currents and winds pushed the Jeannette in a triangle, now north, now south, now east, while simultaneously carrying it slowly to the west. After a while he despaired of Petermann’s theories. ‘I pronounce a thermometric gateway to the North Pole a delusion and a snare,’ he wrote in his journal. The realization came as little comfort. During the winter of 1879 and throughout 1880 he was plagued by far greater problems.

  The first was the crew. They did not get on. The Herald ‘scientist’ became the object of everyone’s mockery when it was discovered that he could not operate the lights or the telephone. That he was also in charge of photography and had left behind the developing chemicals occasioned further jeers. De Long’s first officer, a socialite named Danenhower who had been foisted on him because his family knew Bennett’s, was going blind from syphilis and had to endure repeated operations by candlelight to drain the mucus that collected round his corneas. Another man was diagnosed as insane. None of them could stand the long, tense days except the mate, George Melville, who performed a thousand tiny miracles to keep the expedition functioning.

  De Long’s second concern was the ice, which attacked them with almost human malevolence. Vast pressure ridges ground noisily towards the Jeannette, turning it on its side. Small eruptions came at it from beneath the keel. Like the crew of the Tegetthoff, that of the Jeannette spent days on end huddled on deck with their survival kits. At one point a floe punctured the Jeannette below the waterline. The two men whom De Long sent to battle the flood spent several hours waist-deep in freezing water. When they emerged, successful, De Long was so impressed that he recommended them for the Congressional Medal of Honor.

  By July 1880 they were using 30 pounds of coal per day just to heat the ship and to keep the pumps going. If they continued at this rate they would have enough fuel for only five days’ steaming. The idea of their reaching the Pole was now so far-fetched as to be laughable. Indeed, De Long seemed to fear the prospect of public derision far more than the ice itself. ‘We and our narratives [will be] thrown into the world’s dreary wastebasket and recalled ... only to be vilified and ridiculed,’ he wrote. From his readings he noticed that the ice was pushing them south towards the Russian coast, where in due course he expected they would be ignominiously deposited. ‘The knowledge that we have done nothing [is] almost enough to make me tear my hair in impotent rage.’

  By the spring of 1881, with his dogs killing each other, his officers barely on speaking terms and his ship being twisted and squeezed by the ice, De Long began reluctantly to consider their escape. If they survived long enough to reach Siberia there was still hope that they could bring the Jeannette home in one piece. According to Petermann, the sea off Russia’s northern coast was bound to be open even in winter. His reasoning was that the great rivers such as the Lena and Kolyma, which had their origins in central Asia, would be warm enough to melt the Arctic pack and thus provide a navigable channel between the Atlantic and the Pacific. There was, in fact, such a waterway – the North-East Passage – which had been traversed by a Swede named Nordenskiöld in the year De Long set out. Unfortunately, it was not open every year. De Long did not know this, but past experience had taught him to distrust anything Petermann said. ‘This is about the only Arctic theory that we have not exploded,’ he remarked caustically. In the event, he did not have a chance to put it to the test.

  That summer De Long made a new discovery: two pimples of rock and ice that he named Henrietta and Jeannette Islands. ‘Thank God we have at last landed upon a newly discovered part of this earth,’ he wrote jubilantly. ‘And now where next?’ The pack gave him his answer. On 12 June 1881 the Jeannette was squeezed remorselessly. De Long evacuated the crew onto the ice, where they awaited the inevitable. It came at 4.00 the following morning when the ship suddenly rose up, folded in upon itself and then, its yardarms and masts clasped together ‘like [the hands of] a great gaunt skeleton’, slid vertically into the sea. The situation was not entirely bleak. De Long had saved their sledges, ample food and fuel, rifles, ammunition, compasses and sextants, plus three sledge-mounted boats. From where they stood it was only 200-odd miles to Siberia and, equipped as they were for travel on both ice and sea, there was no reason why they should not reach land.

  Their journey over the pack was as heartbreaking and exhausting as it had been for Weyprecht’s men in 1874. Their sledges were so overloaded that they travelled back and forth 26 miles to make just two. And, as was so often the case in Arctic exploration, no sooner had they decided to go south than the pack moved in the opposite direction. Not long into their trek De Long discovered they were 28 miles north of where they had started. Changing course from south to south-west, the party began to make progress against the drift. On 25 July they discovered another lump of rock – Bennett Island – which boosted morale enormously. Another fillip came soon afterwards when the pack disintegrated sufficiently for them to take to their boats. By 11 September they were 90 miles from land and had a week’s rations left. Before them, if De Long’s calculations were correct, lay the Lena delta. Consulting a map drawn by Petermann, he saw that the channels were easily navigable and dotted with towns and hamlets. Possibly there was a chance they might reach safety.

  That night, however, they were hit by a violent storm. It was, in Melville’s words, ‘an incubus of horrors’. In the darkness and fury the three boats became separated, one of them never to be seen again. It was a tribute to De Long’s seamanship that when the waves abated he was able to beach his craft in the middle of the delta. But the other boat, under Melville, was blown to the east. Separately, therefore, the two commanders began to pick their way through the 260-mile-wide maze of boggy islets that comprised the Lena delta. Melville was the luckier of the two. By pure chance he found a channel broader than the others, up which he and his men were able to row until they reached a village. Here, again by chance, they met one of the Cossack messengers who plied the region, and were able to send word of their plight, via the nearest large town, Yakutsk, to Siberia’s capital Irkutsk, which had a telegraph link to the outside world. But Irkutsk was thousands of miles away. It would be a long time before help arrived, and until then Melville had no idea if De Long was alive, let alone where he might be.

  De Long, too, had no idea where he was. As he led his 11 men through the Lena delta, it became obvious that Petermann’s map was a nonsense. Nothing on it accorded with reality: the channels led in completely different directions; and the settlements simply did not exist or, if they did, they were not where Petermann said they were. Melville had found the same, writing: ‘Bitterly we cursed Petermann and all his works which had led us astray.’ Faced with a far harder task than Melville, De Long cursed his dead mentor with even more vehemence. Resorting to the compass, he travelled due south, now by water, now dragging the boat over swampy protuberances, hoping that in this fashion they would stumble sooner or later on a village. Alas, this was the worst course he could follow. From where he had landed, in the centre of the delta, south led only to the heart of the maze. Here, the best he could expect was to find a hunter’s shack. But this was a distant hope, for winter was closing in and the hunters were already leaving for home.

  Their food began to run out, but they were able to supplement their rations by shooti
ng the occasional deer. This, combined with De Long’s judicious provisioning aboard the Jeannette, ensured they stayed free of scurvy. But as the deer migrated before the oncoming winter, it was starvation rather than disease that occupied their minds – that and frostbite. Their clothes offered little protection against the intense, wind-chilled cold of Siberia. Neither did the thin canvas tent in which they huddled at night. To aggravate the situation, their clothes began to fall to pieces and they were forced to cut up the tent to make replacements. On 6 October frostbite claimed its first fatality.

  By the end of the first week of October they had consumed their last scraps of food and were living on three ounces of alcohol per man per day. In these circumstances De Long took a gamble. Realizing, belatedly, that their southward march was leading them nowhere, he reverted to Petermann’s map; unreliable it might have been, but it was now their only hope. According to his estimates, they were 25 miles away from a village called Kumakh-Surt. He therefore ordered two of his strongest men – Nindemann and Noros to go ahead for assistance, while he and the others followed as best they could. He gave them a small amount of alcohol, a rifle, and strict instructions that if they shot a deer they were to bring it back before continuing to Kumakh-Surt. The two men left on 9 October. On the 17th one of De Long’s men died of starvation. Three days later the others came to a halt, having covered perhaps 12 miles since the 9th. Too exhausted to continue, they lay under the last scrap of their tent, emerging only to stoke a signal fire with sections of their redundant boat. They took hypothetical comfort from the two men’s non-appearance. Perhaps it meant they had got through to Kumakh-Surt and were even now on their way back with food and assistance? By the 29th Nindemann and Noros had not returned, and all but four of De Long’s men had died. Two days later there was only De Long.

  Nindemann and Noros were still alive. They had reached Kumakh-Surt – which lay not 25 miles distant but 80 – by dint of eating their shoes and their leather breeches, only to find it was an abandoned collection of shacks. Then on the 29th they met two hunters, who helped them to the nearest town, Bulun, from where they sent a message of distress to Yakutsk. On 2 November Melville also arrived in Bulun. During the last weeks he had agitated for a rescue mission, but had been discouraged by his Lena hosts: the weather was turning; if he waited awhile the ground would be frozen and he could make as many missions as he liked. Melville knew that he didn’t have the time. Commandeering a team of dogs and drivers, he forced his way to Bulun and then, on hearing the news from Noros and Nindemann, retraced his steps to find De Long. He searched for 23 days, but when the weather became so bad that his dog-handlers refused to go any further he gave up. De Long was surely dead by now. ‘Corpses,’ he wrote, ‘I could find with safety in the early spring.’

  James Gordon Bennett had not forgotten his charge. In a spate of circulation-boosting activity he sent his journalists after De Long. They attacked Siberia by ship (it sank), by train, by foot and by sledge. It was Melville, however, who discovered the remains of De Long’s party. In 1882 he took a team of local hunters and, with Nindemann as a guide, traipsed through the delta in search of his captain. Nindemann had a poor recollection of his trek the previous season, added to which was the fact that he had no idea how far the survivors had travelled since he left them. Also, snow had just fallen, turning the landscape into a uniform blank. Contrarily, it was this last handicap that helped them locate De Long. Protruding from the whiteness were four black poles, which Melville judged correctly were the remains of De Long’s tent. Hurrying to the spot, he cleared the ground. One by one, the bodies came to light. Some rested peacefully; one, partially singed, lay by the remains of a campfire; others were contorted in death throes. De Long was on his back, one arm raised (Melville almost tripped over it), and not far distant, as if he had thrown it over his shoulder, was his journal. Its pages ended on 30 October with the words: ‘Boyd and Gortz died during the night – Mr. Collins dying.’ It was impossible to tell when De Long had died – mysteriously, the page for the 31st had been ripped out – but it was clear that he had been the last.

  Melville collected every bit of evidence he could find – including a cache of maps and journals that De Long had placed on a nearby rise – then ordered his men to give the bodies a decent burial. The spot he chose was a 400-foot hillock 15 miles away. De Long and his party were interred in a communal coffin measuring 22 feet by 7. Above them, Melville raised a massive wooden cross on which he had inscribed their names. It was visible for 20 miles in every direction.

  Siberia, however, was not to be their final resting place. After Melville came one of Bennett’s correspondents, who opened the coffin, rummaged through it for papers that might be damaging to his employer’s reputation, then arranged for the bodies’ transportation to the United States. The Tsar supplied a railway cortège, draped in black, which carried them to the coast. They were then taken by ship to New York, where thousands came out to attend their funeral march. De Long was buried in the Bronx cemetery on 20 February. Fittingly, the occasion was marked by a violent snowstorm.

  Bennett did not attend the funerals. Neither did he attend the subsequent inquiry, which disclosed several unpalatable facts about his organization and equipping of the Jeannette expedition. Instead, he took to his private yacht and sailed for Europe. In his wake, the US government came to three conclusions: first, that De Long had been immeasurably brave; second, that his voyage had been futile from the start; and third, that it would never again support futilities of this nature. Like the British before them, the Americans decided that a line should be drawn. Let who liked go to the Pole – but they would do so at their own peril and at their own expense.

  TRAGEDY ON ELLESMERE ISLAND

  Adolphus Greely (1881–4)

  The International Year of Polar Cooperation was the world’s response to the deaths and disasters that had been such a conspicuous element of its forays into the Arctic. First proposed by Carl Weyprecht following his return in 1874 from Franz Josef Land, it was founded on the sensible notion that if Arctic exploration was to benefit science (as had so often been claimed) then it was pointless despatching murderous expeditions to reach the North Pole – a spot that Weyprecht, among others, was convinced was not worth the finding. Instead, it would be far better to establish a series of research stations around the rim of the Arctic, from where teams of scientists could study the ice and its weather patterns in relative safety. Die-hard members of the exploring fraternity objected: if the North Pole was the culmination, so to speak, of the Arctic, then that was where efforts should be directed; fiddling at the fringes was a waste of time and money. Weyprecht, however, was backed by the influential Iron Chancellor of Germany, Bismarck, and, after a long gestation, the International Year of Polar Cooperation was agreed upon. In the winter of 1882–3 11 different countries sent their scientists to the polar rim. Weyprecht, alas, was not there to see them go: he had died of tuberculosis on 31 March 1881. Perhaps it was as well, because he would not have liked what became of his plan.

  Of the 15 sub-polar stations the northernmost was in Lady Franklin Bay, where Nares’s Discovery had wintered in 1875–6. Its establishment and operation was allotted to the United States of America. The man in charge was not a scientist, but a stern marine officer, Lieutenant Adolphus Greely, who was given responsibility for a 26-strong team including two Inuit hunterscum-sledge-drivers. None of the Americans had ever been to the Arctic before. Greely, however, had long had his eyes on the ice, and so had his leading scientist, Dr Octave Pavy. For these two men, and for many of their subordinates, the International Polar Year had nothing to do with science. It was an excuse to try for the North Pole.

  Greely’s outfit sailed aboard the Proteus and reached its destination in late 1881. This was 12 months too soon, but it was agreed that the extra time would help them acclimatize to conditions and construct a base from which to make their observations. Using materials they had brought with them, Greely’s men constructed a
large, barn-like edifice – Fort Conger – on the western shore of Lady Franklin Bay and settled down for their first winter. They had no ship with them, for the Proteus had returned to Newfoundland for refuelling and reprovisioning. But they had nothing to fear. Robeson Channel, off which Lady Franklin Bay lay, was by now so well known that its navigation was just a matter of waiting for the right moment. It had been arranged that support ships would bring them fuel and provisions, and Greely had no reason to suspect they would not arrive. Indeed, it didn’t much matter if they didn’t, for his stores held enough food to last the men three years on full rations; they had plenty of lemon juice to keep scurvy at bay; and there was ample game to be shot in the region.

  During that first winter the inhabitants of Fort Conger fell prey to the usual Arctic ennui. Greely, a hard, puritanical man, did not get on with Pavy, whom he suspected of being ‘Bohemian’. Their mutual mistrust infected the others. In the officers’ quarters, Lieutenant James Lockwood wrote that: ‘We often sit silent during the whole day and even a meal fails to elicit anything more than a chance remark or two’. As for the crew, he complained that they ‘have no desire to make discoveries and that if they could return next year, they will do so’. The Inuit, meanwhile, were ready to leave at once. One, Jens, took his dog team out in December just to escape the rancour of Fort Conger. The other, Frederick, told Greely that the men wanted to shoot him and all he wanted to do was go into the ice and die. He was persuaded, forcibly, to remain.