Off the Map

by Fergus Fleming

  In April 1882 Greely sent his first two expeditions towards the Pole. One, under Pavy, went north along the coast of Ellesmere Island, the other, under Lockwood, crossed the frozen sea towards Greenland. Pavy returned shortly, having been blocked by open water. Lockwood took a little longer. Conditions were so bad that four of his men had to be sent back in the first week. But Lockwood, accompanied by a 24-year-old marine, Sergeant David Brainard, and Frederick the Inuit sledge driver, pressed on up the coast. On 4 May they reached Cape Britannia, one of the northernmost points sighted by Beaumont during his trek through Greenland in 1876. Beaumont had been prevented from reaching the cape by scurvy and atrocious weather. Lockwood and Brainard faced similar weather, but their superior provisions saved them from illness. On they pressed until, on 14 May, their supplies allowed them to go no further. Here, at 83° 24’ N, they built a cairn to mark the victorious culmination of their journey, then turned for home.

  When they reached Fort Conger on 11 June they brought Greely good news: they had travelled 100 nautical miles further than Beaumont, had explored 85 miles of uncharted coastline and, most importantly, had beaten Markham’s record by four miles. Admittedly, those four miles, when transposed to an atlas, were barely visible to the naked eye; but what seemed small on the page went an astonishingly long way in the Arctic. Brainard, Lockwood and Frederick had done well. They had overcome snowblindness, they had endured gales that pelted them with ice as if they were walking through walls of flying gravel, and they had traversed some of the most inhospitable terrain on earth. Every single man had returned alive. Above all, they had shown that when it came to ice the US could equal, if not surpass, Great Britain.

  Having done what he set out to do, Greely now did what he had been ordered to do – which was to make scientific observations. Even here, however, his exploring instinct got the better of him. During that summer he personally led a party into the interior of Ellesmere Island, a journey which could be justified on geographical grounds but which was really an excuse to find a northern alternative to the North-West Passage. When he and his men emerged from the rugged landscape they carried maps of territories that had never before been visited by humankind. But they had not found the sought-for seaway, and their journey had been so arduous that when they arrived at Fort Conger their boots were practically nonexistent.

  By August 1882 the men were looking forward to the arrival of their first support ship. The promise of these shuttles, with their change of personnel, supplies and, above all, mail, had played a large part in reducing the psychological torment of that first Arctic winter. However, the expected ship did not appear. The Jupiter, which had been primed with every necessity for the men in Fort Conger, was unable to break through the ice in Kane Basin, so had dropped a couple of food caches, one at Littleton Island off the coast of Greenland, the other at Cape Sabine on Ellesmere Island, before returning to Newfoundland. Greely’s men waited patiently and then, as the new ice began to form, resigned themselves to a second winter on Ellesmere Island.

  Nobody had ever spent such a long time so far north, and the atmosphere in Fort Conger, which had never been good, deteriorated markedly as the long nights drew in. Lockwood likened it to life in the Bastille: ‘no amusements, no recreations, no event to break the monotony’. In this respect they were no different from any other US crew that had entered the Arctic – as opposed to the British, who had made it a point to keep everybody busy, the history of American exploration was one of grim and silent suffering that often led to mutiny and madness. The men in Fort Conger, however, had extra cause for despair. Whereas their predecessors had had a ship, or a remnant of a ship, or at the very least some sturdy boats with men who knew how to handle them, Greely’s contingent had only a small steam launch and three boats; none of these was suitable for navigation in the ice, and only two men had the vaguest notion of how to operate them. The Greely expedition, therefore, was dependent for its evacuation on its supply vessels. If no ship appeared – which now seemed a possibility – they would be forced either to take to the ice with their inadequate boats or to withdraw overland. Neither option appealed.

  Greely was not despondent. They still had ample food and fuel, and if salvation had not appeared by 1 September 1883 – the date on which he had been ordered to quit Fort Conger – he had no qualms about escaping in the boats. On the way north he had laid depots along the west coasts of Smith Sound and Kane Basin with just such an eventuality in mind, and had instructed the supply vessels to do likewise. He had also ordered a station to be established at Littleton Island, whose telescope-wielding officers could send help to his party when it hove into view. It was, he reasoned, just a few days’ journey from Lady Franklin Bay to Littleton Island. Buoyed by the prospect, he – or more accurately Lockwood, who loathed life in Fort Conger and had taken a particular dislike to Dr Pavy – flung sledge parties hither and thither during the spring of 1883. In March 1883 Lockwood went north again, in an attempt to better his previous best. He withdrew only when the ice began to break under his feet in Repulse Haven on the north coast of Greenland. A second attempt, in which he promised to be there and back within 44 days, was quashed at the outset by Greely, who declared it too risky. Greely did, however, let him take Brainard and Frederick on journeys through Ellesmere Island, during the course of which they ranged far and wide, at one point discovering a grove of fossilized trees whose slender, nine-inch thick trunks proved beyond doubt that the Arctic had once been a lot warmer than it was now.

  By his last summer in Lady Franklin Bay Greely could congratulate himself on the fact that his expedition had gone further north, west and east than any other to date. He had beaten the British on all counts. At Fort Conger, however, there was less to brag about. Dr Pavy, in particular, seemed to have done very little for the International Year of Polar Cooperation. His cabin, when inspected by Greely, was a mess of rocks, skins, and pressed flowers which, far from being organized and catalogued – as he had assured Greely they would be – were simply scattered about the place. Greely invoked the law: Pavy’s contract expired on 20 July; from that day he was discharged of all duties and ordered to give his records to Lockwood, who would thereafter take charge of the scientific programme. Lockwood, who was not a scientist, did as he was told. When Pavy protested he was placed under arrest, awaiting the arrival of that year’s ship.

  Not one but two ships were on their way. Following the failure of the Jupiter, the authorities had become uneasy about Greely’s situation. In 1883, therefore, they sent not only the Proteus but a smaller ship, the Yantic, into Smith Sound. The Proteus was instructed to batter its way to Lady Franklin Bay at any cost; the smaller Yantic, meanwhile, was to wait at Littleton Island, as a back-up in case anything happened to the Proteus. As a further failsafe, the commanders of both ships were ordered to replenish the existing depots on either side of Smith Sound. So far so good, and exactly as Greely had wished. Unfortunately, the rescue operation descended into chaos. The Proteus offloaded only a handful of supplies before it was crushed by the ice and sank, forcing its crew to escape by boat to Littleton Island. Here, finding that the Yantic had not arrived (and suspecting that it never would, because of its size), the Proteus party sailed for a prearranged rendezvous at Cary Islands, south of Smith Sound. They missed the Yantic by a day. It had reached Cary Islands and had then continued to Littleton Island where, discovering that the survivors had left for Cary Islands, it promptly turned around. The two groups chased each other north and south, from rendezvous to rendezvous, at each point missing each other by a matter of days until, at last, after 15 days and 900 miles, they were reunited at Disko Island. The Proteus survivors were taken aboard the Yantic and the whole operation retired in disarray to Newfoundland.

  While these farcical proceedings were afoot, Greely was preparing to move out. On 9 August 1883, while his would-be rescuers were busy rescuing themselves, the steam launch Lady Greely puttered into Robeson Channel, towing three boats containing the men from
Fort Conger, their scientific data and a limited amount of food. Behind them they left their dogs and enough supplies to see them through a third winter in case they were forced to retreat. Greely’s men thought their commander had gone mad: it would have been much more sensible to winter at Fort Conger and then sledge south in the spring. Indeed, Greely did seem to be teetering on the brink of insanity: he flew into unreasoning rages, ranted, raved and at one point threatened to shoot the Lady Greely’s mechanic for insubordination. When he hatched the lunatic idea of abandoning the steam launch and floating to safety on a large ice floe, some of his men began seriously to consider mutiny.

  In the end Greely abandoned his plan. But it made little difference because, by 26 August, by which time they were more than halfway to Littleton Island, the flotilla was firmly embedded in the ice. After 15 days, during which they had drifted only 22 miles south, Greely called a meeting of his officers. It was agreed that they should abandon the steam launch and drag two of their three boats over the ice to the coast of Ellesmere Island, which was visible just 11 miles to the west. Off they set, 25 men hauling a total weight of 6,500 pounds. Within two days they had jettisoned one of their boats in the hope of easing their task. But the haul seemed, if anything, more arduous still. The remaining, overloaded boat was too heavy to be dragged in one go, so it and its contents had to be shuttled in three separate stages. For every mile they advanced Greely and his men had to cover five. And as if this was not bad enough, the floe began to drift north. ‘Misfortune and calamity, hand in hand, have clung to us along the entire line of this retreat,’ wrote Brainard. Round and round Kane Basin they circled until, at the end of September, more than six weeks after leaving Fort Conger, they struggled on to Ellesmere Island.

  Their position was only marginally better than it had been. It was clearly impossible to cross the jumble of loose floes to Littleton Island, which meant that they would have to winter where they were. Fortunately, there were the supplies at Cape Sabine (which now lay to their north), and while Greely oversaw the construction of three miserable stone hovels, two men trekked to ascertain what the caches had to offer. When they returned eight days later it was with mixed news: the Cape Sabine depots contained 50 days’ food; together with what remained after their drift, this meant they could survive 100 days at the maximum. On the other hand, a note left by the Proteus suggested that more supplies had been laid down at Littleton Island. When the sea froze they could reprovision by sledge: it was only 44 miles there and back, and although the going was hard it was not impossibly so. Cheered by the prospect, Greely decided to decamp at once with their remaining possessions to Cape Sabine. He was under no illusions, however, as to what the coming months would be like: ‘Privation, partial starvation, and possible death for the weakest,’ he predicted.

  At Cape Sabine they erected a rudimentary stone shelter, roofed by the oars from their boats, and consolidated their position. Some men were sent back to collect the remaining stores from the landing point and others were ordered to itemize the contents of the caches. The stocktaking revealed unwelcome deficiencies: some of the food had been laid down more than eight years ago by the Nares expedition and had gone so mouldy as to be inedible. Greely at once reduced rations to 14 ounces of food per person per day. On this amount he reckoned they would be able to survive until March, when it would be possible to sledge to Littleton Island. Lockwood spoke for them all when he wrote, ‘Whether we can live on such a driblet of food remains to be seen’.

  Even this driblet, however, rested on the recovery of 144 pounds of preserved meat that Nares had deposited at Cape Isabella to the south. On 2 November Greely despatched four men to collect these vital supplies. Eight days later one of them staggered back to camp to announce that the mission had failed. One of their number, a man named Elison, had become frostbitten. Without his help hauling the sledge, they had had to abandon the meat. In addition, Elison had become incontinent and had saturated the sleeping bag, with the result that he and the other two were now frozen in place. When a six-man party under Brainard and Lockwood hastened to their rescue they had to chop the sleeping bag open before they could bring its occupants back to safety. On their return Greely reduced rations to ten ounces per day – four of meat, six of bread.

  Greely did his best to maintain morale – he organized uplifting lectures on the states of America – but it was impossible to conceal the dire straits they were in. Elison had one foot amputated, then the other, then his fingers one by one. People began to pilfer from the stores and to fight among themselves. Greely himself became increasingly short-tempered. On 18 January a man died, from scurvy and starvation. An attempt to reach Littleton Island by sledge on 1 February was thwarted by open seas. On 5 April Frederick the Inuit hunter died. The next day, so did another man. On 9 April Lockwood died, to be followed shortly afterwards by another two men. The pilfering continued. A few days after Lockwood’s death they managed to shoot a bear, which saved them from immediate starvation. But on 29 April Jens, the other Inuit hunter, drowned while chasing a seal, taking with him their best rifle. On 10 May Greely estimated they had three days’ food left. Those who had the strength shot a few dovekies or trawled for shrimp – minuscule things, little larger than a grain of wheat and mostly shell: 700 provided an ounce of meat. With this, and even tighter rationing, they managed to postpone the inevitable for a while longer. Still the channel refused to freeze, but even if it had they would not have been strong enough to cross it. It was as much as they could do to extricate themselves from their sleeping bags; for some, even this was too great an effort. As the weeks passed, and more men died, the survivors no longer bothered to bury their companions: they simply dragged the cadavers round the back.

  By the beginning of June the thaw had made their hut uninhabitable, so they erected a tent some 150 yards from their original encampment. Nobody any longer expected to survive. To alleviate their constant hunger they chewed on their oilskin sleeping bags and scraped lichen from the rocks. When Brainard spotted a caterpillar he swallowed it whole. The only one who showed any sign of health was, perversely, the handless, footless Elison, who had been carefully nursed by Pavy. (Pavy, who for a while had seemed the fittest of them all, had gone in early May, having accidentally poisoned himself.) Greely, who had already written his last will and testament, was in as bad a shape as any of them, but he managed to maintain a semblance of military discipline. When one man was caught repeatedly stealing from their communal supplies Greely convened an impromptu firing squad and had him shot. Soon, however, they were all so weak that discipline became a meaningless concept. Besides, there was hardly anyone left to maintain it. At the end of the third week of June 1884 only seven men remained alive. When the tent partially collapsed they did not bother to put it back up, but lay under its folds, waiting for death.

  While Greely’s expedition was withering at Cape Sabine, the authorities were ponderously examining its plight. First there came a lengthy inquiry into why the Proteus and Yantic had made such a mess of things, which occasioned a mild censure of the two officers responsible. Then Congress and Senate spent weeks debating just how much should be spent on Greely’s rescue and who should be allowed to take part in the mission. The deliberation was prolonged by petty squabbles over procedure and errors of wording. When a resolution was eventually passed it transpired that few ice-going ships were available and the two they bought – the Proteus’s sister ship, the Bear, and a whaler, the Thetis – were so expensive that there was no money left for a third. In desperation, they broadcast an alert to the whaling fleet: whoever found Greely’s expedition would be entitled to a bounty of $25,000. Fortunately, Britain remembered how much the US had spent in the Franklin search and donated the Alert, which was re-equipped under the supervision of its erstwhile commander, George Nares. In April 1884, therefore, three ships sailed for Smith Sound under the overall command of Captain Winfield Scott Schley. Behind them came a line of eight bounty-hungry whalers.

  On 2
1 June 1884 the first of the ships, Schley’s Thetis, reached Littleton Island. They found nothing save traces of earlier expeditions and a single, untouched cache left by the Proteus. When the Bear arrived the following day Schley decided to snoop around Cape Sabine before pressing on to Lady Franklin Bay. He did not really expect to find Greely on Ellesmere Island, but the effort had to be made; besides, it would be wise to deposit a new cache at Cape Sabine just in case he should miss Greely’s party on his way north – and just in case, if the Thetis sank, as had the Proteus, he himself had need of the food.

  Schley reached Cape Sabine on 22 June and divided his men into four groups, three of which were to investigate the existing cairns for messages, while the fourth was to comb the shoreline for any signs of Greely’s presence. Almost at once the first returned with a bundle of papers that gave details of the journey from Fort Conger and the whereabouts of Greely’s camp. Soon afterwards the second returned with Greely’s journal, various scientific documents and confirmation of his present whereabouts When they reached the survivors’ camp they were greeted by a surreal sight. One man seemed already dead. Another, who lay handless and footless, with a spoon attached to his forearm, seemed on the point of death. Two others were fumbling with a rubber bottle and a tin can. Stranger than all the rest was a bearded creature in a skullcap and dressing-gown, who crouched at the back of the tent. One of Schley’s officers crawled in, took his hand, and asked if he was Greely. ‘Yes,’ came the faltering reply. ‘Seven of us left – here we are – dying – like men. Did what I came to do – beat the best record.’

  As the starving men were carried to the ships, Schley began a thorough – almost forensic – examination of the scene. The bodies were exhumed (or, in some cases, simply lifted off the ground) and the debris of the camp was picked over with care. Logs, scientific records, instruments, any objects of value – all were carefully retrieved and brought aboard the Bear. Two days later, on 24 June, Schley’s little fleet sailed for home. It reached Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on 1 August, to be greeted by a 15,000-strong crowd. By then, however, there were only six of Greely’s expedition left. Elison, who had hung on so miraculously, had had to undergo further amputations; too weak to survive the operation, he had died on 8 July.