Trial by Ice (35 page)

As th-3y were crossing a crevasse roofed over with windblown snow, the ice bridge collapsed under the weight of the sled. Only the franti: scrambling of the men saved the sled and all their possessions from the gaping maw with its waiting dark waters. Even then, half the crew had to leap back to rejoin the rest. Discouraged, Tyson wr:>te: “Fate, it seems, does not mean that we shall either get back to the
Polaris,
or even reach the shore. Here we are, and here, it seems, we are doomed to stay.”

As if to punish this escape attempt, the Arctic hurled a fierce storm at ihe stranded group. Only the rapid building of new igloos saved them all from freezing. Days of howling winds and whiteout conditions in which one could scarcely see the hand in front of one's face precluded any further efforts to reach land. Trapped inside his snow hut, Tyson collapsed from lack of food and sheer exhaustion. “The weather is so bad no one pretends to leave the hut,” he wrote. “We are all prisoners.”

Miraculously Ebierbing continued to hunt in the worst conditions. On the sixth of November, he returned with one spotted seal and in the process almost lost his life. Stumbling about in the storm, Kruger spotted a white creature climbing stealthily over the hummocks and readied his pistol to shoot the approaching polar bear. Waiting in ambush, the sailor drew a bead on the white fur.

Just as Kruger's finger tightened on the trigger, the face of Ebierbing hovered above the pistol sights. Shaken, the seaman quickly lowered his revolver. The snow-dusted fur parka of the Inuit caused Kruger to mistake him for an ice bear. Only fortune had prevented Kruger from killing the one man capable of keeping them all supplied with food.

One small spotted seal did not go far. Tyson and the others eagerly drank the warm blood and consumed the entire animal, devouring the raw meat “skin, hair, and all.” Still, the dark days melded into equally dark nights to the hungry cries of Puney and the other Inuit children. Weak from hunger, the adults trembled as they moved listlessly about the camp.

Again parties unknown raided the meager supplies of bread. “The bread has disappeared very fast lately,” Tyson scribbled in alarm. “We have only eight bags left.”

On the twenty-second, Ebierbing took another seal. Reserving part of the animal for Thanksgiving, the crew passed about a can of dried apples to mark the occasion. Starving as they were, images of food incessantly occupied their thoughts on that occasion. Few found any reason to give thanks.

Tyson assuaged the gnawing hunger in his belly by warming a few strips of frozen seal entrails over a guttering lamp before he gobbled them down.

“No doubt many of my friends who read this will exclaim, would rather die than eat such stuff!' “he penciled in his journal.” You think so, no doubt; but people can't die when they want to; and when one is in full life and vigor, and only suffering from hunger, he don't want to die. Neither would you,” he added philosophically.

Hardship only widened the gulf between the various factions instead of fostering cohesion. Old loyalties, already formed aboard the
Polaris
and never submerged very deeply, resurfaced with a
vengeance. The instrument of hunger hammered the wedge of discontent deeper into the marooned group.

Meyer and Tyson, essentially the only officers, grated on each other's nerves worse than when they were aboard ship and refused to suppon each other. The German crew reverted to speaking only their native tongue. Tyson moved in with Ebierbing and Tookoo-lito, where he could at least understand them when they spoke English. The navigator complained that in the men's hut, only German was spoken and he could understand not a single word of it.

Responding in kind, the Germans lined the floor of their igloo with canvas yet refused to help drag similar tent scraps to Tyson's hut. Only the two Scandinavians, Lindquist and Johnson, and the cook and the steward helped Tyson to floor his igloo.

Darkly Tyson worried about his lack of firearms. Still puzzled by Buddirtgton's arming of the crew after Hall's death, the navigator lamented that he had neither rifle nor pistol while every other member of the crew had both. Sourly he blamed his commitment to duty for his “unpleasant situation.” “While I was looking after the ship's property,” he wrote, “the men secured their guns and pistols.” Had he selfishly gathered his possessions and armed himself the night of separation as the crew did, he told himself, he would be far better off. “I am the worst off of all,” he bemoaned, “for I have neither gun nor pistol of my own, and can only make a shot by borrowing o Joe. This is a disadvantage in other respects; the men know it; they are all armed, and I am not.”

Craftily Tyson tried to inveigle a firearm out of Ebierbing, but the savvy Inuit refused to part with any of his weapons. “Joe,” the navigator scribbled in his diary, “has both a shot-gun and a pistol; but he didn't seem to care to give either up, and I will not force him to.”

Deepening cold layered atop the oppressive darkness that December brought. The Arctic winter swallowed any distinction between da / and night. Mocking the prolonged starvation of those clustered on the drifting ice, the skies overhead unleashed a spectacular show of lights. Streamers of blue and violet danced and coiled across the heavens, unfolding their beauty to anyone with the energv to appreciate it.

A form of rheumatism struck down Hans at the very time his
hunting skills were most needed. Ebierbing doubled his efforts with no success. Without light the seals spent only scant minutes with their noses pressed to their breathing holes before diving away. Without seals no polar bears appeared. Without bears no foxes followed to scavenge scraps from their kills. The delicate food chain shifted brutally into reverse. Absolutely nothing edible inhabited the stranded men's domain.

“The darkness is on us,” Tyson wrote heavily. While the navigator gave vent to his blackest thoughts in his notebooks, Meyer limited his writing to sterile notations like “colder today; wind blowing from the southwest.”

Rations now were reduced to a few ounces. Food occupied the waking thoughts of all. Insidiously their starvation worked to perpetuate itself. Lack of the proper nutrients robbed them of the energy needed to drag their boat and supplies to safety if the opportunity to reach land had presented itself. The white men huddled listlessly inside their igloos and dreamed of feasts long past.

Other thoughts, far more foul and unspeakable, crept along the corners of the hungry men's minds, ideas that surpassed the limits of humanity.

One day Ebierbing handed his coveted revolver to the startled Tyson. Looking over his shoulder at the sullen sailors watching them, Ebierbing placed his pistol firmly into Tyson's hands as his eyes drifted back to the Inuit families sitting outside their igloo. Ebierbing's gaze rested on the children playing in the snow. Then the Inuit looked back at the seamen.

“I don't like the look out of the men's eyes,” Ebierbing whispered darkly.

A cold shiver shot down Tyson's spine as he fingered the pistol.
He thinks they will first kill and eat Hans and his family,
the navigator thought.
And then he knows Hannah's, Puney's, and his turn will be next!

Cannibalism
The very idea jarred the captain. Tyson looked at Tookoolito. The fear and worry in her eyes confirmed that she felt as her husband did. The Inuit sensed that the sailors, driven by the pains of hunger, would eat them.

They had good cause to worry. The cracked long bones and
knife marks on the skulls of the Franklin expedition's skeletons told of cannibalism. Inuit all along the coast knew of this. If the ordered British wDuld resort to eating their own, what could be expected from this lawless bunch? A tender young child would make their starving mouths water. Even the solid John Herron wrote in his diary: “The only thing that troubles us is hunger; that is very severe. We feel sometimes as though we could eat each other.”

Adde i to this was the general feeling among the party that the Inuit were less than human. The Natives' strange customs, lack of bathing, and habit of eating their meat raw fostered that perception. On more than one occasion, the Inuit's cabins aboard the
Polaris
had had to be cleaned and deloused by the crew when the smell anc offal inside grew too much even for the rank seamen. It was all relative, however. The sailors themselves were no paragons of cleanliness. But seeing the Natives turn their rooms into what the white men considered a pigsty contributed to the seamen's view that the Inuit were animals.

Tyson slipped the revolver into his pocket and nodded to his friend. An unspoken bond was established between them. In exchange for the pistol, the captain would guard the Inuit with his life. Late Tyson scribbled in his diary, “God forbid that any of this company should be tempted to such a crime! However, I have the pistol now, and it will go hard with any one who harms even the smallest child on this God-made raft.”

Frorr a practical standpoint, eating the Natives would deprive the men of their only effective hunters. Tyson recognized this. While he doesn't mention it in his diary, most likely he circulated among the crew and expressed that idea. He wrote:

Fortunately two things averted such an unthinkable event. First, Hans recovered, adding his strength to the opposition once more. Second, he caught a fox, which the men devoured down to the last bone. For the time being, the thoughts of eating the Inuit receded.

Looking for ways to divert their thoughts from food, the Germans seized upon the reward given the crew of the
Hansa
who had experienced a similar situation. For surviving their drift on the ice, their government awarded each man a gift of one thousand talers. Animated by their greed, the Teutonic contingent swaggered about the ice with their rifles and pistols and boasted that Congress would likely double their pay. The sailors forgot that they had no control over their destiny. No one would collect a cent if they never returned.

Christmas arrived with strong winds raking the ice floe. Even though it meant using the last of their ham and dried apples, the event called for some sort of celebration. “Our Christmas dinner was gorgeous,” Tyson wrote. “We each had a small piece of frozen ham, two whole biscuits of hard bread, a few mouthfuls of dried apples, and also a few swallows of seal's blood!”

John Herron, the steward, had balked at eating sealskin on the first of December because “the hair is too thick, and we have no means of getting it off.” By Christmas hunger had erased his doubts about eating anything. Of the banquet, he wrote, “We had soup made from a pound of seal blood, which we had saved for a month.” After adding that to their mulligan stew, he remarked, “the whole was boiled to a thick soup, which, I think, was the sweetest meat I ever ate.”

With that feast went the last of the apples and the one surviving canned ham. Taking stock of their remaining food, Meyer and Tyson found six bags of dried bread and nine cans of pemmican. The cold and darkness continually conspired to thwart the Inuit's search for game. With the open leads sealed under thin ice, neither man could paddle the one kayak far in search of seals, nor could they spot the dark heads, for there was no open water. By the end of December, Tyson's hunger forced him to gnaw on cooked scraps of dried sealskin that Tookoolito had saved for repairing their
clothes. E/en the strips of seal blubber that had been burned dry of all their residual oil in the stone lamps were fished out of the sooty bowls anc wolfed down.

By this time the daily intake of those on the ice was, at best guess, less than five hundred calories. Nazi nutritionists calculated that their slave laborers would need a minimum of eight hundred calories a day to perform useful labor for a period of four to six months before they starved to death. While the men on the ice floe reduced their activity whenever possible, the weather was also considerably :older for them, requiring more calories to keep warm.

So, like the unfortunate captives of the Third Reich, the company of the
Polaris
was also starving. Their symptoms included listlessness, weakness, and constant thoughts of food as their shrunken stomachs groaned and knotted in emptiness. Their hair, nails, and teeth became brittle as the body dissolved itself in search of essential nutrients. Scurvy attacked them all, loosening their teeth and causing their feet to swell. Stocky individuals with more muscle ar d body fat would last longer than the thin ones, but all suffered f “om lack of vitamin C.

To make matters worse, Nature conspired to starve them over prolonged periods before tossing a few mouthfuls of food at them just when they were on the verge of collapse. Then the agonizing cycle repeated itself. Tyson and his party were experiencing firsthand Buddington's fears of starving on the ice.

On the twenty-eighth, a lead opened in the ice. Hans shot a seal, which sank before they could retrieve it. The next day Ebierbing shot another Greenland seal, and anxious moments followed as the men laced to launch the kayak while the dying animal drifted away. Fortune, however, smiled that day, and the animal was caught and dragged ashore.

What followed was an orgy of gruesome proportions. The entire skin, with its blubber so vital for the lamps, was stripped off. Then the carcass was rolled onto its back, and the abdomen carefully Dpened to retain all the blood inside the cavity. The clotted blood was swallowed whole, while cupfuls of the steaming blood were drunk before it cooled. Liver, brain, heart, and meat disappeared uncooked into the shrunken stomachs of the nineteen
people. In deference to the Inuit custom, the eyeballs were given to the youngest in the party, baby Charlie Polaris. Even the entrails were wiped clean on the snow and set aside for later.