Trial by Ice (38 page)

Back at camp even Jim lost heart and refused a third attempt. In fact, none of the Inuit would go with Bessel. The acerbic doctor had alienated them all. Undeterred, the physician convinced the weakwilled
Bucldington to let him try with only Henry Hobby. Secretly Bessel planned on replenishing his food from the goods left at Thank God Harbor and recruiting new dog drivers from the Natives he expected to meet there. Those suppositions were risky. It never occurred to him that Thank God Harbor was a summer camp for :he Inuit, and none would be there. Bessel even offered Hobby two hundred dollars as incentive. Fortunately, the sailor had the good sense to refuse, and the doctor's plans fell through.

Four days later a violent storm hammered the coastline. With the howling wind came another sound, one added atop the clash of the tempest. It seemed to arise from the ground itself, and the men felt it vibrate through the soles of their boots. A low rumbling and grinding shook the ice and reverberated against the watching foothills. The growling ice lifted and rolled like free water under the blows of storm swell punching its underbelly. Before the men's eyes, the vast basin of blue-and-white ice rose and fell, breaking apart with ear-splitting groans. Frozen parapets plunged beneath the leaden sea while spewing foam and froth into the air to freeze. White-walled castles and cities climbed above the floor, only to topple or sink minutes later. 11 about them the landscape changed and reformed as the sea broke ipart the crust that had covered it for so long.

By the end of the day, most of the bay was open, dotted with bobbing a ad rolling slabs of ice. Breakup had come.

Chester and Coffin laid the keels of both lifeboats on the nineteenth of April. With breakup, work on the boats rose to a feverish pitch. Patched-together scraps of cotton sheet and linen towels would serve as sails for the vessels. Buddington opted for a triangular spritsatl, while Chester chose an easy-to-set square sail.

As the builders worked, illness claimed the lives of several Inuit. Most died following a brief but intense inflammation of their lungs. Miouk, one of the first to reach the stranded white men when they came ashore, paid the ultimate price for his discovery. During that time Buddington and Chester also developed respiratory symptoms but recovered rapidly. Most likely the white men had traded, along with their metal knives, pneumococcal pneumonia and tuberculosis with the Natives. Without previous exposure and acquired immunity to these respiratory illnesses, the infected Inuit died quickly.

The Inuit buried their dead in the traditional way, pulling the
odead man in his sled up to the top of a bluff. There they placed him in a hole in the snow, sitting upright and facing west with his spear by his side and his sled laid over him. As a sign of mourning, the Native men placed a twist of dried sea grass in their right nostrils, while the women placed a similar amount in their left. To the sailors' horror, the widow of the buried man smothered her youngest child, who was barely six months old. Without a man to hunt for her, food would be hard to come by for the new widow. Whether the woman killed her child to spare it the agony of starvation or to make herself more marriageable was never explained to the startled crew.

May almost claimed the life of Mr. Bryan. While the chastened Bessel puttered close to the camp, Bryan embarked on a sled journey to Rensselaer Harbor with Jim. Since the harbor was the site of Dr. Kane's winter camp, it had the most carefully established meridian measurement along the entire coastline. Bryan intended to use that spot to measure its difference from the
Polaris
camp.

The Arctic played no favorites, and Bryan encountered the same icy teeth that had frustrated Bessel's attempts. However, the amiable chaplain followed his guide's advice and reached Kane's abandoned camp. Searching about, the men found the copper bolt soldered into the crack of a rock that marked Kane's observatory. Nothing else of value remained save a few scraps of wood and iron and shards of broken crockery and glass. Bryan found the graves of two men named Baker and Schubert, members of Kane's expedition. Already, the land was erasing their presence. Wind and weather had almost scoured the white paint lettering their gravestones.

After building an igloo, Bryan did something that nearly cost him his life. He sent Jim back with the sled and kept one dog to pack his gear. Ever obliging, the young man understood that his contract with Jim only included staying one night. The onset of a storm prevented him from taking his sightings that day, so he would have to remain another twenty-four hours to complete his readings. Not wanting to “impose upon the good-natured Eskimo,” Bryan insisted that the man return while he waited for clear weather to take his readings. Over Jim's objections, Bryan prevailed, and the Inuit left for the base camp.

Alone, Bryan took his readings and then compounded his error by doing cwo more foolish things. He ate breakfast and gave all the rest of his provisions to his dog. Then he assembled his gear and tried to si rap it to the animal. It proved too heavy for the dog. So instead ol lightening the pack, Bryan decided to carry it himself.

Off he trudged, retracing the route back to the
Polaris
camp. With eaci step the pack grew heavier and heavier. After twenty hours of stumbling across the broken plain, the chaplain abandoned his pack and veered onto the smoother ice covering the inlet.

Exhausted and now hungry, Bryan slipped into a snow-covered crevasse. As he fell, his outstretched arms caught the edges of the crack anc saved him from disappearing forever beneath the surface. Soaked from the armpits down, Bryan lurched on with the dog trotting alongside. Without food his strength began to fail, and his situation grew more desperate with each passing hour.

Ahead on the ice, a dark object caught his eye. The dog caught a whiff of something to eat just as the chaplain recognized that the thing was a piece of seal meat. A footrace ensued, which the animal easily wen. But Bryan's hunger pangs overcame his love for animals. When he reached the slab of blubber, he beat off the dog before it could swallow the meat whole.

Then Bryan discovered why the normally frugal Inuit had discarded that piece of meat on the ice. It was gamy. The seal that had been killed was a male deep into rut and so rank and strong-tasting that even the Natives refused to eat it. Still, food was food, and Bryan w^s in no position to be picky. Holding his ravenous dog at bay, he hacked the greasy slab to pieces. Beating back waves of nausea, the young man swallowed chunk after chunk of the pungent blubber ntil he could stomach no more. The dog wolfed down the rest.

The meat restored his energy, but each ensuing belch reminded him of his offensive meal.

Eight and a half hours later, Bryan stumbled into camp. He had walked the sixty miles back to camp in three days and paid dearly for his mistakes. Snow blindness struck immediately. For two days he could see nothing while his damaged eyelids locked shut and tears constantly flooded down his face. The skin of that face blistered and peeled from frostbite and sloughed off entirely. Wet as
Bryan's feet and legs were, the heat of friction from his boots and leggings probably saved the man from developing frostbite of his lower limbs. Days passed before he healed.

While Bryan recuperated, Coffin and Chester painted the boats, dismantled the empty storehouse, and burned its wood for fuel. On the twenty-seventh of May, Coffin hammered the last nail in place. The two boats were done.

An orgy of killing followed as the sailors gathered fresh meat for their escape. With the warm weather, the birds and seals had returned, and parties of sailors hunted them around the clock. Auks, dovekies, and hares packed every spare corner of the boats. The Inuit helpfully supplied fresh seal meat and snared auks with long-handled nets. Even as the Natives worked to help the white men, evidence of the differences between the two cultures continued to unfold.

On a brief trip to Port Foulke, the recovered Mr. Bryan discovered the grave of August Sonntag, the astronomer of Dr. Kane's ill-fated second expedition. In earlier days William Morton and Hans had traveled with the late Sonntag. To Bryan's dismay, their Native friends had dug up the body and scattered the bones about. The cleric collected and reburied the polished skull and bones and replaced the headstone. Later he learned that the Inuit had desecrated the grave for the wood from the coffin.

On the thirtieth the dying
Polaris
made one last attempt to remain with her crew. An offshore wind sheared away the crust of ice riming the beach, and the half-sunken ship drifted free. Wallowing steeply on her port side and groaning out her death rattles, the ship floated two hundred yards south before running aground. That would be as close as the
Polaris
would ever come to returning to home port. The ship had given her all. The Arctic had set its claws into the doomed ship and resolutely refused to let go. When high tide rolled in, two feet of water covered the upper decks.

Indifferent to the fate of the vessel he never had loved, Captain Buddington ordered the boats dragged to the shoreline and loaded the next day. Each man was restricted to eight pounds of personal gear, and the boat crews were selected. Buddington chose Coffin to man the tiller of his boat and selected Morton, Odell, Hayes, and Mauch for his crew. For good measure, he placed the Reverend
Bryan in he bow. The first mate, Chester, commanded the second craft and got all those people who vexed the captain. Emil Bessel steered for Chester as the stroke, and Schuman, Booth, Campbell, and Hobby pulled the oars. Again, like a lucky figurehead, Bud-dington selected the pious Herman Sieman to ride in the bow of Chester's coat.

According to Buddington, the books about the Arctic that Charles F “ancis Hall had loved so well were packed in his sea chest along with two of the
Polarises
logbooks the following day and dragged a quarter mile from the camp. Therealong with two boxed chronometers, the pendulum, and the transitthey were buried in a stone cache. As an afterthought, Buddington included a letter detailing the directions and the plans of the two lifeboats in case a whaling vessel might stumble upon the marker.

On the third of June 1873, while a predawn pink glow illuminated the open bay as far as the eye could penetrate the sea mist, the men launched their two boats. The Inuit lined the shore and watched silently. By two-thirty in the morning, the sailors had poled their way past the brash ice and set their sails. This half of the
Polaris
expedition was once more heading south.

S
LOW
S
TARVATION

If the winter months were hard on Buddington and the men at Life Boat Cove, life on the floating ice during those months was far worse for Tyson's group. Throughout January his band fractured further and further apart. The Germans camped sullenly in their igloo, disdaining any work other than what directly benefited them. Besides the Inuit, only John Herron, an Englishman, and Jackson, the black cook, sided with Tyson.

The long process of starvation did not help. Almost three weeks passed before Ebierbing shot a seal. To the dismay of the Natives and Tyson, the crew snatched the animal away from the hunter and dragged it into their igloo. In minutes nothing much was left. Angrily the captain scratched in his journal:

They have divided the seal to suit themselves, and I hope they are now satisfied; but it does seem hard on the natives, who have hunted day after day, in cold and storm, while these men lay idle on their backs, or sit playing cards in the shelter of their huts, mainly built by these same natives whom they thus wrong.

The crew returned his animosity in kind. One day Robert Kruger barged into the navigator's igloo and swore at him, threatening
to beat the captain senseless. No fight erupted. But Tyson fingered Ebierbing's pistol during the tirade, perhaps recalling the event that had led Hall to shoot one of his sailors on his second trip to the North.

The se amen's dislike for their navigator-turned-leader also took the form of indirect acts of aggression. All of Tyson's worldly possessions resided in a small seabag that had been tossed over the side during the fearful storm that separated the crew. In it were a few shirts, several pairs of stockings, a vest, underpants, and one pair of heavy parts. One day it disappeared, probably stolen or dropped through a crack into the sea.

From then on the hapless commander had nothing else to wear. Working and sleeping in the same oil- and blood-soaked clothing often made his stomach churn.

Despondent and depressed, Tyson extended his quarrels to everyone, especially Frederick Meyer, who obviously headed the German hierarchy. “The German Count,” as the men referred to Meyer, cle arly vied with Tyson for overall command of the drifting rabble. The curse of the
Polaris
continued to haunt even those separated from her. Instead of working together, they fought. On a chip of dissolv ng ice, the officers of the
Polaris
still engaged in a struggle for control, much like two lice battling for ownership of the hide of a dead dog that was drifting over a waterfall.