Resolute (30 page)

Because Hall had discovered that many of the young men he intended to recruit as seamen had headed to the American West to seek their fortunes, most of his crew were also Germans. He did manage to convince an articulate whaling captain who had sailed the Arctic seas for twenty years to serve as his assistant navigator. He was forty-one-year-old George Tyson, the same man who, as James Buddington's mate, had been the first to step aboard the abandoned
Resolute
fifteen years earlier. It would be Tyson's on-the-spot record of the venture that provided the most detailed and accurate accounting of Hall's fateful final expedition. Also aboard were Joe and Hannah, ready for the third time to assist Hall on one of his quests.

The party steamed out of New London Harbor on July 3, 1871, and made its first stop in Greenland, where Hall obtained several sled dogs and picked up the ever-faithful Hans Hendrik and his family. Unlike his previous expedition, in which the
George Henry
had become locked in the ice soon after reaching Arctic waters, Hall was blessed this time with good fortune. By the end of August, the
Polaris
had reached the northern mouth of Robeson Channel. Later, various members of the ship would claim different readings as to where the ship was located at this point. But whether the exact spot was 82°11' or 82°16' or 82°29', the indisputable fact was that it was farther north than any non-native had ever been—more than one thousand miles north of the Arctic Circle, less than five hundred miles from the Pole. (The race for the Pole was fiercely competitive; see note, page 276.)

The voyage of the
Polaris
was little more than two months old, and already there had been a great achievement. But there had also been problems. Almost from the first, Hall had been having difficulty maintaining discipline. He had already had to admonish Buddington for having raided the ship's liquor supply. His biggest problem, however, was with Bessels. Bessels, small in stature, with delicate, sharp features, was highly educated; the sophisticated scientist almost literally looked down his nose at the often gruff Hall. For his part, Hall referred to Bessels as “that little German dancing master.” There were attitude problems with the other German members of the crew as well, a situation that was particularly troublesome to the experienced George Tyson, who worried about the future consequences of the situation. The crew, Tyson would note, “seem bound to go contrary, and if Hall wants a thing done, that is just what they won't do.”

Having reached Robeson Strait, Hall would have liked to push on even further, but now signs of the approaching winter were appearing. As the ice began to build up, the
Polaris
became trapped in the moving floes and started drifting southward. Again luck was with Hall. Within days he found a cove, which he named Thank God Harbor, a spot that was shielded from the flowing ice by a stationary iceberg that he christened Providence Berg. There they would spend the winter. It would, he knew, be a long and dark season, but having come so far north without incident, and having found a safe haven in which to wait until spring, he was more confident than ever that it would be he who would be the first to stand on top of the world. However, there was one thing he wanted to do before settling in. On October 10, he took Joe, Hendrik, and one other crew member with him on a sledging journey to scout out the best possible route to follow once the good weather returned. On October 24, he was back on the
Polaris
, absolutely certain that in the spring the Pole would be his.

Two weeks later, he was dead. As soon as he had settled back on the ship, Hall had asked for a cup of coffee. Even before finishing it, he became violently ill. At first, he thought he was suffering from an upset stomach, but for the next seven days his condition continued to worsen. In great pain, he went in and out of delirium, often crying out, accusing some of his officers of poisoning him. At one point, he called Tyson to his bedside and made him promise that if he should die, Tyson would make the journey to the Pole.

Then, what seemed to be a miracle occurred. Hall's condition improved markedly. He became clearheaded, was able to hold down food, and was even able to go up on deck. But on November 7, he suddenly collapsed and fell into a coma. He died the next day. Three days later, wrapped in an American flag and dressed in his uniform, he was buried in a shallow grave above the permafrost on the shore of Thank God Harbor. Charles Francis Hall's long Arctic odyssey was over.

Command of the expedition now fell to Captain Buddington, a man who hardly shared Hall's passion for reaching the Pole. Whether he really would have pursued the mission will never be known, for within days of Hall's burial, a violent gale set the
Polaris
adrift, driving the vessel against the Providence Berg. The crew would remain imprisoned there for the next ten months.

It would be an excruciating experience. This was no large British naval vessel whose officers, before leaving port, had planned extensive activities and entertainment to bide away the inevitable wintering over. Trapped inside the tiny
Polaris
, the men became agonizingly bored. Nat Coffin, the young ship's carpenter, went mad, imagining that some unknown enemy was determined to kill him. Buddington was unable to maintain discipline over the crew, and he and Bessels—who truly hated each other—were continually at odds. “Nothing has occurred that is pleasant or profitable to record,” Tyson wrote in his log. “I wish I could blot out of my memory some things which I hear and see. Captain Hall did not always act with the clearest judgment but it was heaven compared to this…If I can get through this winter I think I shall be able to live through anything.”

THE ETERNAL ARCTIC
winter darkness provides a solemn backdrop for the burial of Charles Francis Hall. The sudden and mysterious death of Hall left the North Pole expedition without an effective leader, a fact that became all too evident during the following winter's entrapment and the remarkable six-month odyssey atop the ice floes.

By October 15, 1872, with the
Polaris
still firmly entrapped, the morale of the men had almost reached the breaking point. Suddenly, however, they were all brought to life. A wind-driven blizzard erupted, slamming huge chunks of ice against the ship. Within minutes, the engineer began shouting that water was pouring into the vessel and that it was gaining on the pumps. Later, Tyson would recall that when he informed Buddington of what was happening, “the poor trembling wretch stood there oblivious to everything but his own coward thoughts.” Then, Tyson remembered, Buddington “threw up his arms and yelled out to ‘throw everything out onto the ice.'”

As Tyson looked on, the crew began to toss everything overboard. Looking down, he realized that many of the precious provisions were falling between the edge of the ice pack and the vessel and were disappearing beneath the water. “I decided I had better get overboard,” Tyson wrote, “calling some of the men to help me and try to carry whatever I could away from the ship so that it would not get crushed and lost.” Responding to Tyson's shouts, seventeen members of the
Polaris
, including all the Germans (except for Bessels), and all the Inuit, including Hannah, Joe, Hans Hendrik, and a number of women and children, joined him on the floe.

For more than four hours, working in the darkness and the well-below-freezing temperatures, Tyson and his crew struggled to save the provisions that were thrown from the ship. Then, without warning, there was a tremendous sound as the ice between the ship and the floe on which they were perched broke completely away. As Tyson and the others looked on in astonishment, the
Polaris
broke free and, driven by the wind and the currents, sailed out of sight. At the same time, the floe began to drift.

It was utter confusion. “It was snowing at the time and it was a terrible night,” Tyson wrote in his small notebook. “We did not know who was on the ice and who was on the ship … the last thing I had pulled away from the ship were some musk-ox skins. They were lying across a wide crack in the ice and as I pulled them toward me I saw that there were two or more of Hans's children rolled up in one of the skins. A slight motion of the ice, and in a moment more they would either have been in the water and drowned in the darkness or crushed.”

He had just completed this rescue when he heard cries coming from men who, in the splintering of the ice, had become trapped on small ice packs about forty yards away from the main floe. “I took the main scow,” Tyson wrote, “and went for them, but the scow was almost instantly swamped. Then I shoved off one of the whale boats and took what men I could see, and some of the men took the other boat and helped their companions, so that eventually we were all on firm ice together.” By this time everyone was utterly exhausted and, despite the conditions, they all collapsed on the ice and tried to get whatever sleep they could.

At daybreak, they assessed their situation. The ice floe was much larger than Tyson had first thought, almost four miles around. The supplies they had managed to save from the
Polaris
included eleven bags of bread, fourteen hams, a can of dried apples, and fourteen cans of dried meat and lard. They also had the two small boats and two sealskin kayaks. As best Tyson could figure, they were drifting somewhere between Ellesmere Island and Greenland. A few hours later, through the spyglass he had managed to save, Tyson spotted the
Polaris
some ten miles away. He tried to get the ship's attention by fashioning a flag, but his signal went unnoticed. Before he could make a further attempt to hail the ship, the current took the floe further south and the
Polaris
disappeared from view.

By the end of their first week on their floating ice platform, the marooned party presented an incredible sight. The Inuit had built igloos from the loose snow on top of the floe and they, Tyson, and another officer were living in them. The other men had taken up residence in a large snow house they had erected. But they were in an increasingly desperate situation. By October 28, they had run out of meat and were forced to kill and eat two of the dogs. They were bitterly cold and Tyson, who had no real authority over the group, could only look on in anguish as the Germans chopped up one of the boats for kindling. They had no seal blubber to fuel the few lamps they had managed to save, and, with the sun gone for the winter, they spent most of their time in darkness, a situation that greatly diminished their ability to hunt for food. “Here we are,” Tyson jotted in his notebook, “and here, it seems, we are doomed to remain.”

Soon there was another serious problem. Joe came to Tyson in the night and, handing him his pistol, stated, “I don't like the look out of the men's eyes.” What he suspected was that the crewmen, desperate with hunger, were planning to kill the Inuit and eat them. It was the same suspicion that Tyson was beginning to have. Aside from his revulsion at the thought, Tyson knew that the only thing that was keeping the party alive was whatever seal the Inuit were managing to hunt down. From that moment on, he would protect the Inuit by keeping the loaded pistol at his side.

By the end of December, the stranded members of the
Polaris
were eating anything they could get down. “I have dined today on about two feet of frozen seal's entrails and a small piece of congealed blubber,” Tyson wrote on New Year's Day, 1873. By February, they had drifted so far south that they began to notice cracks appearing on their floating island. Then, on March 12, in the midst of a severe storm, the “island” shattered completely apart. Huddled together, eighteen men, women, and children were now standing on an ice floe some seventy-five by one hundred yards wide.

Two weeks later, it became clear that even this floe was about to fall apart. Leaving their possessions behind, they packed themselves into the small whaleboat and rowed for twenty miles until they found a large pack. But several days after setting up camp there, that floe also began to melt and they were forced to row to yet another floating pack. Tyson, who somehow managed to keep a sense of humor through it all, noted in his journal that “this sort of real estate is getting to be very uncertain properly.”

Unbelievably, the worst was yet to come. Battered by April winds and rising temperatures, their latest “island” refuge began to split apart too until, as Tyson observed, there was “such a small foothold left that we cannot lie down tonight.” Then, on April 20, yet another fierce storm struck, threatening to wash everyone away into the sea and certain death. In a last, desperate measure, the Inuit women and children were put into the boat while the men held gravely onto it, fighting to keep it from being swept away, a struggle Tyson described in harrowing detail: