The Ice Balloon: S. A. Andree and the Heroic Age of Arctic Exploration (10 page)

They engaged in what Lockwood described as “several wordy disputes,” one involving “the differences between coons, opossums, etc.,” and they followed bird tracks in the snow, hoping to shoot the bird.

Elison’s frostbitten fingers dropped off. Dr. Pavy cut through the small piece of skin at the ankle that held his foot. His other foot fell off two days later on its own.

Lockwood was unable one day to rise from his sleeping bag, and was raving. “He can understand many things only after several repetitions,” Greely wrote. Lockwood had secretly saved his bread until he had a pound and a half, and then he had eaten it all and got sick. Private Whisler began challenging people to step outside and fight, and one day he fought in his sleeping bag with Private Bender, whom he shared the bag with.

In March the sun returned, and Christiansen and Francis Long, looking for game, traveled seventy-five miles without crossing a track. Greely described the party as “twenty-four starved men, of whom two cannot walk and a half dozen cannot haul a pound.” Lockwood wrote, “The time draws near when our group comes to an end. We look on it with equanimity, and the spirits of the party, with this prospect of a miserable death, are certainly wonderful. I am glad as each day draws to an end. It puts us nearer the end of this life—whatever that end is to be.” Greely added, “It drives me almost insane to face the future. It is not the end that afrights any one but the road to be travelled to reach that goal. To die is easy.” What was difficult was “to strive, to endure, to live.” It was “easier to think of death than to dare to live.”

At the foot of a glacier about a mile from the camp was a tidal pool where Rice began setting nets for shrimps, using skins as bait, and sometimes seaweed until he grew too tired to collect it. The shrimp were almost entirely shell and very small—they were called sea flies, and eight hundred of them weighed an ounce. No one liked them, but they ate them.

In March the Eskimo hunter Jens Edward said that he saw Private Henry steal bacon and hide it under his shirt. That night Henry threw up the bacon. At a meeting in the morning, others said that they had also known Henry to steal food. “A clamor for his life was raised, but repressed by me,” Greely wrote. Instead Henry was confined to his sleeping bag “except under the supervision of his comrades.” Two days later ten ounces of chocolate that had been saved for Elison were missing, and Henry was suspected, but no one could say anything definitely.

Later Henry was discovered drunk on liquor stolen from the tiny store of rum on hand. “A second time his life was demanded, but again I spared him,” Greely wrote. He reminded Henry that unity was essential. Then, not trusting him, he wrote out an order that if Henry were caught stealing again, he was to be shot.

At the beginning of April, the Eskimo, Fred Christiansen, began talking nonsense, and the next day he died. David Linn died the following day, pleading for water, of which there was none. Both were buried shallowly on the hill.

Even though Sergeant Rice was not well, he and Julius Frederick volunteered to collect the beef that had been abandoned in the fall when Elison had been frozen. They had been asking to go for some time, but Greely had not let them, “foreseeing the great chances of a fatal result.” Having finally persuaded Greely that the errand was necessary, they asked that they not be given any extra rations so that no one would suffer any deprivation if they didn’t return. To rest before leaving, Rice shared a sleeping bag with Linn, who was dead. His own bag had been loaded on the sledge.

They left at midnight on April 6. While they were away, Lockwood died early one morning, and—concerned that he might die himself—Greely restored Kislingbury to his rank, meaning, he said, that “in the event of my death the command of the expedition will devolve on you.”

Half miraculously, the men killed a bear that came near the camp. Meanwhile Jewell lapsed into a delirium and died. The bear froze and had to be dressed with a handsaw, which hardly anyone had the strength for. One of the men noticed that Greely’s hands trembled, as if from a palsy, and he wrote, “I hardly think he knows how weak he is.”

“Our condition grows more horrible every day,” Greely wrote. “No man knows when death is coming, and each has long since faced it unmoved. Each man who has died has passed into the preliminary stages of mental, but never violent, wandering without a suspicion that death has marked him. Only those who lived knew, and at the first wanderings we looked at each other, conscious that still another was about to pass away.”

After three days Frederick and Rice reached the place where they thought they had left the cache, but they couldn’t find the rifle they had stood in the snow to mark it. They concluded that the ice had drifted and taken it. To search for the cache, they had left their sledge. Walking back to it, Rice’s feet froze, and then he became too weak to go farther. Frederick gave him spirits of ammonia in rum, and they walked half a mile to the sledge, and in the lee of an iceberg collapsed. Rice talked about his family and friends, his home, and the things he planned to eat when he got there. Frederick took off his jacket to try to warm Rice’s feet; then, on a “desolate piece of ice with the wind blowing a hurricane,” he held him until he died, which took a few hours. What Frederick wished he could do was lie down and die beside Rice, but he knew Greely would send others to look for him, who might die in the effort. He kissed Rice, then walked seven miles to their camp where they had left the sleeping bag, which was “frozen stiff as cordwood.” After sniffing a vial of ammonia he was able to force the bag open. In the morning he walked back to bury Rice. “I had no shovel, only an axe, and the loose ice I had to remove with my hands,” he wrote.

The death of his friend “made a deeper impression on my mind than any experience in my whole life,” Frederick wrote in a report. He walked for three days to reach Camp Clay and when he arrived he gave Greely the food that Rice hadn’t eaten.

At the end of April, ice tore a hole in Jens Edward’s kayak while he was stalking a seal, and he drowned. Without the kayak they couldn’t hunt seals. Furthermore, Edward had gone under with their best rifle, a Springfield. “We are in the most abject misery,” Private Roderick Schneider wrote, “and those that are dead are surely the best off.”

Brainard still walked to the shrimp ground, passing the graves on the hill. According to the navy report, after the last stored food was given out in the middle of May, “the party subsisted on lichens, moss, saxifrage, sealskin, both boiled and roasted, and a little tea.” Greely wrote to his wife, “The whole party are prepared to die and I feel certain that they will face death quietly and decently.”

Pavy asked Greely to write a letter attesting that he had conducted himself as he should have. He wanted it for his wife, he said. Greely wrote it reluctantly, and gave copies to Brainard and Israel, because he feared that Pavy would alter it. Except for Pavy’s medical service, his record “has been mighty bad,” Greely wrote in his journal. “I say all this on the edge of the grave.”

William Ellis, perhaps deranged, drew up a will leaving his pay to his mother and his son, although his son had died before the expedition had left, and then he died, apparently starved. Then Ralson, then Whisler, then Israel, whom Greely was especially fond of “died at 2 a.m., very hard,” Schneider wrote. “He struggled long for life.” Fourteen were left, and the bulk of them decided to abandon their hut because water from melting snow kept dripping into it so that “we are saturated to the skin and are in a wretched condition,” Greely wrote. Eleven of them moved a few hundred feet up the hill to a tent. Some were able to walk on their own, but others needed to be carried. The tent was crowded. One night Brainard had to sleep outside in a storm because the two men he shared his sleeping bag with, one of them Pavy, wouldn’t make room for him. Corporal Nicholas Salor died next, and no one had the strength to carry him up the hill and bury him. He was “put out of sight on the icefoot,” meaning where the ice met the shore. Pavy appeared to be the strongest man left. He would go to a ridge behind the tent and chop ice to melt for water, for which Greely was grateful.

On the first of June, Kislingbury sat up in his sleeping bag in the middle of a gale, and began singing a hymn. He died a few hours later. His body was taken out into the snow and the service said over him, but he was left where he lay. “Party will try to bury him tomorrow,” Greely wrote.

The bay was now free of ice. “How easily we could be rescued,” Greely noted. Pavy prescribed medicine for Maurice Connell and for Bender, but Greely “forbade the issue,” Schneider wrote, “saying that the doctor was not in a way to order medicine.”

Private Henry was suspected again of stealing food. He promised Greely he would stop, but Greely didn’t believe him. His order to his three sergeants said that in light of the party’s “perishing slowly by starvation,” it was essential that if Henry were “detected either eating food or appropriating any article of provisions,” he be shot. “Any other course would be a fatal leniency, the man being able to overcome any two of our present force.”

The next morning Henry “not only stole shrimps for our breakfast, but visiting unauthorized our winter camp, stole certain sealskins for food.” Greely confronted Henry as he returned from the hut, and Henry admitted the theft. “He was bold in his admission, and showed neither fear nor contrition,” Greely noted. In his tent, he wrote,

Near Cape Sabine, June 4, 1884
Sergeants Brainard, Long and Frederick

Notwithstanding promises given by Private C. B. Henry yesterday, he has since, as acknowledged to me, tampered with seal-thongs, if not other food at the old camp. This pertinacity and audacity is the destruction of the party, if not at once ended. Private Henry will be shot to-day, all care being taken to prevent his injuring anyone, as his physical strength is greater than that of any two men. Decide the manner of his death by two ball and one blank cartridge. This order is IMPERATIVE and ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY for ANY CHANCE of life.

The sergeants were not sure how to perform the task—whether it was proper to tell Henry and allow him time to settle himself, or if they should simply shoot him without warning. Early in the afternoon they went down the hill to the hut. About half an hour later Frederick came back and told Henry he was needed, and Henry went down the hill with him. The others heard three shots. Months later Frederick described what had happened: “He did not know that we were about to kill him, but he had been warned,” Frederick said. “We walked to within twenty yards of him” to read him Greely’s order. “There was no missing him at that range,” Frederick said. “Without a word the man dropped dead.” They agreed not to disclose whose bullet had killed him. Hidden among his belongings were twelve pounds of sealskin.

A few hours later Private Bender, who had also stolen food, died “very cowardly for a man who has said so much about meeting death,” Schneider wrote, then Dr. Pavy, who drank extract of ergot from the medicine chest, possibly thinking it was iron and that he was fortifying himself. When sealskin was found among Pavy’s belongings, too, Schneider felt vindicated, since he had also been accused of stealing. His remarks form one of the most haunting declarations in the history of Arctic service. “Although I am a dying man, I deny the assertion,” he wrote. “I ate only my own boots and part of an old pair of pants I received from Lieutenant Kislingbury.” Then he added, “I feel myself going fast, but I wish it would go yet faster.”

Seven men were left. “Every one of us much used up,” Schneider wrote. Strangely the strongest appeared to be Elison, who had lost his feet and hands but had been given extra food. Biederbeck, who looked after him closely, had fashioned a spoon to fit one of his stumps.

Brainard continued to walk to the bay for shrimp, but on the tenth of June he wrote that his nets were lost and his bait gone also. On the twelfth he walked to the top of a hill about a hundred feet above the water and put up a flag made from rags, hoping that a whaler might see it. The wind blew it down, and the next day he climbed the hill again to put it back up.

Sitting in his sleeping bag, a soldier named Hampdon Gardiner held a portrait of his mother and another of his wife, whom he had married only two months before he had boarded the
Proteus
. While talking to them, he died. Two days later he was left on the ice foot, where Pavy and Bender had also been left. The wind had partly uncovered the corpses on the hill, enough so that the buttons on their clothes could be seen. On the seventeenth Schneider wrote, “I am unable to use my legs,” and on the eighteenth, begging for opium, he died. The others managed to get him halfway to the ice foot but could go no farther and left him.

Remembering that it was approximately “the average date of whalers reaching the north water,” Greely said, they began to look for ships. He stayed mostly in his sleeping bag and lapsed in and out of consciousness. Early in the third week of June, a gale blew down the tent, and no one had the strength to put it back up. They lay as if under a shroud.

On the twentieth Greely wrote, “Six years ago to-day I was married and three years ago I left my wife for this Expedition, what contrast! When will this life in death end?”

Just before midnight on June 21, 1884, through a gale, Greely heard a whistling sound, which no one else heard, and when he asked Brainard and Long if they could manage to see what it was, “they thought it only the impression of a disturbed imagination,” Schley wrote in “The Rescue of Greely,” published in 1885. Brainard returned without Long and said the noise had been made by the wind. He got back into his sleeping bag.

One of Schley’s crew, on an island called Brevoort Island, not far from Camp Clay, had found a cairn that Greely had built in the fall. In it were papers that he brought back to the ship. To recall the rest of the searchers, Schley had the ship’s whistle blown, and this is the sound Greely heard. The papers, which were read aloud, described the expedition’s stay at Fort Conger and the retreat. “As one paper after another was quickly turned over,” Schley wrote, “it was discovered with horror that the latest date borne by any of them was October 21, 1883, and that but forty days’ complete rations were left to live upon. Eight months had lapsed since then.”