Trial by Ice (25 page)

Ahead jagged islands of ice choked the passage. Jostling, colliding, and capsizing under the wind and current, these impediments posed a serious concern. Unlike the field they had just crossed, these islands crumbled and tipped and turned and provided no level place to transit. Worse still, the heat of the summer sun, raising the temperature above freezing, attacked the floating islands until huge blocks of rotten ice sheared from their surfaces to tumble into a twisted rubble of melted slush.

Two grounded icebergs loomed ahead with a flat ice floe separating them. Amid the grinding islands, this tranquil spot beckoned. With no Inuit along to recognize the impending trap, Chester ordered his men to pull for that floe just as more ice slid into place behind them. The open channel had lured them into the ice field, but the abrupt change in the sea state and the advancing tide now blocked 11 hope of advance or retreat.

Chesier calculated that the turning tide would draw the pack ice back out to sea and ordered camp made to wait out the rising tide. The men pitched tents, preparing to stay the night, and lit fires. Soon tea boiled over the portable tin stoves. Worn out by their efforts, the men ate a hasty meal and turned in.

Frederick Anthing, the seaman who described himself as “born in Russia, on the Prussian border,” took the first watch atop a saddle of ice facing west. Chester and Meyer stretched out on India rubber sheets about twenty yards from the whaleboat. The other three sail 3rs crawled into a tent pitched beside the
Grant.

No sooner had Chester closed his eyes than a warning shout jarred him awake.

“The ice is coming!” Anthing cried in alarm.

Chesier sprang to his feet and his crew spilled out of their tent to see an advancing wall of pack ice rising above them so high that it appeared to block out the sky. The crowded wedge struck the iceberg sheltering them from the sea with a deafening roar.

The Inuit call this rapid and deadly attack of pack ice
evu,
and they fear it above all else. Sudden storms, rising tides, and current shifts will drive hundreds of tons of pack ice ashore with awesome powerand no warning. Tumbling like dominoes, twisting, and sliding o^er one another, enormously dense plates advance like an army. Nothing at sea level is safe from destruction. Even camps atop the windswept bluffs lining the coast fall prey to ice rafted and stacked until it towers more than one hundred feet high. Like colossal shears, the slabs scythe and crush everything standing before them.

The ground beneath Chester's feet buckled as the
evu
struck their iceberg, and the mate struggled to regain his footing. The force shattered the berg and sundered their campsite. Frozen boulders rained down from the fractured iceberg, crushing boxes and
supply bags. The floe cracked into pieces. Dark open water splashed up from the sudden fissures, and the broken plates tilted and spun as more slabs showered upon them.

The three men by the boat jumped for their lives as their floor split apart. The
Grant
danced away in the second half. Before they could rescue their boat, a mountain of ice fell upon the craft, crushing it to splinters.

For endless minutes a deadly dance ensued as men sprang from one floating chip to the next. Keeping alive meant moving, but one slip or misstep would plunge a man through the cracks into the boiling sea. Opening and closing like a living net, the cracks proved as threatening as the ice attack. Anyone falling into a fissure would be crushed to death or drowned as the ice closed over him. All the while tons of ice from the shattered iceberg and the
evu
bombarded the hapless crew and sent their slippery footholds jumping and spinning.

Abruptly the attack ended. As quickly and as silently as it had begun, the
evu
passed on. Shocked and stunned by the violent event, the men could only stand and stare at their shattered world. Miraculously all survived.

Their material goods had not. The
Grant
had vanished into a pile of matchstick-size splinters drifting out to sea. Three rifles, a boxed chronometer, and Mr. Meyer's journal were all that survived. In its fury and whimsy, the ice attack had taken all else and left these random, unrelated items.

Hours ago they had rowed northward with high hopes of conquering the North Pole, and in the blink of an eye, the Arctic had dashed their hopes. Shaken, they huddled together on broken rafts of ice, stripped of all their possessions and with no alternative but to drag themselves back to their ship.

Ironically among the goods Mr. Chester lost was the Jonah American flag that the ill-fated Wilkes expedition had carried and that Grinnell later presented to Captain Hall.

A chastened Chester and his crew slogged the seven miles back, arriving aching and footsore from climbing over the shore ice piled along the bay. Instead of receiving sympathy for their misfortune, the rest of the crew treated them with the disdain they probably deserved:
c irelessness lay at the root of the second boat team's disaster. Only Tyson's delay had saved his men from a similar fate, yet they acte d superior to the other boat crew.

Again the divisive spirit that pervaded the ship raised its ugly head. Tyson recorded the loss with ill-concealed glee: “Chester's party ha/e all returned, having had the misfortune to lose their boat, and nearly their lives.” He continued, “I called the cape near which th sy lost their boat Cape Disaster, and the bay they were on, beyond Cape Lupton, Folly Bay, which I believe was rather displeasing :o Mr. Chester.” Here Tyson sounds more like a schoolboy reveling n a classmate's failure than an adult who recognized that teamwork was essential to the success of their mission as well as their survival.

Perversely the Arctic fostered this division. Wind and water combine« 1 to once more offer an ice-free channel of open water. Smugly Tyson, Dr. Bessel, and four men launched their boat on the evening of the tenth.

Stunj; by the unfair criticism, Chester begged for another boat. Camping between the two grounded icebergs had been an error, he realized low. The structural strength of a summer iceberg, weakened anc fissured by melting water, differed greatly from that of a winter berg. Rotten to the core and capable of breaking apart and capsizing at any time, summer icebergs offered dangerous sanctuary. Nevertheless, the floe between was the only spot suitable to land.

Chester's pleas brought mixed results. Buddington refused to release a lother longboat, fearing that all remaining boats might be needed ct home. With the
Polaris
sinking lower into the sea as Providence Berg's spur melted, each day found new cracks in the hull and rising water in the holds. Running the steam pumps for fifteen minutes every four hours cleared the bilges of water, but that required the steam donkey to maintain six to ten pounds of steam pressure at all times. Firing the boiler constantly consumed precious coal. The dead Hall's foresight in scrimping on fuel and the special boiler sabotaged in Disko must have haunted the men's thoughts. Burning seal oil in that unique steamer would have resolved tbeir mounting coal problem.

For all his efforts Chester finally got the Heggleman, the patented folding canvas boat. Assembling the portable craft proved challenging, so another day passed before Chester launched the canvas craft on June 12. Paddling after Tyson and Bessel, the men were described as in good spirits and singing “We're going to the Pole” as they rowed away.

Their enthusiasm soon soured and turned to glum determination as the poor design of the Heggleman revealed itself. Square-tipped on bow and stern, the puntlike craft, which might have been ideal for a summer outing on a placid lake, proved agonizingly slow and unwieldy. Its flat nose wedged solidly into any ice floe it encountered instead of pushing the ice aside as the sharp-prowed whaleboats did. Furthermore, the high sides and flat nose caught the wind like a sail. Nose on, the wind blew the boat backward, and a beam breeze left the stern man constantly fighting the tiller to keep on course. Added to all this was the boat's flimsy construction. Hickory and ash thwarts supporting stretched canvas made the boat look fragile as an eggshell compared to the massive blocks of floating ice threatening it. For sailors used to rowing a wooden-planked whaleboat, bobbing along in a cloth contraption must have proved nerve-racking.

The Heggleman's crew battled for a whole week to reach the same spot Tyson had achieved in two days. Weather and the awkward folding boat conspired against them. After a day and a half of hard rowing, the exhausted men collapsed on another floe for the night. A strong northerly wind rose while they slept and blew their floating island back down the channel. In the morning they awoke to find themselves
south
of their starting point the day before at Cape Lupton.

Things were not all rosy for Tyson's boat, the
Robeson,
however. Threading his vessel through the sea ice, Tyson passed Cape Folly and angled along Robeson Straits as far as Newman Bay. There ice thwarted him completely. A solid sheet of white sealed the waters north. Learning from Chester's mistake, Tyson beached his craft on solid ground, pitched camp, and waited for the channel to open. Unable to trap this group as it had Chester's men, the perverse nature of the far North struck at Tyson's team in another way.

Two days of staring at the endless fields of bright snow and ice reactivated Emil BessePs snow blindness. The intensity of the reflected light bouncing off the ice inflamed the doctor's eyes, robbing him of all useful sight. To combat this glare, the Inuit fashioned goggles of wood with narrow slits cut in them to limit the amount of light reaching the eye. Hans and Ebierbing used them, as did the late Capiain Hall and Tyson. Why Bessei did not is unclear. The goggles had to be made, so no extras were available. Certainly Bessel's attitude toward the Inuit guaranteed they would not offer him a pair. He might have disdained such a primitive device. However, his failure to use this protection cost him dearly, for dark glasses w ere yet to be developed.

Confined to the relative darkness of the tent, the doctor fretted away the long hours with his eyes swathed in rags. Discouraged to the poin: of despair, Bessei forced himself to finger the scraps of driftwood brought to him by the sailors and skin the various birds they caught. Equally maddening to this entomologist were the mosquitoes end black flies that buzzed about him and bit him but that he could not collect.

Eventually Chester's men reached Tyson's camp. While the two boai teams waited, more precious time dwindled away. On the sixteenth of July, a flock of geese passed overhead. To the men's alarm, the geese were flying south this time, not north as beforea sure sign that summer was drawing to a close. The next day it snowed.

Behind them the channel leading back to Thank God Harbor closed as pack ice crowded ashore. Now they could row neither north ncr south. Without dogs and sleds, the
Robeson
proved too heavy to drag overland, and no one wanted to set foot inside the Heggleiran boat again.

In desperation Tyson suggested that the two teams combine forces aid mount an overland attacka “pedestrian exploring party,” he named it. His plan called for squads of men leapfrogging their wav north on foot, leaving caches of food as they went for the journey Dack. Struck again by a flash of blinding optimism, Tyson described his incredible plan: “In this way, taking our guns with us to assist in procuring food, we could have walked to the pole itself
if the land extended so far, without any insuperable difficulty during the Arctic summer.”

To his amazement his plan failed to inspire his fellow shipmates. “But, I could get no one to join,” he wrote in consternation. “Some were indisposed to the exertion of walking, and some did not know how to use the compass, and were probably afraid of getting lost; and so the project fell through.”

In their collective wisdom, the sailors realized that summer was over. Instinctively they also sensed that Captain Hall's speculation was accuratethat they stood on the northern tip of Greenland and the end of all land. Had Tyson occupied a well-defined place in the command structure, he would have built up his authority as well as earned the trust of the crew, and the men might have followed his plan. Being placed in limbo by Hall's nebulous appointment, Tyson had none of those things working for him.

An equally frightening thought lurked in the back of each man's mind: Captain Buddington could not be trusted to wait for their return to the ship. More than once Buddington had voiced to Tyson and Chester that if the way south opened for the
Polaris
and if he “got a chance to get out he would not wait.” That scuttlebutt spread below deck faster than the speed of light. Even the lowest seaman clearly knew the captain's mind in that matter. If they pressed farther north, chances were slim that their ship would be waiting for those lucky enough to find their way back to Thank God Harbor.

Back on the
Polaris
Captain Buddington wrestled with his own demons. Rising water in the holds had ruined a number of provisions. The worsening leaks now required the pumps to be run every other hour. Having burned every bit of scrap wood, the captain resorted to fueling the boilers with coal bags soaked in turpentine to conserve their dwindling supply of precious coal.

Next a northeast gale struck, blasting the harbor with winds exceeding forty knots. Providence Berg shifted and ground along the shallow floor under the force of the storm, and all hands feared that their mooring platform would break free and drift out to sea with the rest of the pack ice. The captain ordered the observatory cleared of its instruments and every fragment of wood salvaged for
fuel. As fie advance boat parties feared, Buddington was preparing to retreat.

Complying with Bessel's impractical “sketch,” he left written instructions for the two boats. Here another flaw in the doctor's plan made Buddington's message useless. Unknown to Buddington, ice prevented any movement of the scouting boats. With the crew already preparing to abandon their craft, they would be unable to follow him south.

The gale passed, clearing all ice out of the harbor and turning the way s 3uthwest into one broad expanse of water. But Providence Berg remained firmly grounded and the twelve-foot-thick spread of ice linking the
Polaris
to the iceberg unbroken.