Trial by Ice (28 page)

The superstitious among the crew could not help but wonder if the dog could read their future. What terrible ordeal awaited them that would make a Newfoundland prefer an agonizingly slow death to what lay ahead?

They would not have long to wait for their answer.

Threading her way between the floating hummocks and hills, the
Polaris
turned tail on the brooding rise of Observatory Bluff, swung her nose toward the leaden clouds filling the sky to the west, and churned the pewter-colored water with her screw. With a mixed sense of relief and apprehension, Captain Buddington directed the helmsman. He was heading back, a fact that pleased him, but more than a thousand miles of dangerous water lay between them and their home port. Leaving Thank God Harbor exposed him to the dangers of being stranded in the ice that he so greatly feared. All around him the floating ice waited. To deal with his fears, Budding-ton went below and refilled his tin cup with specimen alcohol.

What Emil Bessel felt as he watched the clapboard shack he called the observatory recede into the watery mist he never recorded. His eyes could not help but notice the solitary mound rising from the level ground near the hut. That lone grave caught his eye whenever he approached his workshop. The image of the frozen crypt wavered constantly in the corner of Bessel's sight, while the specter of the dead commander hovered in the back of his mind.

Fastidious and haughty from the start, the German scientist had
withdrawn even further into himself since the death of Captain Hall. His manner and actions had set him apart from the rest at the very beginning of the voyage, and the closeness of the crew, coupled with the lack of proper sanitary conditions, only heightened his alienatioi.

Imperious as well as aloof, Bessel had openly striven to make himself the overall head of the entire expedition. While he never said so directly, his actions further tagged him as wanting to be the first to reach the North Pole. Only Captain Hall appeared to stand in his way. With the demise of Hall, Bessel believed he had achieved both objectives: he could reach the Pole and direct the expedition. The lion s share of the glory would be his. Of course, the official orders split the command between the German and Captain Bud-dington, but Bessel expected the drunken sea captain to be happy to follow his directives.

Two things conspired to frustrate Bessel's ambitions, however. Buddington not only hindered any plan to reach the North Pole after Hall died but steadfastly refused to consider any undertaking other than retreating farther from their objective. Second, the Arctic forced a harsh reality on Emil Bessel: he was not physically strong enough to be an Arctic explorer, much less make the trek to the top of the world. Whenever he had tried to act the explorer, snow blindness struck him down. Why he never used the carved, slitlike goggles the Inuit wore for protection is another mystery. Perhaps he considered it beneath him. Perhaps he believed his will wou d see him through. But his eyes failed him at every turn. To the German, who considered himself superior in every way to Captain -[all, this weakness, which had never bothered the dead commander, must have been particularly galling. In any event even brief exposures to the constant glare of the snow and ice disabled him for weeks at a time.

It must have been a bitter experience for Bessel to hide from the light with his eyes swathed in bandages while men he considered inferior to him trudged about with impunity. In the end he buried himself beneath mountains of scientific measurements and collection specimens, piling those things around him for a barrier. Eventually he became even more withdrawn and brooding. Faced with
his failures, Emil Bessel the man ceased to exist and was replaced by the two-dimensional Bessel the scientist. In all the testimony later taken from the crew and all the written journals, little is found that describes his human side.

While the Inuit mother nursed her infant son below decks, the
Polaris
crept cautiously southward, following the twists and turns of the open channels that beckoned. Crozier Island and Franklin Island hove into view like hostile monoliths. Because the ship was without anchors, the two islands offered neither shelter nor comfort. While they passed Franklin Island, a thunderous roar overrode the whine of the wind and rattled off the distant cliffs like the shot of a cannon. The report came from an enormous landslide that greeted them, spilling down the island's rocky side to set the sea boiling amid crashing boulders and tumbling clouds of milky glacial dust.

Passing to the east of Crozier Island, the ship sailed beneath the silvery white face of Cape Constitution. Morton and Hans Christian watched glumly as they passed the point that the two of them had reached by sled in 1854 during Dr. Kane's expedition. Their seamed faces showed little of the excitement they had felt when they had steamed northward past the point less than a year before. For Morton this would be his last journey to the far North. Never again would he share the exhilaration of stepping onto undiscovered land with his old friend Hans.

Two days into their steaming, fog settled across the entire length of Kennedy Channel. Buddington steered the vessel west along Cape Frazer, then back toward the western side of Greenland in his attempt to keep within the open channel. Meyer hastily took a sextant reading before the fog obscured the sun. His calculations placed the ship at 80°1' N latitude.

Weaving his way through the tiny, shifting openings day and night weighed heavily on Buddington. All around him cakes of ice threatened the weakened ship, and the open leads he followed grew narrow and turned without warning. As usual he consoled himself with nips from his pocket flask. By noon of the fifteenth, the captain was considerably drunk.

The wrong order slurred from Buddington's lips turned the ship sharply out of the slender canal and drove the vessel into the bordering
ice. Thinner, freshly formed ice might have parted beneath the
Polarises
ironclad prow, but Buddington picked the wrong floe to hit. This floating island stretched more than five miles in length and measured many feet in thickness. In an instant the string of two days' worth of good luck that had come with the birth of the Inuit snapped. With a sickening grind, the bow of the ship rode onto the floe. Abr iptly the
Polaris
jerked to a halt.

Insta ltly Buddington ordered the engine into full reverse. The screw be it the water into a greenish froth while the hull painfully wriggled its way off the island. Men held their breath and gripped the hand ails while the ship struggled to free herself.

Runring the prop in reverse carried a danger of its own. Adjacent blocks of floating ice, drawn in by the suction of the propeller, closed about the screw like wolves on a wounded deer. The blades struck ore mound after another. Chunks of ice flew into the air and spattered the stern before littering the foaming sea with ivory chips.

The bronze blades bent in the process.

Below decks the engineer Schuman sensed the stress on the screw and signaled frantically to the bridge. Another minute might see the driveshaft snap. Reluctantly Buddington ordered the engine shut down. With a groan the ship settled onto the ice and heeled onto its side, once more resuming its familiar angle.

Two days into their escape, the Arctic ice had recaptured the
Polaris.
More ice gathered around the free side of the ship, packing around the hull. New ice quickly formed between the blocks, sealing the openings until the spidery rime once again entrapped the
Polaris
in an icy cocoon.

Chester barked an order, and men leaped onto the floe to drive ice screw > and anchors into the solid surface to keep the ship from rocking t3 pieces. Within an hour stout lines secured the bow and stern.

Just 120 miles south of the farthest point the
Polaris
had sailed, Arctic ice again ensnared the woeful ship. Slowly the sailors walked along the deck peering down at the ice encasing their home. For all their efforts to escape the clutches of the Arctic, little good had come of t. In fact, they were considerably worse off. Providence Berg, desoite splitting apart, had remained grounded on the shallow floor of Thank God Harbor, thereby offering some degree of
protection. The floe that presently held them was adrift. Like a flea riding the back of a dog, the
Polaris
no longer controlled its destiny. Worse still, they had burned two more days' worth of their irreplaceable coal and bent their propeller blades.

Paradoxically the ship appeared to be moving
north
at times! While the current generally moved from north to south, strong southerly winds buffeted the pack and pushed the ice floe north, preventing it from drifting down the coast. Not only had the region recaptured the retreating expedition, it appeared to be drawing the ship back into its northern lair.

The grounding on the ice floe reactivated Buddington's worst fears. The very danger he had worked so hard to avoid had come to pass. He and his ship were trapped in the ice fields. If they could not free the
Polaris,
surely starvation and cannibalism awaited them. Visions of Sir Hugh Willoughby's Muscovy Company sailing ship drifting onto the shores of Lapland with its ghastly cargo of frozen corpses probably haunted his dreams. Even though Sir Hugh's catastrophe had occurred three hundred years before, its dreadful image frequented all the recent publications, adding color to a long string of Arctic disasters that led up to Sir John Franklin's. Ironically the
Polaris
expedition would contribute to the tales, and it would not be the last calamity.

Two days passed before the ice resorted to its old trick of nipping the ship's sides. Hummocks piled into the free side of the
Polaris
with sufficient force to raise the keel and increase the angle of heeling. Panic swept the crew, and Buddington prepared to abandon ship. Supplies littered the deck, readily located for heaving onto the ice should the worst happen. Later that evening another onrush of ice battered the ship again. Heeling increased dramatically while the men looked wistfully at open water miles beyond their reach.

A southwest gale added to the men's anxiety and discomfort. Freezing rain pelted the deck and coated every exposed fitting and line with ice. The angled deck became a skating rink, ready to send the unwary crashing into the lifelines. Exposed skin froze to lashings on contact, and strips of skin tore away when the limb pulled free.

Encrusted doors refused to close, blocks froze to their tackle,
and icy latlines proved so treacherous that climbing to the crow's nest risked life and limb. Even so, Chester and Tyson climbed daily to the topmast to search for a way out. The swirling mist and sea fog parted at times to reveal tantalizing glimpses of open water. Always, however, white walls rose in defiance between the ship and their freedom.

Throjghout this icy rain, the crew fretted through a deadly game of blindman's bluff. Not a day passed without some monstrous, milky hillock emerging from the freezing mist to bear down on the tethered
Polaris.
With singular purpose one or more would cruise stiaight for the vessel, threatening to crush it against the frozen expanse at its back. By hauling on the bow and stern lines, the crew could warp the ship fore and aft to evade the onrush. The work was deadly and disheartening. By using blocks and tackle, the capstan, md even raw muscle, the lines would be pulled in to swing the ship away from the path of the charging mountain of ice. Not unlike dr iwing on strings to turn a child's puppet, the action would pivot the vessel. But this puppet weighed four hundred tons. Around tlie clock the assaults continued until the sailors strained at their lines with numbed minds as well as hands.

Pressure on the weakened hull continually mounted as the oncoming ice packed tighter and tighter against the exposed flank of the ship. The leaking seams and split boards opened wider as the jaws of the vise inexorably tightened. Again Buddington turned to pumping by the steam donkey. With all hands occupied in moving the ship back and forth along their tightrope, no one could be spared to work the hand pumps on deck.

As th.3 ship drifted back and forth with the floe, the opalescent walls of tie Humboldt Glacier shimmered and glistened to the east, guarded by an armada of chalky icebergs passing in review down Smith Sound. Behind this floating wall, the pale lavender and blue mountains of Greenland beckoned like soundless sirens to the helpless crew. On August 25 Joseph Mauch penned words that reflected the prevailing gloom that gripped his shipmates as they watched land pass out of reach: “The ice is opening a few hundred yards from us, but so little that we cannot take advantage of it. The officers are, of course, aware that, ten chances to one, we are lost if we should net be able to reach land.”

For the rest of August and most of September, the ice retained its hold on the
Polaris.
No further gales roared up the sound. Instead, fog and freezing drizzle filled the days, alternating with cold, diamond-clear periods during which the hard reflection of the sun off the ice burned everyone's eyes. The absence of stiff winds proved a curse rather than a blessing. Without wind to roil the water, no waves broke the deepening ice, and the swirling current drifted the intact ice pack north and south, east and west. Dead reckoning and celestial sightings noted little progress to the south. Most days the ship moved less than a mile in any direction. Paradoxically the men now prayed for a gale to release them.

Distressingly the sun wearied of sailing aloft as it had during the summer and dipped below the horizon for the first time since April. Taking their cue from the departing warmth, birds and animals fled southward, leaving the stranded ship alone in the ice. Seal sightings grew scarce. By the end of August, the only sign of life seen all day was one ivory gull winging its way south. Buddington's fears of starving grew closer to reality. No longer could the party rely upon the Inuit to provide fresh meat. All that remained were the tinned foodstuffs, and Buddington's calculations raised doubts there would be enough to feed all of them until next April.