Trial by Ice (36 page)

Normally sinew and strips of skin would be saved for harness, rope, and clothing, but not that day. The men even ate the membranes the Inuit saved for covering the windows in their igloos. What good was having windows when the transparent tissue would ease the hunger pains that racked the men's stomachs? they reasoned.

New Year's dinner brought the usual watery soup made by floating a minute square of dried pemmican in a cup of warm water. Some men sarcastically referred to the broth as “pemmican tea.” This night the seal intestine added a second course. Tyson dined on two feet of frozen gut with relish. Smacking his lips, he scribbled, “and I only wish we had plenty of that, but we have not.”

Persistently the ice erased its openings and sealed the watery leads. Hunger preoccupied everyone's thoughts, entertaining their dreams along with every waking moment. Pilfering of the food supplies resumed. “The provisions are disappearing very fastfaster than the distribution of rations will account for,” the navigator noted. With tongue in cheek, he added, “there must be some leak.” Yet little could be done to prevent it. The thin clothing and weakened state of all precluded posting a watch. Anyone left outside for long would freeze to death.

With hunger came hallucinations and fanciful thoughts. Having satisfied themselves that their suffering would reap them great financial rewards from Washington, the men fantasized that they could reach shore and walk overland to Disko. Despite Tyson's warnings that the ice floe was drifting inexorably west, several of the crew insisted that a run to the east would get them ashore. Their delusions infected Ebierbing, who considered making the trek with his family. Certainly if anyone could do it, the Inuit stood the best chance.

Shaken by his stalwart Inuit's admission, Tyson worried even more about the stronger men splitting apart from the company, taking the last of the food, and making a dash to the east. Among the enfeebled party, a handful of men stood out as far healthier and
stronger than the rest. They acted as ringleaders, and Tyson judged these sailors to be the thieves who had pilfered the stores. How else could they have retained their energy and strength when all the rest crawled feebly about for want of nourishment? he reasoned.

Without a doubt, if the group divided, everyone would be lost, Tyson argued. Even the fittest among them lacked the strength to cover the distance. And it was suicidal to try to reach land by going east. No one could carry enough to survive. The dogs were all eaten, and the unruly men had burned the sled for fuel. The last remaining whaleboat was far too heavy to drag any distance, and it was needed intact in case their floating base should break apart. If there were those who doubted this would eventually happen, they had only to listen to the growing grinding and creaking that arose from the ce beneath their feet.

More Dver, Disko was still a long way off, not only to the south but to thi east. Meyer's last sextant sighting had placed them at 72°N, neir the middle of Davis Strait and far to the west of the shores of Greenland. The party on the ice floe had drifted to a spot more than three hundred miles from their point of separation from the
Polans
and nearly six hundred miles south of the lonely mound of shale and stones that covered the half-buried coffin of their late leader, Charles Francis Hall.

O
N THE
B
EACH

The condition of those men lining the shore beside the dying
Polaris
was little better than that of George Tyson's group, nor would their lives improve. Unlike their compatriots, they had reached land, but that was all. The cold, darkness, and famine extended their fingers across both ground and water.

Buddington, Chester, and Bessel crowded together on the shore as the sled approached. The rest of the crew rushed to the edge of the ice and waved their hands wildly. Loping across the snow, the dog team and its riders came on, advancing with measured pace, until the bone-tipped runners of the sled flashed in the reflected light. The cries of joy died in the men's throats, and disappointment filled their hearts.

The new arrivals were Inuit.

Through sign language the Natives indicated they had smelled smoke from the ship's fires and followed their noses overland to the cove. They were from the village of Etah, they said. By chance both Inuit, Miouk and Awahtok, had lived with Dr. Kane during his last polar expedition. In fact, the two men recognized the aging Morton and remembered a few words of English. Since fate and the currents had driven the
Polaris
close to Life Boat Cove, where Kane's ship died, the coincidence is not too remarkable.

The bundle of steel knives stacked amid the ship's stores attracted
the Inuit's attention. A metal knife was far superior to the bone devices fashioned by the Inuit and impossible to obtain except in trade from the white man. Since they had little food, the two men offered their services in unloading the ship. In exchange for a shiny new knife, each Inuit would help move supplies from the
Polaris
to the safety of land.

Over the next four days, the Inuit worked hard ferrying goods from the sinking
Polaris
to the beach. The lighter sleds with their bone runners proved invaluable in crossing the crevasses and twisting paths among the piled ice. Coffin had built a heavy sled with its iron-edged runners to carry the whaleboats. Without sled dogs it proved next to useless. Even sawing the ponderous sledge in half did no good. The divided parts were still too heavy to use.

On the shore overlooking the bay, Chester erected the framework for the company's house. The salvaged spars and scraps of lumber became the ridgepole and rafters. With the help of Sieman and Booth, the first mate raised a structure twenty-two feet by sixteen feet. When they ran out of sufficient wood to roof the house, Chester si retched two of the ship's sails over the rafters.

While in the act of transferring his possessions ashore, Dr. Bessel broke through the ice on two occasions. To avoid frostbite, the doctcr had to suffer the humiliation of crouching beside the ship's stove like a boy with wet pants while the men continued working. It must have especially galled that educated man that all his training went for naught on the ice, and he could not emulate the skill of the two illiterate savages, who jumped nimbly from floe to floe with effortless agility.

Wherever the German scientist left the security of his observatory or the ship, the Arctic dealt with him harshly. Clearly one of the causes of friction between the late Captain Hall and Bessel arose fron the physician's attempts to take over the exploratory part of the expedition. Bitterly he refused to admit that for all his degrees, he did not qualify as an Arctic explorer. His stiff neck brought him nothing but the grief and pain of snow blindness and frostbite.

After all that could be salvaged was transported ashore, Miouk and Awahtok sledded happily away with their shiny knives tucked in the sealskin scabbards swinging from their necks. Before they
left, the two Inuit discovered the collection of iron-tipped harpoons and whaling lances from the ship. To the Inuit this was a treasure, indeed. They resolved to return as soon as possible.

The crew of the
Polaris
settled in to take stock of their new home. While they possessed most of the Sharps rifles, the officers found that the metallic cartridges for the heavy rifles resided with the long-lost Tyson companyas did the heavy keg of black powder. Both had been tossed onto the ice during the night the two groups were separated. Among all the men, counting the powder in their flasks, they could muster only eight pounds of powder and a handful of Sharps cartridges found in their pockets.

Only six tons of coal remained, but piles of scrap wood stripped from the decking, bunkers, bulkheads, and cabinsensured that they would not freeze anytime soon. Clothing remained the other critical shortage. Most of the seabags had been thrown off the ship in their panic.

If Buddington had planned on receiving help from the village of Etah, he was sorely mistaken. The people of that place were starving and in desperation quickly fastened upon the white men with their weapons of shiny stone as their salvation. Within one day of leaving, Miouk and Awahtok were back with five more dog teams and four friendsall eager to work for a metal knife. With their help, the heavy galley stove was transported ashore and tiers of bunks built inside the
Polaris
hut. When a crack widened in the ice between the supply depot and the rudimentary cabin, the Inuit unloaded their sleds and carried the cargo over the six-foot gap. For their efforts the crew showered their newfound laborers with spoons, buttons, nails, and other metal objects that the Natives readily fashioned into useful tools. All the while the Natives kept their eyes on the metal harpoons.

Freed up to improve his handiwork, Mr. Chester enlarged the living quarters, adding a galley and attaching a storehouse at right angles to the side wall.

On October 24 Schuman and Odell both agreed that burning their limited coal to keep the pumps going was foolish. Without fanfare they extinguished the fireboxes. Like a dying man taken off his respirator, the USS
Polaris
sank slowly under the weight of the
rising water in her hold. Struggling to the end, the ship heeled onto one side and refused to die. Stripped of masts and rigging, gutted of her inner walls, the ship fought to retain her dignity as she lay on her side. Only the blackened and twisted smokestack jutting from the center of the barren hulk gave mute testimony to the once-proud silhouette of the American steamer.

Within a week the rest of the population of Etah arrived via sledsnine men, three women, and eight children. Feeding these extra months sorely taxed Buddington's supplies. Other than the ubiquitous dry biscuit and their salted sections of blubber, there was little enough to go around. Numerous forays in search of fresh game yielded little. Several shots were fired at fleeing caribou, without success. From day to day a fox was shot and added to the cooking pot. Flow far a scrawny blue fox went in feeding the camp of thirty-eight people can only be imagined.

Throughout the months of November and December, blue foxes, wh te foxes, and the occasional unwary raven would supply the camps only fresh meat. Since the usually skittish foxes approached the site only because they, too, were starving, their sparse frames carried little worth eating. For some reason the men of Etah found no eals.

Monotony and fatigue settled over the land base. Morosely the men watched the
Polaris
settle deeper and deeper into the silt of the bay. To those with the gift of insight, the gutted hulk stood as a daily reminder of the expedition's failure.

Excitement rose one day when a man was spotted running across the horizon. From the runner's gait, Buddington and Chester declared it was a white man. Surely he must be one of their separated shipmates, they judged. Morton and a half dozen sailors took off after the distant runner. Only Morton reached him. Disappointedly he returned to announce that the man was an Inuit crossing the ice field in search of food.

For some unknown reason, the Inuit loved to visit the big house, where they would sprawl about on the floor sleeping and disrupting the sailors' movements. Disagreement arose, and the Natives would leave, returning to their hardscrabble settlement. But within a few days, a new group would arrive. And so it went, men
and women coming and going on a daily basis. Perhaps the Inuit were stealing bits and pieces from the
Polaris
camp, but Budding-ton makes no mention of any theft. One main reason the Inuit kept returning was to beg ship's bread from the camp. While the white men's situation was desperate, that of the people of Etah was far worse. Like the starving men with George Tyson, the villagers of Etah were eating their sled dogs.

One hope burned brightly in Captain Buddington's mind. When Dr. Kane had abandoned his camp at Life Boat Cove, he left behind an iron-plated scow and a sizable keg of black powder. Mr. Morton's recollection matched that report. Here in an ironic twist of fate lay the solution to Buddington's two most vexing problems. With plenty of weapons, they were sorely short of powder, and a sturdy boat would go a long way in carrying the crew down south when the ice broke up. Since the bay where they had run the ship aground was close to Kane's old camp, the captain proposed a party to find the needed objects.

Chester, Hayes, Coffin, and Dr. Bessel mounted a search party. Armed with picks and shovels, the four men followed the contour of the land until they reached the site of the earlier expedition. Days of digging about in the snow and driving an iron rod through the wind-hardened crust failed to find any trace of the boat or the powder. Disheartened, the company trudged back.