Trial by Ice (37 page)

About the same time the men were searching in vain for Kane's things, an Eskimo family arrived at the camp. Tattoos streaking the woman's face marked her as belonging to Inuit from Ellesmere Island, across Smith Sound. Tattooing was common practice among these “western” Inuit but not usual among the “eastern” Inuit of Greenland. Her husband also carried a bow and arrows, weapons the Greenland Inuit did not use. The man called himself Etookajeu. When his name tripped the seamen's tongues, they promptly renamed him “Jimmy.” His wife, Evallu, like Tookoolito, possessed a gift for learning English and soon was conversing freely with Captain Buddington.

Her story confirmed his theory that she had come from the western side of the sound. Five years ago she and a large party had crossed the open water in an
oomiak
along with five kayaks. Of the families that came across, she and her husband and children were
all who remained. But what she also told him drove a stake into the heart of aiy further attempt to find Kane's iron boat.

In their traveling along the coast, Evallu's group had landed near Life 3oat Cove and stumbled across the observatory Dr. Hayes had built farther inland. They also found the iron scow and the powder. While the Ellesmere Island Inuit recognized the metal scow as akin t3 their large
oomiak,
the nature of the black powder eluded them, as their village had not seen any white men at that time.

Anguish clouded Buddington's face as the woman related that the boat they found was useless and far from seaworthy, with the gunnels staved in and the sides full of holes. The Inuit, ever grateful for windfalls, appropriated the wood and canvas from the sails, mast, and oars. The woman told of her people's sleeping inside the observatory and heating the place with their usual stone seal-oil lamps. Tragically one night an open flame was placed too close to the keg, and the black powder exploded, killing five Natives, including tl e father of her husband, Jimmy.

The Ellesmere Inuit took the deaths in their party as a bad omen in t lis new land and paddled back to their homeland with the doctor's cars and canvas. Evallu and her husband remained behind and eveniually joined the village of Etah. What remained of Dr. Kane's scow was scattered over the eastern slopes of Ellesmere Island in possession of the migrating Inuit.

There would be neither a fortuitous iron boat nor a keg of black powder to make his task lighter, Buddington realized. He also came to the disheartening conclusion that the Inuit would not be able to feed them as he had hoped. It would be a long and hard winter with little to eat. He was no longer on the floating ice, he realized, but the danger of starving was just as great on the land.

With the Natives of dubious help, the crew's survival hung on the sailors' shooting fresh gamea task made all the more difficult by the fact that they possessed so little powder. Every shot at an animal must count. Yet the ravens and bony foxes the men caught hardly fit the bill. Already evidence of scurvy reared its ugly head among the castaways. Booth, pressed into service as a steward, lay confined i o his bunk with swollen feet and ankles.

Chris :mas and New Year's arrived at the base camp with little
cause for celebration. The salvaged coal, burned all too freely in the stoves, diminished at an alarming rate. Buddington tried to save fuel by abandoning use of the cast-iron galley stove without much success. The cooking pots turned out to be too large to use on the smaller secondary stove. Finally rations were reduced to one meal a day.

Although they were standing on solid ground, the plight of the men ashore was just as grim as that of their shipmates drifting miles to the south on the ice floe. No mention is made of celebrating either Christmas or the end of a dreadful year. Apparently Buddington and his men did not even have one can of dried apples to open for their special dinner, as Tyson's group had.

On the twentieth of January, the stove swallowed the last lump of coal, and Buddington faced a hard decision. Every scrap of wood he burned meant one less piece he could use to build boats to carry his men southward after breakup. The pile of wood scraps stacked beside the house lasted a mere seven days.

The hand of the Arctic winter bore down heavily on the desolate cove, adding to the crew's discomfort. The only signs of light consisted of scattered ribbons of violet and purple fluttering briefly behind the sable mountains. Without the warming rays of the sun, heat fled the country. All the while the thermometer stayed well below zero. Plummeting as low as 42° below zero, the pitch-black days averaged minus 28°. Without a source of warmth, hunger would no longer be a problem. A man would freeze to death before he starved.

Increasingly fuel proved just as critical as food. To make matters worse, Buddington's group had fallen into the trap of conventional thinking. They had built a traditional-style house out of wood and canvas, whereas snow igloos would have been wiser. Larger, more open, and poorly insulated, the walled tent lost heat readily to the subzero air. Heating the building required burning their precious fuel in large quantities, whereas the Inuit way could heat a cramped igloo with a single seal-oil lamp.

Like Saturn eating his children, the
Polaris
expedition cannibalized the
Polaris.
Wood from the wheelhouse provided two additional days of warmth. During this process, Chester and Buddington watched their men with eagle eyes. No wood considered useful in
the constiuction of their lifeboats was burned. The carpenter collected every brass screw and nail from the dismantling for future use. Hungry and cold as the men were, even the dullest among them realized that a lifeboat was their last and only hope.

February saw the bowsprit, masts, and riggings thrown into the insatiable stove. The hatch to the forecastle had been moved ashore to provide a level platform for Bessel's transit. That, too, found its way into the furnace.

By the end of the month, Buddington counted fifty-one different Inuit coming and going from the camp. During crowded periods the bodies strewn about the canvas floor challenged even the most sure-footed sailor.

Event ually the men's tolerance toward the Inuit began to pay dividends Evallu repaired the sailors' clothing, and Jim hunted for his newfound friends. Slowly, steadily, the other visitors brought a trickle of fresh meat to trade for odds and ends. Although scarce, the slices of walrus and hare kept the seamen's scurvy at bay, limiting the signs to a few loose teeth, open sores, and swollen ankles.

On the first of March, Awahtah, an ancient Inuit, spotted a polar bear crossing the ice not far from the wreck of the
Polaris.
With his four-foot-long bone-tipped spear in hand, Awahtah took off after the bear. Cracking his whip over the heads of his sled dogs, the hunter ard his team vanished into the blowing snow. Three days passed w thout a sign of the old man. All that time a gale piled drifts against the tent that forced the men to dig out their only entrance.

On the fourth day Awahtah returned to camp with the dead bear ridirg in his sled basket. When Awahtah took off his sealskin parka, Cliester's mouth dropped at the sight of the terrible scars from previous bear encounters covering the old man's back. Obviously the elderly hunter had learned his lessons the hard way.

Marci saw the sun once again peeking over the powder-blue mountains that rimmed the east like a broken saw blade. Just that added amount of daylight spurred the mate, Chester, to lay plans for their rowboats. With the help of Coffin and Booth, he organized the lumber he had faithfully protected from the woodstove and piled it by the house.

The promise of spring and the Arctic twilight galvanized Dr.
Bessel into action. Over the past six months, the doctor's star had ascended with the death of Captain Hall only to crash precipitously as the Arctic foiled his every attempt at being a polar explorer. Even his battling with Captain Buddington over the man's drinking and the issue of who ultimately controlled the expedition receded into the background following the storm of October 15. The sudden loss of half the crew and the subsequent grounding of the
Polaris
focused all attention on staying alive after that date.

What happened to Buddington's drinking during this time is unclear. He may simply have run out of specimen alcohol to drink, or he may have become more surreptitious about raiding the scientific supplies. Happily for the captain, those who hated him and had kept a record of his drinking were floating miles away on the pack ice, so there is no mention of his being drunk in the camp.

In either case Bessel suddenly lacked the adversary he sorely needed. Without an opponent, the physician retreated into a mind-numbing morass of measurements and magnetic observations. The fledgling rays of the sun, however, rekindled the German's dreams of becoming a world-renowned explorer.

Exploring the Humboldt Glacier fired his imagination. Once there he planned to sled across the frozen Smith Sound and explore Hayes Sound. Studying those areas would fit the bill nicely. The fact that more than one hundred miles of rugged terrain lay between the camp and the Humboldt Glacier failed to faze him. Neither did the miserable history of his previous attempts at being an Arctic traveler.

Immediately Bessel laid plans for his journey. Buddington, perhaps happy at the prospect of being rid of his old nemesis, did nothing to discourage the trip. Maybe the wily captain figured the effort might salvage some of the ruined expedition's honor. Certainly, if nothing else, it would get Bessel out of his hair.

Two sleds and ten sled dogs were purchased at astronomical prices with metal harpoon heads, metal carpenter tools, and the ever precious bits of food. The harsh winter had forced the Inuit to eat all but a few of their dogs. Those that remained were their most prized animals, and they were reluctant to part with any of them. Bessel's timing was poor. In a few months, new litters of puppies would replenish the teams, but Bessel could not wait.

On the thirteenth of April, Emil Bessel, graduate of Jena and Heidelberg, embarked. In preparing for the journey, he made the same ignorant mistakes that had dogged his other trips. First, he overloaded both his sleds. Filling one to the brim with provisions for a month and a half, he then packed the second sledge with “all necessary instruments.”

Second, he chose Jim as one driver and Arrowtah, a one-legged Inuit, as the other driver.

As a child, Arrowtah had crushed his leg under a boulder. His mother had been forced to amputate the limb six inches below the knee, and the surgeon of the passing whaler
North Star
had built a wooden leg for the boy in 1850. Dr. Hayes in his travels had repaired the artificial limb. Currently Arrowtah limped around the camp on one he had “fitted with an ankle-joint of his own manufacture,” according to Admiral Davis's later description.

Besides his disability's being unsuitable for a rigorous passage over
sastrugi
and ice hummocks, which would tax a two-legged person, Arrowtah's motivations differed greatly from Bessel's. Whereas the good doctor wanted to explore the western side of the sound, Arrowtah hoped to find a wife. Since he was a widower and none of the women along the eastern coast “exactly suited him,” again according to Davis, he looked upon Bessel's expedition as an excellent opportunity to find a new mate. Finding a new partner necessitated Arrowtah's traveling to other Inuit villages across the sound. Such villages tended to be more southerly, where game and climate were more favorable.

Whether Bessel understood the man's goals before they left is unknown. Mixing the Prussian's haughty and abrasive attitude with the passive-aggressive defenses of the Inuit could only lead to problems.

Needless to say, within five days Bessel was back in camp, complaining about Arrowtah's insubordination. When Bessel and his two drivers had attempted to cross Rensselaer Bay at the southeastern edge of Smith Sound, they found the unexpectedopen water. Decouring first east, then north, and finally northeast, they struggled :o circumvent the open sea. However, at every turn sharp-sided hummocks of crumpled pack ice presented formidable if not impassable barriers. Bessel tried cajoling and finally threatening,
but the wary Natives refused to drive their sleds into those tumbled dragon's teeth. The doctor took their reluctance for insubordination and laziness, even cowardice. To the Inuit, understanding that the icy ridges would break their sled runners and exhaust them to no good purpose was simply common sense. So they balked. The sudden onset of a storm forced the three men to spend an entire day in a hastily built snow cave. The evil weather only confirmed the Inuit's suspicions that making this trip was a bad idea.

Under a black cloud and an equally gloomy sky, Bessel returned. Looking for a replacement for Arrowtah, he enlisted the help of a man called Ewinokshua, whom Captain Buddington had nicknamed Sharkey. The offer of a long-bladed metal knife so useful in cutting snow blocks for igloos convinced Sharkey to join the team. By mutual consent Arrowtah opted out, as he positively refused to try again, and Bessel would have nothing more to do with him.

Once more Emil Bessel rode forth to conquer the far North. On April 22 he and his new team drove their sleds out of camp. The twilight was cold, clear, and silent. The heavy air carried the soft crunch of the sled dogs' feet and the creak of the sled bindings long after the blue-gray expanse had swallowed the two sleds.

Nine hours later they returned, this time with a badly broken sled runner. When they reached Cape Inglefield, endless rows of jagged
sastrugi
had greeted the party. To Sharkey and even Jim, the way was impassable.

Ingrained in the hunters was the concept of conserving their energy along with their lives, and both men quickly realized they would beat themselves to death in the crossing. Yet Bessel remained adamant. He would not be denied a second crossing. He ranted and railed.

Confronted with this dilemma, the Inuit resorted to an old trick that worked well whenever white men obstinately refused their sound advice. Without Bessel's seeing him, Sharkey purposefully rocked one of his sled's runners over a sharp edge and broke it in two. Now there was no question, they would have to return.