Fatal North (17 page)

The weather continued to warm. The snow was disappearing from the mountains and the pack ice softening. While it was now too late for any extended journey by sledge, Tyson still did not like the look of the ice conditions for boat travel, even though outside the bay the ice had begun to move and the water to show. He was in an odd position: while expressing his opinion that he did not think much could be done with boats this time of the season, he stood ready to lead such an effort north.

Meanwhile, as the warm weather melted the snow and ice that surrounded the vessel, the icy grip on
Polaris
started to loosen. The ship began to rise in the water.

With the rising water came reports of more leaks. On June 3, four hours of continuous pumping with a small engine were needed to clear her of accumulated water below decks. Two days later, a new and dangerous leak was discovered on the starboard side of the stern at the six-foot mark; two planks were found to be split. It was little wonder, since the strain on the hull had been tremendous with her stem resting on the foot of the iceberg for months.
Polaris
was a strong ship, but her awkward position atop the berg was enough to ruin any ship. In the berthing compartment in the forepart, crewmen could hear water streaming in at floodtide—a sound no shipboard sailor wanted to hear. An attempt was made to stop the leak, but it was not successful.

On June 7, scouting parties reported openings in the ice above Cape Lipton, news of which caused the boat crews to
make final preparations for their departure. They packed sleeping bags that Hannah had sewn from skins and covered with canvas.

Tyson spoke to Buddington a final time about the ill-advised nature of the expeditions, warning of the dangers of navigating the boats in the ice, reiterating that they would probably not accomplish anything, and that there was a good chance one or both crews would meet with “serious if not fatal disaster.”

The captain shrugged. He hoped the boat crews would “catch hell and get a belly full,” he admitted. “If the damned fools live to come back, they'll be ready to go south.”

For the first time before Buddington, Tyson found it impossible to suppress his indignation. He was deeply offended that his captain was hoping for the boat crews to meet with trouble, and told him so. Tyson recognized that Buddington viewed the boat expeditions as a means of getting Bessels out of the way, while extinguishing any further talk among the rest of the crew of taking the ship farther north later in the summer. As Tyson marched away angrily, Bessels, who had overheard the conversation, came up and patted him on the back, telling him not to be discouraged.

Tyson decided the best thing he could do was take good care of his boat and crew.

Chester and Tyson were each assigned a twenty-foot launch equipped with oars, and which could raise a sail. Chester's crew consisted of meteorologist Frederick Meyer and four seamen; Tyson took along Emil Bessels and four seamen. On June
7,
both parties headed north by sledge.

Chester launched his boat off the cape at noon on June 9, an act that Tyson considered foolish given the ice conditions. After climbing a hill, Tyson spotted Chester's boat—not a mile away—already in trouble and making an unplanned stop on a large ice floe.

Observing them through an eyeglass, Tyson muttered, “Damn fools.”

Tyson went hunting in hopes of bagging fresh game. He
dared not go out of sight lest he miss a chance of the ice opening up to the north. He shot some gulls and dovekies, and saw brent geese. When he returned, Tyson asked the men if they had eaten their supper. When they said they had not, he suggested they grill the game he'd shot and, if tired, turn in.

They looked at him in astonishment. “Sir, are we not going to start out on our journey?” one asked.

“We will not start,” Tyson said, “until we have a chance of succeeding.”

“They've gotten a start on us,” seaman William Nindemann complained. “We'll not see Mr. Chester and his men anytime soon. They're on their way to the Pole.”

“In twenty-four hours,” Tyson said evenly, “Mr. Chester will not have a boat.”

The men walked away, murmuring in discontent.

Tyson believed it was better for them to think he was lukewarm or even afraid to go north by boat than to proceed while it was unsafe to navigate a small boat in the ice, and risk losing lives.

The next day as the men were having morning coffee, a man came hiking over a nearby hill. It was the first mate, his exhausted crew following single-file.

“What happened?” Tyson asked when Chester came within earshot.

“Our expedition went to hell. We lost our boat and nearly all that was in her.”

While warming around a fire with hot coffee, Chester and his men provided details. After stopping on the large floe and drawing up their boat, they had discovered open water about a quarter of a mile away. They hauled the boat over to the other side of the floe and launched from there. But the ice quickly closed in once again, and they went only a little more than a mile before they were compelled to pull up again onto another floe. This time they found themselves stuck between two icebergs grounded on the shore—a very dangerous position, for at this time of year during thawing weather, icebergs could explode at
any moment. They set up their tent and prepared to spend the night. One of the seamen had the first watch; Chester and Meyer had lain down to rest about twenty yards from the boat, and the other three men were lying in the tent close to the boat.

Suddenly the watch shouted out, “The ice is coming!”

All immediately sprang to their feet and sprinted for the shore. They had hardly cleared the ice when the heavy floe, full of hummocks, came on with such force that it shattered one of the bergs, which fell with a thundering crash, crushing the boat to pieces. At the same time the pack ice crowded in, coundess blocks of ice overlapping each other. It seemed that they would lose all, but after a while the pressure ceased and they managed to get out on the ice and save some of their belongings, although Chester lost the journal he had been keeping since the expedition had started.

Tyson could imagine how pleased Buddington would be at the fiasco when he heard about the fate of Chester's boat expedition. He would go around to the remaining crew telling everyone, “I told you so. I knew they would make a mess of it. Let them get a belly full! Let them get all the North Pole they want!”

Two days later, after Chester and his men had left for
Polaris
with a sledge driven by Joe, clearings in the ice suddenly appeared. Surprising his men, Tyson announced that they would launch immediately.

Before Joe had left for
Polaris,
he had given Tyson advice on navigating the ice in a small boat. The Eskimo also said that if Buddington made good on his threat to leave for home without waiting for Tyson's boat party, he and Hans had agreed they would disembark from the ship and wait for the stranded men. They would winter together if need be, said Joe, and then strike south come spring. It was a very kind and thoughtful offer, and a brave promise. Tyson felt less vulnerable knowing that the experienced native hunters, whose Arctic expertise would be needed to get through a winter without the provisions and
shelter the ship afforded, would not desert them—even if their captain and ship did.

As Tyson's boat skirted the ice and plowed through virgin waters, it was a humbling sight to see their little boat, powered by sail and oars, flying along under the dark shadows of the lofty and precipitous mountains above them.

They arrived at Newman Bay—twenty miles farther north—in two days without much trouble, as Tyson deftly worked the boat through openings in the ice until stopped by a solid ice pack. They hauled up the boat and camped, waiting for an opening to the north. Bessels became incapacitated almost immediately by snow blindness and could do nothing to help.

A week later, Chester followed them, arriving at Newman Bay with his party in a flimsy canvas boat fit more for children to paddle about on a placid lake than for service in Arctic seas. Determined to make another try by boat, they had brought the small boat by sledge to their original launching site. The canvas boat would have been easily crushed like an eggshell in the ice pack, and was dreadfully slow, making only three miles an hour and taking on water in the least wind. With one man having to bail constantly, they had labored for five days to get to Newman Bay.

Chester arrived with news of the ship: she was in the same leaky condition, pumping by steam and consuming coal fast. It was the first mate's dire opinion that when
Polaris
was finally released from the ice holding her, she might not even float.

The boat crews waited for open water to the north. Since the ice continued to move south, they hoped the channel northward would be cleared before long. The weather turned pleasant. Little willows that were more like vines than trees and rose only a few inches from the ground were found in the ravines. Mosses and wildflowers, made all the more colorful against the stark backdrop, were now to be seen everywhere.

A number of attempts were made during the next week to get farther north, but they were unable to force the boats through the pack. Stricken by sudden snow squalls carried by
a stiff northerly breeze, the crews remained hunkered down for days.

When the ice in the channel began to thicken and it became apparent that nothing could be done with the boats, Tyson proposed to organize a pedestrian exploring party. His plan was to forge ahead—alone or with one or two companions—and divide the remainder of the company into two-man teams that would follow as far north as the lay of the land permitted. Tyson remembered, when he had gone musk-oxen hunting the previous month, standing at the highest latitude they had reached and observing land rolling away to the north as far as he could see. It gave him great hope of a landward route to the Pole. Each party would leave caches of food at marked intervals so that they would have something to eat on their return. They would also take their guns with them to assist in procuring food. Tyson believed they might be able to walk, during the Arctic summer when game of various kinds was abundant, all the way to the North Pole. But he could get none of the men interested in his plan. They either opposed walking hundreds of miles or, inexperienced in Arctic geography, feared getting lost.

The boat crews continued to wait for the channel to clear. Two men returned to
Polaris
for provisions, taking with them Bessels, still suffering from snow blindness. His desire to return to the ship had been voiced nonstop since their arrival.

Before Bessels left, he again counseled Tyson not to be discouraged. “We must persevere,” Bessels said in a most serious tone.

Tyson looked at the little doctor who had been so useless on every journey he had undertaken in the Arctic. His large eyes, reddened and swollen, stuck out like a lobster's.
We must persevere?
Tyson couldn't help himself; he fairly roared with laughter. The doctor, not knowing the source of Tyson's amusement, dropped his eyes. Tyson followed his gaze downward only to find the doctor's two large feet—out of proportion to the rest of his undersized body—encased in Eskimo moccasins that made his feet look even larger.

Tyson could not control himself. He continued his outburst—the best laugh he'd had since leaving home—as he waved weakly to the doctor, who climbed into a sledge and carefully wrapped himself in blankets.

Looking up from the sledge, Bessels vowed to return as soon as his eyes improved. Tyson read it as an empty promise; the doctor, he could see, had had enough of ice exploration. In any case, his absence would be no great loss.

“Fear not, Doctor,” Tyson said as the sledge got under way. “Persevere we shall.”

Forty-eight hours later, the two men returned with a note from Buddington ordering everyone to come back to the ship immediately, and explaining that Tyson and Chester were needed to help keep the vessel afloat. The men reported that the captain had nearly detained them and blocked their return, and had relented only when they urgently requested to be allowed to round up their shipmates.

Tyson well remembered Buddington saying he intended to head south as soon as there was an opportunity even if it meant stranding men on the ice. Regrettably, he believed that the
Polaris
captain was capable of doing just that. They had no choice, Tyson told his crew, but to return to the ship right away. His men were in agreement, but Chester said he and his crew would remain in the hope that the ice might yet open up, although Tyson could not see them accomplishing anything in the canvas boat.

The state of the ice in the channel was now such that they were unable to proceed any direction by boat, not even back south. Tyson's crew carried the heavy wooden launch overland for two days of fatiguing labor before finding a secure place to leave it, and walked the rest of the way to the ship—some twenty miles—arriving July 8.

Buddington swore when he saw that Chester's crew had not followed orders. “With or without those men,” he told Tyson, “I shall start south at first opportunity.”

Tyson said nothing but resolved that he would have something to say about the matter should the captain give orders to
leave any of the crew behind, although he could not be sure who, among the officers, would support him against Buddington.

Upon his return to the ship, Tyson found
Polaris
still leaking badly. No one had made another attempt at repairs. Determining that most of the water was coming from the forward leak where the stem was broken at the six-foot mark below the water line, Tyson proposed carrying all the ship's stores aft so as to put the stern down. Then they could try to lay her bow on shore at high water so that they could get to the leak and fix it.

Buddington said there was not tide enough to raise the bow and refused to try.

Tyson next recommended that the ship stop making steam for pumping. The crew could man the ship's four excellent hand pumps and thus conserve coal, which was rapidly disappearing. No such orders were given.