Fatal North (7 page)

Davenport was not finished. Knowing how insubordination could sweep through a ship like a deadly plague, he had Hall call all hands together on the deck the day that
Polaris
was to leave Disco, and the
Congress
skipper delivered a brief but ringing lecture on naval discipline. He was thinking not only about Meyer and Emil Bessels, but also of Sidney Buddington. Hall had told Davenport of having caught the sailing master stealing food for his own consumption. Captain Davenport hoped his comments served to remind the crew of their responsibilities, and felt he had done everything in his power. Still, he worried.

The chaplain of
Congress,
the Reverend Doctor J. P. Newman, who had led a service aboard ship when President Grant's party visited in Washington Navy Yard and had come up on the supply ship for a final farewell to the
Polaris
crew, stepped forward to offer a parting prayer. The first part of his blessing was suitable for any naval journey, but at the end the minister
seemed to address what was happening aboard
Polaris.
He prayed for the men to have “noble thoughts, pure emotions, and generous sympathies for each other while so far away from human habitations.” From God he sought for them a charity that “suffereth long and is kind, that envieth not, that is not puffed up, not easily provoked, that thinketh no evil, but that endureth all things.”

Then the visitors departed,
Polaris
weighed anchor, steamed from the Disco harbor, and turned north. The weather was fine and the seas calm, but many icebergs rode outside the harbor, and it required some skillful steering to avoid running afoul of them.

As the polar-bound ship passed
Congress,
Davenport's men cheered heartily.

Most, but not all, of the
Polaris
crew standing on deck returned the greeting.

In his benediction, the chaplain had offered a fitting prayer.

For
Polaris
and her divided crew, endurance and survival near the top of the world would soon become paramount.

4

Destination: The Pole

G
eorge Tyson had been prepared to quit the expedition in Greenland.

After what he had seen taking place aboard
Polaris
the week they were at Disco, he decided that if his commission papers failed to arrive on the supply ship, he would pack his bag and disembark. That would be a valid reason for returning home, even though he would be without a job, as it was too late in the whaling season to pick up a sailing assignment.

He surmised things would never work well between Hall and the scientific corps when they got north. Expressions were freely made by the two rebellious scientists that they, not their commander, would get credit for any discoveries of the expedition. My God, this is before they have discovered
anything,
Tyson thought bitterly. What will it be like when they really had something to fight over?

Hall's troubles with Emil Bessels did not surprise Tyson. Before the ship even left New York, he had noted a lack of mutual respect between the two. Bessels had been so outwardly discourteous to his superior officer that Tyson thought Hall would be justified in replacing the arrogant physician scientist before the
expedition started. The well-educated and wealthy Bessels practiced a kind of intellectual and social snobbery toward not only lowly seamen but his own commander, whom he clearly considered ill-educated and well beneath his own station in life. Had he been in Hall's place, Tyson would have had no qualms about ridding his ship of the man that Hall had taken to calling “the little German dance master.”

Other members of the crew seemed bound to go contrary, too. Whatever Hall wanted done was exactly what they would not do. All the Germans were sticking together, and even some of the officers had already decided how far north they would go. “Queer sort of explorers these!” Tyson scribbled in his journal.

If this crew could not work together after only three weeks at sea, Tyson knew that matters would only get worse during the two long winters they were to be stuck in the ice pack. The resulting deprivations and close quarters would test the loyalty and stamina of even the most disciplined crew. With the
Polaris
crew already so divided—explorers versus scientists, sailors versus landlubbers, Americans versus Germans—how in the world would they survive?

When his commission papers showed up on
Congress,
Tyson was somewhat disappointed, although not for long. Officially appointed to an officer's billet, he felt obligated to Hall and to the Navy Department to help the voyage succeed. He would give it his very best, and gave no further thought to quitting.

In Hall, Tyson saw a commander who was energetic, persevering, courageous, and, above all, unselfish. He was also beset with problems and embarrassments from which, at times, there seemed no way to free himself except by giving up all for which he had worked so long and so hopefully. Instead, Hall subsumed all distractions to the single ideal of pushing on to the Pole. He was a man possessed, and he would not allow his bright hopes of geographic conquest to be clouded by insubordination or other human frailties. He dreaded nothing so much as being delayed, or worse, compelled to return without setting foot at the top of
the world. He was willing to die in his quest, but not to abandon the expedition.

Three days out of Disco, the ship pulled into Upernavik, a small settlement on the upper western shore of Greenland, where Hall decided they would buy more dogs to fill out their complement of sixty needed to pull the sledges they had bought from native builders.

Also, they were looking for one final addition to the crew: hunter and dog driver Hans Hendrik, a Greenland Eskimo who had been a member of two earlier expeditions to the Arctic, one under the command of Hall's nemesis, Dr. Isaac Hayes, in 1860-61, and the other with the respected Dr. Elisha Kent Kane, in 1853-55. Although Hendrik had eventually deserted Kane to take a wife, Hall thought he would be good to have along to drive a dog team, and also to hunt for fresh meat on the tundra. Hall believed that Joe, Hannah, and Hans together would provide the expedition with an ample supply of Eskimo knowledge and skills, attributes he knew might one day be lifesaving.

After
Polaris
anchored in the Upernavik harbor, first mate Chester Hubbard took a small boat ashore to find Hendrik and present him with Hall's offer to join the expedition for a salary of $300 per annum. Hubbard's assignment turned into an overnight mission, since Hendrik had gone to another small settlement a short distance up the coast.

Hendrik accepted Hall's offer but insisted that his family and worldly goods come, too. This included his wife, Merkut, a short, stout woman who, like her husband, spoke no English, and their three children, Augustina, twelve, Tobias, nine, and Succi, four. Crammed into the small launch when Chester returned with the Eskimo family were bags, boxes, and skins, on top of which rode the children, dressed in ragged dogskin clothing. They also brought tents, cooking utensils, tools, implements of Arctic hunting, including a rifle, and four Newfoundland puppies whose eyes could scarcely bear to look at light.

Once they were deposited on deck, second mate William
M
orton stepped forward to greet Hans. About the same size as Joe, with similar dark chestnut coloring, Hendrik was cleanshaven and had high cheekbones. The grey-bearded Morton remembered his Eskimo guide from the Kane expedition almost twenty years before, but Morton had aged so in the intervening years that Hans did not recognize him. When Morton pointed to the scars on the Eskimo's right hand and spoke of the gunpowder explosion on the shores of Smith Sound that had caused the burns, Hans finally placed him. Together, traveling by dog sledge, they had left the rest of the Kane expedition and reached Cape Constitution, where they were given their famous glimpse of the body of water they both were convinced was the open Polar Sea.

Hall, infatuated with the notion of the Polar Sea being nothing less than the glorious gateway to the North Pole, was pleased to have as members of the expedition two intrepid men who had seen it.

Reports reached them at Upernavik from a Swedish expedition conducting hydrographic surveys that the ice conditions in the north were still favorable to navigation. Upon hearing that very good news, Hall changed plans. Rather than proceeding westward through Jones Sound and taking a more circuitous route north, he decided to follow in Kane's wake: striking north through Smith Sound, the route Morton and Hans had taken on the way to their discovery.

It seemed like a good omen and outwardly invigorated the expedition commander.

After divine services the day before leaving Upernavik, Hall openly addressed, for the first time, the hostilities that had been simmering aboard ship since Disco.

“That man,” he said, pointing at Bessels, “is trying to make a disturbance amongst the company of this ship, and I want it known that I shall not tolerate it. Any more such conduct, Doctor, and I assure you, the authorities back home shall be properly advised.”

Bessels glared at the deck, eyes gone cold, lips pressed tighdy together.

Typically, the
Polaris
crew was divided in their reactions. American seaman Noah Hayes thought that Hall was simply “asserting his determination to maintain order and obedience to all lawful commands,” he wrote that day in his diary. German seaman Joseph Mauch, however, saw it as “insulting Dr. Bessels most severely.”

Hall spun on his heel and marched off to his cabin.

 

In his last dispatch to the Navy Department, on August 24, 1871, Charles Francis Hall sounded like his usual buoyant and determined self:

The prospects of the expedition are fine; the weather beautiful, clear, and exceptionally warm. Every preparation has been made to bid farewell to civilization for several years, if need be, to accomplish our purpose. Our coal bunkers are not only full, but we have full ten tons yet on deck, besides wood, planks and rosin in considerable quantities, that can be used for steaming purposes in any emergency. Never was an Arctic expedition more completely fitted out than this…. The anchor of Polaris has just been weighed, and not again will it go down till, as I trust and pray, a higher, a far higher, latitude has been attained than ever before by civilized man. Polaris bids adieu to the civilized world. God be with us.

The complement of
Polaris
was filled. Their final number was now thirty-three: seven officers, two mates, an assistant engineer, carpenter, cook, steward, two firemen to man the boilers, a deck force of ten ordinary seamen, and eight Eskimo men, women and children.

Three days out at sea, Tyson came upon Hall writing furiously. Tyson knew that Hall had brought along his journals from his second Arctic expedition and intended to fill the long, empty
hours of the trip working on a new book. Hall had previously authored
Life with the Esquimaux,
published in London, in 1864, about his first expedition in search of the survivors of Sir John Franklin's expedition.

“Writing up your new book, sir?” Tyson asked.

“No, friend Tyson. I left those papers at Disco.”

Tyson hesitated, not wanting to press his commander to explain.

The unspoken question registered with Hall, even though he didn't look up. A sort of gloom fell over him. Without lifting his head, he said ominously, “I left them there for safety.”

Tyson would later learn that Hall had left his valuable papers with the inspector-general of North Greenland for safekeeping. That day Tyson made no further remark, but he could not help thinking about the incident. To the rest of the world, Hall remained upbeat, a man on a mission. But inside, the events that had transpired with the crew had obviously taken their toll. Tyson had to wonder, did the expedition commander have a premonition of a coming calamity?

Onward they went, north, as Hall was wont to do.

 

From the deck, the men could see ice gathering into packs in the channels—frighteningly huge packs that, pushed by high winds and seas, could easily collide with the ship. Beyond rose the stark coastal mountains of Greenland, inhospitable to all but the hardiest of God's creatures.

An occasional humpback whale surfaced, regarded them briefly, then flipped its big tail as if in dismissal and dived back down to the deep.

They passed a party of walruses basking on floes close by. While most of the large, ungainly creatures enjoyed their sleep, some of their number remained on watch to give the alarm in case of approaching danger. The vessel made little noise, and the lookouts of the walrus party evidently did not consider her dangerous, for their only sign of apprehension was a more frequent raising and rolling about of their heads. The rest of the company
of walrus remained undisturbed except for the occasional one turning over lazily.

Meanwhile, all was excitement aboard
Polaris.
Many had never before seen the animals, and they were intrigued by their appearance and actions. Even those who had often captured them hurried to the side to get a nearer view of the sleepers. Joe, animated by the love of blood sport, readied himself in the bow with his rifle. It was proposed to Hall to man a boat and attempt the capture of at least one of the walruses, but he decided that this would delay the vessel too much.

Joe and several others took pot shots at the animals, who came suddenly awake. None were hurt, since it is almost impossible to kill a walrus from the front, unless one was lucky enough to hit an eye. Their skulls are very thick, except on the crown of the head, which is a difficult point to strike.

The sky was at times hypnotic. Crew members fixed their gaze upward as wide plumes of light, shaped like tornadoes, hung frozen overhead, turning into greenish, shivering bands of light strung out seemingly amid the stars, then exploding in great white clusters across the horizon.