Trial by Ice (21 page)

Magnetic fields do accompany the aurora borealis. Intense light displays will send power surges along high-tension electric lines running between Anchorage and Fairbanks, Alaska, and magnetic fields do flow down the Alaska oil pipeline. So why the scientists of the
Polaris
failed to detect magnetic changes is uncertain. However, the pipeline and power wires act as giant conductors, concentrating the aurora's magnetism.

That the
Polaris
escaped major damage from the storm amazed all hands. The ship narrowly missed being dragged out to sea with the ice pack. Without a full head of steam, the ship would have drifted without power until crushed amid the jostling ice. If divine intervention had played any part in the ship's salvation, the idea
was lost 3n Captain Buddington. The following Sunday, over the objection; of Mr. Bryan, the captain announced that attending Sunday services was no longer required.

Two days later an eerie sight greeted all the men. A strangely shaped full moon rose and shone brightly across the covered decks. Refractio i of moonlight on ice crystals suspended in the air, aided by the density of the cold air, produced an optical illusion called a
paraselene.
Three identical images of the full moon hovered in the dark sky, surrounding the real one, one on each side and one above. A fourth image, the lowest one, was hidden by the mountains. The four visible images connected by the rays of light from the real moon, aided by the mind's eye, formed a cross. The Inuit took this to be another omen of bad things to come.

They didn't have long to wait. Providence Berg, once the protector, turned on the ship it sheltered. Another storm struckthis time from the south. Heavy snow fell, adding to that blown by the wind, and soon the visibility dropped to a few feet. Wind and waves attacked both ship and iceberg from their unprotected side.

Unde r constant pressure from the ice floe, Providence Berg split in two. The advancing ice floe wedged the halves apart until more than eight feet separated them. The half that sheltered
Polaris
swung or its grounded foot while the smaller island of ice rammed into the ship's side. Every man held his breath as the
Polaris
creaked and groaned against the point of this frozen lance.

Buddington rushed back and forth along the covered deck, peering over the side with each protest from the straining oak planks. Was the side cut through? he wondered. Were the ribs staved in? Miraculously the wood withstood the pressure. Seams opened, but the ship's flanks remained intact.

However, another, more dangerous, event occurred. What the ice could not break, it sought to overturn. A shelf of ice protruded from Providence Berg below the waterline, close beside the ship's nose. Slowly the force of the storm drove the
Polaris
onto the underwater projection, lifting her keel until the bow rose into the air, exposing the copper sheathing and barnacle-encrusted iron plate of the prow. Shaking and quivering like a whipped dog, the ship advanced with each blow from the thundering waves.

In time the
Polaris
keeled to one side, coming to lie nearly on its
beam end. Men slid down the icy deck to crash into the aft cabins. The deck canted so steeply that walking proved difficult without using the lifelines. When the
Polaris
finally came to rest, the stem jutted two and one-half feet above the sea. Here the ship remained, careened to one side like a trader run on a reef. When the tide ran out, the ship's stern dropped and the bow rose four feet in the air. On the flood tide the stern rose again, lowering the stem to two and one-half feet once more. All the while this teeter-tottering worked its damage on the keel. The pitch and yaw of the ship so frightened the Inuit that they moved from the ship to the observatory. There they took up residence, scattering their skins and oil lamps among the crates of brass instruments.

Thanksgiving arrived with no special services to celebrate their deliverance from another near disaster. As George Tyson wrote acerbically in his diary, “Thanksgiving was remembered at the table, but in no other way.” Opened cans of lobster, turkey, oyster
soup, pec ins, walnuts, plum duff, cherry pie, and wine punch made up for the lack of spirituality. While the men feasted, no one considered the extra fuel they were using. Ominously, 6,334 pounds of coal were burned during November, 1,596 pounds more than the previous month.

December brought deepening cold. The men amused themselves by playing cards and racing sleds on the refrozen bay. Captain Buddington wrote in his journal: “All possible preparations are being made to succeed with our sledge parties next spring.” His notes mu >t have been for public consumption. Already the skipper was doin^ his best to paint the brightest picture possible for the men in Washington. No other journals mention such preparations. Tookoolito's sewing of new skin anoraks and pants appears to be the only measure taken.

Chester wrote glowing praise of the men, describing them like cheerful Boy Scouts, always industrious and especially neat: “They are all
good
men. They keep clean and take good care of themselves. Everything about their quarters looks clean and neat. There is not much danger of such men being troubled with scurvy.”

His rose-colored glasses are impressive. First, soap cannot prevent scurvy. Second, stability aboard the
Polaris
had all but vanished. Inc reasingly Captain Buddington was drunk, and the men, taking their cue from the captain, pilfered the ship's alcohol stores. Gallons of ethanol intended to preserve scientific specimens simply vanished. Duplicate keys to the storage lockers sprang up throughout the ship. Boisterous, drunken parties reigned nightly.

Orde and discipline suffered. Day and night became the same. One long, ongoing period of darkness engulfed the crew. Day and night activities bled slowly into each other. Now when the need was greatest t3 establish regular routines to prevent the malaise that follows the loss of these normal cycles, there were none. Buddington had no siomach for order, preferring to drink in his cabin. Tyson, Hayes, and Hobby regularly visited Hall's grave and lamented his absence. “Captain Hall did not always act with the clearest judgement,” George Tyson wrote, “but
it was heaven to this.”

Tyson saw things quite differently from Chester. “There is so little regularity observed,” he lamented. “There is no stated time
for putting out lights; the men are allowed to do as they please; and, consequently, they often make nights hideous by their carousing, playing cards to all hours.” He took to walking on the ice in the darkness “longing for a moment's quiet.” But the heartless isolation and oppressive darkness weighed heavily on him. “The gloom and silence of every thing around settles down on one like a pall,” he wrote.

Nathan Coffin turned worse. When he was sane, he worked diligently repairing sleds in the aft-galley space, which had become the carpentry workshop. During those times he appeared normal. At other times a black mood fell over him. His deranged mind remained convinced that someone on board intended to murder him.

Their method for doing him in was bizarre by any standards. Coffin imagined that after boring a hole in the bulkhead where he slept, they would insert a nozzle through the opening and spray him with carbolic acid, thus freezing him to death. Such a death would be ascribed to the Arctic cold rather than to a murderer, he reasoned, and would go unpunished. The open questions about Captain Hall's recent demise gave credence to his theory. Hall's ravings about poison still remained fresh in everyone's mind. Many still wondered if their commander had been murdered.

Many nights Coffin lay awake, cowering in fear from that anticipated sound of a wood bore. He changed sleeping places nightly, hiding in lockers and behind bulkheads. Other times he would pretend to sleep in one place only to move to another site while the others slept. Gaunt and hollow-eyed from lack of sleep, the carpenter stalked about below decks like a wraith. His madness served as a constant reminder to the crew of Captain Hall's sudden, suspicious death.

In the face of the ship's crumbling discipline, Captain Budding-ton did a curious and unexplained thing: he issued revolvers and rifles to the crew. What purpose this served is unknown. No external threat from Natives or animals existed. Hunting parties had need of firearms, and armed guards could be posted against the occasional marauding polar bear, but arming the crew during peacetime is unusual. Tyson would later surmise in his diary that Buddington armed the crew to curry their favor, intimating that Buddington
might have feared that Tyson would snatch command away from him. But Tyson was no great favorite of the men either.

On December 6 the Arctic almost snatched Emil Bessel. Showing the same general contempt for the North Country that he had showered upon Captain Hall nearly cost him his life. Without carefully checking the weather one night, he departed the ship for his observatory. Normally the walk over the ice took half an hour, with the hut always within sight. The distance was a mere 1,307 feet, roughly a quarter of a mile. The onset of a sudden storm caught the doctor in the open. Pressing onward instead of turning back in the whiteout conditions, he missed the shack. Disoriented in the blowing snow, he could neither find the house nor locate the
Polaris,

Forced to shelter behind an outcropping of ice, Bessel spent the night trying to keep warm. Undoubtedly his Inuit clothing and boots kept him from freezing in temperatures close to 30° below zero. Duiing that time he no doubt realized that a guide rope from ship to shore would have prevented his problem. Four hours later the snow diminished enough for him to find the observatory. Alarmed when he heard he had almost lost his chief scientist and ally, Buddington ordered a hastily constructed line of rubber-coated wire struig between the two points.

The lemainder of December passed with little note. “Nothing occurring that is pleasant or profitable to record,” Tyson wrote. The oppiessive darkness continued to exert increasing pressure on all, and the North showed its total disregard for these interlopers. Alternating periods of misery and elation washed over the crew like irregular waves. The northern lights flashed brighter and clearer with each passing day, taunting the men, while frost and ice infested the sleeping quarters.

When the
Polaris
broke free and drifted against Providence Berg, the ship had lost the insulating layers of snow so carefully banked along its sides. With the ship rocking up and down on its keel with each rise and fall of the tide, no amount of work could keep a new layer of snow in place. Without proper insulation, frost and cold crept quickly through the wooden walls. The dark interiors of the berths soon sported crystal layers of hoarfrost and ice. Water vapor from the stoves and human breath condensed
everywhere. Showers of snow and icy crystal flakes fluttered down with every movement when the stoves were unlit. Lighting the heaters made matters only worse. The heat melted the rime and filled the quarters with a dripping, soggy haze of fog and dew that penetrated wool clothing and chilled everyone. When the stoves died out, the frost reformed, and the cycle repeated itself.

Christmas arrived to elaborate preparations but once again without any religious services being held. As at Thanksgiving, the table groaned under the weight of food and drink.

The divisiveness that set the crew at odds with one another raised its head briefly over the celebration. Since Christmas Eve was on a Sunday, some of the crew objected to celebrating on the Sabbath, preferring to have the party on Christmas night. The Germans absolutely refused to go along with that idea, wanting their party. Being the majority, they flexed their muscle. Rear Adm. C. H. Davis, in his
Narrative of the North Polar Expedition,
wrote of this incident that “the others cheerfully yielded.” That they did seems unlikely. One does not usually give up religious preferences “cheerfully.” Davis's work under the direction of Navy Secretary Robeson paints a rosy picture of every aspect of the expedition.

A drawing distributed Christmas packages to the crew, and everyone opened theirs at exactly ten o'clock. The presents turned out to be toys and trinkets bought by Captain Hall as gifts for any Eskimo children they might encounter. In a macabre twist, the dead explorer's specter rose over the occasion. Few noticed, and most were too drunk to care.

All the while the onshore wind continually stacked additional pack ice against the outside of their protective iceberg. The growing weight levered the shelter farther onto its side, and that, in turn, raised
Polaris
ever higher out of the water. Cracks developed in the stem and along the keel. One worrisome leak opened near the bow, where ice had staved in the planking. Located near the six-foot watermark, the shattered beam teetered tantalizingly just out of reach as the bow dipped in and out of the water.

And just as the wind and water wore away at the ship, the cold, isolation, and Arctic night worked to divide the crew. Buddington and Bessel soon quarreled over control of the dogsleds. Robeson's orders directed Bessel to conduct the sled trips, but the Prussian's
lack of Arctic experience left him open to question. His frostbitten ear and recent fiasco while attempting to reach his hut highlighted his inexperience. To Buddington the haughty foreigner acted too proud to admit his ignorance. To Bessel the ship's captain, on the other hard, was no more than a drunken lout. While neither man openly confronted the other, animosity radiated out from each like light from the oil lanterns.