Trial by Ice (42 page)

After two days of questioning Tyson, the panel turned to the next officer, Frederick Meyer of the scientific corps. But an easy confirmation of Tyson's accusations was not forthcoming. Without
realizing it, the board was reopening dark chapters in each of the survivors' lives, chapters that contained failures in their character that the men wished to keep hidden. As the panel probed, each person remained silent as to his failures and did his best to avoid in-crimination. Tyson's testimony would have to stand on its own merits where it criticized his fellow castaways. They would grudgingly confirm the navigator's tale of Hall's bizarre death and confirm their abandonment by the
Polaris.
For their own actions on the ice, the men spun a convoluted picture as obscure as the gray ice fog that had covered their floating island.

Meyer, always the Prussian officer, did his best to present a dry, impersonal account, emphasizing his findings and measurements. But probing by the committee confirmed the strange death of Hall with his “blue vapors” and the dying man's accusations against Dr. Bessel, Buddington, and Mr. Chester.

“Captain Hall called me to his bedside and said that he knew that some persons on board the ship intended to kill him, and he wanted me to stand by his side,” Meyer revealed, adding that he was around the captain because he shared the same cabin.

“Did you at any time hear him accuse anyone of an intention to murder him?” the board asked.

“Yes, sir. When I was about the cabin I could hear him. Some persons might be attending to him, sitting by his side, and he would be talking pleasantly, and all of a sudden he would say: ‘What is this; what is this blue smoke; and what is that there, all blue?’ He thought it was poisonous vapors, he said.”

The panel persisted, searching for a name. “Did you ever hear him accuse anyone to other people? When one was sitting by him would he speak of other people?”

Perhaps trying to protect a fellow German, Meyer sought to shift Hall's suspicions mainly to Buddington and Chester. “Yes, sir. He would accuse other people, and ask the protection of the man sitting by his side. He accused Mr. Chester and Captain Buddingtonthose were the two principal onesand Dr. Bessel.”

Here Meyer planted the idea that the delirious Hall had accused whoever was absent, certainly the sign of a deranged mind to which the panel could point.

“When talking with Chester, for instance, would he accuse anyone else?' the board asked.

“Yes, sir; he would accuse Captain Buddington.”

But a disturbing fact emerged. In his torment Hall had never asked for Bessel to protect him. “When talking to him, did you hear him accuse anybody else, and ask the doctor to stand by him?” Meyer was asked.

“I do not remember that I heard him appeal to the doctor to stand by him,” Meyer admitted.

Meyer confirmed that Bessel had hovered about Hall during his illness. When asked if Bessel had provided regular treatment to his patient, Meyer replied, “He gave him a great many; hypodermic injections of quinine, I believe, for one.” The meteorologist's statement conflicts with the careful record Bessel kept of his treatment. In that record the doctor mentions giving only several injections.

On another subject, Meyer was not shy about discussing Bud-dington's addiction to alcohol.

“Did you ever know of Captain Buddington's being drunk on board ship?” he was asked.

“Yes, sir; he was drunk most always while we were going to the southward. I do not remember whether he was drunk when we got beset with this last floe. There was only alcohol on board, and he would brew beverages out of the alcohol.”

Meyer's statements revealed two new things. First, the crafty Dr. Bessel had not added his own papers to the boxes that Meyer threw onto the ice, keeping them on board during the frenzy. If the
Polaris
si ill survived, hope remained that Bessel's diaries and measurements did, too. Second, Buddington had possession of Hall's papers at the time Meyer fell overboard. That raised obvious but unspoken questions: Had Bessel and Buddington special information that the ship was in less danger than they pretended? Had they protected their own records while attempting to destroy other incriminating material?

“I have seen the outside of the papers many times, and have seen Captain Buddington looking at them,” Meyer continued, referring to Hall's documents. “He had them in a large tin box. I was on board about five minutes before the ice broke. Then I saw
Captain Hall's papers in the cabin; so that they are, very likely, on board. I did not see the journal. The tin box was standing on the table and the papers were lying alongside of it.”

Had Buddington been reading the papers just before he ordered Tyson, the Inuit, and those of the crew he disliked over the side? Was there something in Hall's letters that made him choose those men? The panel had to ask.

“At the time when you were separated from the ship had you any idea that the separation was any other than purely accidental?”

Meyer pondered the question that had vexed him while he suffered on the ice. “My idea was at the commencement that it was accidental,” he started. Then his doubts poured forth. “But, I thought they neglected to pick us up, for it was possible to do so. The ice was not sufficient to keep them from picking us up. We expected them to come, and did not give up the hope until we saw that we were drifting off, and they did not come. …”

As if embarrassed by his outburst, Meyer lapsed into a rambling dialogue. While the stenographer's pen raced along, trying to keep up in shorthand, the Prussian discussed the weather, the shrimp, the types of driftwood found on the beaches, and every aspect of his scientific studies in a disjointed manner. Realizing the panel considered him a suspect, Meyer made it clear that he had no quarrel with Hall. As he closed his testimony, he threw more light on the reasons the expedition had failed: “I believe that a party might have gone much farther north by establishing a sub-base of supplies at Newman's Bay, and this would have been done but for the unpleasant relations existing between Captain Buddington and Dr. Bessel.”

Next came the Inuit. Why the board departed from examining the crew and chose the Natives is unclear. As was their custom, the Inuit's words were direct and to the point. Tookoolito with her better grasp of English helped Hans with his answers. Their close association with Hall during his sudden illness cast more suspicion on the cup of coffee.

” ‘Now, Joe, did you drink bad coffee?’ he asked me,” Ebierbing responded when asked about Hall's words. Tookoolito also spoke of the strange-tasting drink. “He said the coffee made him sick. Too sweet for him. … ‘It made me sick and to vomit,’” she
said, quoting the late captain. Both husband and wife confirmed their dead friend's fears he was being poisoned.

Tookoolito also cast further light on Captain Hall's papers. “He said to take care of the papers; get them home, and give them to the Secretary.” Robeson straightened at that revelation. Tookoolito turned back to the other man who had asked the question. “If anything had happened to the Secretary, to give them to someone else. After his death I told Captain Buddington of this charge several times. He said he would give them to me by and by.”

The men of the panel looked at one another, then changed the line of questioning. To their surprise, Tookoolito revealed Budding-ton's unusual action during the night of October 15. The captain had ordeied her onto the ice even after she told him one of the firemen had issured her the ship was in no danger.

“I asked the fireman who was pumping how the ship was,” she said. “He said the ship was all right. Was not tipped at the time. He was pumoing close to my door. He said, ‘You need not carry anything more out, you will come aboard all right tonight.’ I stayed down in c abin a few minutes. Captain Buddington told me to go on ice, and to take my things with me.”

Tookoolito paused for effect. “I told him that fireman said ship all right. He replied, ‘Never you mind; take little girl and go on ice.’ “She raised her eyes to look directly at Admiral Golds-borough. In a voice barely a whisper, she said, “In a few minutes ship went.”

Ebieroing ended his interview with a poignant tribute to his dead friend and an implied criticism of those who had assumed command after Hall's death. When asked if he wanted to resume his quest for the North Pole, he shook his head. “I would not like to; Captain Hall, my friend. With a man like him I would go back.”

John Herron, the steward, was questioned next. While born in Liverpool, the thirty-one-year-old pointed out that he was a citizen of the United States. Herron could speak only from his personal knowledge. Being in the galley, he'd overheard Bessel's confrontation with Captain Hall over Frederick Meyer's duties and had served Hall the questionable coffee. Defensively Herron explained carefully that he had not made the coffee. Making the coffee was the sole responsibility of the cook. Also Herron had not kept track
of the tin cup after he brought it to Hall. He could not recall how many hands had touched the cup. Other than confirming Budding-ton's drinking habits, the steward offered little that was new.

One by one the board called the able-bodied seamen, all young and foreign. Each man gave guarded replies. Well aware of Tyson's hostility toward them, they did their best to appear bland and cooperative. John Kruger reminded the panel that he was called Robert, praised Captain Hall, and made no mention of his threatening Tyson while on the ice.

Fred Jamka, another German, related overhearing Buddington tell Henry Hobby, “Well, Henry, there is a stone off my heart,” and explaining when asked why that was, “Why, Captain Hall is dead.” Jamka also had seen Buddington drunk many times. Jamka spoke of the night of the separation, painting Captain Buddington's actions in an even more questionable light. While Buddington had no qualms about ordering certain of his crew onto the ice with supplies, he seemed reluctant to lower the lifeboats.

“We started to transport the provisions farther from the ship,” Jamka related, “and thought it rather careless to be on the ice without boats. I sang out to Captain Buddington to lower the boats.
I sang out for a dozen times.
By and by he answered, and lowered the aft and then the forward boat, and we pulled them to our side.”

The two naval officers shifted in their chairs. If the
Polaris
were in danger of sinking, any sensible commander would have lowered the lifeboats to keep them from being lost with the ship.

“All at once we heard a crack under the boat,” Jamka continued. “At the same time the vessel's stern swung off. All at once the lines slacked, and off the ship went. Captain Buddington sang out, ‘Take care of the boats, and I will take care of the ship.’” Like all who had gone before him, Jamka saw no reason the
Polaris
had not returned to rescue them.

Gustavus Lindquist, the native of Sweden, refused to say if any of the officers had been drunk. “I am no judge whether a man has got liquor or not,” he said flatly. He kept his testimony factual and added only one personal impression. Tellingly he admitted, “There was good discipline while Captain Hall lived, but we put discipline along with him in his grave.”

Peter Johnson, the Dane, and Frederick Anthing, the Russian
born along the Prussian border, had little more to add. Both Lindquist and Anthing remembered Buddington's shouting for them to” work for their lives” as the storm struck. Why the
Polaris
had not seen them and picked them up puzzled them all. The consensus of the crew was that the
Polaris
was still intact with the remainder cf her crew, waiting to be rescued.

William Jackson, the cook, came last. Wary of being implicated in anything, he added little. “Did you ever see any stealing of provisions?” he was asked.

“No, sir.”

“Did the man who had charge of the provisions give Captain Tyson his share?”

“NobDdy, that I know of, refused to do as Captain Tyson told them.”

Faced with conflicting reports, the panel turned to the journals kept on the ice. If the members of the board hoped to find written comments that backed Tyson's recriminations, they were sorely disappointed. Frederick Meyer's diary started on October 15 with comments and narratives of the party's situation. But within two weeks it had degenerated into sparse notations of wind directions and air temperatures. Reading the contracting notations, one can easily imagine the starving Meyer withdrawing deeper and deeper into his inner mind.

John Perron's diary painted a graphic picture of the suffering and terror that gripped the party as they floated helplessly amid a white he 1. Nothing in Herron's writing, however, confirmed Tyson's tales of insubordination, mutiny, and thoughts of cannibalism. Had the steward wisely excluded documenting that damning behavior, had he been a party to it, or had Tyson's imagination played tr-cks on him during their dreadful journey? The panel could only wonder.

Two journals belonging to William Morton, the second mate, and Herman Sieman had been tossed onto the ice and accompanied the drifting men. Of the men who remained aboard the
Polaris,
the sturdy Morton and the pious Sieman would be most likely to incriminate any lawbreakers. Had their journals been tossed onto the ice in an attempt to destroy them? Again, the panel could only wonder.

Just one page of Morton's notes survived. Strangely that page describes Dr. Bessel pronouncing Captain Hall's sudden illness as fatal just two days after the man got sick. “Captain Hall seriously ill,” Morton wrote, “and Dr. Bessel has no hopes of him. He told Chester and myself so.”

Hastily the board of inquiry had Sieman's journal translated from its original German. The devout Sieman filled his pages with prayers and lines of guilt for his sinfulness. He carefully documented Buddington's gradual elimination of religious services aboard the ship. One interesting fact emerged from the water-stained pages. Sieman had dearly wanted to watch over Captain Hall during the first episode of his illness. But Buddington denied his request. Was Buddington trying to protect Hall from being proselytized by the overzealous Sieman, or was the skipper isolating his commander from loyal men? The journal gave no clue as to motive. Only Sieman's disappointment came through.