Trial by Ice (13 page)

Hall had crossed his Rubicon. He could not turn back. He would rather die than forgo his quest to reach the North Pole, he had told his crew. His unbending ambition and goal threatened the safety of two of the three groups. Unwittingly, by pressuring
them, Hall put his own life in jeopardy. In the back of his mind, the leader of this flawed party must have realized this. Grave foreboding crept into his thoughts.

One evening Tyson found Hall working at his writing desk. Already an author of one book on his first Arctic travels, Hall had shown Tyson the notes and drafts of his attempt to find the lost Franklin expedition. Hall brought them aboard when the ship left New York. What better place to finish a manuscript than during the idle hours aboard the ship, both men realized.

“Are you writing up your Franklin search book?” Tyson asked.

Hall stopped writing. For a minute he regarded the papers before him. “No,” he said flatly. “No,” he sighed, “I left those papers in Disco.”

In Disko! The reply shocked Tyson. In New York all Hall could talk about besides reaching the North Pole was his unfinished manuscript. With drawings, detailed notes, maps, and etchings of the varied artifacts recovered from Franklin's trail of death and disaster, Hall's work held valued insights and poignant relics. The public eagerly awaited his book. Now it might be two to three years before he could work on it again.

And leaving it in Disko in the hands of the Danish governor made no sense. An uneasy knot turned in Tyson's stomach.

“Why?” he blurted out.

A mask of gloom spread over Hall's face. Even in the pale light of the guttering oil lamp, Tyson watched the shadow of darkness settle across his leader's features and the ruddy color drain away. The depression and anguish reflected in the man's face made Tyson truly uncomfortable. He would later record his feelings that night in his diary.

Without raising his head, Hall whispered, “I left them there for safety. …”

Feeling as if he had accidentally stepped on his companion's soul, Tyson backed out of the cabin. Hall never raised his head, never made eye contact. Instead, he returned to writing his journal.

Back on deck Tyson shivered, but not from the cold. What was Captain Hall thinking? What safer place could there be for the man's manuscript than by his side? Was there something bad that Hall sensed? Did he believe disaster lay ahead for the ship? Did
he fear someone aboard might maliciously destroy his precious notes … or even do him harm?

“I saw the subject was not pleasant, and I made no further remark,” Tyson wrote that night of their discussion, “but I could not help thinking it over.”

N
IPPED

On August 29, 1871, the
Polarises
run of luck ended. Geometric slabs of ice forty feet thick drifted down Robeson Channel to fill the gaps between the heavier bergs. Birthed amid overhanging ledges and wrenched from the shallows by tides and winds, these blocks cascaded into the narrowing channel. Floating slush and brash ice the ship could brush aside, and its reinforced beak could ram past inches of newly formed sea ice. This liberated land ice was another matter. Weighing tons apiece, these miniature icebergs could easily ram through the hull planking. To make matters worse, a thick fog settled over this shifting minefield just as the sun slipped below the peaks to the west.

Engineer Emil Schuman looked up from his gauges at the first clang of the ship's communicator. The lever spun to all stop with a final ring. He wiped the sweat from his eyes with the back of his hand and signaled to John Booth and Walter Campbell, the firemen, who were blackened from head to foot with coal dust. Their eyes shining like agate stones from their dusted faces, they wearily set their shovels aside and settled atop the piles of coal.

Spinning the bypass valves, Schuman diverted the steam from the pistons that drove the ship's screw. Warily, he watched the needles on the pressure dials rise. This was always a tense moment. Any weakness in the boiler's plating could lead to disaster. Even the tiniest pinhole might bathe them in superheated steam. Vapors that hot would boil the skin right off a person in the blink of an eye.

Boiler explosions occurred frequently. Only six years before, the paddle wheeler
Sultana
had exploded on the Mississippi with the loss of seventeen hundred lives. Schuman must have considered the irony of cooking to death while the temperature outside the hull remained below freezing.

The screech of ice grinding along the length of the hull filled the close chambers. With the engine quiet, every contact with the solid water reverberated through the engine room. More ice raked the sides, one block after another. If the seams split, freezing water would pour inside. Then the boilers would explode. Death by fire and iceneither one a pleasant way to die, as Robert Frost would later note.

On deck seamen cast grappling hooks to an adjacent floe and made the ship fast while they waited for an opening. The wind freshened, then backed. A gale was brewing.

By 7:30 p.m. a lead opened near the eastern shore. Like a shadow amid the shimmering ice fields, the channel challenged them. At Hall's urging Buddington reluctantly steered the ship up the gauntlet until the stem grounded against the ice. Ahead jumbled blocks and shards packed the channel amid mountainous icebergs. The way ahead was impassable.

They had gone as far as possible by ship. The ice made this decision for them; neither Hall's exuberance nor Buddington's reluctance played a part. The wind rose again, swirling down the passage and pressing heavy ice against both sides of the
Polaris.
Within minutes thick ice hemmed in the sides of the vessel.

Hall checked his calculations against Tyson's and got 82°29' N. They had sailed farther north than anyone before them. Still, he wanted more, if possible. Launching a whaleboat, the two men rowed to the Greenland side. From the deck of the
Polaris,
a notch in the land looked inviting. If the ship could winter there, Hall thought, so much the better.

What looked like a harbor turned out to be a shallow bight, nothing more than a subtle curve in the coastline, without protection from wind or icebergs sweeping along the shallow bay. Hall waded ashore and raised an American flag. With little thought that this wind-scoured spit might belong to Greenland, the explorer
claimed this northern land for the United States. When the harbor proved unsuitable, he ironically named it Repulse Harbor.

Dejectedly the two men struggled with the boat back through the howling wind to find the
Polaris
tightly caught in the icy jaws. A full-fledged storm fell upon them now. Driven by the gale-force winds, the shore ice ground and compressed the hull like a vise. Planking groaned and seams opened until streams of water sprayed into the bilges.

The ship appeared endangered as the ice layered about its sides. Just to be sure his achievement did not die if the ship sank, Hall noted their latitude and cast the report overboard in a second brass cylinder, in accordance with his written instructions. To the sailors who beat back ice piling over the deck, that cylinder had as much chance of being found as they had of remaining afloatnext to none. They were correct; none of the brass containers cast adrift was ever seen again.

The wind veered to the east. Shifting counterclockwise as it did was a sure sign of an approaching storm. Now the floe that had provided safety threatened the ship, becoming the anvil to the rampaging ice's hammering blows. Smaller, swifter pieces of ice crashed into the ponderous ice island and rammed the side of the ship against its mooring. The bow and stern hawsers snapped, and the ship swung around like a drunken sailor. A sudden rush of twenty-foot-thick blocks drove the vessel high onto the ice shelf until it lay heeled over on its side. Crests from the froth-filled waves broke over the railings and ran along the scuppers. The
Polaris
creaked and groaned as ton after ton of ice squeezed its sides.

It looked as if the ship might be crushed. Hall ordered provisions placed on a wide floe wedged against the ship. Blankets, tents, medicines, and tins of salted pemmican piled on the ice. Rifles, cartridges, and two suits of dry clothing for each man joined the supplies. If the ship rolled or sank suddenly, these provisions would prove lifesaving.

Around the
Polaris
hummocks, pressure ridges, and open leads rose and fell, twisting and buckling under the wind and water like land rippled by an incessant earthquake. Snow fell, slanting horizontally through the fog to sting the men's faces like nettles. As the
landscape shifted and buckled, Hall ordered the emergency stores divided and half moved to another hummock as an extra precaution. While the world about them bucked under their feet, the frightened and exhausted sailors struggled through the clouds of swirling snow to move their precious goods.

Schuman kept the boilers fired to run the steam pumps, but the leaks remained minimal. The shipyard repairs were proving sound. By morning the storm abated, and the supplies were returned to the deck but kept ready if the situation worsened.

On September 1 the temperature plummeted well below freezing. Ice covered the topsides and formed over the open leads. Hall ordered the propeller unshipped. Raised through the special slot in the hull, the shaft and bronze screw reposed out of harm's way.

The storm alternated its attack among ice, wind, and snow. While the ice rested, heavy snow showers filled the air. First gales, then charging ice vied with periods of eerie calm and fog until the men's nerves frayed like the overtaut hawsers. The pressing need to move supplies onto the ice, then back aboard, disrupted the normal ship's routine of four-hour watches, adding to their disorientation.

Men prayed in earnest. Hall held his usual Sunday service and exhorted the crew to pray even harder for the ship's safety. The captain's zealousness and religious fervor led him to assume even the role of chaplain. Herman Sieman wrote in German in his diary: “Ship and crew appear to be ready prey to the ice. But there is a God who aids and saves from death; to Him I trust between these icebergs and ice-fields, although I do not deserve all the good he grants me.” The Lutheran Sieman found good need to pray for everything. Before the
Polaris
departed New York, he penned a prayer in his journal: “Then, even if the icebergs cover our mortal part, or the fierce polar bear tears it, we shall have Thee, Savior, and the best guide of our heart's ship.”

Lacking Sieman's faith, Captain Buddington was battered all the harder by the storm. He fretted about the harbor at Port Foulke they had passed up.

The day after the propeller had been raised, a fresh northeastern wind opened a tantalizing new channel along the eastern coast. Immediately Hall called a conference. George Tyson recorded it word for word in his diary. In his small cabin Hall expressed his
desire to press northward once the storm ended. His zeal infected Mr. Chester this time. Both the first mate and Tyson supported the notion. But the ice rasping along their wooden walls was too much for Buddington.

“We'll never get back again,” he protested. “We have no business to go!” Before Hall could reply, Buddington ended the meeting. “I'll be damned if I'll move this ship from here!” he swore. With that oath ringing in the others' ears, he stomped off.

Chester and Tyson looked at Buddington's receding bulk before turning back to Captain Hall. They had to follow Buddington's orders, but Hall held overall command of the expedition. He could overrule Buddington, and the officers must obey.

But the rent in the fabric of command started earlier at Disko made that unlikely. Hall hurried after Buddington like a chastened schoolboy. The two talked animatedly out of earshot. For awkward minutes Chester and Tyson waited. But the council had ended. There was to be no further attempt to sail the ship farther north. Nothing more was left but to find the best spot to winter the vessel.

That evening Hall unburdened his fears to Tyson, admitting, “I'm worried.”

Tyson shook his head. “Well, I've got nothing to gain, but it would be a great credit to you if we made another two or three degrees north.”

Hall nodded slowly and backed away. For the first time Tyson sensed that his commander feared offending someone in the party. Who could that be? Tyson wondered. Buddington or Dr. Bessel? What hold over the captain did they have that he feared more than the ice itself? Bessel seemed a dark shadow as he moved about the ship, his presence like the breath of cold air off an iceberg. He was rarely overtly defiant but was never supportive of the captain, and that sufficed to produce a chilling effect.

Buddington, on the other hand, clearly feared what lay ahead and showed it. While he might sneak around the pantry to steal sugar, he wore his emotions plainly on his sleeve. The ice and the storms frightened him to death. The steward and cook saw his fear, and the word quickly spread, adding to the men's unease. A worried ship's captain inevitably leads to a worried crew.