Trial by Ice Read online

  BY RICHARD PARRY

  The Winter Wolf

  The Wolf's Pack

  The Wolf's Cub

  The Fateful Lightning: A Novel of Ulysses S. Grant

  To my wife, Kathie,

  Just keep rer tinding me that

  over the next hillies a new adventure.

  And to my sons, David and Matthew,

  For making me proud of them …

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Author's Note

  Corrected Muster Roll of the Polaris Expedition

  Introduction: Tragedy

  1. A Grand Beginning

  2. A Hearty Crew

  3. Flags and Fanfare

  4. First Ice

  5. Nipped

  6. Death

  7. Disorder

  8. Calamity

  9. Retreat

  10. A Dreadful Night

  11. Marooned

  12. Adrift

  13. On the Beach

  14. Slow Starvation

  15. The Inquest

  16. The Whitewash

  17. 1968

  Aftermath

  Select Bibliography

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Unlike the ill-fated vessel Polaris, this manuscript had many loyal hands, which skillfully guided k from inception to its final state. I feel fortunate in having had two editors direct my efforts. I would like to thank Gary Brozek for his insightful comments during the early stages of the manuscript. I am especially grateful to Tracy Brown and his assistant, Abby Durden, for grasping the reins in midstream and carefully guiding this project to solid ground. Their attention to detail and commitment to excellence are reflected throughout the finished product.

  David Stevenson's artistic rendering of the book's jacket unerringly depicts the danger and uncertainty that must have terrorized the ship's crew. Jie Yang as production manager and Nancy Delia as production editor deserve special recognition for transforming the manuscript into print.

  As always, my thanks to my agent, David Hale Smith of DHS Literary, Inc., for his unwavering faith and support.

  I would also like to thank Robin Benway, Marie Coolman, and Kim Hovey of the Ballantine Publishing Group for their help in publicizing my work. Last but not least, a special thanks to Joanne Miller, my Arizona publicist, for beating the desert on my behalf.

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  Truth is stranger than fiction. Nowhere is that statement more true than in the facts surrounding the first American expedition to the North Pole in 1871. No fiction writer could invent a more convoluted plot. No one would believe what transpired aboard the Polaris. Yet what follows is true.

  The events that led to the death of the expedition's leader, Charles Francis Hall, the disaster that left half the crew adrift on an ice floe in the dead of the Arctic winter, the folly that eventually sank the Polaris might read like a fantastic murder mystery or a Greek tragedy; nonetheless, what transpired is well documented. The plot contains all the elements of an epic novel: a glorious purpose; a journey led by a noble and dedicated man; a mission destroyed by treachery and the darker sides of human nature; a battle of man against the heartless elements, where unimaginable conditions degrade the best ideals humanity has to offer until those trapped sank to the level of considering cannibalism; embarrassed people in positions of power moving hastily to protect their own interests at the expense of the truth.

  Even the dialogue is true, taken from the men's testimony at the inquiries following their return to the United States, their written journals and diaries, and their published accounts of the ordeal they endured. What these men had to say reveals the exciting truth of an expedition gone fatally wrong. Throughout the series of mistakes and misdeeds that plagued the Polaris, one fascinating truth emerges: miraculously, not all the men were lost. Despite the volume of material available that recorded these exploits, several puzzling questions remain. How could these men have such widely divergent perceptions of the events that took place? Who or what was ultimately responsible for Charles Francis Hall's death? And perhaps most troubling of all, how much did the extremity of the conditions they endured and the imperfections in their troubled souls contribute to their collective and individual failure?

  The select bibliography in the back of this book lists only the books from which direct quotations were used. An effort was made to use material published close to the time of the disaster so as to avoid the subtle variations in meaning that result over the passage of time. The list is by no means a complete record of all the resources consulted. In regard to the scientific, nautical, medical, and polar explanations, I drew upon my personal reading, my experience sailing in the Arctic, thirty years of medical practice, and the twenty years I lived in Alaska.

  The astute reader will note the variation in spelling of places and persons in this work. This is due to the different spellings used in the historical references of the time. Within the body of the text all effort has been made to use the modern spelling, such as Disko for Disco, but the quotations retain the exact spelling used in those works.

  CORRECTED MUSTER ROLL

  OF THE POLARIS EXPEDITION

  Corrected Muster Roll of the Polaris Expedition Corrected muster roll of the Polaris expedition as made out by Captain Hall on July 2, 1871, and forwarded by him to the secretary of the navy. (Nationalities added by the author.)

  C. F. Hall Commander

  Sidney O. Buddington Sailing and Ice Master

  George Tyson Assistant Navigator

  H. C. Chester First Mate

  William Morton Second Mate

  Emil Schuman Chief Engineer (German)

  Alvin A. Odell Assistant Engineer

  Walter F. Campbell Fireman

  John W. Booth Fireman

  John Herron Steward (former British citizen)

  William Jackson Cook

  Nathan J. Coffin Carpenter

  Seamen

  Herman Sieman (German) Joseph B. Mauch (German)

  Frederick Anthing (Russian/German) G. W. Lindquist (Swedish)

  J.W.C. Kruger (German) Peter Johnson (Danish)

  Henry Hobby Frederick Jamka (German)

  William Lindermann (German) Noah Hayes

  Scientific Corps

  Emil Bessel Surgeon and Chief of Scientific Corps (German)

  R.W.D. Bryan Astronomer and Chaplain

  Frederick Meyer Meteorologist (German)

  TRAGEDY

  I believe that no man can retain the use of his faculties during one long night to such a degree as to be morally responsible. …

  ——NOAH HAYES, SEAMAN, POLARIS EXPEDITION, 1871

  November 10, 1871. The black sky leaned heavily upon the land. So dark was the air that the earth glowed brightly by contrasta pale, ethereal light radiated from the ground itself. Faint blue and violet shapes of snow-covered earth blended with wildly strewn blocks of ice littered the landscape. Without distinction solid land and frozen water, sky and earth floated together into one shimmering, surreal dream.

  But this was no dream. This was the Arctic winter, and a nightmare for the weary procession that wended its way over the ice. Led by a single figure holding a lantern, which cast a feeble light and flickering glow that the cold air quickly swallowed, the party moved slowly across the snow in a broken column. Behind them rose the dark hulk of their ice-locked ship, the Polaris, their only sanctuary in this hostile world. Slowly, reluctantly, the procession trudged on, separating themselves from their lifeline. Even as they shuffled in a single line, the party was sharply divided. While all ventured forth to bury their fallen commander, half feared his death might have been a result of deliberate acts.

  Trapped in the grip of ice, the Polaris no longer resembled the sleek ship she was. A fish out of water,
a vessel “nipped” in the Arctic ice provided neither speed nor security for its crew. Without open water to which to run for safety, their vessel was potentially a pile of scrap wood.

  The black needles of the steam schooner's masts jabbed futilely at the sky to protest their captivity. Canvas tenting cloaked the decks while slabs of ice and snow were banked about the ship's sides to insulate it and to keep it from rolling as the implacable ice squeezed the hull out of its frozen cradle like a pip from a rotten apple.

  Ahead, barely visible in the gloom, two tiny figures waited near a shack. Beside them an American flag drooped from a spindly flagpole. The fur-covered men pulled a rope that dragged a sled. Draped across the sled, a second American flag trailed its corners in the grooves left by the runners. Under the flag rested a hastily built coffin. Beneath the pine lid lay their captain, Charles Francis Hall, dressed in a simple blue uniform and wrapped in another American flag. The crew of the Polaris was burying their leader with as much ceremony as they could muster. No funeral dirge sounded. Only the scrape of the sled's runners and the crunch of their boots on the fresh snow broke the silence. Here in the Arctic, men replaced horses; a simple sledge replaced a funeral carriage.

  This far above the Arctic Circle, no sun would rise in November, even though it was one hour before noon. Since October the sun had no longer battled with the growing Arctic night, no longer struggled to rise above the horizon, and simply fled south, abandoning the land to the perpetual blackness of the Arctic winter.

  The party trudged along in silence, dwarfed by the immense presence of the sky, the unending whiteness, and the threatening rise of a shale bluff that towered before them like a crouching beast. Observatory Bluff, the sweeping rise of wind-scoured rock was called. Today it rose over them like a granite wave, waiting to roll down and crush them. Panting from exertion, the party drew to a halt beside the waiting individuals.

  A wisp of wind riffled the flag and sent snow devils spinning across the ice. The men looked about uneasily. A burst of wind could easily fill the air with snow, blinding them and causing their ship to vanish. Men had frozen to death mere feet from safety in such whiteouts.

  The wind ceased. The snow settled, and the sky cleared into an inky blanket pierced by innumerable diamond-hard chips of starlight. The men's fears abated, and they turned back to the business at hand.

  Before them lay a shallow depression scarcely two feet in depth. The hole looked like a sullied refuse pit where the snow and ice had been scraped from the hard earth and the frozen gravel attacked with pickaxes and shovels. From there the diggers had encountered permafrost, the eternal slab of ironlike ice that dwells beneath the Arctic ground. Since the last Ice Age, this permafrost possessed what ground the water renounced, and a mere mortal's grave was no cause to relinquish its hold.

  Two days of backbreaking work with pick and crowbar had yielded only this rudimentary grave. Like every attempt by man on its sovereignty and secrets, the Arctic resisted. The coffin would lie in the meager depression, half-exposed. The only thing left to do was to cover the exposed box with shale and gravel from the diggings and hope a bear would not rip the lid off. The thought of their captain's corpse dragged over the hills by a playful polar bear, then left for the foxes and lemmings to shred, bore heavily on the crew's minds.

  But this was the best they could do. Captain Hall's grave would be like his quest to reach the North Polea work unfinished.

  The coffin was lowered into the ground, and Mr. R.W.D. Bryan, the ship's astronomer and chaplain, stepped forward to read the service. On board the Polaris were copies of four prayers written especially for the expedition by the famous Reverend John Philip Newman, the leading evangelist of the time. Cleric to kings, presidents, and magnates, Newman was the one who would baptize the dying President Ulysses S. Grant in 1885, then claim his prayers had done the trick when Grant miraculously recovered from a massive hemorrhage.

  But Newman's prayers dealt with success, not death. One was to be read on reaching the North Pole. So Bryan read the simple seaman's burial service from the captain's Bible. Even this was difficult. In the gloom, George Tyson, the ship's navigator, thrust forward his lantern so that Bryan could read the words.

  As he spoke, a serpentine coil of light burst forth overhead and snaked, hissing, across the sky. Undulating in bands of violet, blue, and red, the aurora severed the blackness from horizon to horizon and cast an unworldly glow upon the party. Suddenly the men could see their faces and hands shimmering in the light like apparitions from another world. Amazed and startled by this show of fireworks, they shoveled the scarce spadefuls of dirt over the coffin and hurried back to the security of their ship.

  Emil Schuman, the ship's engineer, readied a wooden headboard with a hastily penciled inscription: “C. E Hall, Late Commander of the North Polar Expedition, died Nov. 8, 1871. Aged 50 years.” Noah Hayes, an Indiana farm boy far from home, struggled to drive it into the frozen ground. The board splintered and fell facedown across the mound. Cold, frightened, and depressed, Hayes drove his crowbar into the earth in frustration. In his journal he wrote of the iron bar. “A fit type of his will. An iron monument marks his tomb.”

  There it stood jutting crookedly from the mound like a melted cross, marking the grave.

  Hayes and Schuman hurried after the rest of the crew, heads bent, unmindful of the sinuous lights dancing over their heads. To them it was a coincidence, a scientific demonstration of the magnetism and electricity they had come north to study.

  Behind Schuman and Hayes came the Eskimo guides of the Po-laris.Shuffling away from the grave of their longtime friend, the Inuit purposefully kept their backs to the northern lights. Unseen by the white men, each Inuit held a drawn knife behind his back, between him and the lights, for protection. For to the Inuit the hissing lights overhead were the spirits of the restless dead, those who had died violent deaths or had been murdered.

  Not one of them doubted that their friend Captain Hall's spirit was overhead. Hall's spirit was calling out. Was he calling for vengeance? Bad things lay ahead for all of them. Their trial on the ice was just beginning.

  A GRAND BEGINNING

  Under a general appropriations act “for the year ending the thirteenth of June, eighteen hundred and seventy-one,” we find the Congressional authority for the outfit of the “United States North Polar Expedition.”

  Be it enacted, That the President of the United States be authorized to organize and send out one or more expeditions toward the North Pole, and to appoint such person or persons as he may deem most fitted to the command thereof; to detail any officer of the public service to take part in the same, and to use any public vessel that may be suitable for the purpose; the scientific operations of the expeditions to be prescribed in accordance with the advice of the National Academy of Sciences.

  CONGRESS, JULY 9, 1870

  Executive Mansion, Washington, B.C., July 20, 1870 Captain C. F. Hall:

  Dear Sir: You are hereby appointed to command the expedition toward the North Pole, to be organized and sent pursuant to an Act of Congress approved July 12, 1870, and will report to the Secretary of the Navy and the Secretary of the Interior for detailed instructions.

  U.S. GRANT

  Sixteen months before, things were quite different.

  By 1870 the United States was ready for something new. To be the first to reach the North Pole fit the bill. Doing so would meld national pride with hard-nosed business. Such an expedition transcended politics and touched Southern and Northern hearts alike. Here was something to raise the spirits of everyone: an American expedition. With eyes fixed northward, those on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line could forget the slaughter of five years before, the carpetbaggers plundering their property, and the legions of shattered bodies that had littered their hometowns. Grasping the unknown land to their bosom once more gave Rebel and Yankee a noble ideal, a worthy one that fit them both.

  Here was an especially worthwhile endeavor, especially since th
e British had failed so miserably at attaining the same goal. There was little love for England in either Dixie or the North at this time. After all, John Bull had failed to enter the war on the side of the South yet had managed to extract an embarrassing apology from President Abraham Lincoln over the Trent affair. If the Americans were to succeed where England had failed, it was only just.

  Besides, there was money to be made. Whaling was a million-dollar industry. Before the advent of petroleum mining, whale oil lit the lamps of the world. Baleen supplied the stays for ladies' corsets, and precious ambergris and spermaceti from the sperm whales made perfumes and cosmetics. And north was where the whales were.

  Driven by this lucrative trade, whaling ships from New Bedford already braved the Davis Strait in the east and the Bering Sea in the west. A Northwest Passage would eliminate the need to sail round Cape Horn and cut months off the trip. Trade with the Far East would also benefit. Glory was all well and good, but a profit was even better.

  The United States was going north to plant the Stars and Stripes at the North Pole. No matter that Danes, Britons, French, and Norwegians had tried and failed; the United States of America, fresh from a divisive civil war, was flexing its muscle. With Yankee ingenuity and American resolve, the first American polar expedition would succeed. No question about it.

  America was ready.

  And with typical Yankee stinginess, the Navy Department selected an unused steam tug named the Periwinkle for the honors. Why spend extra money to lay a fresh keel when this scow lay gathering barnacles? Weighing 387 tons, the screw-propeller Periwinklehad never been farther north than Gloucester. But to her went the honors of being the one to carry the flag farther north than anyone had previously gone. Planting the flag at the top of the world was the ultimate goal. Nothing less would do.

  But a complete refitting was needed. In her present condition, the Periwinkle would not make Greenland, let alone the North Pole. Money being tight, a bill, called the Arctic Resolution, introduced in the Senate requested $100,000 to fund the expedition. Immediately the bloc of southern senators protested. Spending money to find the North Pole that could better go toward Reconstruction galled them.