Fatal North (31 page)

Robeson asked Tyson if he had been privy to any consultations between Buddington and Bessels as to whether
Polaris
should sail for home.

“I do not know. Buddington asked me if I wished to stay another winter. I told him no. If a man swears that nobody shall do anything, I want to get home as soon as possible. I thought that, under the circumstances, with him in command, I would rather get home. We started for home on the twelfth day of August. The ship was leaking still the same. The leak did not increase any at the time. On the fifteenth day of August we were beset in the ice, just north of Cape Frazier, in latitude 80 degrees, 2 minutes
north. The cause of that, I think, was that Captain Buddington got intoxicated, and ran the vessel off in the middle of the sound.”

The board members exchanged glances, but waited for Robeson.

“Was Captain Buddington
drunk
at the time you were beset?” asked the Navy Secretary, sounding somewhat offended.

“Yes, sir, he was drunk. Not on rum or whisky, but alcohol reduced to preserve specimens.”

“How do you know that?”

“It was all there was to get drunk on. He got it from the scientific stores.”

Curiously, Robeson seemed to be losing patience with his own line of questioning.

“How do you
know
that?”

“The doctor caught him at it. I was not present. I was on deck.”

“Tell all you know about that.”

“Captain Buddington was drunk, and the doctor decided he was going to catch him and he did. There was no liquor on board, except a couple jars of this alcohol, at that time.”

From there, Tyson segued to the drama of October 15. He told of the engineer's report that
Polaris
had sprung a new leak, and Buddington's order to throw provisions overboard. Tyson described the panic that night, and his dropping down onto the ice with other volunteers to save what provisions they could.

He told of later going back aboard ship and finding out that the engineer had issued a false alarm, and that
Polaris
was not taking on more water than usual. A short time after returning to the ice, he told the board, the ship broke away in the darkness “when the piece of ice on the starboard drifted away and she righted from her beam ends.”

“How did you happen to have all the Eskimos on the ice?”

“They said that Captain Buddington told them the ship was going to be lost and they must get out.”

At that point, the board adjourned for the day. Tyson was told to return in the morning at nine o'clock, and to refrain from discussing his testimony with anyone.

The next morning, Tyson picked up where he left off, telling of the first “terrible night” on the ice: “The wind was blowing strong, it was snowing, and fearfully dark.”

He described their efforts the following morning to launch the boats and try to make their way toward land, but held back criticizing the crew for their slowness. “They were very tired, and very hungry, and very wet. They had had nothing to eat since three o'clock the day before.”

He told of their being stopped by ice and having to haul the boat onto a floe, then seeing
Polaris
come around a point about eight or ten miles distant, under sail and steam, but their hope for rescue were soon dashed when the ship anchored behind a nearby island.

“I did not feel right about the vessel not coming for us,” Tyson admitted.

He told about the other abortive efforts to make for land and eventually, giving up hope of immediate rescue, how they settled in on the ice floe for the winter.

“How did you live on the ice?”

“We built our snow huts,” he began, delving into details of their hardscrabble life on the ice during the Arctic winter. He told of the men burning one of the boats for firewood, and the difficulty he had trying to control them. “I endeavored to maintain the discipline of the party as well as I could, but there was little or nothing that could be called discipline. All the men were armed with pistols but myself. I was on the ice without anything, and they did as they pleased. I could merely advise them. They had been under no discipline on the ship, and the ice was no place to establish discipline without assistance. If I had attempted to do it by force, I could have made an example of one of them, but why should I? They were all leagued together. I endeavored to preserve discipline, but I could only do it by advice, and doing the best I could for all of us.”

“Did they get better afterward?” asked a board member.

Tyson considered the question. “They got really no worse. They had many plans of their own, concocted during the winter, but they did not know how to carry them out, and it all ended right. They all had to come eventually to me. I thought they were going to make disturbances, but it was through fright. They were afraid of starvation.”

That was as close as Tyson would get to the overt threat of cannibalism, a word that would not be uttered by anyone at the inquiry.

He described the near-starvation rations they ate during the winter, and how, come March, the natives were able to start catching more seals, which saved all their lives.

After Tyson provided details of their rescue, Robeson backtracked, wanting to know more about any difficulties Hall had with the officers aboard ship.

“Well, the conduct of Sailing Master Buddington—I don't like much to speak of it, sir, but if I must tell all I know and thought, I must say that he was a disorganizer from the very commencement.”

“How do you mean? How did he disorganize?”

“By associating himself with the crew, and slandering his commander, and in other ways that I might mention.”

“Let us have the whole of it.”

“He cursed his commander and blamed him. On the most frivolous things he would be among the crew and complaining of Captain Hall. His ground of complaint was that the captain was not a seaman.”

“Was he insubordinate to the captain in any way?”

“Oh, he was very subordinate to the captain in his presence.”

“Anything else?”

“He was inclined to take provisions, sir, and privately consume them.”

“When did Captain Hall become aware that he was acting in this way?”

“Just as we were leaving St. John's, Captain Hall first had difficulty with Buddington, and he threatened to send him home at Disco. It was about taking provisions from the ship's stores for himself. I don't mean liquor. It was something to eat.”

Robeson probed some more about Buddington's drinking habits, then asked, “When you left
Polaris,
Captain Buddington was in command?”

“Yes, sir. Nobody disputed his command from the time that Captain Hall died until our separation. We were all law-abiding people on board. There was no violence whatever at any time. I believe about everybody thought the command was not a good one, but we still all submitted.”

“Did you know of any difficulty between anybody who was left on board and Captain Buddington?”

“Nothing more than that feeling that will always be between an incompetent man and a subordinate who thinks him so.”

“The criticism you have to make of Captain Buddington is that he would get drunk when he had a chance?”

“The criticism I have to make is that the man had neither heart nor soul in the expedition. It was not his intention to go north if he could help it. His idea was to go to Port Foulke, and spend his time, while the others tried to get to the Pole; while he was taking care of himself the others should go on. And then he would return home with the rest. That was the headquarters he had fixed on; he did not want to go above that. He wanted the ship to lie there, and the rest to go on. That was his whole ambition.”

If Robeson was starting to be sorry for the public comments he had made in support of Buddington, he did not show it. “How did you gather that?”

“I gathered it from his own conversations. He tried to keep the ship from going farther north, and succeeded in stopping her for the winter. As soon as Captain Hall died, he tried to have the ship return farther south. He swore nobody should do anything.”

“Didn't he let you go off with the boats?”

The question seemed to have been put forth in Buddington's defense.

“Yes, sir, but I told him we should lose them. He would not advise with the doctor about a sledge journey, and between the two of them there was a mess made of it. If we had started an expedition overland, there would have been a high latitude reached. I told them so.”

“How do you account for the ship's not coming to you to help you off the ice?” asked the Navy's most senior officer.

Tyson lowered his eyes and shook his head. Throughout the winter he had asked himself that same question coundess times. It was still a mystery, and a sore point. He had been quoted in the press as saying that he and his party had been turned adrift due to Buddington's “anger or incompetence”—both possibilities galled him equally.

“That I do not know how to account for. I was surprised that it did not come. It might have been that it was in a sinking condition, but I think not. The vessel that I saw under steam and sail at sea could not be in a sinking condition. He went in there and tied up. She was upright, and appeared to be all right when I looked at her with the eyeglass.”

“Have you any reason to think they saw you?”

“I cannot see how they could avoid it, if they were looking for us. It was daylight, and they were within four miles. I could have seen on board the ship. I could have seen a man if one had been walking on deck. The moment I saw her in safety, I knew we were about to be abandoned for some cause or other.”

“Would not he naturally think that he should save the ship and let you come to him in the boat?”

“That may have been his idea, but at that time I thought the first thought should have been to save the people off the ice. When the wind changed so suddenly, it was his duty to come and save us.”

“Still, the possibility may remain,” Robeson said, “that in
securing the ship in the harbor, he may have supposed that you and the Eskimos could reach him?”

Tyson was getting the secretary's drift;
“Abandonment on the Ice”
was a scandalous headline.

How difficult it was to sit in a clean, pressed suit on a Navy ship in the safety of a harbor, after a good night's sleep and a hot meal, and describe desperate times during life-and-death situations. Everything had been so simple to see then, but now events could be obscured and made more complicated by important men asking lawyer-like questions.

Perhaps that is why Tyson held back and did not tell the board of inquiry the story that he had already told several people since his rescue—including Captain Bartlett of
Tigress
as well as one of that ship's owners—of Buddington's “astonishing proposition” to scuttle
Polaris
in waters frequented by whalers, go ashore in boats, and wait for rescue in the spring; collecting full pay while taking few risks. In any case, the board did not hear of it from Tyson this day, nor did they question him about it, even though the
Tigress
owner had prompdy passed word of Tyson's charges on to the American consulate, which in turn advised the owner to keep secret what he had heard.

“Sir, I cannot imagine he would abandon us,” Tyson said, “but that it was a matter of bad judgment and perhaps some indifference. The other people on board would not have been content to abandon us if they had known it was his intention to do so. They might not have known that it was possible to save us, and if they did, they would not have known what to do.”

The questioning turned to the survival prospects for the remainder of the
Polaris
crew last been seen aboard her nine months earlier.

“They had enough provisions to last them two years, if they lived with economy,” Tyson said. “Should they stay with the vessel, this should be enough. I think that under almost any other commander the vessel would be all right, but under his command, I don't know.”

“Was the vessel left in a place where they could get any food?”

“Yes, sir, there was game in plenty—walrus, seals, bears, and in the summer, ducks and eggs. I believe there are salmon there at times. There is an abundance of birds. I think about July they will break out if they have stayed with the vessel. It is about three hundred miles to the nearest permanent Danish settlement. If he had a clear way, he could make it in two days, and in about three days under sail if he doesn't have sufficient coal. She sails well with good winds. She gets off five or six knots under sail, which is well for the amount of canvas she carries. But she is not easily handled under sail in rough water.”

The commodore wanted to know the latest that a steamer, bent on rendezvousing with
Polaris
and bringing back her crew, should start from New York.

“It would be well to start by the first of July.”

Someone asked what had become of Hall's journal and papers after he died.

“I do not know.”

“Was there no examination of his papers in the presence of the officers?” asked the commodore.

“No, sir. His journal was taken around and scanned by one and another.”

“Did Captain Hall keep a regular journal?”

“Yes, sir. It was one of the bound books, one that could not be put in a pocket.”

“Were they not certified and sealed up?”

“No, sir. I saw some of them. I know many remarks were made about them. I understood some were burned. Buddington told me he was glad the papers were burned because they were much against him.”

“When did you see Captain Hall's journal last?”

“After Captain Hall's death. Captain Buddington was reading it.”

Robeson removed his rimless spectacles and pressed thumb and forefinger to the bridge of his long, patrician nose. “Have
you any opinion of your own,” the secretary finally asked, “as to the cause of Captain Hall's death?”