Fatal North (5 page)

She had a round stern, with nothing about it that could catch the ice, and a well with a hoisting apparatus so that the propeller could be taken up at short notice; the rudder could
also be unshipped in the event of submerged ice. The bowsprit, a spar running out from the stern to which cables that helped stabilize the main mast were attached, was rigged so that it could be run in immediately if there was danger of coming in contact with ice. Her bow was reinforced, made strong enough to resist any shock it was likely to receive. The stern had sheets of boiler iron bent around it and bolted through the solid wood. From these, similar plates were carried aft forty feet on each side, two feet above and below the waterline so that the ice would have no chance of cutting into the wood. In these respects,
Polaris
was better protected against ice than any vessel ever built; in a real sense, it was the world's first icebreaker.

Special cabin heating was installed, generated by small coal-burning stoves added to each compartment. The ship was not without amenities: a little cabin, handsomely carpeted, had been fitted up, and a cabinet organ, donated by the manufacturer, had been placed in it.

When the work was completed, all agreed that everything deemed necessary for safety and comfort had been done, and that no ship, even one especially built, could have been better adapted to Arctic service. Wrote Hall to a friend after visiting the ship: “I am very much in love with it.” He was also elated when the government paid for the shipyard work without charging it to the $50,000 appropriation.

To Hall, there was just one thing wrong: the name. He could not fathom going Arctic exploring on a ship named after an evergreen herb of the dogbane family. The rebuilt
Periwinkle
was launched at the Washington Navy Yard in April 1871, renamed by her commander as
Polaris,
after a conspicuous bright star in the northern hemisphere which, until the year 1500, would mark the location of the north celestial pole. Hall's choice of name expressed his sanguine expectation of success.

A month later, a twenty-one-gun salute by a military honor guard echoed across the rows of piers and locks. On the deck of his ship, freshly scrubbed and full of snap, Hall awaited
the presidential party that emerged from black horse-drawn carriages.

Warmly shaking hands with Hall at the top of the gangway, President Grant said he was pleased to hear how well preparations for the Arctic expedition were coming along and had come to see for himself. Hall took the President, the Secretary of the Navy, and other officials on an inspection of the ship. Then, on the main deck under a brilliant sky, the chaplain of the Congress led a brief service, blessing the ship, her crew, and commander on their long journey.

A month later in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, only twenty-four hours before the departure of
Polaris
for Arctic waters, another religious service was conducted aboard ship, the regular Sunday services for all hands, only with visiting members of a local Baptist congregation.

Standing close to Hall were his loyal Eskimos, Joe and Hannah, with their adopted daughter, Punny, age four, a beautiful child with porcelain skin and almond-shaped eyes. (Joe and Hannah had lost their own child, a young boy, to illness.) Joe, a Greenland Eskimo, was a swarthy fellow with a straight black mustache and coal-dark eyes. He was barely five feet tall, but pound for pound, when it came to hunting or driving a dog team on the ice, Hall would have taken Joe over any man alive. His English was limited, but Hall, from his years of living with the Eskimos, was conversational in Inuktitut.

They had met on Hall's first trip to the Arctic a decade earlier. One day he was in his cabin aboard ship, writing in his journal, when he heard a soft, sweet voice behind him murmur, “Good morning, sir,” with a distinctive English accent. Hall turned, expecting to see a refined English lady before him. To his surprise, there stood a stout Eskimo woman, all of four feet ten, dressed not in skins or furs but in crinoline and wearing a large bonnet. He had heard of Joe and Hannah before meeting them, as they were well known throughout the Baffin Island region. In the early 1850s an English whaling captain had taken
them home with him, and they had stayed several years in England, where they aroused so much curiosity that they were given an audience with Queen Victoria and dined with Prince Albert. At that first meeting, Hall couldn't resist asking the couple what they had thought of the Queen. “Very pretty,” Joe said, smiling. Hannah was more impressed with where the Queen lived. “Fine place, I assure you, sir,” she offered. The couple had subsequently accompanied Hall on his overland expedition, and without their assistance and knowledge in surviving the Arctic rigors, he would have surely died.

On the North Pole expedition, Joe would serve as hunter and dog driver, Hannah as seamstress.

The rest of the crew that stood on deck for Sunday services were a capable lot. At the time, the U.S. Navy and Merchant Marine both relied heavily on recruiting immigrants to run their ships, since the most adventurous Americans were going West rather than to sea.

Emil Schuman, a German national, had been appointed chief engineer of
Polaris.
A handsome, well-groomed man with a mustache, side whiskers, and slicked-back hair, Schuman was well educated in engineering principles and had spent years at sea, most recently as assistance engineer in the service of Lloyds Steamship Company. An excellent engineer and machinist, it would be his job to keep the ship, its boiler, engine, and mechanical gears running in the world's coldest, most adverse seas.

Alvin Odell, from Connecticut, was assistant engineer. A Civil War veteran who had fought for the Union, he was a good machinist and blacksmith, and a practical man. Rail-thin and stoic, he displayed an inborn Yankee shrewdness toward money and possessions.

Frederick Meyer, military academy graduate and former lieutenant in the Prussian army, would serve as meteorologist. Before he left Germany, he had held an appointment in Maximilian's army and had been destined for Mexico in support of the Austrian archduke's effort to rule that country. Upon reaching the United States, however, Meyer decided to stay and
entered the U.S. Army. His was a fortunate decision, as within two years Maximilian was in disgrace in Mexico, court-martialed and executed. Detailed as a signal observer at St. Louis, Meyer had distinguished himself as a sergeant in the Signal Corps. The tallest member of the crew at well over six feet, Meyer was in his early forties, with a receding hairline and bushy mustache. He could be downright dapper in appearance, favoring a gold watch and chain in his vest pocket. Meyer was a natural at telling others what to do, and he had a disturbing tendency to believe that he was always right, even in the face of evidence to the contrary.

The ship's carpenter, Nathaniel Coffin, was the oldest member of the crew, a neat, natty little fellow of more than fifty summers. He was talented with saw and hammer, but at heart he was a poet and songwriter, and would often amuse his shipmates with his latest verses and renditions about life on the sea.

Of the ten common seamen who formed the deck crew, one was a Swede, one a Dane, and seven were German, several having fled their native country to escape nearly a decade of war in the name of German unification since Bismarck's rise to power in Prussia. Only one deckhand was American-born: Noah Hayes, twenty-six, a wide-eyed Indiana farm boy who had never been to sea. The remaining crew were two firemen—one American and one English—to work below deck in the boiler room, an English steward to help prepare and serve food, and a sad-eyed mulatto cook from New York named William Jackson. In all, the eleven Americans in the crew were outnumbered by fourteen immigrants, ten of them Germans.

After the services Hall, resplendent in his finest uniform, rose to speak. With sunlight dancing off his polished brass buttons, he introduced the ship's officers and thanked the Baptists for their presence. As he spoke, his preacher-like voice gathered strength and spread across the deck of the ship, carrying out over the harbor.

“I believe firmly that I was born to discover the North
Pole,” he said. “That is my purpose. Once I have set my right foot on the Pole, I shall be perfectly willing to die.”

Most of the men cheered, although a few officers exchanged glances. The ladies of the congregation smiled shyly under their bonnets, unsure what to make of such bold talk.

That day Charles Francis Hall heard only the cheers and saw only the smiles.

3

“Icebergs Dead Ahead!”

4:00
P.M.
, J
UNE
29, 1871
B
ROOKLYN
N
AVY
Y
ARD

 

I
n the midst of a summer thunderstorm, with the U.S. flag he had been presented days earlier by the American Geographical Society hoisted at the fore, Charles Francis Hall stood on the bridge as the lines securing
Polaris
to the pier were released and she nudged away from the dock, where scattered onlookers stood under umbrellas waving good-bye.

At last the expedition was under way, sailing with a set of official orders addressed to Hall and signed by Navy Secretary George Robeson:

  Having been appointed by the President of the United States, commander of the North Polar Expedition, and the steamer
Polaris
having been fitted, equipped, provisioned, and assigned for the purpose, you are placed in command of the said vessel, her officers, and crew, for the purposes of the said expedition ... the main objective attaining the position of the North Pole. All persons attached to the
expedition are under your command, and shall, under every circumstance and condition, be subject to the rules, regulations, and laws governing the discipline of the Navy, to be modified, but not increased, by you as the circumstances may in your judgment require.

Near the end of the official orders, which seemed to provide for every possible contingency, was a paragraph addressing what would happen in the event of the death of the Expedition's commander:

In case of your death or disability—a contingency we sincerely trust may not arise—sailing master of the expedition, S. O. Buddington, and chief scientist, Dr. Emil Bessels, shall consult as to the propriety and manner of carrying into further effect the foregoing instructions, which I here urge must, if possible, be done. In any event, Mr. Buddington shall, in case of your death or disability, continue as the sailing master, and control and direct the movements of the vessel; Dr. Bessels shall continue as chief of the scientific department, directing all sledge-journeys and scientific operations.

It was a curiously worded clause that allowed for a kind of split command, unprecedented in U.S. Navy command structure, in which no loopholes were ever allowed for insubordination to creep, no way in which more than one person could assume authority at the same time. This tradition made good military sense, since divided authority led to unclear orders and weakened discipline. Most emphatically, the Navy had always followed the policy that command at sea, and all the life-and-death responsibilities that came with it, must fall to one individual.

With
Polaris,
however, the Navy could not make up its mind to trust anybody with full command of the expedition in the case of Hall's demise. It seemed as though the wintertime—when the ship would be stuck in the ice—was to be handed over
to the physician-scientist, and the summer would belong to the sailing master.

Polaris
pulled out of the Navy Yard and steamed past the bustling, vibrant waterfront of New York. As they headed south, where they would hook east around Long Island and head for the open sea, George Tyson felt strange having nothing to do with directing the ship. While serving as sailing master for his last five voyages, he had learned to withdraw, once the bow and stern lines were off, from any thoughts of shore and concentrate on the business of getting under way. Feeling the early morning sun in his face, putting everyone on deck to work, and taking charge as they headed for sea, more of a home to him than any he had ever known on dry land—he doubted there was anything better in the world.

But now he found himself sailing toward unknown seas without any duties on the bridge or even a clearly defined position. He still had not received his official commission papers. They were to be sent from Washington on a supply ship that was to rendezvous with them in Greenland. Tyson had no idea what an assistant navigator was supposed to do. Hall had simply wanted him along on the trip and said they would work out the details later. Tyson had agreed because the adventure would be high—of that he was certain—the pay was good, and he would be at sea, where he loved to be.

Tyson gave himself up to the novelty of observing others performing their tasks instead of commanding them, and enjoying the view as though a mere passenger. They passed down the East River with the great city of Brooklyn, fourth largest in the country with over 400,000 souls, on his left, and to their stern, the island of Manhattan, with nearly a million residents.

This was the Brooklyn of Walt Whitman—a city with a distinct seagoing and farming character to it, but one that was rapidly turning to manufacturing and becoming a bedroom community for people working in Manhattan. Numerous ferries plied the waters of the river, back and forth, an endless stream of cargo and humanity that even the future completion of the
Brooklyn Bridge and a network of elevated railways wouldn't put out of business. Off in the distance Tyson recognized the tallest building on the skyline, Trinity Church, which dominated Wall Street.

He wondered how many of these residents would concern themselves the next few years with reports of the expedition. The North Pole was a long way off, and meant nothing at all to their daily lives. He surmised that a good number of those who did think about the expedition considered the
Polaris
crew a wild and reckless bunch willfully going to their own destruction.