18.
Greenlandic Inuit Save the Kane Expedition
Late in May 1853, while Robert McClure was trapped in the western Arctic, Elisha Kent Kane sailed on his second voyage out of New York City. On returning from Beechey Island, the articulate, charismatic young doctor had secured the leadership of the Second Grinnell Expedition to sail in search of Franklin. In keeping with prevailing geographical theory, he believed that Franklin and some of his men might yet be alive in the mammal-rich Open Polar Sea at the top of the world. In September, he sailed the small, wooden Advance—26 metres, 144 tons—into Smith Sound, achieving a new farthest north and getting locked into the ice at a bay he named Rensselaer, after his grandmother’s family.
Here, before he orchestrated a difficult escape, Kane would endure two horrendous winters of endless darkness and cold, with temperatures hovering around thirty-two degrees below zero Celsius. Starting with twenty men and fifty dogs on board, Kane sought to avert sickness with good hygiene. To avoid scurvy, he regularly mustered the men for health inspection, and also checked and cleaned the living quarters. Running low on meat, he relied on cabbage, and then raw potatoes and lime juice. Even so, men began showing symptoms of scurvy—sore joints, swollen gums, patchy discolorations on the skin.
Kane lost two men after exposure and frost turned their feet black. After enduring amputations, one of them died of tetanus, the other of a bacterial infection. Kane buried them with due ceremony, walling them into a cave on a rocky island. He then had to deal with a near-mutiny. A number of malcontents defected in an attempt to scramble over the ice to Upernavik in northern Greenland. They abandoned him with a few active men and several ailing comrades. The defection, lacking leadership, ended in near-starvation and an ignominious return to the ship.
By then, thanks to the help of his Inuk interpreter, Hans Hendrik, Kane had established an enduring alliance with the Inuit who lived at Etah, roughly eighty kilometres south. Without that alliance, neither Kane nor any of his men would have returned alive to New York City.
Hans Christian Hendrik (Suersaq), born in 1834 in Fiskernaes, southern Greenland, would prove invaluable to several Arctic expeditions. He was nineteen years old when, in 1853, Kane called in at his hometown, looking to add an Inuit interpreter and hunter. The local superintendent recommended Hendrik as an expert with kayak and javelin. On meeting the chubby young man, Kane grew skeptical. But then the laid-back Inuk, he wrote later, “as stolid and unimpressible as any of our Indians,” demonstrated his value by spearing a bird on the wing.
Kane not only agreed to pay Hendrik a modest wage, and to leave his mother two barrels of bread and fifty-two pounds of salt pork, but “became munificent in his eyes when I added the gift of a rifle and a new kayak.” Years later, Hendrik would corroborate this account in Memoirs of Hans Hendrik, the Arctic Traveller. He wrote the manuscript “in tolerably plain and intelligible Greenlandish,” according to first translator Henry Rink, and explained that he decided to join up when he learned that Kane would pay his mother. His father, assistant to the three priests in the community, had died the previous year. His mother begged him not to go, he reports: “But I replied, ‘If no mischief happen to me, I shall return, and I shall earn money for you.’”
Kane sailed into Smith Sound and, as noted above, settled in for the winter, expecting to depart the next spring. The constant darkness took a toll. In mid-November, Hendrik declared that he could no longer tolerate such a confined and miserable existence. He bundled up his clothes, took his rifle and prepared to leave. Later, in his published memoir, he would write: “Never had I seen the dark season like this. To be sure it was awful. I thought we should have no daylight any more. I was seized with fright, and fell a weeping. I never in my life saw such darkness at noon time. As the darkness continued for three months, I really believed we should have no daylight more.”
Hans Hendrik (Suersaq) was nineteen years old when he came aboard the Advance at Fiskernaes, southern Greenland. He would prove invaluable. Sketch by Elisha Kent Kane.
Hendrik remained on the ship after talking with Kane. The commander ascertained that the young man yearned after “one of the softer sex at Fiskernaes,” and noted that “he looked as wretched as any lover of a milder clime.” Kane gave him a dose of salts and a key promotion: “He has now all the dignity of a henchman. He harnesses my dogs, builds my traps, and walks with me on my ice-tramps; and, except hunting, is excused all other duty. He is really attached to me, and as happy as a fat man ought to be.” Kane’s response to Hendrik, who had difficulty adjusting to a shipboard existence, led one jealous seaman to refer to the youth as “the captain’s pet Eskimo.”
In April 1854, while Kane sat below deck with a man dying of tetanus, he heard strange sounds coming from the nearby shore. He climbed into the sunlight to see figures “on all sides of the rocky harbor, dotting the snow-shores and emerging from the bleakness of the cliffs, wild and uncouth.” Inuit hunters had climbed onto the highest fragments of land ice to stand waving and calling out “singly and conspicuously, like the figures in a tableau of the opera.”
Hans Hendrik was away hunting. But soon he returned and found he could communicate with these people, who lived farther north even than those John Ross had encountered some four decades before. At first, Hendrik wrote later, “I feared they might be murderers, as they lived apart from any [Christian Greenlanders]; but, on the contrary, they were harmless men.”
After some initial misunderstandings—pushing, shoving, pilfering, and then some brazen robbery—Kane negotiated a solemn treaty. Through Hendrik, the Inuit agreed to steal no more, and also to lead the sailors to finding animals. In return, the white men would release three hunters they had captured thieving, and use their guns to shoot game on joint expeditions.
As a result of this friendship treaty, the sailors and the Inuit began hunting together. “I can hardly say how valuable the advice of our Esquimaux friends has been to us upon our hunts,” Kane would write. “Every movement of ice or wind or season is noted, and they predicted its influence upon the course of the birds of passage with the same sagacity that has taught them the habits of the resident animals.”
Kane’s vivid descriptions of Arctic wildlife resonate with contemporary implications. He describes hunting birds, seals and walrus, all now seriously depleted in numbers, and incidentally waxes eloquent about the strength of polar bears. He relates, for example, how several bears ravaged a cache of provisions, smashing open iron caskets, and tossing aside boulders that had tested the strength of three men.
During the second winter, with the ship still locked solid, the people of Etah retreated into two large huts buried in snow, completely enclosed except for vent holes. At one point, Kane lived among them for a week. While joining in settlement life, he also functioned as an ethnographer. In his book Arctic Explorations, Kane would devote more than twenty pages to describing habits and customs, touching on everything from eating utensils to mourning rituals, religious beliefs and the perquisites of the Nalegak-soak, or head chief, who enjoyed “the questionable privilege of having as many wives as he could support.”
Kane’s detailed depictions of clothes, sledges, weapons, housing and habits provide a unique opportunity to juxtapose today and yesterday. Unlike some others, this gentleman from Philadelphia proved humble enough to learn from hunter-gatherers who had been born into a tradition of Arctic survival.
An excellent artist, Kane drew sketches that later he developed into etchings for his book. At some point, using musical notation, and as evidenced in the archives at the American Philosophical Society, he went so far as to transcribe “An Eskimo Round” for six voices. Over a period of several months, Kane would add to these sketches, producing detailed descriptions and drawings of life among the Inuit. One historian, L. H. Neatby, would suggest that these writings “make the most interesting part of his Arctic Explorations.” For many southerners, in that age before even movies or photos, Kane created the conventional image of the “Eskimo.”
During the second winter of entrapment, Kane wrote in his journal: “I have determined to borrow a lesson from our Esquimaux neighbours, and am turning the brig into an igloo.” Praising Inuit housing and diet as “the safest and best to which the necessity of our circumstances invited us,” Kane put his men to work prying moss and turf from the rocks and applying this material to the quarterdeck for warmth. Below decks, he created a large room roughly eighteen feet square, with interior walls again of moss and turf.
Having analyzed the functional ingenuity of the tossut, or narrow entrance-tunnel, to the conventional igloo, which keeps heat loss to a minimum, Kane got Christian Ohlsen, the carpenter, to create a similar entrance to the cabin from the much colder hold of the vessel. The winter quarters lacked “the dignity of a year ago,” the captain wrote, but he and his men had become warriors under siege, hunkered down in a “casemate” or bunker, with all their energies “concentrated against the enemy outside.”
Recognizing that Inuit attire suited the climate, Kane took to wearing bird-skin socks and fur boots; a fox-skin jumper, or loose-fitting shirt with an airtight hood; and bear-skin breeches, though he altered these to shelter those “parts which in the civilized countries are shielded most carefully.” Outdoors, he learned to use “a fox’s tail held between the teeth to protect the nose in the wind.”
By forging a cross-cultural alliance with the help of Hendrik, Kane not only saved the lives of most of his men but set an example that is still remembered among the Inuit of Greenland. In the 1980s, after criticizing several other explorers for their arrogance and insensitivity, the Frenchman Jean Malaurie would hail the “extraordinary agreements” Kane made with the Inuit, and observe that “the favorable memory that Kane has left among my Eskimo friends is vague, certainly, but tenacious.”
In the spring of 1855, when the ice showed no signs of breaking up, Kane developed a detailed escape plan. Around mid-May, when the cold grew less intense, he would lead the men in dragging boats along the ice-belt, and then over the pack ice of Smith Sound—a difficult trek of perhaps 110 kilometres. The men would then climb into boats and sail south, and so complete a journey “of alternating ice and water of more than thirteen hundred miles [two thousand kilometres].” At least four of the men would have to be carried—three because of amputations, and one as a result of a frost wound.
To the men, Kane offered an optimistic analysis. The hunting would soon improve, and collectively they would conquer scurvy with fresh meat. Warmer weather would enable them to reach Etah. It would also allow them to clean the cabin, filthy from lampblack, and to dry and air their fetid sleeping gear. Also, he exhorted the men to stick together. Only by doing so could they meet the challenges that lay ahead. Already he had begun sorting through documents and records, selecting those he must preserve. He set the men to working on clothing, boots, bedding and provisions, and kept them busy cutting up and stitching canvas and skins.
With the Advance still locked in the ice, Kane took Hendrik and a few others to check how far the ice pack extended. Near Littleton Island, they spotted a great number of ducks, and tracked their flight to a rugged little ledge so thick with wild fowl that a man could not walk without stepping on a nest. The men killed a couple of hundred birds for food. A rocky island crowded with gulls proved especially productive, and Kane named it “Hans Island.”
Hendrik was by far the best hunter on the expedition. At one point, with most of the men sick and provisions nearly gone, Kane wrote: “If Hans gives way, God help us.” Back on the ship, Kane sent Hendrik to seek help from Etah. Before long, he reported that the young man arrived with fresh food, three fellow hunters and much to relate: “To men in our condition,” Kane wrote, “Hans was as a man from the cities.” After spending one night at Anoatok, Hendrik had reached Etah late the next day. He was welcomed—but found himself surrounded by “lean figures of misery.” The people of Etah, too, had endured famine, and been reduced even to eating twenty-six of their thirty dogs.
When Hendrik proposed a walrus hunt, his listeners rolled their eyes. They had tried repeatedly to kill walrus. But when the sea is frozen, that crafty creature can only be taken at an ice hole. With a harpoon, this was proving an insurmountable challenge, because even a struck walrus could escape into the water. In response, Hendrik showed the people Kane’s rifle, and demonstrated what it could do. They dug out a sledge and harnessed the last four dogs. During the ensuing hunt, the men harpooned and shot not only a walrus, which took five musket balls, but also two seals.
Soon after the three hunters left, Hendrik approached Kane “with a long face” and asked permission to travel south to acquire some walrus hide for boots. He declined the offer of dogs, insisting that the weather was fine and that he could walk the eighty or ninety kilometres to Etah. The commander consented—but then waited in vain for his return.
For a while Kane worried. But from other visitors, he gleaned that Hendrik had formed an attachment to a young woman named Mersuk, the daughter of Shanghu. “Hans was a favorite with all,” Kane wrote later, “the fair especially, and, as a match, one of the greatest men in the country.” He continued to inquire after him, because “independent of everything like duty, I was very fond of him.”
Later, Hans Hendrik wrote that he doubted his companions would ever reach Upernavik. While visiting Etah, he fell sick, and the local men “behaved so kindly towards me, I began to think of remaining with them.” Still, he says that when he went off for the last time, he intended to return. But the men of Etah “began persuading me to remain. My companions would never reach Upernavik, they said, and they would take me along with them when they removed.”
Still, he adds, “it was my intention to return. But I began to envy the natives with whom I stayed, who supplied themselves with all their wants and lived happily.” Eventually, he writes, “I got a sweetheart whom I resolved never to part with, but to keep as my wife in the country of the Christians. Since then, she has been baptized and partaken of the Lord’s Supper.” This was Mersuk, who became the mother of his children.
Now, Kane wrote that some of his men were “fearfully down.” But thanks to the meat provided by Hans and the other Inuit hunters, most began shaking off scurvy. Forced to burn even the ship’s beams for fuel, Kane had preserved just enough wood to build two sledges seventeen and a half feet in length. Late in April, he set a departure date. Starting on May 17, using the new sledges, the men would drag the two whaleboats south to open water beyond Etah. They would use a smaller sledge to haul the tiny Red Eric. From water’s edge, they would set sail for Upernavik.
Kane himself would use a dogsled to ferry food and equipment as far as Anoatok, an abandoned Inuit hunting camp, halfway to Etah, that would serve as a staging post. Four of the other men could not walk. These Kane would transport by dogsled, first to Anoatok, and then to the edge of the ice pack. With preparations progressing, Kane assembled his officers and announced that he would make one final attempt to search northward for any trace of John Franklin, possibly still trapped behind a great ring of ice in the Open Polar Sea.
So far, the expedition had identified Kennedy Channel, which runs between Greenland and Ellesmere Island and today forms part of “the American route to the Pole.” As well, Kane had discovered the largest glacier in the northern hemisphere, and named it after scientist Alexander von Humboldt. In April, after a final northward sortie, Kane closed “the operations of the search” for Franklin.
Focusing exclusively on the projected evacuation, and determined to avoid anything resembling the debacle that ended the mutiny, Kane organized everything from the cooking apparatus to the arms and ammunition. He put Ohlsen in charge of the boats. Despite the man’s unparalleled abilities as a carpenter, however, and some capable assistance, nobody could confidently declare even one of the three vessels seaworthy.
The two whaleboats—twenty feet long, seven wide, three deep—had been battered by exposure to snow and ice. Ohlsen had reinforced the bottoms and fitted them with a neat housing of light canvas. And he had provided each of them with a mast that could be unshipped and carried with the oars, boathooks and ice poles. Yet the planking of both remained so dry that it could hardly be made tight by caulking. The third boat, the little Red Eric, was small enough to be mounted on the old sledge, the Faith, and could eventually be cut up for firewood.
With departure looming, Kane allowed the men twenty-four hours to select eight pounds of personal effects. Each man had woollen underclothes and a complete fur suit in the Inuit style, including kapetah, nessak and nannooke, or shirt, hood and trousers. Each had two pairs of boots, extra socks and a rue-raddy, a long canvas strap for hauling, adjusted to the proper length. Kane had also stipulated Inuit-style goggles to protect against snow blindness; sleeping bags of buffalo fur; eiderdown quilts covered in waterproof canvas; and canvas bags for personal effects, all of them numbered to avoid confusion.
On Sunday, May 20, 1855, Kane summoned all hands into the dismantled winter cabin to say a formal goodbye to the brig. The moss walls had been torn down and the wood supports burned. Most of the bedding had been stored on the boats and the galley sat cold and empty. In these bleak surroundings, Kane said a prayer, read a chapter from the Bible and took down the inspirational portrait of Sir John Franklin. Having removed the picture from its frame, he cased it for protection in an India rubber scroll. To a stanchion near the foot of the gangway, Kane fixed a note justifying the abandonment of the vessel, and explaining that “a third winter would force us . . . [to] give up all hope of remaining by the vessel and her resources. It would therefore in no manner advance the search after Sir John Franklin.”
After saying a temporary goodbye to the four invalids who could not walk and would, for a while, remain on the brig, all the other hands went up on deck. Kane hoisted and saluted the American flag, and then hauled it down for the last time. He dispensed with further ceremony. He believed that cheers would be a mockery and, lacking alcohol, proposed no final toast. “When all hands were quite ready,” he would write, “we scrambled off over the ice together, much like a gang of stevedores going to work over a quayful of broken cargo.”
Kane and his men had to haul their boats across a massive field of ice. As the weather warmed and the ice began to melt, the journey south became increasingly hazardous.
Determined to maintain discipline, the lack of which had doomed the defection, Elisha Kent Kane established clear lines of control. He assigned each man a fixed place in the drag lines, and ordered everyone except the whaleboat captains to take a turn at cooking. Recognizing that six worn-down men could not hope to haul the heavily laden sledges, Kane stipulated that the entire party would haul first one sledge and then the other. They would slog five kilometres to accomplish one, fifteen to advance three.
By May 24, the men had moved both whaleboats eleven kilometres south. That night, instead of returning to the brig, they began a routine of sleeping beside the boats beneath canvas housing. The next day, having patched and caulked the Red Eric, three men hauled it across the ice and entered it into the rotation. Temperatures remained below zero, though now the sun scarcely set. To avoid glare, the men slept by day and travelled through the twilight hours.
Kane began moving the four invalids to Anoatok, one by one. Using six dogs and a light sledge, he also shuttled provisions from the brig until the total weight reached fifteen hundred pounds—as much as the two whaleboats could carry. And now some Inuit friends from Etah, having discovered the evacuation in progress, had begun lending a hand without being asked. Already, an older man, Nessark, had used his dogs to transport supplies, and helped Kane bake bread on the brig.
With the sun climbing higher each day, temperatures rose and the ice-belt running along the coast grew soft. On June 5, the sledge carrying the Hope crashed through the ice and dragged six men into the water. They managed to crawl onto the ice, but Kane began to worry that he might be cut off from the relief hut at Anoatok. He set about moving the stores forward to two temporary stations.
Soon, heavy snow and widening chasms rendered the ice-belt almost impassable. Driven out onto the floes, Kane saw with growing concern that the ice had become sodden and stained with water from below. Besides the loads in transit, nearly nine hundred pounds of provisions remained at Anoatok, and two hundred pounds more, including shot and bullet bags, waited to be removed from another location.
Kane decided to ask the people of Etah to lend him two of their four dogs. He sent word ordering the invalids at Anoatok to be ready for instant removal and pressed on to Etah, arriving near midnight, with the sun low in the sky. Despite the temperature, twenty degrees below zero Celsius, he found thirty people gathered outside on the bare rocks. Melting snow had reduced their huts to a shambles, so now they camped out, variously socializing, sleeping, cooking auks or chomping on bird skins.
After spending the night, Kane left his tired dogs and took the settlement’s only team in unequal exchange. Old Nessark piled Kane’s sledge with walrus meat, and two young men came part way to assist him through a stretch of broken ice. Later, in Arctic Explorations, Kane would remember familiar figures with melancholy: “It pains me when I think of their approaching destiny—in the region of night and winter, where the earth yields no fruit and the waters are locked—without the resorts of skill or even the rude materials of art, and walled in from the world by barriers of ice without an outlet.”
Kane also prepared a census, “exactly confirmed by three separate informants,” that identified 140 souls scattered along almost a thousand kilometres of coast from the Great River near Cape Melville to the wind-loved hut of Anoatok. Within this narrow range, he wrote, the people exist “in love and community of resources as a single family.” They situated their huts one dog-march apart. They named each rock and hill, so even the youngest hunter could go to retrieve a cache of meat deposited anywhere in the region.
But now, Kane had no time to reflect. From Etah, with fresh dogs and a sledge-load of meat, he raced back to the whaleboats, which had arrived within five kilometres of Anoatok. Warmer weather, improved hunting and diet, and increased exercise had made all the men healthier—but also hungrier. Some food remained on the brig, and Kane managed to retrieve that.
Increasingly fearful of getting cut off from Anoatok, Kane began shuttling invalids from there to the whaleboats. The next day, one of his men returned from Etah with several Inuit, sledges piled with meat and blubber, and every sound dog that remained. Once again, Kane controlled a serviceable dog team: “The comfort and security of such a possession to men in our critical position can hardly be realized,” he would write. “It was more than an addition of ten strong men to our party.”
From the Advance, Kane fetched the last bit of burnable pork fat, so necessary to the looming boat journey. Then, from Anoatok, he retrieved the sick men. Travelling along beneath the cliffs, he marvelled at the dramatic changes in the landscape. The hot sun released rocks that had been frozen into the ice, and they rolled down the debris-strewn slopes “with the din of a battle-field . . . clogging the ice-belt at the foot.”
On June 16, 1855, after losing one man to the ice in a sledging accident, Kane and his crew began stowing cargo in their boats at the mouth of the bay near Etah, fewer than two kilometres from open water. The men had been steadily hauling for one month, except for a brief spell when, with a breeze blowing from the north, they had managed to sail across a stretch of smooth ice, using the long steering oars as booms. Thrilling to this new sensation, the men had broken into song: “Storm along, my hearty boys!”
But mostly they had slogged ahead, battling hummocks and snowdrifts with capstan bars and levers, or proceeding carefully over “salt ice marshes” scattered with threatening black pools. Without the help of the Inuit, Kane wrote, the escape might have foundered. The local people supplied the visitors with enormous numbers of small auks, which men and dogs together consumed at a rate of eight thousand a week. Once, when a sledge sank so deeply into the ice that the whaleboat floated loose, five Inuit men and two women worked with the sailors for more than half a day, asking for nothing.
Finally, at water’s edge, moved by affection and gratitude, Kane distributed needles, thread, items of clothing and even his surgical amputation knives among the Inuit of Etah. His remaining sled dogs he donated to the community as a whole, taking only Toodlamik and Whitey into the boats: “I could not part with them, the leaders of my team.”
Some of the Inuit wept, and Kane felt his heart go out to them—“so long our neighbors, and of late so staunchly our friends.” Without these people, he wrote, “our dreary journey would have been prolonged at least a fortnight, and we are so late even now that hours may measure our lives.” As the wind continued to blow, Kane gathered “these desolate and confiding people” around him on the ice beach and spoke to them as to brothers and sisters.
Kane told them that other groups of Inuit lived a few hundred miles to the south, where the cold was less intense, the season of daylight longer and the hunting better. He told them that, if they acted boldly and carefully, in a few seasons of patient march, they could reach that more welcoming environment. He implored them to make that march.
On the afternoon of June 19, the sea grew quiet and the sky cleared. At four o’clock, Kane and his men readied the boats, lashing the sledges and slinging them outside the gunwales. The three vessels were small and heavily laden. Split with frost, warped by sunshine and open at the seams, they would need to be caulked repeatedly. In these frail craft, Kane proposed to sail almost eight hundred kilometres. With the sea looking smooth as a garden lake, and despite overhanging black nimbus clouds, the captain and his men pushed off from the ice beach. Stars and stripes flying, they were making for home.
Contemporary Upernavik is a colourful town of 1,200. But in 1855, when Elisha Kent Kane and his men arrived in small boats, these few buildings constituted the entire settlement.
The voyagers had spent one month (May 17 to June 16) transporting supplies and dragging three small boats eighty or ninety kilometres south across ice to Etah. Now, having said a fond farewell to the Inuit who had helped him survive, Kane and his sixteen remaining men piled into tiny boats and began the eight-hundred-kilometre voyage to Upernavik. They survived seven storm-tossed weeks in those open boats, battling blizzards and threatening ice floes, and enduring near starvation.
But on August 1, Kane spotted the famous Devil’s Thumb of Melville Bay. Approaching the Duck Islands, he decided to end the voyage, probably the most difficult in Arctic history, not with a reckless display of derring-do, but by wending cautiously through the labyrinth of islands along the coast. On August 6, Kane and his men rounded a cape and spotted the snowy peak of Sanderson’s Hope, which rises above Upernavik. They heard the barking of the dogs, and then the six-clock tolling of the workmen’s bells. Could this be a dream? Hugging the shoreline, they rowed past the old brew house, and then, in a crowd of children, hauled their boats ashore for the last time.
The people of Upernavik fitted up a loft for the Americans and shared their meagre stores. Now, Kane learned that two vessels had passed this way, looking for him. And from a German newspaper, translated by the local pastor, he gleaned news of the lost Franklin expedition. Some 1,600 kilometres to the southwest, on Boothia Peninsula, John Rae of the Hudson’s Bay Company had retrieved relics. Apparently, the Franklin expedition had ended in disaster. Some of the final survivors had been driven to cannibalism. What? Surely not. Could this be true?
