26.
Inuit Hunters Keep Castaways Alive
“It was blowing a terrific gale from the northwest,” the Inuk Hans Hendrik tells us in a dramatized narrative, “and about six o’clock in the evening we were nipped in the ice. The ice crushed down on us with tremendous pressure, and if the Polaris had not been surprisingly strong she would have sunk at once.” This happened on October 15, 1872, during an expedition that had set out under the command of Charles Francis Hall, bent now on becoming the first explorer to reach the North Pole.
Most of the men on board the Polaris, we learn, were gathered in the waist of the vessel, looking over the rail at the floe to which we were made fast. The ship was rising somewhat to the pressure. Now the engineer came running up from below, and shouted that the vessel had started a leak aft and that the water was gaining on the pumps.”
The ship had sprung no leak, Hendrik adds in Hans the Eskimo by Edwin Gile Rich, which is based on Memoirs of Hans Hendrik, the Arctic Traveller. But the engineer “was too scared to know exactly what was happening.” When Captain Sidney Budington (also spelled Buddington) heard of the supposed leak, he “threw up his hands in excitement, and shouted, ‘Throw everything on the ice.’ He must have thought the Polaris was sinking with all hands.”
In the memoir, published in 1878, Hans Hendrik—who had first sailed far north twenty-five years earlier with Elisha Kent Kane—declares simply that “the movement of the frozen mass in a heavy gale caused the ship’s crew to land boats and provisions on the ice, to be prepared for the worst. In the following night the accident occurred which separated the ship’s company.” He then lists the nineteen persons “left upon the ice,” and the fourteen who “were drifted off with the ship.”
In the dramatized version quoted above, which surfaced in 1934, the ice commenced cracking and “exploded under our very feet and broke in many places. The ship broke away in the darkness and we lost all sight of her in a moment.” Snow was falling and a stiff gale was blowing from the southeast: “So bad were the snow and sleet, that one could not even look to windward.”
In addition to Hans Hendrick and his family, three more Inuit—Tookoolito, Ebierbing and their adopted daughter, Punna—were among the nineteen people stranded on the ice floe. Without that Inuit presence, all of the castaways would almost certainly have died.
In June 1871, Tookoolito and Ebierbing had accompanied Hall in sailing from New York for the North Pole on the Polaris, intent on extending the route discovered by Kane. At Proven on the west coast of Greenland, just south of Upernavik, Hall met Hans Hendrik. That resourceful Inuk had spent the past decade working in this area for the Greenland Trading Company. At Hall’s invitation, Hans joined the expedition aboard the Polaris, bringing his wife, Mersuk—whom he had met while voyaging with Kane—and their three children.
The ship was not a happy one. Two men accustomed to captaincy—George Tyson and Sidney O. Budington—soon came to detest each other. And Hall and the chief scientist, Dr. Emil Bessels, fell out over who controlled the scientific staff. A large contingent on the ship, resenting Hall’s micro-managing, sided with Bessels. Amidst acrimonious exchanges, the Polaris proceeded north into Smith Sound. By September, it had reached a latitude (82°29´ north) some distance beyond that attained by Kane—a new “farthest north by ship.” Tensions flared over whether to go still farther, so risking the ship to reduce the length of the projected dogsled journey. But on September 10, 1871, the ship settled where it was, in “Thank God Harbour” in northern Greenland.
Charles Francis Hall in his grave. In 1968, almost one hundred years after the explorer died, biographer Chauncey C. Loomis exhumed the body and determined that Hall had died of arsenic poisoning.
The following month, as the dark winter took hold, Charles Francis Hall became ill. Emil Bessels maintained a vigil by his bedside, ostensibly to treat him. Hall accused the doctor of poisoning him and refused further treatment. On November 8, 1871, he died, possibly the victim of deliberate poisoning. An official investigation would rule that Hall had died of apoplexy. In 1968, the scholar Chauncey C. Loomis, while writing a biography of Hall, travelled to Greenland and exhumed the explorer’s body, which was well preserved by permafrost. Forensic testing showed that Hall had indeed died of arsenic poisoning. This might have been accidental, although Loomis doubted it. No charges were ever laid. Tookoolito strongly suspected that Hall had been poisoned, and spoke of coffee provided to him by Bessels: “He [Hall] said the coffee made him sick. Too sweet for him.” She quoted the explorer’s words: “It made me sick and [want] to vomit.” The inquest discounted her evidence. Some pointed to Bessels, while George Tyson was convinced that Budington was the guilty party. In a 2001 book called Trial by Ice, surgeon-author Richard Parry suggests that Budington was an accomplice who “knew or suspected more than he let on.” In the present work, we must content ourselves with noting the controversy.
Now, in June 1872, with Hall dead and buried, Budington dispatched a party to try for the North Pole in a whaleboat. A few kilometres out, ice crushed this craft. Budington tried again, sending out both a collapsible boat and a second whaleboat. But then the Polaris floated free, and he sent Ebierbing north to summon the men. When they arrived, determined to avoid another Arctic winter, Budington turned the ship around and started south.
On October 15, while opposite Humboldt Glacier, Polaris ran up onto a shallow iceberg and got stuck. When a second iceberg threatened to demolish the ship, men began throwing cargo overboard to lighten and free the vessel. This was when those nineteen people, having been ordered off the ship, found themselves out on the ice when the pack began to break up. The two Inuit families were among them. As the castaways watched the ship drift farther away, and then disappear into the distance, the hunters turned to building igloos on what they now determined was a massive ice floe.
Those fourteen men still on the damaged Polaris would run ashore near Etah, Greenland, within a couple of weeks of the accident. They would survive a harsh winter thanks to the Inuit who lived nearby, and after starting south in two rough-built boats, would be rescued the following July by the whaler Ravenscraig.
The more dramatic struggle for survival played out on the ice floe. The jettisoned supplies included 1,900 pounds of food. For the rest, those stranded looked to the Inuit hunters, Ebierbing and Hendrik. They kept everyone alive as, during the next six months, the ice floe shrank in diameter from a few kilometres to not more than one hundred metres. The ice carried them, drifting, more than 2,900 kilometres south. George Tyson, the ranking officer on the floe, wrote: “We survive through God’s mercy and Joe’s [Ebierbing’s] ability as a hunter.”
Finally, on April 30, 1873, off the coast of Newfoundland, sealers aboard a ship called the Tigress spotted and rescued the castaways. They had survived thanks to the survival skills of Ebierbing, Hendrik and Tookoolito, though official reports and newspaper scarcely mentioned this. Hans Hendrik did undertake a modest speaking tour of several American cities. Then, back at Upernavik, he resumed working for the Greenland Trading Company.
In 1875, Hendrik joined a British expedition led by George Nares and sailed on the Discovery to the northeast coast of Ellesmere Island. Nares wrote later that “all speak in the highest terms of Hans . . . who was untiring in his exertions with the dog-sledge, and in procuring game.”
After the debacle of the Polaris expedition, Tookoolito and Ebierbing returned to Groton, Connecticut, where with the help of Hall and Budington, they had established a home. Ebierbing revisited the Arctic several times as a guide, while Tookoolito stayed in Groton, working as a seamstress and caring for their daughter, who had not been well since those months on the ice floe. When Punna died at age nine, Tookoolito fell into declining health. Ebierbing was with her when, at thirty-eight, she died on December 31, 1876. She was buried in Groton.
Her death meant that Ebierbing was alone two years later when Lieutenant Frederick Schwatka invited him to travel north to renew the search for records from the lost Franklin expedition. Over the next two years, as the guide and main interpreter on the longest sledge journey recorded to that date—4,360 kilometres—he would play a crucial role in unearthing still more Inuit testimony. And in 1880, when Schwatka sailed home, Ebierbing would remain in the Arctic.