As the Nares expedition was setting off for Smith Sound in the summer of 1875, a young Austrian scientist and naval lieutenant, Karl Weyprecht, fresh from his discovery of Franz Josef Land off northern Russia, began a campaign of his own. Simply put, Weyprecht’s scheme was to strip the glamour and romance from polar exploration and concentrate exclusively on scientific matters.

It was, of course, an ingenuous idea. Explorers, almost by definition, are romantics; it is the very glamour of the quest that lures them on, not the laborious collection of geological or botanical data. The mass of scientific evidence collected since Parry’s day was merely a byproduct of the ardent pursuit of the Unknown. Not only the explorers but even the hardest-headed of the scientists who accompanied the polar sorties were seduced by the spell of the Arctic and the need to move deeper and deeper into that mysterious and often magical realm. Weyprecht was right when he argued that the race for new discoveries – the search for the Passage and the Pole – had taken precedence over solid research.

His plan, which he proposed to a meeting of the German Scientific and Medical Association at Graz, was to forget matters of national prestige and personal ambition and to organize a carefully integrated international program of observation and analysis during the polar night of the Arctic and Antarctic that might lead to discoveries that would benefit mankind. This laudable proposal met with some opposition, but Weyprecht persisted over the next four years. He had history on his side, for this was, in a real sense, a golden age of applied scientific development. In those four years, the telephone, the typewriter, the electric light bulb, and the phonograph all came into their own. The world was dazzled by a burst of technical accomplishment – from the player piano to the carpet sweeper, from dryplate photography to the four-cycle gasoline engine. Science was seen to work; it was obvious now that it could improve the quality of life. Who could tell what new wonders might emerge from the laboratories of America or even from the makeshift observatories set up on the naked tundra of a remote Arctic island?

In 1879, Weyprecht’s ideas were adopted by the International Polar Conference in Hamburg. That led, in 1882-83, to the establishment of the first International Polar Year, in which eleven nations were pledged to establish fifteen new observation stations in the Arctic and Antarctic.

The remotest station of all would be at Lady Franklin Bay, where George Nares’s second ship, Discovery, had wintered in 1875-76. This would be the United States’ contribution to the great international undertaking. On those barren shores, twenty-four men and two Eskimos, all under U.S. Army command, would carry out scientific observations for the good of humanity. There was, of course, another, less publicized purpose. In spite of Karl Weyprecht’s high-minded pursuit of science, the expedition’s task was to try to reach the Pole, or, at the very least, to beat the British record and plant the Stars and Stripes on a new Farthest North. Thus the stage was set for the most appalling tragedy since the loss of John Franklin and his men.

At the same time another polar tragedy was in the making. On July 8, 1879, the 420-ton barque-rigged coal burner, Jeannette, steamed out of San Francisco Bay under the command of a thirty-five-year-old naval veteran, Lieutenant George Washington De Long, who had taken part in the search for Charles Hall’s Polaris. De Long was convinced that he could reach the North Pole by way of the Bering Sea. McClure’s and Collinson’s explorations should have convinced him that the permanent pack they had encountered off the Beaufort Sea would make such an excursion dubious. But De Long had been seduced by the theories of the noted German geographer August Petermann, the so-called “sage of Gotha,” an armchair scientist who was convinced that a current of warm water from the Pacific led north through Bering Strait to a tepid basin – another version of the Open Polar Sea theory.

The expedition was under naval discipline but was financed by the flamboyant New York Herald publisher, James Gordon Bennett, who hoped that the impetuous De Long would do for him in the Arctic what an earlier explorer had done for him in Africa: De Long would become another Stanley; his Livingstone would be the Pole itself. As De Long’s wife, Emma, put it, “the polar virus was in his blood and would not let him rest.”

The Jeannette had last been seen by the homebound Pacific whaling fleet east of Wrangel Land – a mysterious realm that some thought stretched like a bridge to the Pole itself. (It was actually an island.) That was in September 1879. Now it was June 1881, and nothing had been heard or seen of the missing ship for twenty-two months. Some doubts, in fact, had been cast on her seaworthiness.

Before it left, the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition, as it was officially named, was given a secondary task – to search for any clues to the Jeannette in the ice-bound waters north of Ellesmere Island. There was an element of unofficial competition here: both the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Army had mounted expeditions to seek the Pole. Now the Army had been ordered to search out and perhaps rescue the missing naval vessel. The bluecoats of the senior service would have been less than human if that had not rankled.

The Army officer selected to take charge of this ambitious undertaking was a studious, straight-backed New England puritan named Adolphus Washington Greely, who, characteristically, preferred to use his initials “A. W.” He was thirty-eight years old, a wiry, six-foot-one-inch veteran of the Civil War, bearded and bespectacled, well read but humourless, and a stickler for military discipline. Indeed, he was something of a martinet, an indication, perhaps, of an inner insecurity that would make itself felt in the ordeal to come. His creed was the work ethic. He did not countenance gambling for money; he allowed no frivolity on Sunday; he permitted no profane language among his men.

He was brave – he had shown that during his Civil War service; but he could also be irritable, and he didn’t like to be crossed. He had a strong sense of his position as a commissioned officer and of the importance of maintaining a gap between himself and his enlisted men. Although he was not imaginative, he was ambitious. He wanted the Arctic posting badly, and he got it through the help of Captain Henry Howgate, a fellow officer in the Signal Corps, who had also been infected by the polar virus. Howgate, in fact, had tried unsuccessfully to mount an Arctic expedition of his own, with Greely’s help. Neither man had ever been to the Arctic – nor had any of the officers and soldiers who would accompany Greely north – but Greely had devoured every book and journal he could find that dealt with the polar regions. He felt he had some useful experience, for he had survived a devastating three-day blizzard in the Sioux country of the American West. Clearly, the Army felt he was the best they could supply to establish a scientific station on Lady Franklin Bay. Of Greely’s twenty-four followers, half were officers or non-commissioned officers, an indication of the importance the Army placed on the expedition.

The ship that would take this party north and deposit it on the inhospitable shores of Ellesmere Island was a 467-ton sealer, the Proteus, a rugged steamer built of oak and ironwood. Early in July, 1881, she reached St. John’s, where the native Newfoundlanders, long since accustomed to polar parties shifting back and forth through their capital, showed a marked lack of interest in her departure. She crossed the treacherous Melville Bay in a record thirty-six hours – a remarkable feat – and reached her destination on August 11.

Greely had already written a last letter to his wife, Henrietta, which the Proteus would carry back: “I think of you always and most continually. I wonder what you and the darling babes are doing. I desire continually you and your society, our home and its comforts. I am content at being here only that I hope from and through it the future may be made brighter and happier for you and the children. Will it? We will so hope and trust. There seems so little outside of you and the babes that is of any real and true value to me.…”

Now here he was, as far from civilization as it was possible to get, almost a thousand miles north of the Arctic Circle, six hundred miles south of the Pole, living with two dozen followers in a barren hut named Fort Conger and facing, on that very first night, the same tensions that Hall and Kane had encountered and that the American government had hoped to forestall.

Both of his lieutenants, James B. Lockwood and Frederick Kislingbury, had been in the habit of lying in bed long after breakfast call when the enlisted men were up and about. Greely resented this and gave both men a dressing down. When Lockwood admitted his delinquency and promised to reform, Greely forgave him, although the promised reform took several weeks. But the other lie-abed, Kislingbury, took Greely’s words in bad part, and that Greely couldn’t abide. When Kislingbury continued to sleep in, Greely, nervous about his command, brought matters to a head in an acrimonious encounter that ended when Kislingbury asked to be recalled.

Obviously, there was more to it than that. Kislingbury, a veteran of fifteen years’ Army service, eight on the frontier, had been the first to volunteer. He had lost two wives in three years and was now the single father of four small boys. The trip, he said, was “a Godsend … a wonderful chance to wear out my second terrible sorrow.” Now he was throwing it all away. Obviously he felt he could not get along with his commander.

But Kislingbury had left his decision too late. The Proteus had unloaded her stores and was ready to leave as soon as the ice blocking the harbour cleared. On August 26, noticing that the way to the sea was open, the captain, in ignorance of Kislingbury’s resignation, steamed off, leaving Kislingbury making his way across the ice toward the ship.

It was an unfortunate turn of events. Greely now had a supernumerary on his hands, a man who had resigned his command, who could be given no work of any kind, and who actively despised him. The feeling was mutual, aggravated by the close conditions under which all would suffer. It was one of those foolish standoffs that sometimes make grown men act like small boys. Greely needed Kislingbury. Kislingbury needed to be an active member of the company; all he had to do was swallow his pride and apply for reinstatement. Greely clearly expected this, but it didn’t happen. All Greely had to do was offer reinstatement and Kislingbury would have jumped at it. Many months later, when both men were at the end of their tether, Greely relented. But for most of that long time of troubles, neither would unbend.

There were other problems. At Godhavn, Greenland, the expedition’s remaining four men had been taken aboard – two Eskimo dog drivers, Jens Edward and Frederick Christiansen, and two civilian volunteers, Henry Clay (grandson of the great Kentucky orator) and a surgeon, Dr. Octave Pavy. Pavy was the problem. He and Clay quarrelled so viciously that one would have to go. Greely, who could not spare the doctor, agreed that Clay would return with the Proteus. Clay made the ship that Kislingbury missed.

Pavy was not an easy man to deal with. Mercurial, often moody, ambitious, this high-domed, pipe-smoking scientist felt himself superior to the others – as Dr. Bessels had on the Hall voyage. There was no doubt in his mind that he would make a better leader of the expedition than Greely. Technically, he was now a soldier, but he considered himself above military discipline; and there was little that Greely could do about that. As scientific leader of the expedition and its only doctor, Pavy was immune.

Except for his interest in polar exploration, which was obsessive, Pavy had very little in common with his commander. In fact, it would have been difficult to discover two more disparate characters. The strait-laced Greely didn’t like him, was suspicious of his motives, and referred to him as a “Bohemian,” a word that, in Greely’s puritan lexicon, carried connotations of the devil.

Pavy’s background was both romantic and bizarre. The son of a wealthy French plantation owner and cotton merchant in New Orleans, he had been educated in Paris, where he studied both science and medicine. He had travelled widely in Europe – French was his first language – and considered himself a connoisseur of painting and sculpture. But the virus was in him, too: the Arctic captivated him; the mystery of the Pole magnetized him. In his early twenties he had encountered the French explorer Gustav Lambert and planned with him a polar expedition that was aborted only by the onset of the Franco-Prussian War. Pavy fought with distinction as a captain in the Black Guerrillas. But his Arctic hopes were dashed when Lambert was killed.

Back in the United States, Pavy had fallen under the spell of Charles Francis Hall, with whom he held daily conversations. When Hall headed north on his government-sponsored expedition, Pavy sought to out-do him with a private one. Like De Long, he was convinced that the proper route to the Pole led through the Bering Sea, and so the “Pavy Expedition to the North Pole” was born in San Francisco. In a weird turn of fortune, the chief financial backer was murdered by his valet just before the expedition was to sail in the summer of 1872. Pavy was given the news while attending a fashionable ball. It changed his life.

For the next four years, sunk in despondency, the thwarted explorer became a vagabond, living along the banks of the Missouri River – a ragged, threadbare, and friendless wanderer, working at a series of menial jobs until he was taken up by two Missouri physicians. Suddenly, he was back in society, completing his medical studies, marrying into a well-to-do family, and lecturing at the St. Louis Academy of Science. In 1880 he headed for the Arctic. The following year, at Godhavn, he boarded the Proteus and became part of the Greely expedition.

There is something splendidly ironic about Pavy’s connection with the International Polar Year. The Greely expedition, following Karl Weyprecht’s philosophy, was supposed to be devoted entirely to scientific observation; the romantic idea of a “race to the Pole” had no part in its conception. Yet the scientist placed in charge at Lady Franklin Bay was less interested in meticulous observation than he was in the adventure of polar discovery. Octave Pierre Pavy was determined to get as close to the Pole as possible – and to beat out any possible rival, including the members of his own expedition.

Greely was by no means immune to a similar ambition. At the very least, he wanted to push one party farther north than Markham of the Nares party had gone five years before. That fall he sent out two parties under Lockwood and Pavy to scout the land and set up depots for the spring sledging. He had already picked Lockwood – a tireless worker in spite of his problems at early morning rising – to try to beat the British record. But Pavy was determined to forestall him. That October, while on a sledging trip with Jens, the cheerful Eskimo dog driver, he revealed his plan to young Private William Whisler, his sledgemate. He promised he’d take Whisler with him in the spring to try to reach the highest northern latitude yet attained. He would manage this by having Whisler steal the expedition’s only remaining dogteam. Without dogs, Lockwood wouldn’t be able to travel as far, and Pavy would grab the glory. When Whisler refused, Pavy became abusive and angry. Whisler threatened him with a revolver, and there the matter ended. Whisler kept the plot to himself and didn’t reveal it to Greely until both were on the point of death. Pavy and Whisler had attempted to reach Cape Joseph Henry on Ellesmere’s northern coast but couldn’t reach it. Nor did they find any traces of the missing Jeannette.

For 136 days, from mid-October 1881 to the end of February 1882, the twenty-five men closeted in the small hut they named Fort Conger were without the sun. Marooned on those bleak and treeless shores, hemmed in by sullen, wall-like cliffs that rose as high as a thousand feet, they did their best to pass the time playing Parcheesi and chess, backgammon and cards (but never for money), engaging in theatricals, taking classes in everything from grammar to meteorology, and publishing a newspaper, the Arctic Moon. Greely himself lectured on “the Arctic question,” a euphemism for the North Pole discovery, which, as George Rice, the civilian photographer who had been given sergeant’s rank, remarked, was “a subject especially absorbing to those present.”

The four officers lived precariously, crammed together into a fifteen-by-seventeen-foot space and separated from the enlisted men by an entry alcove and a kitchen. The mordant Pavy, who felt confined “like a white bear in its cage,” had gravitated toward the equally sarcastic Kislingbury; they shared a common distaste for Greely, whose “indomitable vanity” (Pavy’s words) and rigid discipline continued to chafe.

To the restless young James Lockwood, eager to be off on his northern quest, the months seemed to stretch off endlessly. “Surely this is a happy quartet occupying this room!” he wrote sardonically in his journal that fall. “We often sit silent during the whole day and even a meal fails to elicit anything more than a chance remark or two. A charming prospect for four months of darkness penned up as we are.…”

Greely at Fort Conger, 1881-83

Lockwood longed for relief, but there was none. They had arrived in the High Arctic to experience the coldest winter on record. The enlisted men became depressed, growling over the least imagined slight. Pavy noted sourly that “they say and express loudly that they came here only to make a stake. That they have no desire and interest to make discoveries and that if they could return next year, they will do so.”

On December 5, Jens, the Eskimo dog driver – a great favourite – ran away, apparently prepared to die from starvation or suicide. A search party found him, sullen and stubborn, and convinced him that no one had intended to wrong him. Two days later, his companion, Frederick, armed with a large wooden cross, presented himself to the officers, claiming that the men were going to shoot him. He announced that he was going away to die and was restrained only with difficulty. Small wonder that Sergeant David Brainard, when he finally located Charles Hall’s grave at Polaris Bay – an equally desolate prospect – sounded a wan note in his diary. “One scarcely wonders that Hall died,” he wrote. “I think the gloom would drive me to suicide in a week.” That night Brainard kept his spirits up with some of Lockwood’s rum punch.

Late in April 1882, Greely dispatched his two main expeditions to try to better the British record of Farthest North. Pavy would take one party up the coast of Ellesmere Island, following it to Cape Joseph Henry, its northern tip, to try to beat Markham’s record. Lockwood would take a second across Robeson Channel to the Greenland coast and then north in Beaumont’s tracks.

Pavy had the bad luck to encounter open water. He returned empty handed and, if the letters Greely wrote to his wife in the expectation of a relief ship are to be believed, more surly than ever. Greely had already written that the doctor was “an arrant mischief maker.” Now he described him to Henrietta Greely as a “tricky double-faced man, idle, unfit for any Arctic work except doctoring & sledge travel & not first class in the latter.” Pavy and Kislingbury were now spending most of their time together, “united by the common wish and desire to break down the commander but not daring to openly act to that effect.”

Greely’s hope lay in Lockwood, who was facing harsh conditions in his attempts to better the British record. Within a week, four of his men had broken down and been sent back to Fort Conger. Brainard, his second-in-command, described the blowing snow as “like handfuls of gravel thrown in our faces.” On April 29, on the northern coast of Greenland, with Cape Britannia in the distance, Lockwood sent all but two of his men back, three to wait at the Polaris boat camp, the others to return to the ship. Fred, the dog driver, was indispensable, and Brainard, in spite of snowblindness, was still the strongest and most steadfast of the group. This pair would accompany him on the final dash to break the record.

At twenty-four, Sergeant Brainard – blue-eyed, firm-jawed, and handsome – had already seen five years of service with the 2nd Cavalry. He had joined the Army at nineteen on an impulse, having left his home in Norway to visit the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. Changing trains on the way back to New York, he found he’d lost the money he’d been keeping to buy a ticket home. He was too proud to write for help; instead, he took the free ferry to Governor’s Island and signed up. Wounded in the Indian wars in the West, he’d been ready to return to civilian life when the Arctic beckoned. Here he proved his mettle. Greely called him “my mainstay in many things,” and so, in the dark days that followed, he would prove to be. David Brainard was all soldier. Others in that strangely assorted company might whine, grumble, and plot; not he.

In his own words, he “stumbled about all day like a blind man,” his eyes smarting from the glare as if scoured by red-hot sand. In spite of that, the party made good time. On May 4, at four-thirty in the morning, the bulk of Cape Britannia loomed out of the haze. Beaumont had seen it, but, wracked by scurvy, had never reached it. The two Americans and their Eskimo driver, sucking on lemon-juice lozenges, arrived at its base at seven-thirty that evening and unfurled a small American flag to mark their triumph.

They pressed on for another ten days until their supplies ran out. At latitude 83° 24′ N they built “a magnificent cairn which will endure for ages” and planted another Stars and Stripes on the spot. For the first time in three centuries, it was a non-British expedition that had reached the highest explored latitude on the globe, and Brainard was determined to mark it in a uniquely American way. Everywhere he had travelled, he noted, he had always seen a malt liquor called Plantation Bitters advertised conspicuously. Nothing would do but that he climb the face of a volcanic cliff and carve out the company’s familiar trademark: St 1860 X (“Started trade in 1860 with ten dollars”). That done, it was time to head for home.

They had managed to get one hundred nautical miles farther north than Beaumont but only four miles farther than Markham. Nonetheless, the record stood for thirteen years. They had also charted eighty-five miles of unexplored Greenland coastline. On the return journey they came upon one of Beaumont’s cairns containing a message detailing the onset of scurvy, from which, thanks to an improved diet and the lemon-juice lozenges, they were happily free. But two of the support party had been so badly blinded by the glare that they had to be led back by the hand to Fort Conger. They reached it on June 11.

Lockwood’s victory did not sit well with the jealous Dr. Pavy, who was so persistently rude and hostile to him that Lockwood pleaded with Greely not to send the two out together the following spring. Greely refused. Scientific observations, he said, had to take precedence over personal failings. Greely himself set out that summer to explore the interior of Grinnell Land, as the mid-section of Ellesmere Island was called, seeking if possible to find a route through that fiord-riven domain to the “Western Sea” – in short another North West Passage. In this he was unsuccessful, but he did unlock many of the secrets of Ellesmere’s mountainous interior – a country so rugged that when he and his men returned, their bleeding toes protruded from what was left of their tattered boots.

By August 1882, the party began to look forward to the arrival of the supply ship from the south, bringing new provisions, new personnel, and, far more important, mail and news from home. Days passed; nothing. Yet the harbour was relatively clear of ice, more open than it had been the previous year. Greely could not know that the ship, the Neptune, was two hundred miles to the south, vainly striving to force its way through a frozen barrier that could not be breached.

As hopes began to fade, the company was faced with the dismaying prospect of a second winter cut off from civilization. “The life we are leading now is somewhat similar to a prisoner in the Bastile [sic]” the impatient Lockwood wrote, “no amusements, no recreations, no event to break the monotony.… The others are as moody as I am – Greely sometimes, Kislingbury always, and as to the doctor, to say he is not congenial is to put it in a very mild way indeed.” On the other hand, “the hilarity in the other room is in marked contrast to the gloom in this.”

By late fall, with no hope of relief, the mood grew even darker. Sergeant William Cross, the glowering, black-bearded former machinist who had charge of the expedition’s motor launch, Lady Greely, got drunk on spirit-lamp fuel pilfered from the little vessel and tumbled, senseless, into the icy waters of the harbour. Brainard pulled him out and because, like Pavy, he was indispensable, Greely treated him leniently. When Greely wasn’t present Kislingbury and Pavy engaged in what Lockwood called “the most gloomy prognostications as to the future, and in adverse criticisms on the conduct of the expedition.” Sometimes, Lockwood thought, the life of an exile in Siberia would be preferable. The only reading available consisted of novels and books on the Arctic. Lockwood, in studying these, became convinced, as did others, that Isaac Hayes had exaggerated his own exploits. He could not, for instance, have come anywhere near Cape Lieber as he claimed. To reach that farthest point he would have had to travel ninety-six miles in fourteen hours, a clear impossibility.

The monotonous winter dragged on. Because of the danger from polar bears the men were ordered to stay within five hundred feet of the hut, a restriction that made exercise boring. Brainard noticed the “state of nervousness our idleness has brought on all of us.” The smallest things caused aggravation and annoyance. To combat lassitude Greely had forbidden the men to sleep in their bunks during the day. The Christmas celebration, Brainard noted, was a mockery. No other expedition had spent a second winter this far north; no other had experienced nights longer or darker than these. On New Year’s Eve, there was barely enough spirit left to get up a dance. Fred, the Eskimo driver, was the star of the evening, dancing a hornpipe that at last brought a few chuckles from the downcast assembly.

Lockwood was in a frenzy to be off to reach the 84th parallel and set a new record. He left on March 2, 1883, with a party that again included Brainard and Frederick, his comrades on the previous journey. This time they failed. The polar pack, which had the year before allowed the sledges to make shortcuts across the frozen inlets, was breaking up early. The party barely escaped drowning when the dogs crashed through the thin ice near Repulse Haven on Greenland’s north shore. Lockwood wanted to keep on, but Greely’s orders had been explicit: if the pack started to break up he was to return at once and not endanger human life. Brainard told him he had no choice. They arrived back at Fort Conger on April 11, 1883.

Lockwood was grievously disappointed. “Do I take up my pen to write the humiliating word failed?” he wrote. “I do, and bitter is the dose.…” He was eager to go out again – anything to get away from the morose Pavy and the gloomy Kislingbury – and so proposed a new scheme that, he insisted, would see him exceed his previous record and still be back within forty-four days. Greely quashed it; it wasn’t prudent, he told Lockwood.

Lockwood promptly came up with an alternative plan – to go west along the north shore of Grinnell Land and then north to surpass the English again in new discoveries. This time Greely agreed. The romantic idea of an international race of discovery – the very kind of geographical contest that Karl Weyprecht had deprecated and this expedition was supposed to eschew – now seemed uppermost in everybody’s mind. Lockwood took Brainard and Frederick with him again; there was no more talk of Pavy travelling with him that spring. They set off on April 25, and this time their explorations bore fruit.

While the others continued with the ambitious scientific program the trio charted more of the interior of Grinnell Land. They discovered the vast Agassiz Glacier, which sprawls for eighty-five square miles over the heart of Ellesmere Island. They crossed the divide to the “Western Ocean” – a long fiord that led, not to the open sea, but to a tangle of islands off Ellesmere’s western coast. On their return they came upon an unexpected sight: another of those strange fossil forests that are scattered across the face of the Arctic – trees nine inches thick, turned to stone, that hint at a temperate northern world before the ice ages.

Lockwood, Brainard, and Frederick had achieved for the Greely expedition three new records: a Farthest North, a Farthest East, and a Farthest West – records the British had held for three centuries. They had travelled by foot and dogsled a distance equal to one-eighth of the world’s circumference at the eightieth parallel. Geographical exploration and national sentiment had again taken precedence over scientific observation. That became painfully clear when Greely discovered that Dr. Pavy’s own collections were in a shambles. The doctor was far more interested in scoring geographical firsts than he was in keeping a systematic scientific record. He had deceived Greely, claiming that his specimens were properly preserved and that he’d kept careful notes. He had not. The “collection” was a vast jumble of artifacts, skins, pressed flowers, and rocks. Greely fired Pavy as scientific leader and appointed Lockwood, who had no training, to bring order out of chaos. In the end it didn’t matter. The specimens, which Lockwood arranged, noted, and carefully packed, had to be abandoned.

Pavy’s contract terminated on July 20. He announced he did not intend to renew it but would continue to attend to the men’s medical needs free of charge until the expedition returned to the United States. Greely was outraged. He ordered the doctor to turn over all his official observations and memoranda to be sealed and kept for the Chief Signal Officer, as the original instructions provided. Pavy bluntly refused. He claimed his journal had no scientific value and contained only “personal and intimate thoughts … of an entirely private character.” That wasn’t entirely true, but there were some personal and intimate thoughts – those that criticized Greely and some of the others.

Greely put Pavy under arrest. Pavy blustered. Greely remained firm. He would not confine him, he said – the party needed a doctor – but he was determined to charge him with disobedience to orders and place him before a court-martial when the expedition returned.

He had a more pressing concern. What if the relief ship should again be blocked by ice? Before sailing, he had worked out a careful plan for that eventuality. If the relief ship didn’t get through in 1882, she was to deposit supplies on the western shores of Kennedy Channel. These he could pick up if he was forced to retreat down the eastern coastline of Grinnell Land. He had laid out similarly detailed instructions for the failure of a second relief expedition in 1883, fully expecting that additional caches would be left at specific points both at Cape Sabine and farther north in the area of Cape Bache. In addition, the relief ship was to leave a depot of provisions at Littleton Island on the Greenland side, directly across the twenty-three-mile channel from Cape Sabine. Here a winter station would be established. Men with telescopes would search the shoreline of Ellesmere daily looking for the Greely party as it made its way south.

Greely had no real worries about supplies. With the depots he himself had established on the way north, he expected to find seven caches along the coastline. His orders were to leave Fort Conger by September 1, 1883, if the relief ship failed to appear. If necessary he could winter near the depot at Cape Sabine – a rock island 245 miles to the south, just off the Ellesmere coast at the head of Smith Sound. The relief party in winter quarters at Littleton Island would be able to cross the channel to help them, or, if the weather was right, his own party could make its way to the island by open boat and steam launch.

Greely didn’t intend to wait until the September deadline. He had long since decided to leave for the south in early August if no ship appeared. He was convinced he would meet it somewhere along the Ellesmere coast, probably only a few miles south of Fort Conger.

Hindsight suggests that it would have been better to stay put. Game was plentiful in the area of Lady Franklin Bay, but conditions were quite different farther south. Adolphus Greely of course had no way of knowing the tragedy that was being forced on him by events over which he had no control. And so, on August 9, 1883, in two open boats and the steam launch, the party set off through the jostling ice pack on the second stage of its long ordeal.

2 Abandoned

The two attempts that were made to reach the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition in the summers of 1882 and 1883 were characterized by bureaucratic bungling, vague and often contradictory orders, and flawed planning.

The supply ship Neptune set off for the North in the summer of 1882, carrying more than eight tons of provisions for Greely and his party. The man in charge of the expedition – but not of the ship – was Private William Beebe, private secretary to General William Babcock Hazen, the Chief Signal Officer and Greely’s superior. Beebe had asked for a promotion to sergeant “or better still … lieutenant,” but that request was denied. (He was later damned in the press as a man that Hazen “knew to be an habitual drunkard.”)

The Neptune deposited two small caches of 250 rations, one on the Ellesmere coastline, the other at Littleton Island off Greenland. It struggled for forty days to get through the pack at Kane Basin and then returned to St. John’s with a ton of canned meats, an equal amount of fruit, and some six tons of seal meat, all of which might have been left for the retreating Greely party. Poor Beebe could not be blamed; he was following the general’s orders to bring back the rest of the supplies if the ship couldn’t get through. A more experienced officer with a higher rank might have acted on his own. Private Beebe did as he was told.

Henrietta Greely, the explorer’s young wife, did her best to “simulate calmness,” as she told James Lockwood’s mother, after she learned that the Neptune had failed to reach the party. After all, her husband’s expedition was provisioned for three years and, with the fresh game available and with careful rationing, could probably hold out for four. As far as she knew there would be no debilitating sledge journeys toward the Pole; these men were to remain at Fort Conger doing scientific work. All the same, with the help of the senior Lockwood – he was, after all, a general – she was doing some lobbying behind the scenes in Washington for a better-equipped and better-led expedition in 1883.

Mrs. Greely had long since come to terms with her husband’s obsession with the Arctic. It had been an obstacle to their marriage in 1878, when Dolph Greely was trying vainly to help his friend Howgate set up a North Pole expedition. “I could not think of going without you were my wife,” he had written to her. “I should suffer untold agony while gone in thinking of you … I could not endure it! You must say that we will have a few months of happiness and of each other.”

She had been torn, then. “Are not your ambition and pride guiding you to the exclusion of all other thought?” she asked him. She would rather be his wife than the widow of a dead hero, she declared. “I am not Lady Franklin. My spirit may be willing but my flesh is weak.” Fortunately for her, the Howgate expedition came to nothing. They were married in June 1878. She bore him two children, made her peace with his ambitions, and, in the finest tradition of Arctic exploration, presented him when he left with a silk flag she had personally embroidered, to be placed on lands unknown.

Now, in the winter of 1882-83, she began to read the journals of Kane, Hayes, and other Arctic explorers until, like Lady Franklin, she became as knowledgeable about the frozen world as those who had dispatched her husband to examine it.

Her efforts and those of the Lockwood family bore fruit. They had chosen the Proteus as the best possible vessel to reach the expedition. Its skipper, Captain Pike, was a veteran of forty years in the sealing fields. Two years earlier he had taken the Proteus to Lady Franklin Bay. Now, under the same master, the sealer and its crew of Newfoundlanders were the Army’s ideal choice to repeat the voyage. The Navy supplied an escort vessel, the Yantic, to accompany her. The Yantic wasn’t strong enough to invade the main pack, but she could act as a supply ship and, if necessary, an auxiliary rescue vessel.

The Secretary of War, Robert Todd Lincoln, son of the murdered president, wanted to clear up the whole embarrassing mess as quickly as possible. He had always been lukewarm to Arctic exploration. Now he was being harried by the press not only for the failure of the Neptune but also for his inability to bring Greely’s old comrade, the would-be Arctic explorer Captain Henry Howgate, to justice. Shortly after Greely left for the North, Howgate was discovered to have embezzled $200,000 in Army funds, which he squandered on a paramour. Unfortunately, he had managed to escape custody and was now at large with a covey of Pinkerton detectives vainly trying to find him.

Even worse was the sobering news that trickled in from the Jeannette expedition, a tragic failure that had cost the lives of a dozen men, including its commander, George De Long. Early in the fall of 1879, the vessel had been trapped and held in thrall by the ice pack beyond Wrangel Island, an experience that convinced De Long the theory of a warm gateway to the Arctic was “a delusion and a snare.” For the next twenty-two months, the ship remained in the grip of the ice, which bore it slowly north and west along the Siberian coast until it was finally crushed and destroyed. The crew of thirty-three left the foundering vessel in three open boats and set off on a dreadful Odyssey through the ice-choked Eastern Passage, the mainland several hundred miles away. After two months the boats became separated. One was lost in a gale; the other two landed at separate points in the bewildering maze of the Lena Delta in central Siberia. One party managed to find a native village and was eventually rescued. The other, led by De Long, perished on the tundra from starvation and exhaustion.

The subsequent naval inquiry in the winter and spring of 1882-83 (to be followed by a congressional inquiry) had turned up the usual stories of dissension, insubordination, rival cliques, plotted mutiny, and threats of court-martial – “a spirit of turmoil,” one survivor called it – that were familiar to Arctic veterans but served to tarnish the glamour that had once captured the public. Small wonder, then, that Secretary Lincoln, and indeed the president himself, had little stomach for further Arctic adventure. All they wanted to do was get the whole imbroglio over as quickly as possible.

This time, the man in charge of the Greely relief expedition would be no office clerk but a career Army officer. Lieutenant Ernest A. Garlington was a thirty-year-old West Point graduate, “sober, persistent and able,” in General Hazen’s estimation. Hazen was positively ebullient about the success of the expedition. “Everything that the most careful study and close attention could devise has been attended to and will be availed of,” he told the press. And to Henrietta Greely, he declared, “I am confident everything will go right.”

Everything, in fact, went wrong. The Proteus was to be loaded with enough provisions to last forty men fifteen months, but Garlington and his crew were not on hand to supervise loading of these supplies onto the relief ship when she reached St. John’s. Instead, they were shipped out of New York on the Alhambra on June 7 in charge of a young, newly married sergeant named Wall. Garlington and the rest of his men did not leave until four days later on the Yantic. Garlington had urged that they travel with the provisions, but that request was turned down on the grounds that discipline would be easier to maintain aboard a naval vessel.

When the Alhambra reached Halifax, Wall quit, having, it was said, been “injured by an accident”; a more believable suggestion was that he was eager to be back with his bride. Since no one from Garlington’s crew was present when the supplies were unloaded from the Alhambra at St. John’s and stowed aboard the Proteus, nobody knew exactly where anything was. To reach the meteorological instruments, for instance, the stores had to be broken into. The location of the guns and ammunition was never pinpointed, a delinquency that was to have serious consequences.

General Hazen appeared to harbour the belief that Greely was running short of supplies at Fort Conger. His orders to Garlington stressed haste. “Lieutenant Greely’s supplies will be exhausted during the coming fall, and unless the relief ship can reach him he will be forced, with his party, to retreat southward by land before the winter sets in.”

Actually, Greely had gone north with enough provisions to last three years and enough coffee, beans, sugar, and salt to last four and a half years. In addition he had, at the outset, three months’ supply of fresh muskox meat, which could certainly be added to by the hunters in his party. The expedition could easily have remained at Fort Conger for another year in relative comfort and reasonably good health if Greely had not been ordered specifically to get out by September 1; and Greely was the kind of man who was a stickler for orders.

“… no effort must be spared to push the vessel through to Lady Franklin Bay,” was Hazen’s written order to Garlington. He took this to mean that he shouldn’t stop for anything – not for the slower Yantic, not to unload supplies at Littleton Island, not to pause on the way north to unload more supplies, not even to replenish existing caches on the coast of Ellesmere Island.

There was ambiguity here. For one thing, Garlington was told that the Proteus and the Yantic must stick together as far as Littleton Island, where the Yantic was to await his return – that would force him to wait for the slower vessel. And, though he wasn’t told to stop on the way – the orders suggested the opposite – if he did stop, then he was to examine the depots for damage and, if necessary, replenish them. But the emphasis was on haste. If he couldn’t get through, the orders read, he was to return to Littleton Island, unload his supplies, and search the opposite coastline for signs of Greely’s party.

To add to the confusion, Garlington found included in the envelope that contained his orders a second memorandum that seemed to contradict Hazen’s instructions. This one told him he should unload supplies at Littleton Island en route north and also at the various coastal depots. If the Proteus foundered, the Yantic was to bring the survivors back to Littleton Island. But the Yantic was given more leeway to go her own way if the ice conditions became too dangerous. This sensible memorandum, the result of some equally sensible afterthought – none of it officially approved – had been tacked onto Garlington’s instructions as the result of a clerical error. Garlington questioned it: was it part of the official order? he asked. He was told it was not. That helped save Garlington’s skin in the inquiry that followed.

He did not wait for the Yantic. He left St. John’s on June 29 and pushed directly on to Godhavn on Disco Island off the Greenland coast. The Yantic limped along far in the wake of Proteus – as well adapted for the ice, in the words of one observer, “as a Brooklyn ferry boat” – and then, with her boilers giving out, stopped at Upernavik for a week of repairs.

Garlington, in the Proteus, blocked by the ice pack in Kane Basin, crossed Smith Sound and entered Payer Harbour off Cape Sabine on July 22. Here were two caches, one left by Beebe near the point of the cape the previous year and, on a small island about half a mile from the Proteus’s anchorage, another left by the Nares expedition in 1875. The Beebe cache was found and repaired, but in the four and a half hours that the Proteus stayed at Cape Sabine, no extra provisions were landed, even though these were easily available, having been stowed on board at Godhavn in separate packages especially for this purpose. Garlington’s almost frantic insistence on getting under way frustrated any chance of leaving a substantial cache of food and fuel for the Greely party, which would, within a fortnight, begin its long struggle with the ice down the Ellesmere coastline.

From the shore, the impetuous Garlington thought he saw an open lane of water leading north. He hurried aboard the ship and ordered Captain Pike to get moving. Pike demurred. It was too early in the season, he insisted: what Garlington had seen was no more than the ice shifting with the tide. Garlington was stubborn. Unless the Proteus moved, he insisted, “he should not consider himself as performing his duty to the people at Lady Franklin Bay or the United States Government.” And so a veteran of forty years of Arctic service was overruled by a thirty-year-old landlubber. The Proteus weighed anchor and headed out of the harbour. Fifteen minutes later she entered the loose pack.

She was a sturdy ship, built for the ice, but a decade in the sealing grounds had taken its toll. Her boilers were defective, two of her lifeboats unseaworthy, her rigging old, and her compass untrustworthy. The captain’s twenty-one-year-old son was first mate; it was his first time in the Arctic. The second mate was the captain’s cousin. The chief engineer had just been promoted to that post when the ship sailed. But even a new ship with an experienced crew could not have survived the beating the Proteus took the following afternoon.

She had tried to bull her way through a barrier of pack ice toward an open lane without success. Heavy floes, some ten feet thick, were pouring south through the narrow passage of Smith Sound. In the nip that followed at three o’clock, the sealer was in the worst possible position, headed east-west, so that the ice caught her amidships. Gripped in a hammer-lock between the pressure of the advancing ice and the unyielding barrier of the shore pack, she had no chance. Her starboard rail was crushed to matchwood at 4:30 p.m.

By this time Garlington and some of his men were desperately trying to untangle the jumble of stores in her hold. Another party at the forepeak was trying to save the parcels of prepared rations taken on in Greenland. These they hurled overboard onto the encroaching floes. A third of them tumbled into the sea and were lost.

Suddenly, the ship’s sides burst open as a flood of ice and seawater poured into the bunkers and the hold. The ship stayed afloat, caught and held by the pressure of the ice against her, until 7:30, when the tide turned and she began to sink. By then the scene on the floes was chaotic.

Everything had to be abandoned, including the sledges and the dogs that were to have been used to succour the Greely party. There had been no boat drill; it was every man for himself. The Newfoundland sealers were interested only in saving themselves and their kits. With the ship foundering, their contracts came to an end, and they had no further responsibility to any but themselves. Now they began to plunder the relief expedition’s supplies, rifling open boxes on the ice for clothing and food. There was nothing Garlington could do, for his fourteen soldiers were weaponless. All the guns and ammunition had been stowed heiter skelter in the hold in St. John’s.

Pike could not control his own crew. “You’ve got a lot of men,” he told Garlington ruefully. “But I’ve got a lot of dirty dogs who are too mean to live.” All Garlington could do was to try to prevent a confrontation by keeping his group at a distance from the “pirates and scoundrels” on the ice.

A worse concern faced him. He realized that Greely would arrive at Cape Sabine to find that the promised provisions had not been placed in the cache. With Pike’s help he persuaded four seamen to go with some of his men in a whaleboat and deposit five hundred individual rations on the nearest point of land, about three miles west of the Cape. These would last Greely’s party of twenty-five no more than three weeks.

What was he to do? The previous spring, the young cavalry officer had been out in the Dakotas. Now here he was, a man with no experience at sea, caught in the centre of the ice-choked channel, responsible not only for the men under his immediate command but also for the beleaguered party threading its way down the Ellesmere coast.

He had several choices. He could stay at Cape Sabine and wait for Greely, meanwhile eating up the supplies. He could head north, looking for Greely, a foolhardy course that he immediately dismissed. Or he could seek out the Yantic, which had plenty of provisions, leave two or three men with the Yantic’s supplies at Littleton Island to maintain a lookout for the lost party, and hustle back to St. John’s with the others to arrange for a new ship and more provisions.

He opted for the last course, but with apprehension. Although his orders were to rendezvous with the Yantic at Littleton Island, Garlington couldn’t believe that the little ship could make it across Melville Bay, that notoriously dangerous stretch of water that had once cost Leopold M’Clintock a year’s delay. It would make more sense, Garlington thought, to go in search of the Yantic. Thus was set in motion a series of mischances that might be called a comedy of errors had the results not been so tragic.

The shipwrecked party crossed Smith Sound – the Proteus’s crew in three of the ship’s lifeboats, the soldiers in two whaleboats – and reached Littleton Island on the morning of July 26. The Yantic had not yet arrived, and Garlington didn’t believe it would. With only his own rations saved from the Proteus, he could leave nothing for Greely but a message. That done, he hurried south seeking his consort.

Contrary to Garlington’s supposition, the Yantic had crossed the unpredictable Melville Bay without difficulty and was steaming steadily north. A series of rendezvous points had been arranged along the Greenland coast. One of these was the Cary Islands, some twenty miles west of the mainland. Garlington, who knew nothing of navigation, decided to by-pass this meeting place because he felt the approaches were too hazardous to make a safe landing. In doing so he overruled his more experienced second-in-command, Lieutenant J.C. Colwell. Thus he missed the Yantic, which that very day was putting in to the same rendezvous point. Not finding any message, her commander continued to steam north, passing Garlington’s party in the fog. That mischance finally doomed the Greely party to a winter of starvation.

The near-misses continued. The Yantic reached Littleton Island where its commander, Frank Wildes, learned that Garlington had left for the south. He steamed after him, neglecting to leave any supplies or message for Greely. When he landed at the Cary Islands he found no trace of Garlington and so went back north again, still seeking his elusive quarry. At one point, the Yantic was within four hours’ steaming distance of Garlington’s five boats, but the two parties failed to meet.

At Northumberland Island, Wildes found the remains of Garlington’s camp – the first clue as to his current whereabouts. He decided to turn south again to Cape York, another of the rendezvous points, but as his fuel was low and the situation looked treacherous, when he reached Cape York he decided not to land. The date was August 10; by a maddening coincidence, Garlington’s party had just arrived at that meeting place. But even as they beached their boats and set up camp, the Yantic was heading south toward Upernavik. Wildes reached it on August 12, hoping that Garlington would soon turn up.

Garlington, however, with his shipwrecked crew of sailors and soldiers, was still at Cape York. On August 16, he decided to send the experienced Colwell and a few men in one of the whaleboats to attempt a dash south across the treacherous waters of Melville Bay. He and the others, in the remaining four boats, would creep around the shoreline.

In a remarkable feat of navigation, Colwell reached Upernavik on August 23, only to find that the Yantic, having waited for ten days, had departed. Pausing only long enough to snatch some food and a few hours’ sleep, Colwell borrowed an open launch from the governor and, with his exhausted men straining at the oars, headed south for Godhavn, the Yantic’s next port of call. He reached it and found the Yantic on August 31, having spent fifteen days in an open boat and covered close to nine hundred miles of some of the most treacherous water in the Arctic. Wildes took him and his men aboard the Yantic and returned to Upernavik, where Garlington’s company and the crew of the Proteus were waiting. Thus, after more than a month of cat-and-mouse chase, the two search parties were reunited.

Area of the Greely relief attempts, 1882-84

The survivors of the wrecked ship had come through without the loss of a man; but the relief mission that had brought them to the Kane Basin was a disaster. As General Hazen wrote to Henrietta Greely, it was too late in the season to mount another rescue attempt, but “no effort will be spared to set on foot another expedition at the earliest moment possible.” Somehow Greely and his men would have to try to survive the winter on their own resources. “I hope,” the general told Henrietta, “you will not be needlessly alarmed.”

3 No turning back

On August 9, 1883, just as Garlington and his shipwrecked crew were vainly attempting a rendezvous at Cape York, Adolphus Greely and his men left the barren shores of Lady Franklin Bay and started on their long trek south. They left their dogs behind but did not kill them; they would be needed if the party were forced to return. They also left a winter’s supply of food, albeit a meagre one. Each man was allowed to take no more than eight pounds of clothing and equipment, the officers sixteen. But Greely took more.

In addition to his scientific data, he insisted on bringing his dress uniform, sword, scabbard, and epaulettes, “an emblem of authority,” as he told Lockwood. It was a significant remark, for had Greely been in firm command he would have needed no symbols. But in his attempts to hide his own uncertainties and irresolution he became a different man – imperious, irritable, unbalanced. On the second day out, he attacked the faithful Brainard with an undeserved tirade that astonished the stolid sergeant, who did not believe his commander capable of such profanity.

Like Garlington, Greely, the cavalryman and signal officer, had no idea of how to operate a boat in the ice, nor did any of his men. Only two had any sea training – Private Roderick Schneider, who had once been a seaman, and Sergeant Rice, the photographer, who had been raised on Cape Breton Island. Rice quickly became the hero of the journey. When the yacht, Lady Greely, steamed off into the ice-choked channel, towing three open boats, Rice, perched on the foredeck of the jolly boat Valorous, developed an uncanny ability to spot lanes of open water. For his pains he suffered a series of duckings, which he took with good humour.

Even the gloomy Kislingbury thought the world of Rice, reserving his harshest condemnation for Greely. “Lt. G. controlling things,” he wrote in his diary on August 13. “Poor man he knows nothing about the business, has not sense enough to put a good man like Rice as ice navigator … Lockwood could run things better than he does. We lose more distance, time and coal by his nonsense.”

Kislingbury’s comments might be taken as biased, but there were similar remarks in the diaries of others on that long journey. In order to establish authority, Greely tried to run things himself, refusing to listen to the counsel of others. Even Sergeant Joseph Elison, a more dispassionate observer, was vitriolic, referring to his commander as a “lunatic,” a “miserable fool,” “a fraud [and] a humbug.”

Greely’s temper did not improve when he discovered that Cross, the engineer aboard the yacht, was again getting blind drunk on fuel alcohol filched from the engine room. Greely’s hands were tied: Cross, like Pavy, was essential to the expedition. Then, on August 15, he could stand it no longer; Cross was drunk again and insubordinate to the commander, whom he considered “a shirt tail navigator.” In the bitter altercation that followed, Greely drew his pistol. “Shut up!” he shouted, “or else I put a bullet through you.” At that Cross replied, “Go ahead!” Greely didn’t shoot, but he suspended Cross and replaced him with Julius Frederick.

That same day an extraordinary incident took place that was not revealed until many years later. Everyone in the party was concerned because Greely was insisting on abandoning the launch, hoisting the boats onto an ice floe, and trying to drift nearly three hundred miles south to Littleton Island – an act that Brainard, for one, considered “little short of madness.” On the day of the Cross incident, Pavy, Kislingbury, and Rice came to Brainard with a proposition. Pavy volunteered to examine Greely and pronounce him insane. It would not be difficult, he explained, because the commander’s frequent outbursts without provocation established a prima facie case of dementia.

Pavy said he was prepared to establish the legitimacy of his diagnosis before any later court of inquiry. Once Greely was shown to be incapable of maintaining leadership, he would be deposed and Kislingbury would assume control of the expedition. The party would at once turn about and go back to Fort Conger, spend the winter there, and then sledge south in the spring. If Lockwood refused to acknowledge Kislingbury’s authority, he was to be placed under arrest. But the plotters had to have Brainard on their side. The men respected the senior sergeant and would follow his lead. Without him the plan was doomed.

Brainard was, by this time, almost certain that disaster was inevitable. He, too, thought the party’s best chance was to return to Fort Conger. But Brainard was all Army, and this was mutiny. He was having no part of it. In fact, he said, he would resist any such attempt with his life. Nonetheless, he did not tell Greely, for he knew his obstinate nature and was convinced the commander would immediately put into practice the very plan they were resisting – to drift helplessly south with the polar pack. Brainard disclosed the plot only in 1890 and in doing so made it clear that he was not in any way condemning the plotters, who, he felt, were “impelled by a spirit of devotion to the expedition.” Indeed, he wrote that had the plan been consummated, “it is not at all improbable that every man would have escaped with his life.”

But the plan was abandoned. By August 22, the party had reached the halfway point between Fort Conger and Littleton Island. Now there was no turning back. By August 26, when they arrived at a depot that Nares had left at Cape Hawks, they had only sixty days of provisions left, augmented by 250 pounds of mouldy bread and 165 pounds of potatoes left by the English.

Greely could not understand why there was no sign of the relief vessel. More and more he despaired of reaching Littleton Island. If Cross and Kislingbury are to be believed, he had become benumbed, spending more and more time in his sleeping bag. The flotilla, now trapped in the ice, was drifting helplessly with the pack – a perilous position in which the boats could be crushed or destroyed at any moment. When he overheard Kislingbury discussing this with the men and publicly chafing at the inactivity of his superior, Greely upbraided him for undermining his authority. But on September 9 he did call a council of his officers and senior sergeants and turned the navigation over to Rice.

Their progress had been maddeningly slow. Beset in the ice for fifteen days, they had moved only twenty-two miles. The council decided to abandon the yacht and the jolly boat and haul the other boats and supplies across the ice to the Ellesmere shore, eleven miles to the west. Remarkably, the men unanimously agreed not to jettison the hundred-pound pendulum whose observations, taken at Fort Conger, would have no value unless they could be subsequently repeated with the same instrument. Off the party went – twenty-five men hauling sixty-five hundred pounds across the broken surface of the frozen sea. It was more than they could handle. Two days later the whaleboat also was abandoned.

To move everything one mile the men had to haul for five, shuttling the supplies forward bit by bit. The situation grew more dangerous. Even Brainard was shaken by the roar of the grinding pack to the east, “so terrible that even the bravest cannot appear unconcerned.” The floe they were crossing was not connected to land but drifted helplessly about in the basin. When the wind suddenly shifted, the weary men realized they were being blown back north. By the afternoon of September 15, they had lost fifteen miles and were down to forty days’ rations, together with whatever seal meat the two Eskimo hunters could shoot for them.

In order to prevent a further decline in morale, Greely forbade his meteorologist, young Sergeant Edward Israel, to disclose to the others any observations of latitude. Pavy, meanwhile, was bitterly denouncing his commander, claiming that had his advice been taken the party would have remained safely at Fort Conger. A nasty row ensued, but since the doctor was irreplaceable Greely again could take no action.

The wind changed. The floe spun about and began to drift south again. On September 19, land was spotted no more than three miles away. But where was the relief ship? There was no sign of human movement on the Ellesmere shore.

Again the wind shifted. The floe was driven back into the Kane Basin until they were farther north and east of land than before – a good twenty miles. Brainard was heartsick. “Misfortune and calamity, hand in hand, have clung to us along the entire line of this retreat.… To cross the floes over this distance seems a hopeless undertaking when we can average only about a mile and a quarter per day. And now we have been shown what child’s play the wind can make of our struggles. How can we put our heart and strength into hauling the sledges!” That night the wind abated and Greely called a council, urging that an attempt be made to cross to the Greenland shore by abandoning everything except twenty days’ provisions, records, boat, and sledge. To Brainard that was madness.

The floe had become their prison. As long as it whirled about precariously in the moving pack – the ice grinding, crumbling, and piling up about the edges – there was no opportunity to reach land. The pressure on it increased until on September 25 the floe broke apart and the corner on which the party was camped fell away, leaving them marooned on a tiny chunk, the plaything of the winds, tides, and current. That afternoon the wind shifted again. To their dismay, they found that after thirty-two days adrift, they had passed Cape Sabine, where the food caches were supposedly waiting for them, and also the first point on the Ellesmere coast where the relief ship would have stopped.

Following another wild night the floe broke again, leaving them scarcely room enough to stand beside the boats. They were moving farther and farther south of their original destination at alarming speed in a violent ocean that seethed and foamed and could swamp them at any moment. “I see nothing but starvation and death,” Lieutenant Lockwood wrote in his journal.

Two days later the floe slammed against a grounded iceberg, “an act of Providence,” in Brainard’s grateful words, that saved them from being driven into Baffin Bay. Now two lanes of water opened up through which they ferried the sledges and provisions to the Ellesmere shore, four miles away. By this time a third of the party was ill and Cross, the engineer, so hopelessly drunk on alcohol that he couldn’t work the drag ropes on the sledges. But at least, after more than six weeks of exposure, hardship, and terror, they were on solid ground.

They realized they could not possibly cross the strait to Littleton Island. They would have to winter at this spot. The indefatigable Rice volunteered to trek north to Cape Sabine to find the cache. He and Jens, the Eskimo hunter, set off on October 1 with four days’ rations while the others built three hovels on the barren, snow-covered rocks at the base of a conical hill, using the debris from some old Eskimo huts and the oars from the two boats.

Greely estimated the party had enough food to last thirty-five days; in a pinch, that could be stretched to fifty. He showed that he intended to maintain discipline when he broke Sergeant Maurice Connell to private for complaining about his leadership and reprimanded the normally mild Edward Israel for flaring up at Brainard. Israel’s outburst suggests the strained nerves among the company. At twenty-one, the meteorologist was the youngest member of the expedition and the only Jew, a great favourite with everyone – cheerful, good humoured, innocent. He had accused Brainard of grabbing the best material for his hut but quickly regretted that outburst, apologizing profusely to Brainard, charging that others in the party had goaded him into it.

By the time Rice and Jens returned from Cape Sabine on October 9, Greely and his men were worn ragged from digging the heavy stones out of the ice with their bare hands. Greely’s own hands were torn and bleeding, his joints stiff and sore, his clothing tattered, his footgear full of holes, and his back so lame he could not stand erect. “The work,” he wrote, “has taxed to the utmost limit my physical powers, already worn by mental anxiety and responsibility.”

Rice brought terrible news. He had found Garlington’s note reporting the loss of the Proteus but discovered that the three caches in the area – Nares’s, Beebe’s, and Garlington’s – contained only enough rations to last for forty or fifty days.

Garlington’s note had suggested that the Yantic would leave more rations at Littleton Island, just twenty-three miles across the strait from these caches. At this, some of the party, Greely included, cheered up. Surely a rescue party in sledges could make its way there from Cape Sabine once the sea froze! Hadn’t Garlington written that “everything within the power of man” would be done to rescue them? Even Lockwood brightened at the prospect. “We all feel now in excellent spirits by the news,” he wrote.

Greely decided to move north to Cape Sabine at once. Garlington’s note, he thought, made their fate “seem somewhat brighter.” Privately, however, he expected to see to “privation, partial starvation, and possible death for a few of the weakest.” Brainard was even gloomier. Rice’s news, he noted, had brought them “face to face with our situation as it really is. It could hardly be much worse.”

Here they were, six hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle, on a rocky, windswept islet off Ellesmere – a spot rarely visited by ships, a land that had scarcely been mapped – subjected to the intense cold and deathly blizzards of the High Arctic, without shelter or fuel and with very little food. With the long Arctic night about to close in, the only glimmer of light was the hope that men were waiting across the strait to rescue and feed them. It was this belief, and this alone, that sustained them. Had they known they had been abandoned, Greely said later, he would have attempted to cross the ice-choked channel to Littleton Island, a foolhardy act that would certainly have doomed them all.

4 Starvation winter

The move to Cape Sabine began on October 12, 1883, and for the next several weeks Greely and his men shuffled back and forth, hauling supplies to the new camp. The weather was dreadful; October 15 was, in Brainard’s words, “the worst night of our lives.” That same day Greely examined the cache left by Garlington and discovered to his bitter disappointment that it held much less than he had anticipated. Instead of five hundred rations of meat, for instance, there were only one hundred. Meanwhile, Rice, who had been sent to examine the Nares cache, returned to report that it contained only 144 pounds of preserved meat.

Starvation faced them, but the party was in more immediate danger of freezing to death. In spite of the cold they laboured to build a hut with stone walls and a roof made of the whaleboat supported by spars made from oars. It was soon buried in snow and so cramped, being but three feet high, that even in a sitting position the taller men found their heads scraping the ceiling. They named it Camp Clay, after their erstwhile shipmate who had left the expedition because of the quarrel with Pavy.

Clay’s name turned up in some scraps of old newspapers, used for wrapping lemons, that were found in the Proteus cache. In the dim light of an Eskimo lamp, the marooned company devoured the few fragments of news from the outside world. The president, James Garfield, had been shot and replaced by Chester Arthur. And an article by Clay, written the previous May, condemned as inadequate a government plan for relief. Clay had urged that two ships be sent north; otherwise, he predicted disaster for the Greely party if it was forced to exist entirely on the provisions left by Beebe at Cape Sabine.

“The cache of 240 rations,” Clay had written, “if it can be found, will prolong their misery for a few days. When that is exhausted they will be past all earthly succor. Like poor De Long, they will then lie down on the cold ground, under the quiet stars.”

Obviously Clay’s letter had had some effect. But it was also clear that the Jeannette expedition, for which Greely had been ordered to search, had ended in tragedy. Now at last he learned that De Long had perished. It was not a cheerful piece of news.

By the end of October everybody was ravenous. When a hundred pounds of dog biscuits were opened, Greely was dismayed to discover that all were mouldy and half had been reduced to a filthy green slime. At the doctor’s urging, these were thrown away as inedible. Later, he discovered that some of his people had searched for them and gobbled them up. Lockwood was one who found himself “scratching like a dog in the place where moldy dog biscuit [sic] were emptied.” He found a few crumbs and devoured them, mould and all.

The party was already subsisting on reduced rations. Now Greely realized he must reduce rations again if they were to survive the winter. Over Dr. Pavy’s objections he cut the total daily quantities to a lean fourteen ounces per man. That, he figured, would make supplies last until March 1, when they could cross the strait with the few ounces of pemmican, bread, and tea left.

“Whether we can live on such a driblet of food remains to be seen,” Lockwood wrote. “We are now constantly hungry and the constant thought and talk run on food, dishes of all kinds, and what we have eaten, and what we hope to eat when we reach civilization. I have a constant longing for food. Anything to fill me up. God! what a life. A few crumbs of hard bread taste delicious.”

In spite of the bad weather and the darkness, Greely knew he would have to send a party to Cape Isabella to bring back the 144 pounds of preserved meat from the Nares cache. He chose Rice to lead a party of four: Private Julius Frederick, Sergeant Joseph Elison, and David Linn, the latter newly promoted to sergeant to fill the demoted Connell’s position. The party, having been fed extra rations for several days, left on November 2. They took with them additional clothing borrowed from other members of the party.

A week passed with no word. Then at two o’clock on the morning of November 10, Rice stumbled into the hut, broken, exhausted, unable to speak. At last he managed to blurt out a single sentence: “Elison is dying at Ross Bay.”

As Greely made hasty plans for a rescue attempt, Rice recovered enough to give a few details of the party’s ordeal. In the third day, Elison’s thirst was so great that in spite of all warnings he was reduced to eating snow. In doing so he froze both hands and his nose. Worse, his body heat was drained off, as the snow he had devoured melted. By the time the party reached the cache on November 7, he was in a bad way. By the morning of the ninth, during the return trip, with both his hands and his feet frozen, he had to be carried on Frederick’s back. At that point the party was forced to abandon its precious supply of meat.

The nights were a horror. The four-man sleeping bag was frozen stiff because Elison, in dreadful pain, had become incontinent, and his urine froze. In order to thaw Elison’s limbs, Rice cut up Nares’s abandoned ice boat for fuel. The results, for Elison, were excruciating. In spite of that, his feet were so solidly frozen that by the time the group reached Ross Bay, he could no longer stand. Rice grabbed a chunk of frozen beef and set off at once for the main camp, sixteen miles away. He had already walked nine miles that day; by the time he reached the hut he had been on the trail without rest and scarcely any food for sixteen hours.

At 4:30 that morning, Brainard and Fred, the Eskimo hunter, set off as an advance party. A six-man sledge, under Lockwood, followed behind. Brainard reached the Ross Bay camp at noon to find Elison and his two comrades frozen into their sleeping bag. Brainard no longer had the strength to free them. All he could do was force some brandy down their throats. Elison uttered a strangled cry: “Please kill me, will you?” Linn was not much better; Elison’s nightly screams had unhinged his mind, and it was with difficulty that Frederick had prevented Linn from leaving the sleeping bag to encounter certain death.

Brainard immediately turned back into the howling gale to find Lockwood and hurry his party along. When he reached it, he took his place in the drag ropes, and the group reached the sufferers at 5:30 that afternoon. Exposed to the storm, the three men were still frozen into their sleeping bag. The bag was chopped apart and Elison, delirious from pain, was wrapped in a dogskin coverlet and placed on the sledge. The party then set off for Camp Clay, a sixteen-mile trek that Greely was to call “the most remarkable in the annals of Arctic sledging.” Seventeen hours later they reached their destination.

Elison’s condition was pitiful. His feet were shrunken, black, and lifeless, his ankle bones protruding through the emaciated flesh. Private Henry Biederbeck, the medical orderly, who spoon fed him, changed his bandages, and helped with his bodily functions, did not leave his side for sixteen waking hours.

Meanwhile, there were thefts. Somebody had broken into the commissary and stolen hard bread. Schneider was suspected, especially when it was found that a milk tin had been broken into with a knife that was traced to him. Schneider denied it; he had lent the knife to Private Charles B. Henry. Nobody then knew that Charles B. Henry was actually Charles Henry Buck, a convicted forger and thief who had once killed a Chinese in a barroom brawl in Deadwood and had served a prison term for the crime. He had been dishonourably discharged from the cavalry but re-enlisted under an assumed name. Greely had his suspicions about Henry, whom he had caught in several lies. But at this point the evidence against him was inconclusive.

On land, Greely was a better commander than he had been at sea. With nine of his men under Pavy’s care, suffering from a variety of ailments – rupture, frostbite, rheumatism, infections, and incipient scurvy – he organized a series of two-hour morale-building lectures on the geography of the United States, covering one state at a time. Meanwhile, the two Eskimo hunters with Sergeant Francis Long set out to hunt for meat. They brought in an occasional fox or seal, but game was not as plentiful as Greely had supposed. By mid-November, he was again forced to reduce the daily ration to four ounces of meat and six of bread. The ravenous men grew more irritable, each eyeing and mentally weighing in his mind the rations doled out to the others. When the scanty meals were cooked, the entire hut was filled with the dense, choking smoke from the damp wood. Half suffocated, the men crawled into their sleeping bags. But the cooks could not protect themselves, suffering “such misery and discomfort,” in Brainard’s description, “as can scarcely be appreciated by others.”

“We are all more or less unreasonable, and I can only wonder that we are not all insane,” Brainard wrote. “All, including myself, are sullen, and at times very surly. If we are not mad, it should be a matter of surprise.”

To these burdens, another was added. One night in early December, Greely realized that Dr. Pavy was stealing from Elison’s bread can. What could he do? A confrontation would provoke a bitter fight. The doctor was the one indispensable man in camp. Greely confided in Lockwood and Brainard but took no further action.

The conversation at night centred exclusively on food. Each man made lists of the delicacies he intended to order on his return to civilization. Lockwood, who by December was obsessed by food to the point of dementia, listed a series of repasts he intended to organize with his fellows after relief came. He took to writing memoranda to himself as if the very act of committing the names of dishes to paper could somehow assuage his hunger. The result was a veritable lexicon of American regional cooking: Virginia Indian corn pone, turkey stuffed with oysters, chives with scrambled eggs, pumpkin butter, corn fritters, bacon in cornmeal, oatmeal muffins, sugar-house molasses, fig pie, coffee cake, apricot paste, Maryland biscuit, Boston pilot bread, smoked goose, spiced oysters, leaf dough biscuit, hot porter with nutmeg and sugar, hog’s marrow, blood pudding, cracked wheat with honey and milk, cranberry pie, corn pudding, bannock cake, green tomato pie, macaroni pudding, charlotte of apples – the list went on, day after day.

“Chewed up a foot of a fox this evening raw,” he wrote on November 23. “It was altogether bone and gristle.” He followed that sentence with another memorandum to himself: “Pie of orange and coconut.” Two days later in another obsessive entry he listed all the food he intended to keep in his room in Washington for midnight snacks. There were thirty-five items in all, enough to provision a medium-sized restaurant, ranging from smoked goose and eel to Virginia seedling wine and Maryland biscuit.

Christmas came. In the interests of morale Greely briefly relaxed his Spartan rationing. The men devoured a meal of seal stew with preserved potatoes and bread, followed by rice pudding, a little chocolate, and rum punch. They talked, laughed, cheered, sang songs, and exchanged with each other fanciful menus from happier Christmas days.

Elison was worse. The demarcation lines between his useless fingers and his hands, the feet and the ankles, became more pronounced each day. His fingers began to drop off. On January 2, the doctor severed the small piece of skin holding his left foot to his ankle, without Elison realizing what was happening. The following day he amputated another finger. Two days later Elison’s other foot dropped off.

By January both Lockwood and Cross were failing. Lockwood’s mind was wandering and he could not rise from his sleeping bag. It was discovered that he had hoarded his bread allowance and then eaten it all at once – twenty-four ounces. In his half-starved condition that orgy of gluttony caused him dreadful distress. He began to see double, but when Greely offered to let him have his own ration of beef, he gamely refused. Everyone was suffering from thirst by this time, chewing on old tea leaves to help fill their stomachs. Greely put some ice in a rubber bag and took it to bed with him; it melted and was used to help slake Lockwood’s raging thirst. In addition, he raised the bread ration by half an ounce a day. That was too late to save Cross, who died on January 18, a victim of both scurvy and starvation. Greely hid these causes from the others, though they no doubt understood the symptoms. Cross was buried in a gunny sack; Greely could not spare wood for a coffin.

Tempers continued to fray. Private William Whisler kept offering to take people outside to fight them, an invitation subject to fits of passion and insubordination. Kislingbury and Pavy came close to blows. “Better this than mental apathy,” Greely wrote philosophically.

On February 1, Rice and Jens attempted to cross Smith Sound to reach Littleton Island. Their passage was blocked by a lead of open water and they returned a week later, exhausted and frustrated. To counter the loss of morale Greely raised the rations for a week. He was struggling now to keep his party alive, doling out an extra ounce of meat here, an extra gill of rum there, whenever it became necessary. Brainard had told him that the party could hold out until April 1 if they could exist on four ounces of meat and eight ounces of bread a day. But the lack of game was distressing. This dismal land appeared to be destitute of life.

A kind of torpor was setting in. Sergeant Winfield Jewell spent twenty-two hours a day in his sleeping bag. Linn was gradually losing his mind. Schneider was so debilitated he refused to cook. Private William Ellis became fearful of his fellows and talked of cannibalism; later it was discovered he was stealing Israel’s tobacco. Henry, whose profanity increased each day, gloomily predicted all would be dead within five weeks. Lockwood was so obsessed with hunger he could talk of nothing but food. He complained bitterly of the meagreness of his rations, called Biederbeck “a miserable spy,” and quarrelled with Greely. Biederbeck himself was ill with fatigue brought on by caring for Lockwood and Elison. Greely doubled Elison’s rations; he could only hope to retain his own mental powers after his physical powers failed. “I am troubled by the many little matters as well as by our situation, that my temper is not as good perhaps as it should be,” he confided to his journal.

In mid-March the sun was back, but there was no sign of game. Francis Long and Fred Christiansen travelled for seventy-five miles and saw not so much as a track in the snow. Had they stayed at Fort Conger, they realized, they would now be feasting on muskox meat. As Greely put it, “we have been lured here to our destruction.” How could they attempt to cross Smith Sound – twenty-four weakened men, two unable to walk, half a dozen others incapacitated? “It drives me almost insane to face the future. It is not the end that afrights any one, but the road to be travelled to reach that goal. To die is easy … it is only hard to strive, to endure, to live.”

A freakish accident almost finished them. Fumes from the alcohol cooking lamp escaped into the hut, and the men began to topple. Biederbeck, acting as cook, succumbed first, then young Israel. Sergeant Hampden Gardiner got the door open and the others began to crawl from the hut, some fainting on the way. Greely saw Brainard stretched out on the snow. Whisler tottered in front of him, but before the commander could reach him he too lost all his strength and fell to the ground. Gardiner tried to get to him to put mittens on his fingers, but before he could do so, Gardiner himself succumbed. Nobody died, but many suffered frostbite. Greely could not use his hands to eat with for a week.

It was noticed that during the confusion one man, Private Charles B. Henry, had not tried to help anybody but himself. Little Jens reported that he had seen Henry hide half a pound of bacon in his shirt. Later that night, the culprit vomited up most of it. Greely relieved him of duty and confined him to his sleeping bag. There was little else he could do.

Meanwhile, the energetic Sergeant Rice was fishing for shrimps. He expected, he said, to rake in about a quart a day. It was little enough. The crustaceans were no bigger than a grain of wheat, and three quarters of their bulk was hard shell. Seven hundred shrimps were needed to produce an ounce of meat. But it was nourishment of a sort, and so were the tiny dovekies that began to appear at the end of March.

Although Elison’s sufferings were truly terrible, he was remarkably patient. “My toes are burning dreadfully and the soles of my feet itch,” he told Dr. Pavy. “Can’t you do something for me?” But he had neither toes nor feet, a condition that had been kept from him since January. Pavy continued to steal his bread, as Israel reported to Greely, but Greely was impotent to act.

On April 4, Fred Christiansen, the Eskimo hunter, became delirious. By morning, he was dead. The following day Linn pleaded for water; there was none to give him and he died almost immediately. Rice and a fellow Signal Corps sergeant, David Ralston, slept soundly in the same sleeping bag with the corpse, preparing for the exertion of the following day’s burial. As Brainard wrote, death “has ceased to arouse our emotions.”

For some days, Rice had been pleading with Greely to be allowed to return to Cape Baird, where the Nares beef had been jettisoned the previous November during the Elison fiasco. Greely refused, not wishing to endanger his men further. Now, with two more of the party dead, he changed his mind. Rice had been ill, but he insisted on going. At midnight, April 6, he and Private Julius Frederick set off.

Three days later, the emaciated Lockwood died. Greely restored Kislingbury to duty as his second-in-command and eulogized him for his hard work during the desperate winter days. Young Sergeant Israel broke down the following day, and Sergeant Winfield Jewell lapsed into a delirium from which he did not recover in spite of the extra rations Greely allowed him. Only the fortunate capture of a bear prevented the others from starving to death. Had it not been for this miraculous supply of fresh meat, Brainard noted grimly, most would have died within a fortnight. Greely allowed Brainard and the other shrimp fishermen two ounces extra rations a day. It was scarcely enough.

The day after Jewell’s death, Frederick returned alone with a terrible tale. He and Rice had jettisoned their sleeping bag and most of their rations at Eskimo Point in a final dash to find the English beef on the floe of Baird Inlet. To their bitter disappointment, there was no sign of it in the swirling snow. Rice was weakening badly, his feet frozen solid from trudging through pools of ice water. Dragging their light sledge, the pair started back to the point empty-handed, but Rice was soon too weak to continue. Frederick removed his own outer clothing to wrap around Rice’s feet and there, seated on the sledge, cradling the sergeant in his arms, he watched his partner die.

He described his situation in a report to the War Department: “Here I was left alone with the body of my friend in an ice-bound region, out of reach of help.… The death of my companion … made a deeper impression on my mind than any experience in my whole life. As here I stood, completely exhausted, by the remains of poor Rice, shivering with the cold, unable to bury the remains, hardly able to move, I knew that my chances to reach Eskimo Point … were very small indeed. I was completely disheartened; I felt more like remaining here and perishing by the side of my companion than to make another effort, but the sense of the duty which I owed my country and my companions and to my dead comrade to bear back the sad tidings of the disaster, sustained me in this trial.”

Frederick realized that if he didn’t return, another party would risk their lives trying to find him. He kissed Rice’s freezing face and, after seven hours of hard travel, reached his abandoned sleeping bag. It was frozen so hard he couldn’t unroll it, but he sustained himself by sniffing at a phial of ammonia. That revived him to the point where he could force his way into the bag. The following morning he went back to bury Rice’s body. Without a shovel or an axe, he was reduced to scraping away the loose ice with his hands and there, on a paleocrystic floe, he laid the dead sergeant in an icy grave. When he stumbled at last into the hut at Camp Clay, terribly worn down, he returned to Greely all of Rice’s unused rations. Despite his condition, the dedicated young cavalryman had refused to eat more than his share.

In spite of a small increase in rations – partly the result of Long’s capture of a sixty-pound seal – the state of the survivors continued to deteriorate. Kislingbury’s mind was wandering. “He talks at times like an infant,” Greely wrote. He was now concerned about the line of succession if he, the commander, expired. After some discussion with Biederbeck he agreed to increase his own ration slightly; Elison was already being allowed extra meat and so were the hunters, Brainard, Long, and Jens. Biederbeck was relieved. “Lt. G. has shown himself to be a man of more force of character & in every way greater than I believed him to be,” he wrote, “that I think it better that he & our records be saved than all of us together. I am very sorry not to have sooner found out his full worth & done him while at Conger & coming down, on the retreat, so often injustice in my thoughts.”

Greely, the martinet and arrogant amateur navigator had, under stress, become a patient and caring father-figure, sometimes even denying himself while secretly doling out extra rations to men so proud they would often refuse them. He himself was suffering from heart palpitations, convinced that his own end was near. But when Schneider broke down and refused to cook dinner, Greely left his bag and, in spite of the men’s entreaties, did the job himself.

Everyone was in poor spirits, in spite of a welcome increase in rations. Pavy had been caught by Long stealing Schneider’s rum ration. A day or two later he was found stealing Elison’s bacon. Yet in spite of these individual lapses, the party’s long trial was marked by other moments of selflessness. When Schneider spilled his tea and Ralston his stew, the others offered the two men part of their own meagre portions.

The strongest men were the two hunters, Long and Jens. Kislingbury’s mind was almost gone, and he was no longer fit to command. Brainard, who would take over if Greely and Kislingbury died, was too weak to cut up the frozen meat. When Henry stole some fuel alcohol and drank himself into intoxication, Gardiner wanted to throttle him, but was too frail to crawl toward the culprit’s sleeping bag.

Then, on April 29, Long came back from hunting with terrible news. Jens, the cheerful Eskimo, had ripped his kayak chasing a seal and drowned. Both the kayak and Jens’s Springfield rifle, the best weapon in the party, were also gone – a triple loss that cast everyone into further gloom. “I think that I am near my end,” Greely confessed to Brainard a few days later. That same morning – May 3, 1884 – Private Jacob Bender and Henry forced open the commissary door to steal rations. Whisler could not resist the temptation to seize a piece of bacon, whereupon the other two raised a cry, putting all the blame on Whisler. Whisler was contrite and offered to accept any punishment inflicted upon him, but no action was taken.

The glue of comradeship and discipline that had held the company together was coming unstuck. Pavy, ever the troublemaker, quarrelled with Greely over the distribution of rations. “If you were not the surgeon of this expedition I would shoot you!” Greely cried. When Bender tried to take the doctor’s side, Greely threatened to shoot him too. He seized Long’s rifle, but Brainard quietly took it from him and ordered Bender into his sleeping bag.

In the days that followed, Greely scribbled to Henrietta on a narrow slip of paper some final words that he expected would be found on his body: May 10: “Our chances are going fast – no game now in 27 days & only 3 days food remaining. I have cut off some hair for you …” May 12: “The whole party are prepared to die and I feel certain that they will face death quietly and decently …” May 16: “Our last regular rations … given out today … I think but one or two have any confidence in surviving. My heart troubles me & grows worse so my chances are very slim.…”

In a shaky hand he wrote some last instructions to his wife. He suggested she remain in their home in Newburyport, which “has many advantages. Cheap, good society, excellent schools, widows house not taxed, etc. etc.” His watch, he said, should go on loan to one of his daughters “with the understanding that it goes on his twenty-first birthday in perfect condition to the first male born of either daughter.” He knew a man in New York who could make excellent carbon pictures on a stretched canvas, and he urged his wife to have a dozen of his most striking photographs reproduced in that manner. It would, he scribbled weakly, be a good investment. “You can finish them off, and sell for from $50 to $100 or more according to your talent.…” A few more lines and he could write no more. He scrawled his initials “AWG” and put down his pencil.

He had already divided up the last of the rations to prevent further theft. On the seventeenth he distributed the last of the lard, which had been saved for medicinal purposes. Elison, in spite of his amputations, continued to live and even to thrive on his extra rations, while Dr. Pavy, in an unexpected burst of energy, paid several visits to the lake behind the ridge to chop ice for fresh water. But the weakest men began to die: Ellis first, on the nineteenth, followed by Ralston, four days later. And then Whisler, still begging forgiveness for stealing the bacon. According to Pavy he succumbed from fright. On May 27, Sergeant Israel, Greely’s bag companion and favourite, also died. His “cheerful and hopeful words during the long months,” Greely wrote, “… did much to … relieve my overtaxed brain.”

Those who were left existed on shreds of saxifrage, the occasional dovekie shot by Long, and the shrimp that Brainard continued to bring in. Bender, spotting a caterpillar, swallowed it whole, exclaiming, “This is too much meat to lose.” The fourteen survivors had to abandon the hut when melt water made it uninhabitable. They were now crowded into a tent pitched on a knoll 150 yards away. Brainard, returning exhausted from a shrimping trip on May 27, was forced to sleep outside in a storm because Pavy and Corporal Nicholas Salor, who shared his sleeping bag, refused to make room for him. Brainard was too weak to remonstrate. On June 1, Kislingbury died. Salor followed two days later. No one had the strength to bury the corpse, which was simply hidden behind a projection of ice.

That same day Long shot a dovekie and Greely ordered that it be given to the hunters to maintain their strength. Bender pleaded for a portion; Greely reluctantly allowed it, and that caused further trouble. Shortly afterward Henry was again caught stealing from the supply of shrimps. Bender and Schneider were also suspected of theft. “It will be necessary,” Greely confided to his journal, “to take some severe action, or the whole party will perish.”

The following day, June 5, Greely issued an order to his three sergeants, Brainard, Frederick, and Long. If Henry was again caught stealing, they were to shoot him at once. “Any other course would be a fatal leniency, the man being able to overpower any two of our present force.”

Next day, Frederick caught Henry stealing shrimp again. He had also taken part of the dovekie set aside for the hunters and had stolen and eaten sealskin lashings and boots taken from the expedition’s stores. Greely did not hesitate: “Private Henry will be shot today.… Decide the manner of his death by two ball and one blank cartridge. This order is imperative, and absolutely necessary for any chance of life.”

There was only one rifle left, however. The three sergeants drew lots and agreed never to reveal who fired the fatal shot. A brief struggle followed as Henry tried to fight with his executioners. He died with a bullet in his chest, another in his head. When his bag was opened it was found to contain various articles stolen from the stores.

A few hours later, unnerved, perhaps, by his comrade’s execution, Bender succumbed. Dr. Pavy died almost immediately after. That was a surprise, for he had seemed remarkably healthy. But he had been secretly dosing himself with the drug ergot, which, in his deranged state, he believed to be iron. In the pockets of both Bender and Pavy the survivors found stolen sealskin and thongs, which, in Schneider’s phrase, “showed how dishonest they was.”

The remaining nine men were reduced to eating lichens. On June 12, Gardiner died, a blow to the others because, as Greely put it, “he has appeared to live mainly by will power for the past two months,” an inspiration to all after the doctor had predicted his imminent death the previous April. He had been determined to return to his family and in the moments before his death had clutched an ambrotype of his wife and mother. “Mother! Wife!” he cried, and then expired.

By Sunday, June 15, the party was gnawing at the oilskin covers from Greely’s and Long’s sleeping bags. Schneider pleaded for opium pills to put him out of his misery. The shrimps had all but disappeared. Brainard worked for five hours in a high wind and got only two or three ounces. It was all he could do to crawl home with them. On June 19, Schneider died. The following day, Greely scribbled a gloomy note in his journal: “Six years ago today I was married and three years ago I left my wife for this Expedition. What contrast! When will this life in death end?”

For nearly eleven months none had washed or changed his clothes. Elison, ironically, was perhaps the strongest man in the tent. Biederbeck, who rarely left his side, strapped a spoon to one of his stumps so he could feed himself with stewed sealskin if the others perished before him.

By June 21, 1884 – the summer solstice – neither Greely nor Brainard was strong enough to hold a pencil to keep up their journals. Connell was close to death. Greely was too weak to read from his Bible. And so the seven survivors of the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition composed themselves for the end, paying only scant attention to an odd sound blowing faintly through the gale just before midnight on June 22. What had produced that mournful note? Was it the wind … or was it something else?

Greely, who could barely speak, asked whether Brainard or Long had the strength to investigate. Brainard crept out of the tent, crawled up a small knoll, and returned to report he could see nothing; it was only the wind howling across the barren rocks. He got back into his sleeping bag, resigned to death. But Long stayed out to raise the distress flag that had been blown down. A fruitless discussion followed as to the source of the sound. Suddenly, Greely sat bolt upright, his heart racing. Outside the tent he heard strange voices, calling his name.

5 The eleventh hour

In his annual report for 1883, Secretary of War Lincoln did his best to mask the mounting public anxiety about the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition. There would, he said, “be no reasonable apprehension for their safety” if it were known that they had remained at Lady Franklin Bay. It was possible, of course, that they had left Lady Franklin Bay. It was, in fact, more than “possible,” since Greely’s orders required him to do that very thing – and by September of that year. Lincoln made a clumsy attempt to explain away the probability that Greely would follow orders, go south, and find the caches all but empty. “Even in this case his condition would be by no means desperate,” he declared, for “it is thought that it would not be impossible for him to retrace his steps.” But old Arctic hands like Henry Clay and new Arctic experts, of whom Henrietta Greely was now one, knew that a trek north to Fort Conger in the winter of 1883-84 was quite impossible. Lincoln’s smooth words, however, served to allay concern. When the president, Chester A. Arthur, delivered his annual address to Congress in December, there was no hint of any money being set aside to rescue Greely.

Meanwhile, a lengthy inquiry into the Proteus disaster was still taking evidence. In January, after ten weeks of hearings, it lightly rapped the knuckles of Lieutenant Garlington and Commander Wildes. Garlington had “erred” in leaving Littleton Island without waiting for the Yantic, while it was “greatly to be regretted that in his earnest desire to succor the crew and party of the Proteus” Wildes had not delayed a few hours to unload his own supplies. The inquiry reserved a harsher criticism for General Hazen for his failure to organize a proper expedition and for his muddy instructions to Garlington. The New York Times had been baying all the fall of 1883 for Hazen’s resignation, but by the time the 575-page printed report was issued, the general was already sitting on a joint Army and Navy board contemplating another relief expedition. Nobody was court-martialled as a result of the summer’s botched mission.

On January 17, 1884, the Army and Navy board recommended to the president that up to three sturdy vessels – Dundee whalers or Newfoundland sealers – be purchased, fitted out, and provisioned for two years to seek out Greely. Every moment counted. The relief ships should be at Upernavik by May 15 at the latest if they were to get across Melville Bay and Smith Sound in time.

This sense of urgency did not communicate itself to the legislators in the House and Senate, who argued over the bill for weeks. The board had asked for unlimited funds; the politicians wanted to put a ceiling on the cost. Was this really a relief expedition, some asked, or was it yet another disastrous attempt to reach the North Pole? Congress, still investigating the Jeannette disaster, had had quite enough of the North Pole, and its members wanted to make sure that there would be no more publicly financed attempts to reach it.

Some worried about the dangers and tried to insist on a clause that would limit the expedition to volunteers. Several insisted that only American-built ships be sent north. (It turned out there were none suitable.) Others wrangled over procedural points and technical errors. There were discussions and behind-the-scenes conferences. General Lockwood himself was closeted with the president, on whom he made little impression. At one point, the senator in charge of the relief bill, Eugene Hale of Maine, was moved to cry out that “if Lieutenant Greely is to be left to perish with his followers, I hope they may die in a parliamentary manner, so that it shall be satisfactory, so that no question may be raised as to their violating any rule!”

At last, on February 13, the resolution was approved. It was very late in the day. Most available ships were spoken for as early as December. Fortunately, the two secretaries – War and Navy – acting on their own, took a chance. Before the congressional wrangling ended they bought the Proteus’s sister ship, Bear, considered the best vessel in the St. John’s fishing fleet, for $100,000. She arrived in New York harbour just two days after the appropriation was passed. By then the shortage of suitable vessels had bumped up the price. A second ship, the Thetis, purchased in Dundee, cost the government $140,000. She reached New York on March 23.

Now, however, the bread cast upon the Atlantic waters many years before returned to save the American taxpayers further expense. The Admiralty had not forgotten the generosity of the United States in salvaging the Resolute and presenting her to Britain. The British government had the opportunity of replying in kind. It gave the United States Nares’s old vessel, the Alert, which had been lying dismantled at Chatham, England, and fitted her out in the country’s best shipyard, with Nares himself and some of his officers acting as advisers. She arrived in New York on April 22. Two days later, the Bear left for the Arctic. The Thetis followed a week afterward.

This was entirely a Navy show. The crews were made up of naval volunteers, and the overall command was in the hands of a naval officer, Winfield Scott Schley. This time there would be no ambiguous instructions. One man and one man only would be responsible for everything – from the recruiting of the crews and the strengthening of the ships to the sailing orders.

“I leave the dearest home ties in the earnest hope & with the sincerest purpose to return to you the noblest of husbands,” Schley wrote to Mrs. Greely just before he sailed. “May God bless our efforts and help you to be patient in the long hours between our sailing and return.”

The two whaling ships reached Upernavik at the end of May after a difficult passage. The Alert arrived a fortnight later. Melville Bay lay ahead. Greely had crossed it in thirty-six hours, Beebe in eighty, Garlington in seventy-six. But this was June, not July, and it took the two leading relief ships twenty days to reach Cape York. Beside them and behind them, strung out through the shifting ice, were eight commercial whalers, spurred on by the U.S. government’s promise of a reward of $25,000 to any private vessel that should save the Greely party.

The Thetis reached Littleton Island on June 21. Schley immediately set his men combing the terrain. They found a pile of coal. They found a cache left by Beebe. They found traces of the Nares expedition. But there was no sign of Greely or his men.

When the Bear arrived the following day, Schley decided to cross Smith Sound at once and search the Cape Sabine area just in case Greely might be in the vicinity. He felt reasonably certain that the party had returned to Lady Franklin Bay. On the other hand, Greely might have reached the southern tip of Ellesmere. He knew it was a long shot: Greely simply didn’t have enough supplies to sustain him on that bleak promontory, but he had to make sure. The least he could do would be to examine the cairns there, leave a new cache of four thousand rations to fall back on, and then push on north.

The cape lay twenty-three miles away, hidden in the murk of an Arctic storm. Driven with the wind, the two ships reached it in just four hours. They anchored off the shore ice in Payer Harbour – a notch cut into the tip of the peninsula. Schley sent out four parties: one would search the Nares cairn, which could be seen plainly on Stalnecht Island, a low strip of land connected at low tide with the shore. One would try to find the cairn that Beebe had left in 1882 on nearby Brevoort Island. A third would take the steam tender Cub and look for the cairn that Garlington had left some three miles to the northwest after the Proteus wreck. A fourth would comb the shoreline of the harbour. No one expected to find living men.

But even as the Bear was lowering the Cub to seek out Garlington’s cache, a sailor was spotted returning from the Beebe cairn, carrying a bundle of papers and crying out that Greely was at Cape Sabine after all. Schley seized the papers and found that they gave details of the expedition and also the position of Greely’s camp. Then, to his dismay, he realized that they were dated October 21, 1883. How could these lightly clad men possibly have survived for eight months on this wind-swept promontory, with only forty days’ rations in the caches and very little fuel?

Even as Schley was pondering this news, a signal came from Stalnecht Island that more papers had been found in the Nares cairn. These consisted of the original records of the expedition together with Lockwood’s journals, a set of photographic records, and again the position of the expedition’s camp at Cape Sabine.

Schley at once dispatched Lieutenant Colwell, the veteran navigator of Garlington’s ill-fated relief attempt, in the Cub. Colwell, on an impulse, called for a flag, which he attached to a boat-hook. The Thetis sounded her steam whistle above the storm, recalling all shore parties, while Schley, in the Bear, set off behind Colwell’s launch, dreading what he would find.

Colwell’s cutter rounded the point of the cape that evening and moved up the rocky coast, which Colwell recognized from his previous visit. He found the site of the Proteus wreck cache and searched the shore with his spyglass but saw no sign of human habitation. The cutter moved on in the tossing sea and rounded another rocky point. As Colwell scanned the ridge above, he suddenly saw a figure limned against the grey sky. He called for his flag and waved it furiously. The man on the ridge stooped down painfully, picked up a flag lying on the rocks, and waved it back. Then he made his way slowly down the rocks, falling twice, and walked feebly toward Colwell, who was standing on the prow of the Cub.

“Who all are there left?” Colwell asked.

“Seven left,” said Sergeant Long.

Colwell jumped onto the shore, shocked at the scarecrow figure who approached him – hollow-cheeked, wild-eyed, ragged and filthy, hair and beard matted and straggly. Long mumbled something, twitching as he tried to speak. Then, on an impulse, he removed his tattered glove and shook Colwell’s hand.

“Where are they?” Colwell asked.

“In the tent. Over the hill. The tent is down.”

“Is Mr. Greely alive?”

“Yes, Greely’s alive.”

“Any other officers?”

“No. The tent is down.”

Colwell was already striding up the hill, his pockets bulging with bread and pemmican. He gained the crest and looked about him on a scene of desolation – a long expanse of rock sloping to the shore ice, a low range of hills behind, its steep face broken by a gorge through which the wind howled, and a small elevation in front of which lay the collapsed tent. Colwell, with his ice pilot, James Norman, and another seaman crossed the hollow just as a man emerged from the tent. It was Brainard.

The sergeant drew himself up at once and raised a hand to salute, but Colwell forestalled him and grasped it instead. Within the tent he heard a weak voice ask, “Who’s there?”

“It’s Norman – Norman who was in the Proteus,” the ice pilot answered. A feeble cheer followed.

One of the relief party began to weep as Colwell, calling for a knife, slit the cover of the fallen tent and looked in on a scene of horror.

One man, apparently dead, his eyes glassy, his jaw slack, lay close to the opening. Another, without hands or feet, a spoon tied to the stump of his right arm, lay opposite. Two others, seated in the middle, were trying to pour some liquid from a rubber bottle into a tin can. Directly across, on his hands and knees, was a pathetic figure with a long, matted beard, wearing a skullcap and a tattered dressing gown. His body was skeletal, his hands and face black with filth, his joints swollen, his eyes sunken and feverish. He stared at Colwell and then put on a pair of eyeglasses.

“Who are you?” Colwell asked.

Greely was unable to answer, but one of the others, in a weak voice, identified him.

Colwell crawled into the toppled tent and took him by the hand.

“Greely, is this you?”

“Yes,” Greely croaked. His voice was faint and hesitant as he managed a few faltering phrases: “Yes – seven of us left – here we are – dying – like men. Did what I came to do – beat the best record.” Thus did the commander of the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition reveal the true and secret purpose of the so-called scientific survey. He had got closer to the Pole than any other expedition; that was what mattered and, with what had been almost his dying breath, he made it clear. Having said that, he fell back, exhausted.

Colwell looked about him – at the filthy piles of cast-off clothing, at the ragged sleeping bags in which these men had spent most of their time for several months, at the tins of disgusting jelly made from boiling strips cut from sealskin clothing, and at the remnants of a bottle of brandy the men had been sharing when he entered.

Connell was close to death, unable to speak, his body cold, his heartbeat weak, all sensation gone. Biederbeck and Frederick were too weak to walk. Greely could not stand upright. Long and Brainard, both men of iron constitution, were in slightly better shape. Colwell sent a man to the Bear for a doctor and fed the survivors, bit by bit, from the biscuits and pemmican he’d brought in his pockets. When they cried and pleaded for more, he sensibly refused. Greely seized one of the tins of sealskin jelly, saying it was his and he had a right to eat it. Colwell took it away from him, but while he was trying to raise the tent, the others grabbed a half-empty pemmican tin, clawed out the contents with their hands, and devoured it. When Colwell told them rescue was at hand, they refused to believe it.

The doctor arrived, and little by little Greely and his comrades revived on small amounts of milk punch and beef tea. Even Connell began to recover; his rescue had come not one minute too soon. Six of the starving men were placed on stretchers and taken in the driving rain to the two rescue ships. Frederick insisted on trying to walk but had to be supported in this act of braggadocio by two seamen.

All of the bodies were exhumed, over Greely’s protests, identified, and brought to the ships. Schneider’s four-day-old corpse lay at the foot of the ridge facing the sea; his comrades had not had the strength even to cover it with a few shovelfuls of sand. Some distance away, Henry’s corpse was found, with the two bullet holes clearly visible. Schley’s men carefully sifted through the scattered piles of old clothing, notebooks, diaries, empty tins, cooking utensils, and rubbish that lay scattered everywhere. Anything of value – including a fat roll of banknotes – was to be brought home, along with the scientific records and Greely’s precious pendulum. The following afternoon, both vessels were back at Littleton Island. They left for the south on the morning of June 24.

In sick bay, the survivors began to mend. On June 28, Greely, who, next to Connell, was the weakest, was able to dress and sit up briefly. He appeared on deck for the first time on July 1. But Elison’s condition began to deteriorate. When the relief vessels arrived at Disco Island on July 5, it was clear that the stumps of his ankles would have to be amputated or he would die of blood poisoning. His strength was so badly depleted that he did not survive the effects of the operation. He died on July 8.

Six men out of twenty-five had survived. When Greely learned of the bungled efforts to relieve him the previous summer, he was bitter. In his memoirs, he blamed Garlington for “taking every ounce of food he could carry when he turned southward,” and Wildes for his long delay in the Greenland ports and “his precipitate retreat” from Smith Sound. Nor could he understand why the government hadn’t sent another ship north immediately it received the news of the Proteus disaster. If a stout sealer had left St. John’s within ten days of the Yantic’s return, he believed, the entire company would have been saved.

Meanwhile, on July 18, 1884, the first news of the rescue hit the American newspapers and the country went wild. There was no room for any other news on the front page of the New York Times that morning. When the rescue ships arrived at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on August 1, they were greeted by a screaming mob who waved and shouted from the shores and from hundreds of pleasure craft. But nobody – not even Schley’s wife – was allowed on the Thetis until Henrietta Greely had been taken aboard for a quiet reunion with her husband, alone and unobserved in the commander’s cabin.

Fifteen thousand people poured into town that weekend for the parade on Monday, August 4. On doctor’s orders, the six survivors did not attend the welcome-home rally held that night in the Portsmouth Music Hall, when fifteen hundred of Greely’s New Hampshire neighbours lauded him to the skies. Only the Secretary of War was missing. He sent along a tepid telegram which contrasted starkly with the ebullience of the moment.

The ebullience was momentary. The press soon turned from celebrating the rescue of six men to ferreting out the most melodramatic details of the deaths of nineteen others. General Hazen had tried to contain the account of Henry’s execution within Army circles. He relieved Greely’s mind by reporting that Secretary Lincoln had agreed that his act in putting down a mutiny was “thoroughly legal and proper.” But the New York Times was busily investigating rumours flying around the hospital where some of the survivors were still patients. On August 12, the paper’s front page carried a sensational scoop. It disclosed not only the story of the bullet holes in Henry’s body but something much more horrifying – cannibalism. The government, it charged, was covering up the fact that “many of the seventeen men who are said to have perished by starvation had been eaten by their famished comrades.” (As usual, the Times appeared to ignore the existence of two Eskimos in the party.)

Based on gossip and innuendo, garbled and exaggerated in the telling, the Times story could scarcely be denied. Schley’s party had exhumed the bodies and discovered that six – Kislingbury, Jewell, Ralston, Henry, Whisler, and Ellis – had been mutilated. Strips of flesh had been cut from their limbs after their deaths. Because of this discovery, Schley had sent an urgent wire as soon as he reached St. John’s, asking permission to have the corpses sealed in metal caskets.

The story caused an uproar as other newspapers scrambled to catch up to the Times. The reports grew wilder and woollier, but no one could dispute the findings of the Rochester Post-Express, which persuaded Kislingbury’s three brothers to allow it to exhume the body and examine it medically. The medical finding was that large strips had been cut from the trunk and the thigh.

Greely was shocked. He issued an immediate statement denying any knowledge of cannibalism at Camp Clay. If it had occurred, he said, it had been done in secrecy. Each of the survivors had come to him to swear that they knew nothing about it. Schley helped to dampen the most outlandish rumours in the press by confirming, on August 22, that only six of the corpses had been mutilated.

The Times, in its interview with the Kislingbury brothers, reported that the flesh had been removed “by a hand skilled in dissection.” The flesh was not hacked but neatly cut in a systematic manner by a sharp knife or scalpel, with the flaps of the skin used to conceal the wounds. That and other evidence seemed to point to Dr. Pavy as one of the culprits, perhaps the only one. The deaths of the six men in question took place between April 12 and June 6 – the latter the day Henry was shot. Pavy himself expired a few hours later, somewhat to Greely’s surprise because he had appeared to be in better condition than the others. It was recalled that in May, he had frequently gone to the lake near Cemetery Ridge (as the survivors called it) to chop ice for fresh water, an exertion that was for him unusual. At that time he could easily have taken flesh from five of the bodies. But the doctor had died only a few hours after Henry. Did he have the strength in that extremity to crawl from the tent and mutilate the body of the executed private? Perhaps; it was, apparently, the doses of ergot that killed him, not the lack of food. But it may also be that someone else was a party to cannibalism. No one will ever know.

The furore died down eventually. A remarkably large number of people took Greely’s side in what the Times insisted on calling The Shame of the Nation. Thirty years had passed since an earlier generation had rejected the suggestion that Franklin’s men could have engaged in cannibalism. Now, the attitude of Americans and Britons alike seemed to be that starving men on the brink of death could be excused for wanting to stay alive.

More significant than these disclosures was a new trend in the American press, which reflected public disillusion by excoriating what the Philadelphia Inquirer called “the monstrous and murderous folly of so-called Arctic expeditions.” The president himself concurred. “The scientific information secured,” he declared, “could not compensate for the loss of human life.”

Reasonable as it was, this reaction overlooked Greely’s genuine accomplishments. He had triumphed over scurvy, thanks to his use of fresh muskox meat and pemmican treated with lemon juice. Although the medical secrets of the disease had not yet been unlocked, it was now clear that an expedition could exist in the High Arctic without danger from scurvy if it adopted the proper diet. And Greely’s voyage to the top of the world had amassed more than two years’ worth of systematic scientific and geographical records. His official two-volume report ran to thirteen hundred pages. It covered everything from the tide patterns of Arctic waters to the question of the insularity of Greenland. In every scientific field, from meteorology and astronomy to oceanography and biology, Greely’s facts, figures, charts, and photographs became the basis for future Arctic studies. But this substantial contribution was long overshadowed by the disclosure of cannibalism, the rigid temperament that prevented Greely from becoming a popular hero, and above all public revulsion against expeditions that sacrificed human lives to personal ambition and government goals. The New York Times thundered, “Let there be an end to this folly.”

Did Greely’s scientific discoveries justify the agony that his own misjudgements and rigid adherence to orders inflicted on his men? Like his admirable sergeant, David Brainard, he eventually rose to general’s rank, having long since subdued, at least publicly, any doubts about the worth of his expedition. By the time of his death, at ninety-one, he had become an authentic American hero not only because of his Arctic ordeal but also because of his work in organizing relief for the victims of the San Francisco earthquake. His published memoirs, written shortly after his return from Ellesmere Island, summed up his own blunt view of that ghastly winter of 1883-84. “I know of no law, human or divine,” he declared, “which was broken at Sabine, and do not feel called on as an officer or as a man to dwell longer on such a painful topic.”

Chapter Eleven

1 The polar virus

2 Abandoned

3 No turning back

4 Starvation winter

5 The eleventh hour