In the Shadow of the Pole: An Early History of Arctic Expeditions, 1871-1912

INTRODUCTION

The invisible grid lines that horizontally circle the Earth are known as lines of latitude. Latitude is measured in degrees and minutes. Each degree is divided into sixty minutes, with approximately sixty-nine miles between each parallel degree. Each minute is, therefore, 1.15 miles.

This bit of information is of absolutely no interest to the general population. However, for a good part of the nineteenth century, countries such as Great Britain and the United States were preoccupied with gaining the highest degree of latitude. Each minute of latitude that an explorer attained closer to that elusive point at 90°N — the North Pole — garnered heaps of praise, incredible financial remuneration, and unbounded glory for his homeland.

Fame and glory come with a heavy price tag, though. In their bid for the Pole, countries and private individuals spent the equivalent then of what has been spent on the space program. Expeditions were outfitted and lives wagered in order to notch another degree in that country’s exploration belt. The number of lives lost in striving for the prize of 90°N is both staggering and appalling.

Sir John Franklin, undoubtedly, holds the record for lives tragically lost for the sake of Arctic exploration. In 1845, the British Admiralty gave Franklin command of an expedition with two ships, the Erebus and the Terror. His orders were to find the Northwest Passage — the other coveted Arctic prize. Franklin and his 128 men sailed into Lancaster Sound, north of Baffin Island, and were never seen again by their countrymen.

Receiving no word of the expedition by 1847, the British government, and later Franklin’s wife, Lady Jane, spared no expense in sending expeditions to find the missing men. They combed the Arctic, searching as many of the snow- and ice-covered islands and channels as was humanly possible for men unaccustomed to, and ill-prepared for, living in an environment where the mercury in the thermometer remains below zero degrees for the majority of the year. Finally, in 1859, Leopold M’Clintock’s expedition returned to England with evidence of the death of Franklin and his crew.

In those twelve years of searching for Franklin, thirty-five ships and five overland expeditions explored the archipelago, greatly increasing the knowledge of the Arctic frontier. The irony of Franklin’s disappearance is that his search parties mapped more of the Arctic than Franklin could have done in his lifetime. When the search was over, only the most northern islands remained to be explored.

For over a decade after M’Clintock’s return, Britain ceased its Arctic explorations. However, American interest in the Arctic had been kindled by its participation in the search for Franklin. By 1870, exploring the High Arctic with the intent of claiming the North Pole held great appeal. The idea of an American being first to the Pole offered possibilities of glory, international fame, and recognition.

Yet Canada, the country directly south of the Arctic region, had no interest in exploring it. While the first United States North Pole Expedition was readying for departure in 1871, Canada was celebrating its fourth birthday. It was a new nation whose physical size had quad-

rupled the summer before when, on June 23, 1870, an imperial order-in-council transferred the two territories controlled by the Hudson’s Bay Company to the Dominion of Canada for £300,000. Known as Rupert’s Land and the North-Western Territory, the addition of these territories expanded the new country’s boundaries to the west coast, east to Hudson Bay, and as far north as the Arctic Ocean; a significant area of 1,351,600 square miles.[1] Three weeks later, on July 15, 1870, the province of Manitoba was created from the southeastern section of Rupert’s Land, and the remaining area became known as the North-West Territory. On July 20, 1871, days after the First American North Pole Expedition ship Polaris weighed anchor in St. John’s harbour, Newfoundland, on its way north, the province of British Columbia joined Confederation.

Canada encompassed almost the entire northern section of the North American continent, stretching from sea to sea. Although its physical size was enormous, Canada was a small country, population wise. The first formal census of 1871 put the population at 3,737,257 people. Its southern neighbour, the United States of America, counted a population of over thirty-eight million souls.[2]

Despite the pledge to assume the duties and obligations of government and legislation for the new region under its administration, the Dominion government did little about it other than redraw the map of Canada to include the territory.[3] The fledgling country was preoccupied with governing the small and scattered population that stretched along the southern regions of Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick. The vast northern region, sparsely populated by Aboriginal people, a handful of fur traders, and Hudson’s Bay Company employees, was left to thrive on its own.

However, economic considerations in the mid-1880s led to the government sending out three expeditions to the Low Arctic region of Hudson Strait and Hudson Bay.* Though the expeditions did not cross the Arctic Circle, they were the first official northern voyages after the Arctic had been transferred to Canada. The purpose of these expeditions was not to assert sovereignty in the region, but to carry out scientific studies.

At the end of the nineteenth century, two main geographical prizes had yet to be attained: the North and South Poles. It became an international race to see which country’s flag would be raised first at these points. Britain and America were leaders in the race, each besting the other by a degree, sometimes merely by minutes, or a few miles.

As expeditions from other countries publicized their treks across the Arctic, it became apparent to members of Parliament that there was a possibility that one of these countries might claim more than just the North Pole. Foreign expeditions were roaming land that supposedly belonged to Canada. The government needed to assert itself in the Arctic, but a limited budget prevented this from being carried out in any overt way. The Dominion government managed to send another seven modest expeditions to the North over three decades. In all, ten government expeditions went to the Low and High Arctic between 1884 and 1912.

These expeditions were not widely publicized and are relatively unknown today. There was no glamour or glory about them. The expedition men were not dashing adventurers. They were heroes of a modest kind — scientists, geologists, policemen, and administrative officers — who carried out their civic duties quietly, asserting sovereignty in the North with flags and legislation. These men named geographic landmarks, made scientific studies, and informed the people they met in these regions that they were on Canadian soil or in Canadian waters. They established a presence in the most unobtrusive and unoffending way possible. They collected scientific data, issued whaling and hunting permits, and raised the Red Ensign from Hudson Bay to Ellesmere Island.

The expedition leaders, Lieutenant A.R. Gordon of the Meteorological Service, Dr. W. Wakeham of the Fisheries Protection Services, Major J.D. Moodie of the North West Mounted Police, A.P. Low of the Geological Survey of Canada, and Captain J.E. Bernier, carried out work in relatively unknown territory with no contact with the southern world they came from. They endured as much hardship (including scurvy) and as many incredible adventures as any of the well-known British, American, or Norwegian explorers who published their tales of exploration. Yet only snippets of these men’s stories and their expeditions appear in books on the Canadian Arctic. And no one book tells how collectively these men contributed to Canadian Arctic sovereignty.

This book sets out to tell their stories. It focuses on a period of just over forty years, from 1871 to 1912, when Canada first took interest in the Arctic.

In the Shadow of the Pole examines the main expeditions to Canada’s Arctic that influenced the Dominion government’s awareness of it, with particular focus on those little-known expeditions organized by the government itself. It is a tribute to the intrepid men who weren’t as concerned with latitude as they were with establishing Canada’s presence in the North.

* The region defined as the Arctic in this book is made up of two areas: north of the Arctic Circle at 66°33'N, referred to as the High Arctic, and the treeless zone along the shores of Hudson Bay, Ungava, and the Labrador coast, known as the Low or Subarctic.

CHAPTER ONE

The First American North Pole Expedition

The USS Periwinkle was used as a gunboat by the Union Navy during the Civil War. The ship did not encounter ice in its war service, nor had ice been a consideration when it was built in Philadelphia in 1864. Nonetheless, the Periwinkle was chosen in 1871 for the first United States North Pole Expedition.

Expedition commander Charles Francis Hall re-christened the ship Polaris — the North Star — a name more suited to an Arctic expedition than Periwinkle. The ship underwent significant modifications in the Navy Yard in Washington, DC, to prepare it for its Arctic voyage. After its makeover, it was believed that the Polaris was better protected against the thick sea ice it would encounter than any vessel ever built.

With an unsinkable, Titanic-style attitude, the Polaris sailed for the Brooklyn Navy Yard on June 10, 1871, where it shipped its crew and received the last necessary alterations, supplies, and stores for the six-year journey. At high tide on the afternoon of June 29, 1871, the USS Polaris slipped her moorings, the Stars and Stripes waving from its stern flagstaff. A twenty-one-gun salute officially sent the ship on its mission. The crowd that turned out to cheer the vessel’s departure was conspicuously small, though — an astonishingly poor send-off for a momentous North Pole expedition. The Polaris then steamed down the East River toward the Atlantic Ocean on its last voyage.

On August 30, 1871, the Polaris reached a latitude of 82°11'N in the strait between Greenland and Ellesmere Island. The ship had successfully attained the farthest point north of any expedition, and had explored seven hundred miles of previously unmapped coastline. Despite these accomplishments, the Polaris expedition retains a place in history not only for its success, but also for its abysmal failure.

However, the demise of the Polaris led to a series of events that changed the map of Canada. It was the catalyst for Canada becoming landlord of the entire Arctic Archipelago.

The Polaris’ company totalled thirty-one: Commander Hall, twenty-one crew members, three scientists, two Inuit couples, and four children. Captain Sidney O. Buddington was sailing master, and Dr. Emil Bessels was surgeon and chief of the scientific corps. Both men were at odds with Hall before the ship crossed the Arctic Circle. Assistant Navigator Captain George Emery Tyson remained loyal to Hall. He also kept a journal detailing the expedition, which was later published.

When its prow hit the Atlantic waves, the Polaris charted a course northward, docking at St. John’s, Newfoundland, on July 11. The ship continued its odyssey up the coast of Labrador, into Davis Strait, through Baffin Bay, Smith Sound, and beyond. Robeson Channel, the narrow strait between northwest Greenland and Ellesmere Island, was relatively ice-free that summer. The weather was with them. Pushing as far north as possible, it reached the highest north latitude on August 30. Ice prevented any further progress. So, on September 5, the men landed, raised the American flag, then turned back and took refuge in a harbour on northwest Greenland, which Hall named Thank God Harbour. Within weeks, the ship was frozen in for the winter.

On October 10, Hall and three others set out on a two-week sledging trip, scouting for a route north along which they could make an attempt at the Pole. Shortly upon their return to the ship, Hall became violently ill after drinking a cup of coffee. He died on November 8, 1871. Bessels, the ship’s doctor, pronounced the cause of death to be apoplexy, or a stroke. However, until his death, Hall deliriously accused various members of the expedition, including the doctor, of poisoning him.[1] His crew despondently chipped out a shallow grave in the frozen ground. A mound of stones still marks Hall’s resting place on a rocky promontory.

The expedition, now leaderless and rife with discord, fell apart. When the ship was released from the ice the following August, no one was interested in making an attempt at the Pole. Instead, the Polaris headed south, down the coast of Greenland.

In a vicious gale on October 15, 1872, the ship appeared to be mortally struck by ice. When its sinking seemed imminent, supplies were tossed overboard onto the ice and the crew prepared to abandon ship. Nineteen of the expedition members had disembarked when the Polaris suddenly broke free and floated away, leaving them stranded on an ice floe about four miles in circumference.

The abandoned party included Assistant Navigator Captain Tyson; nine of the crew members and scientists; Hans Hendrik, the Inuit guide from Greenland, and his wife with their four children (the youngest had been born aboard ship only two months previous); and Hall’s Baffin Island Inuit companions Ebierbing and Tookoolito and their young daughter. The ice floe broke apart and shrank to a fraction of its original size, but the nineteen managed to survive on what rations they’d tossed overboard and food hunted from the sea. This floe was not stationary, but slowly drifting south.

On April 30, 1873, the Newfoundland sealing ship Tigress spotted their SOS signals through the fog off the coast of Labrador. The ship’s boats were lowered and the nineteen castaways were rescued from their floating frozen campsite. The party had spent 197 days on the ice and drifted fifteen hundred miles.

The sailing steamship Tigress was in the midst of a sealing voyage when it dropped anchor alongside the pan of ice with the Polaris refugees on it. Sealing ships like the Tigress were typically out at the floe edge hunting from March to the end of May. Picking up the Polaris party partway through the hunting season meant that the rescued party would have to wait until the Tigress had caught its quota of seals. So, although Captain Isaac Bartlett generously offered those rescued passage to St. John’s, the ship did not head for shore but continued sealing.

Two weeks later, they were about one hundred and thirty miles north of St. John’s. The Polaris crew were very ill. Tyson noted that after coming on board, all the rescued suffered with colds, swollen feet, sore-throats, and rheumatism.[2] After their ordeal on the ice floe, the rescued party should have had immediate medical attention. But as it was now mid-May and there were seals in the hold, Captain Bartlett decided to return home.

The Tigress moored at the St. John’s wharf on the evening of May 12. The rescue of the nineteen expedition members who had survived for so long on the drifting ice was soon front page news. There was no doubt, though, that the group survived because of the expert assistance of the two Inuit men and their families, who did the majority of hunting, cooking, and making shelter and clothing. Had the two families not abandoned ship with them, all would have perished.

The United States steamship Frolic picked up the entire party at St. John’s on May 27, and docked at the Navy Yard in Washington on June 5. The Polaris party finally arrived back in the United States five weeks after they had been rescued from the ice floe, and almost two years after they had sailed north aboard the Polaris. It was not the glorious return any of them had imagined.

A naval inquiry into the plight of the expedition promptly took place, and was followed closely in the newspapers. A decision was made to dispatch a search vessel to find the Polaris and bring back the fourteen people still on board when it drifted away. While the Navy searched for an appropriate rescue ship, it sent the U.S. sloop-of-war steamship Juniata to drop off coal and supplies on the west coast of Greenland that would be used by the search ship. The three-masted Juniata, which was twice the size of the Polaris, was not built to handle Arctic ice packs and so was instructed to wait for the coming rescue party at Disko Island, halfway up the west coast of Greenland.[3]

In Greenland, Lieutenant George Washington DeLong, one of the officers on the Juniata, was given command of a thirty-two-foot steam launch, nicknamed Little Juniata. It would cruise the fiords and inlets along the Greenland coast for any sign of the missing ship and crew. The Little Juniata, with a party of nine, set out on its search on August 2. The launch was provisioned with two months of supplies. It explored some of the fiords, but met with extreme weather conditions and returned to the mother ship nine days later.

The Juniata set up a supply depot on Greenland as instructed, then returned to New York, arriving on November 1, 1873 — a period of little more than three months during the mild, relatively ice-free summer months.

The Rescue Mission

As it turned out, the United States Navy had no available ice-worthy ship, and without the luxury of time to refit one of its existing fleet, settled for a privately owned vessel built for the icy North Atlantic waters. The Navy purchased the Tigress (the same ship that had rescued the party from the ice) for $60,000. It gave the owners, the prominent Newfoundland sealing and fishery business Harvey and Company, the option to buy the ship back after the rescue operations.

The three-masted sailing steamship Tigress was built in Quebec in 1871 for the sealing trade. The Tigress differed from ordinary vessels because its bow was designed at an acute angle, with a flat hull that widened gradually below the waterline. This flaring of its hull enabled the ship to rise up on the floe ice and break through the ice with its sheer weight. Modern icebreakers employ the same principle.

At 165 feet, the Tigress was twenty-five feet longer than the Polaris. The first twenty feet of the Tigress’ bow were more than three feet thick, with the first twelve feet of that encased in half-inch-thick iron. It was fitted with two steam engines of twelve hundred horsepower. However, its boilers were designed to burn soft coal, and as the Juniata had only deposited hard coal at Disko for the rescue vessel, the boilers had to be replaced.

The ship was brought to the Brooklyn Navy Yard for modifications. There the boilers were changed and the ship outfitted with new rigging, sails, and topmasts. Steam pipes were added to the interior for heating in the event that the Tigress would be forced to overwinter in the North. As well, the cabin was enlarged, and two deckhouses were constructed to accommodate the large number of naval personnel required for the rescue mission.

Civil War veteran James A. Greer was given command of the expedition, and Captain George Tyson was named acting lieutenant and ice-master. The Tigress carried a complement of eleven officers and forty-two men. However, only thirteen of these men were actually seamen, who had to do all the work of the ship. One of the men who shipped as ordinary seaman was Mr. Commagere, a reporter for the New York Herald. He was given clerical duties. Ebierbing, Hall’s faithful Inuit companion, was on board as interpreter.[4]

The publicity surrounding the rescue from the sea ice and the impending search for the remaining crew drew huge crowds to see the Tigress off. The turnout for the departure of the rescue mission was far bigger than that of the North Pole expedition two years earlier. The New York Times reported that thousands of people stood on the Brooklyn Navy Yard docks and along the riverbank to cheer as the Tigress cast off her lines at five o’clock on the evening of Monday, July 14, 1873. Women in bright summer dresses waved handkerchiefs while the men waved their hats. People shouted farewells and God bless yous to the men on board as the ship slowly steamed up the East River. Through the steamer’s smoke, the crowd could make out the hats and handkerchiefs of the men on board waving back.

The crews of the ships Vermont and Brooklyn manned the yards and sent up cheer after cheer at the passing ship. The men standing in the rigging of the Tigress returned the cheers. Ships’ whistles sounded as the Tigress passed in the lanes, and a parting salute was fired from the government battery. The crowds only dispersed after the vessel steamed out of sight.[5]

The ship’s orders were to locate the Polaris and, if it was found in seaworthy condition, sail it back to Washington. On August 14, one month after leaving Brooklyn and cruising the Greenland and Baffin Island coasts, the Tigress approached Littleton Island off the coast of Etah, Greenland, near the scene of the abandonment in the previous October’s gale. Here a dinghy was lowered. The men who went ashore found an encampment that the remaining Polaris crew had used as their winter campground. But the Polaris men were no longer there. The site was inhabited by a small group of Inughuit men from northern Greenland who explained how they had helped the Polaris crew survive the winter.

The Polaris had run aground the day after the October storm. The crew had dismantled much of it and used the timbers and canvas sails to build two boats. Then, when the ice began to break up, they sailed south. The Polaris sank shortly after their departure. While the Tigress and Juniata were plying the waters off Greenland and Baffin Island, the men they searched for had already managed their own rescue.[6]

Having discovered what had become of the Polaris, the Tigress turned its bow south. Arriving at Godhavn on Disko Island, Greenland, on August 25, the men learned that nine Dundee whalers had gone north. Commander Greer figured that at least one of these ships would have met the boats carrying the Polaris crew and picked them up. The Tigress then headed west to the whaling grounds in an attempt to intercept the whalers and carry the missing crew home to America.

The likelihood that the men were safely aboard whaling ships took the urgency out of the Tigress’ journey. This was strictly a search-and-rescue expedition and the officers were not expected to make any scientific observations. Tyson noted, however, that some of the members took the initiative to make mineralogical collections of their own at the various anchorages on Cumberland Sound.

Mica is here in abundance, and its collection could, I believe, be made to pay. One of our company got the stone fever bad this morning. Taking chisel and hammer, and a good-sized canvas bag, in which to put the precious specimens, he started off to make his fortune. This evening, just at dark, he returned. The officer of the deck heard his hail, but the shore-going boat was at that time away … so Billy had to wait until it returned. He sat himself down on a rock, which happened to be on an extensive shoal. He was on the outer edge of it looking wistfully toward the Tigress, and as the inside of the shoal was lower than the off shore, and the tide was setting in, he was, without knowing it, very soon surrounded by water. Suddenly discovering that he was on an improvised island of somewhat limited extent, he yelled most lustily for relief, and we finally got a boat out to him. But poor Billy was the most frightened man I have seen for many a day.[7]

Having no success locating the men at the whaling grounds, the Tigress made for home. Upon arriving at the Brooklyn Navy Yard on November 9, the men learned that the remaining Polaris crew had shipped aboard the Scottish whaler Ravenscraig in June 1873, three weeks before the Tigress had set sail to search for them. The Ravenscraig picked up the men as it headed west into Baffin Bay for the summer hunt. Like their compatriots on the sealer Tigress, the rescued men were compelled to go along on its summer whale hunt. Eventually, the men split up and took passage on three separate whaling vessels that were returning to Dundee, Scotland, before the Ravenscraig. From there, each of the men found their own way back to the United States, with the last man arriving in New York City on November 13, 1873.

Amazingly, with the exception of Commander Hall, the entire Polaris expedition returned alive. The birth on board of baby Charlie Polaris to the family from Greenland actually meant that the company’s numbers had not diminished. Despite the harrowing escapade of the Polaris expedition, the loss of life was minimal by comparison with countless other Arctic expeditions before and after.

Captain Tyson detailed the whole misadventure in his book Arctic Experiences: Containing Capt. George E. Tyson’s Wonderful Drift on the Ice-Floe, A History of the Polaris Expedition, the Cruise of the Tigress, and Rescue of the Polaris Survivors. To Which Is Added A General Arctic Chronology, published in 1874. Tyson’s version was the only account of the ordeal published in English, Hall’s journal being lost. Emil Bessels published his own account in German in 1879. Tyson’s book was not a financial success.

The Tigress was promptly sold back to Harvey and Company for $40,000, $20,000 less than what the United States government had purchased it for five months previous. This was a good financial venture for the owners, especially since the Tigress had been outfitted with new sails, rigging, and other improvements required for the Polaris rescue. The Tigress returned to the sealing grounds with Captain Isaac Bartlett again at the helm in the spring of 1874. Sadly, it suffered a disaster more deadly than that which had befallen the men it had rescued from the ice the year before.

On April 2, one of the boilers exploded, scalding and causing the death of twenty-one of the men on board, including the captain’s son, James Bartlett. Flag signals of distress were hoisted, but it wasn’t until the following day that they were seen. The steamer Brigus then towed the powerless Tigress out of the ice, where it solemnly proceeded under sail to Bay Roberts, Newfoundland, bringing the bodies home to their families. The Tigress then sailed for St. John’s to deliver the two dead men from that city, one of whom was the chief engineer who had tended the boiler at the time.

The Bay Roberts Guardian reported, "The Tigress, it will be remembered, was purchased last summer, by the U.S. Government and fitted out for an Arctic voyage in search of the missing Polaris crew, from whence she returned in the fall, and was subsequently sold to her former owners here. She had new boilers, furnished by a Philadelphia firm, put in at New York, previous to her departure for the Arctic seas."[8]

The implication that one of the new boilers was faulty seems an easy conclusion to draw. However, an inquiry determined that water had become low in one of the boilers, and when the feed cock was turned on, the crown of the firebox gave way. The chief engineer, an excellent, careful, and sober man, had been deceived by the water level shown in the gauge glass. The accident was a result of human error.

The Transfer

Three months after the Tigress returned from its search for the Polaris, a Wm. A. Mintzer of the United States Navy sent a letter to Mr. George Crump, acting British consul in Philadelphia. His letter of February 10, 1874, read,

Sir:

I hereby make application to the British Government, through you, for a land grant giving me possession of a tract of land situated on what is known as the Labrador coast, on the shore of Cumberland Gulf.

I apply for a tract of land twenty (20) miles square, having north latitude sixty-four degrees, fifty-six minutes (64º56') and west longitude sixty-six degrees, twenty-one minutes (66º21') as a geometrical centre.

The space bounded by the limits stated above is not inhabited except by a few wandering esquimaux and does not appear to be claimed by anyone. It and the surrounding country is wild and desolate with no vegetation but moss, and for about eight (8) months of the year is covered with ice and snow, and apparently not available for anything except mining purposes.

It contains a deposit of a useful mineral, which under the protection of a land grant a company or individual might develop with advantage.

In consideration of the above, I respectfully ask that the within application be granted that I may be enabled to investigate and develop the mineral resources of the space herementioned.

I have the honour to be, very respectfully,

your obedient servant,

Wm. A. Mintzer,

Corps of Engineers, U.S. Navy[9]

This William Mintzer obviously had firsthand knowledge of the locale referred to in his letter. Cumberland Sound is on the east side of Baffin Island, not Labrador, as Mintzer states. Whalers were generally the only non-Inuit with knowledge of that northern vicinity. Mintzer was not a whaler, though. He is listed as second assistant engineer aboard the Tigress on its Polaris rescue mission the summer before. This was the same Billy that Captain George E. Tyson had jested about who was stranded by the tide while collecting minerals.

Mintzer did not specify in his letter what useful mineral he planned to mine. Judging by Tyson’s account of what the men had found on Cumberland Sound, it was likely mica that Mintzer was after. Mica is a transparent mineral found in large glass-like sheets. Its heat-resistant properties made it an ideal replacement for glass in windows for wood stoves, kerosene heaters, and furnaces. In 1874, mica would fetch $10 a pound, an equivalent of $194 today.[10] Mintzer was not just a young man with stone fever, as Tyson had termed it. He was enterprising and had seen the potential of profitable mining operations on Cumberland Sound.

It was really only crude chance that this letter had been written at all. The likelihood of an American naval officer applying for a tract of land on eastern Baffin Island is slim. If the United