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Ghosts of Cape Sabine: the Harrowing True Story of the Greely

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Ghosts of Cape Sabine: the Harrowing True Story of the Greely REVIEWS • 317 GHOSTS OF CAPE SABINE: THE HARROWING TRUE Howgate’s breezy assertions were particularly fateful in STORY OF THE GREELY EXPEDITION. By light of later events. First, the experiences of Charles LEONARD F. GUTTRIDGE. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Francis Hall in 1871 and Nares in 1875–76 had led Sons, 2000. 354 p., maps, b&w illus., notes, bib., index. Howgate to conclude that Lady Franklin Bay could reliably Hardbound. Cdn$37.99. be reached by ship every summer. Second, he believed that ships were undesirable “cities of refuge” that hindered Depending on their personalities, explorers have always proper adaptation to the Arctic. The polar colony, he made a choice between pursuing dramatic geographical proposed, should be transported by ship, left with adequate discoveries or doing quiet, competent scientific work. supplies, and picked up three years later (Howgate, 1879). Some tried to play both sides, but the conservative ones Howgate’s optimism seemed well founded when the could never quite match the dash of the sensation-seek- Proteus, a refitted whaling ship, left the 25 men of the ers—who, for their part, feigned scientific aspirations but Greely expedition at Lady Franklin Bay in August 1881. A brought back few solid results. In the High Arctic, Robert ship was to bring mail and supplies the following summer, Peary and Elisha Kent Kane are classic examples of the and the pickup was scheduled for 1883. Adolphus Greely, melodramatic explorer, while Otto Sverdrup exemplifies an ambitious Signal Corps lieutenant who had done well the ideal leader of a nineteenth-century scientific team. stringing telegraph wire in the American West, proved less The Lady Franklin Bay Expedition was to have been adept as a leader of men in an isolated colony. The copious pure science, one of 14 expeditions sent to the Arctic and journal excerpts that add color to Guttridge’s narrative the Antarctic to gather data for the First International Polar show just how discontented the men were with their by- Year of 1882–83. Conceived by Austro-Hungarian Karl the-book commander. “This man (I cannot call him a Weyprecht, these expeditions were to mark a shift from the gentleman) comes among us like a serpent in Eden and geographical claim staking of the day to cooperative scien- creates eternal hatred toward himself,” wrote Sergeant tific effort. It is thus ironic that this expedition became David Brainard, perhaps the most competent of the 25 (except for the disappearance of Sir John Franklin and his expedition members (p. 154). crew) the most sensational Arctic tragedy of the nineteenth Overcoming the stresses of isolation and a rigid, defen- century. sive leader, the expedition did an admirable job of collect- But whereas the murky fate of Franklin has been recon- ing data on natural history, meteorology, and magnetic and structed from crumbs of evidence glued together with tidal variation. Despite the anti-nationalistic spirit of educated speculation, the disaster that befell Lieutenant Weyprecht’s Polar Year, they also achieved a new Farthest Greely and his 24 men is well documented. Not until now, North, besting the earlier British record by four miles. however, has someone sifted through all those documents During those first two years, there were a few broken to create a modern historical analysis of the tragedy. bones but no deaths or serious injuries. Leonard Guttridge, an amateur but careful historian Unfortunately, a relief ship failed to appear in both 1882 whose previous works include Icebound, a similar study of and 1883. The first summer, it couldn’t get through the ice the Jeannette expedition, spent years exhaustively scour- and had to retreat; the second year, it was crushed in the ing the National Archives, the Library of Congress, and pack and sank. Accenting these failures were vague orders other repositories of primary material near his Maryland about the leaving of food caches, unsympathetic politi- home. He also attempted, with some success, to track cians, an army-navy rivalry, and slipshod efforts by those down descendents of the key participants, at one point in command, both in Washington and on the relief ships. contacting most of the Bucks in the U.S. Midwest in the Following his own orders, and against the opinion of hope of learning more about the enigmatic Charles Henry virtually all his men, Greely decided to abandon the secu- Buck, whom Greely executed for stealing food. The result- rity of their still well-stocked station and head south on a ing effort far eclipses earlier accounts of the expedition, nightmarish 51-day journey in small boats through the such as Alden Todd’s Abandoned (1961) and Theodore pack ice, as the polar winter closed in around them. Powell’s The Long Rescue (1961). Learning of the destruction of the relief ship through a If the International Polar Year was Weyprecht’s idea, it cairn message, they eventually settled in for the winter at was the visionary scoundrel Henry Howgate who set the Camp Clay on Pim Island, a barren satellite off the coast of specific terms for the Greely project. In between bouts of east-central Ellesmere Island. Here they built a metre-high embezzling over $200,000 from the U.S. Army Signal rock enclosure, roofed it with one of their boats and a Corps, Howgate tirelessly promoted around Washington tarpaulin, and endeavoured to hibernate through the polar his idea of a temporary Arctic colony. By the late 1870s, night with 40 days of food. he had already picked a site: Lady Franklin Bay, near the The dramatic eight-month ordeal, during which all but northeastern tip of Ellesmere Island, had the advantage of seven perished, has been covered before in books by Todd, a nearby coal seam, found by the recent British Arctic Greely, Brainard, and others, but Guttridge has drawn exten- Expedition under George Strong Nares. Little was known sively on all the men’s journals, not just two or three. Some about the Arctic in that era, but that did not deter confident previously anonymous characters come to life for the first people from making sweeping generalizations. Two of time. Sergeant David Ralston, really just a name in earlier 318 • REVIEWS accounts, becomes a man who married for money and, when POWELL, T. 1961. The long rescue. London: W.H. Allen. it ran out, abandoned his wife to join the army. William Cross, TODD, A.L. 1961. Abandoned. New York: McGraw-Hill Book the alcoholic engineer who was the first to die, acquires Company. character through his gruff journal entries, usually colorful knocks at Greely, whom he labeled “Old Stubbornness” or Jerry Kobalenko “STN (our shirt-tail navigator)” (p. 157, 173). PO Box 1286 Guttridge’s fairness and the depth of his historical Banff, Alberta, Canada research are striking. If there is a drawback to Ghosts of T0L 0C0 Cape Sabine, it is that the 80-year-old author has no [email protected] personal experience with the Arctic he writes about and thus makes many small errors. Dutch Island lies within a few metres of mainland Ellesmere, not two miles offshore; BARK, SKIN, AND CEDAR: EXPLORING THE CA- the photo caption of Pim Island misidentifies Cape Sabine; NOE IN CANADIAN EXPERIENCE. By JAMES and contrary to what Greely himself believed, the small RAFFAN. Toronto: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd., 1999. seabirds the party hunted at Camp Clay were not dovekies: ISBN 0-00-638653-9. xiv + 274 p., maps, b&w illus., they were guillemots. More importantly, the author over- notes, index. Softbound. Cdn$19.95. looks key issues in the tragedy because of his lack of familiarity with the area. In February 1884, when Sergeant Bark, Skin, and Cedar will surely make for informative Rice and the Greenland native Jens Edward tried to cross and inspirational reading for housebound canoe enthusi- Smith Sound to reach Greenland for help, they were asts this year. Unlike conventional canoe books that nar- stopped by open water. Guttridge assumes, with earlier rate individual journeys or explain how to handle a canoe writers, that the Sound simply did not freeze over that in whitewater, Raffan’s new book is an amiable, discur- winter. But Pim Island lies at the fluctuating edge of the sive ramble across Canada, with little more holding the North Water Polynya. Some years an ice bridge forms volume together than a desire to share excitement about right at Cape Sabine, but often a detour to the north is canoes. Bark, Skin, and Cedar meanders from anecdotes necessary. In 1914, under ideal conditions, the American about personal experience, through a study of competition explorer Donald MacMillan (1918:51) crossed from Green- in the canoe-building industry, toward an understanding of land to Pim Island in six hours, following the same line the values gained from experiencing the world from a attempted by Rice and Edward in 1884. Yet in 1909, canoe. Frederick Cook (1912:434) claimed to have been forced to The book is organized into 11 chapters, each one devel- make a 60-mile detour north of Cape Sabine before finding oping some aspect of the canoe in Canada. Its organization ice. Cook’s numbers are rarely reliable, but it is not is spatial, moving from Labrador in the first chapter, then uncommon for the ice bridge to begin around the north end sweeping through the Maritime provinces, westward of the Bache Peninsula, some 35 km beyond Camp Clay. through Quebec and Ontario, and west and north as far as From their lookout knoll, Greely’s men would not have the Bering Strait. One of the best features of the book is been able to see the solid ice in the distance.
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