Prologue : Baptism by Ice On a misty morning in late April 1873, the Tigress, a steam barkentine out of Conception Bay, Newfoundland, was pushing through the loose floes and bergs off the coast of Labrador, heading for the seasonal seal-hunting grounds. Late in the morning, the Tigress encountered something strange: A lone Inuit in a kayak was hailing the ship, waving his arms and screaming at the top of his lungs. The native man was clearly in some kind of trouble. He had ventured much farther out into the perilous open waters of the North Atlantic than any Eskimo ordinarily would. When the Tigress pulled closer to him, he yelled, in accented English, "American steamer! American steamer!" The crew of the Tigress leaned over the railings and tried to decipher what the Inuit was talking about. Just then, the fog parted enough to reveal, in the middle distance, a jagged floe piece, on which more than a dozen men and women, plus several children, appeared to be trapped. Seeing the ship, the marooned party erupted in cheers and fired guns into the air. The Tigress ''s captain, Isaac Bartlett, ordered rescue boats put in the water.
When the stranded people--nineteen in all--were brought aboard, it was immediately apparent that they had suffered a horrific ordeal. Emaciated, filthy, and frostbitten, they had haunted looks in their eyes. Their lips and teeth were greasy from a just-finished break- fast of seal intestine. "How long have you been on the ice?" Captain Bartlett asked them. The senior member of the group, an American named George Tyson, stepped forward. "Since the fifteenth of October," he replied. Bartlett tried to understand what Tyson was saying. October 15 was 196 days earlier.
These people, whoever they were, had been stranded on this ice slab for nearly seven months. Their precarious floe had been, Tyson said, a "God-made raft." Bartlett questioned Tyson further and learned, to his astonish- ment, that these pitiful castaways had been aboard the Polaris, a ship famous around the world. (This was the "American steamer!" the Inuit had been screaming about.) The Polaris, an unprepossessing steam tug that had been reinforced for the ice, was the exploring ves- sel of an American polar expedition, partly funded by Congress and supported by the U.S. Navy, that had left New London, Connecticut, two years earlier and, after a few stops along the way to Greenland, had not been heard from since. A FTER PENETR ATING JUST beyond the 82nd parallel, a nautical latitude record at the time, the Polaris had become trapped in the ice high along the west coast of Greenland.
Then, in November 1871, the expedition commander, a brooding, eccentric visionary from Cincin- nati named Charles Francis Hall, had died under mysterious circum- stances after drinking a cup of coffee that, he suspected, had been laced with poison. Following Hall''s death, the leaderless expedition had completely unraveled. On the night of October 15, 1872, a large piece of ice on which Tyson and eighteen other expedition members were temporarily encamped had suddenly broken away from the vicinity of the ship and started drifting into Baffin Bay. The party of castaways, which included several Inuit families and a newborn infant, was never able to rejoin the Polaris, and they resigned themselves to their slab of ice. They helplessly floated toward the south, through the winter and spring, sleeping in igloos and living on seals, narwhals, seabirds, and the occasional polar bear. Not having any fuel with which to cook, they ate only raw meat, organs, and blood, when they were lucky enough to have it, for the duration of their drift. Tyson said they had been "fools of fortune." Huddled miserably on their ever-shrinking slab, they were batted around "like a shuttle-cock," he said, by heaving seas, crashing icebergs, and powerful gales.
Amazingly, though, no one in the stranded party had died. In all, they had drifted eighteen hundred miles. Dumbfounded by Tyson''s story, Captain Bartlett welcomed the unfortunates to his ship, fed them a warm meal of codfish, potatoes, and coffee, and in due course delivered them to St. John''s, Newfound- land, where they were met by a U.S. Navy vessel and taken straight to Washington. A hasty interrogation of Tyson and other survivors revealed, among other things, that the Polaris, though damaged, was likely still intact and that the balance of the expedition--fourteen members--might yet be alive, trapped on their leaky ship somewhere high in the Greenland ice. Naval authorities, after cross-examining the survivors, learned that the Polaris had suffered a crisis of leader- ship nearly from the start, that mutiny had been discussed, and that Charles Hall may indeed have been poisoned.
(Nearly a century later, forensic experts exhumed his corpse and detected toxic quantities of arsenic in tissue samples.) Tyson, though refusing to name names, cried foul. "Those who have baffled and spoiled this expedition," he roared, "cannot escape their God!" The American public, stunned by this woeful tale of a national voyage gone spectacularly wrong, clamored for a relief expedition to return to the Arctic to hunt for survivors. And so, with President Ulysses S. Grant''s approval, the Navy promptly dispatched a ship, the USS Juniata, to Greenland to commence a search for the hobbled Polaris . The Juniata, under the command of Daniel L. Braine, was a battle-scabbed sloop of war that had seen much action in the Atlantic blockade during the Civil War. Newspapers across America celebrated her departure from New York on June 23.
The Juniata ''s mission to Greenland had all the elements: Here was a thrilling rescue story of national import--and also a detective story, with a whiff of intrigue and possible murder. A correspondent from the New York Herald would be joining the Juniata at St. John''s to report on the search. In large part because of the Herald ''s presence, the hunt for the Polaris would become the sensation of the late summer of 1873. THE SECOND-IN-COMMAND A BOARD the Juniata was a young lieutenant from New York City named George De Long. Twenty- eight years old, his keen blue-gray eyes framed by pince-nez glasses, De Long was a man in a hurry to do great things. He was large and broad-shouldered and weighed 195 pounds. A graduate of the U.
S. Naval Academy, ginger-haired and fair-skinned, he had a shaggy mustache that drooped prodigiously over the corner creases of his mouth. Whenever he had a moment to sit, he could usually be found smoking a meerschaum pipe, his head buried in a book. The warmth of his smile and the softness of his fleshy face were offset by a certain truculence in his jawline, a feature observers often remarked upon. De Long was a determined, straight-ahead sort of man, efficient and thorough, and he burned with ambition. One of his expressions, a motto of sorts, was "Do it now." De Long had sailed over much of the world--Europe, the Carib- bean, South America, and all along the Eastern Seaboard--but he had never been to the Arctic before, and he was not especially look- ing forward to the journey. De Long was far more accustomed to the tropics.
He had never paid attention to the great quest for the North Pole, which had so ferociously preoccupied explorers like Hall and thrilled the public. To De Long, the Juniata ''s cruise to Greenland was just another assignment. He did not seem to think much of St. John''s, where the Juniata stopped to take on stores and where shipbuilders sheathed her bow in iron for the coming encounters with the ice. When the Juniata reached the half-frozen hamlet of Sukkertoppen, on Greenland''s southwestern coast, De Long wrote to his wife, "I never in my life saw such a dreary land of desolation and I hope I may never find myself cast away in such a perfectly God-forsaken place . The ''town,'' such as it is, consists of two houses and about a dozen huts made of mud and wood. I went into one and have been scratching ever since." De Long was positively smitten with his wife, Emma, a young French-American woman from Le Havre.
He hated being so far away from her. He and Emma had been married for more than two years but had scarcely seen each other, for De Long''s Navy assignments had kept him almost constantly at sea. Sylvie, their baby girl, was nearly a stranger to him. The De Longs had a little apartment on Twenty-second Street in Manhattan, yet he was never there. Emma said her husband was a man "destined always to be separated from the ones he loved." There was not much he could do about his prolonged absences--this was the life of a career naval officer. At times, though, De Long dreamed of taking a leave and liv- ing another kind of existence with Emma and Sylvie, somewhere in the American West, or in the countryside in the south of France. From Greenland, he wrote to Emma about his fantasy.
"I cannot help thinking how much happier we should be if we were together," he said. "When we are apart I devise so many schemes . How nice it would be to go to some quiet place in Europe and pass a year by ourselves, where the Navy Department would not bother me with its orders, or any troubles come to make us uneasy. I think, darling, when I finish this cruise I might be able to get a year''s absence and we might spend it togethe.