Labyrinth of Ice: The Triumphant and Tragic Greely Polar Expedition

PROLOGUE

September 1, 1883

Expedition commander Lt. Adolphus W. Greely stood on the edge of the ice floe listening to the constant groan and roar of the ice pack, a sound so eerily hideous that it had come to be known by Arctic explorers as the Devil’s symphony. Not even the howling wind—which was pushing out to sea the small ice floe Greely and his twenty-four men were stranded on, away from their destination—could drown out the weird and terrible sound of the pack: ice grinding against ice, shearing and shrieking and wailing, an ever-present reminder of their desperate vulnerability in this colossal and hostile environment. He and his men were mere specks, adrift on a small island of sea ice moving at the mercy of the tide and winds. Two of their boats had been hauled up onto the ice, and a third—the ten-thousand-pound steam launch Lady Greely—had been made fast to the side of the floeberg with ice anchors.

Greely consulted with his meteorologist, who took readings through the blowing snow. It was 11ºF.¹ No polar party had ever recorded a lower temperature this early in the year. Greely surveyed the desolate surroundings between Ellesmere Island and Greenland: To the west, on the Ellesmere Island side of the lower Kane Basin, were rugged, rocky cliffs, and beyond them the snowcapped Victoria and Albert Mountains rose high above. To the east were foggy fiords and mist-shrouded peaks rising from the Greenland shore. Everything and everyone—all the gear and boats and men—were encrusted with a veneer of frost.

They had made it to within thirty miles above Cape Sabine, the location where Greely—through prearranged and explicitly written military orders—had instructed relief ships to deposit food for his expeditionary force. But for the last few days they had been drifting slowly away from land and back toward the north, away from shore and the food cache that Greely hoped would be their salvation. His men were exhausted from three weeks of nearly constant motion, their hands raw and bleeding inside their sealskin mittens from pulling at the oars and from hauling the boats on and off icebergs every day—or sometimes every hour. Their shoulders were sore and blistered from the drag ropes. Men shivered, nearly hypothermic, as they fought for sleep bivouacked directly on the ice or hunkered in the bottoms of their uncovered small craft. Greely took his trusted sergeant, David Brainard, aside and they carefully inventoried their dwindling stores. Counting the various meats, including pemmican, bacon, and beef—plus the hardtack bread—there were rations for perhaps fifty days, maybe a week longer if the hunters could shoot seals, walruses, or bears.

The expedition had already been through tremendous trials. Together, more than two hundred miles to the north, they had been confronted by and survived every possible challenge: attacks by wolves; hurricane-force winds; temperatures approaching 100º below zero; and near insanity brought on by the months of total darkness. Following orders, three weeks earlier Greely had commanded his men to abandon the comforts of Fort Conger—which they had built above an inlet at the far northeastern shore of Ellesmere Island. They had turned away from the fort’s coal-burning cookstove, its fireplace, insulated walls, and protective roof—and a year’s supply of food—and traveled by boats into the ice-choked seas, heading south toward Cape Sabine. Navigating the roiling chop and massive bergs through mist and fog, sleet and snow, and dying autumn light had been treacherous. And although Greely would not admit it, his poor eyesight was making navigation nearly impossible. He needed a better set of eyes to do the ice piloting.

Ultimately, with ice pressing in on them from all sides, Greely had made the decision to commit the boats and men to the mercies of the floes, with the forlorn hope that tides and winds would propel them south to Cape Sabine. If that failed, they would abandon everything not essential and attempt to cross ice bridges from floe to floe until they reached land. Some of Greely’s men disagreed with him, muttering that his decisions were madness and amounted to suicide. One of the men said he feared another Franklin disaster. The expedition doctor scribbled furiously in his journal: It is terrible to float in this manner, in the snow, fog, and dark. This seems to me like a nightmare in one of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories. And in many ways, it was.

Early on the afternoon of September 1, 1883, Greely’s two Greenlandic hunters brought in two seals. While one of the cooks struggled to light an alcohol stove in the high Arctic winds, the native Greenlanders skinned and cleaned their kill—doling out the raw hearts, lungs, and intestines to the famished expedition members, who chewed hungrily at the entrails. A few of the weaker men hovered nearby, then knelt at the bodies of the slain seals, taking turns lapping at the warm blood still spouting from the bullet holes.

Just then, with men gnawing on seal offal and wiping blood from their chins, Sergeant Brainard sprinted from the edge of their floe and screamed for everyone to prepare for impact. A giant iceberg was thundering toward them from the north. Men looked up to see a mass of white upon them and then felt a shuddering jolt of impact from the collision. The immense pressure of the striking pack tore great rifts in their small berg, splitting its surface into canyons. They scurried wildly, leaping over deep fissures, hurrying to secure food and boats and gear as the ice rent and ruptured underfoot.

Frozen rubble from the colliding floe fractured like glass around them, some of the pieces the size of their whaleboats. Commander Greely stood in stupefied awe as the five-ton Lady Greely, squeezed by unimaginable pressure, rose out of the water and up the iceberg’s wall, suspended there. Everyone stared, mouths agape, expecting the boat to splinter like firewood. But it did not break. It was held aloft, pushed up by the ice, for hours until the winds and tides shifted, releasing the pressure and easing it back down into the sea.

Commander Greely ordered all of the Lady Greely’s remaining contents brought up onto what remained of their floe to be lashed down. They would abandon it if they must. The ice floe on which they rode had been torn in two, and all the men ducked and shuddered from the blasting wind and the wailing, menacing roar of the pack. Their small ice island now pitched and spun as they drifted out to sea at the mercy of the winds and tides, with no way to predict or control when or if they would ever reach land again.

1

The Lady Franklin Bay Expeditionary Force

July 9, 1881—Labrador Basin, North Atlantic Ocean

Lt. A. W. Greely, commander of the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition, rode at the bow of the two-hundred-foot-long steamship Proteus, his vision fixed on the northern horizon. He wore a double-breasted, boiled-wool peacoat with thick fur at the collar and cuffs. He and his crew were bound for the top of the world, to one of the last regions yet unmarked on global maps. As the inlet narrowed near the strait of Belle Isle, they passed great protruding shapes of ice rising from the sea. Some resembled immense white-blue anvils, and some looked like the wind-scoured sandstone towers he’d seen in the American Southwest. Most of the icebergs¹ he could not describe, or compare to phenomena he had ever witnessed before in nature. He observed them and everything else, squinting through his oval spectacles at the breathtaking expanse, trying to visualize what lay ahead. The combination of ice, rock, and water appeared to have some vague kind of course he might plot his way through. As the Proteus plowed into the wind-chopped Labrador Sea, massive slabs of glacial ice cleaved off the shore and crashed into the sea, spewing freezing brine over the gunwales and frosting his sharp narrow face and pointed black beard.

His heart raced with anticipation, but his mind was much burdened. Less than a week earlier, on July 2, at the Baltimore and Potomac Rail Station in Washington, D.C., President James A. Garfield had been shot twice at point-blank range—once in the shoulder and once in the back, the second shot lodging near his pancreas—and now, with family and physicians huddled around him, he fought for his life at the White House. Greely’s heart was heavy at this news, with the uncertainty of how another presidential assassination—should Garfield not recover—would rock the Republic. And he already missed his young family, his wife of just three years, Henrietta, and their two infant daughters, Antoinette and Adola. But the call of adventure—and possibly international fame—had lured him toward the Arctic on a voyage of exploration and discovery that would last at least two years, should all go as planned. However, Greely was savvy enough to know that Arctic journeys never went as planned. He had spent years studying the history of Arctic exploration and the quest for the Northwest Passage, and he understood the dangers and stark realities: He steered toward a harsh, ice-bound labyrinth where crew losses of 50 percent or more were the norm. But Greely had some hard bark on him, a war-earned toughness coupled with an uncanny sense of the thing to do now, and he hoped his men had it too. They’d better: A. W. Greely would allow no disorder. This was sovereign. He’d started following orders when he was seventeen, then nicknamed Dolph by his friends. He’d been weaned on discipline. Now he was the one giving the orders, and he demanded a strict, unwavering adherence to them, and to discipline generally.

Poor weather and northwesterly gales slammed into the Proteus, slowing progress, but within a week they’d steamed into the Davis Strait, where they encountered their first pack ice.

Greely was fascinated and awed by the ice, noting in his journal that

the greater part of the ice ranged from three to five feet above the water, and was deeply grooved at the water’s edge, evidently by the action of the waves. Above and below the surface of the sea projected long tongue-like edges.… The most delicate tints of blue mingled quickly and indistinguishably into those of rare light green, to be succeeded later as the water receded from the floe’s side by shades of blueish white.

They passed more bergs, some jutting fifteen feet from the water, the ice rising in giant hummocks and pinnacles. Greely contemplated the threefold mission at hand: First, he was to set up the northernmost of a chain of a dozen research stations around the Arctic, to simultaneously collect magnetic, astronomical, and meteorological data. This was part of a revolutionary scientific mission named the International Polar Year (two years, really)—a global effort to record data at the farthest reaches of the world to better understand the earth’s climate. Second, Greely would search for and hopefully rescue the men of the lost USS Jeannette, which had vanished two years earlier during an attempted voyage to the North Pole. Greely had known Lt. Cdr. George W. De Long, the expedition’s leader, very well. He would try his best to find him. Third—though definitely not last—Greely secretly intended to reach the North Pole; or, should he fall short, to attain Farthest North, an explorer’s holy grail of the highest northern latitude, which had been held by the British for three hundred years.

At thirty-seven, tall, sinewy, and strong, Greely had earned his current command through two decades of army service, surviving some of the bloodiest battles in the nation’s history. At Antietam in 1862, as part of the Nineteenth Massachusetts Regiment, Greely took a bullet to the face that fractured his jaw, knocked out several teeth, and left him unconscious as his regiment retreated. When he came to, a Confederate soldier stood over him and tried to capture him, but Greely fought his way to safety, though he was struck in the thigh by another musket ball during his escape. As Greely received treatment and then recovered in a field hospital cot, he witnessed a macabre sight: Piled up high against the side of the house were the amputated arms and legs of soldiers, both Union and Confederate, stacked like cordwood. The Union lost 12,410 men that day, the most of any single day in the Civil War.

From then on, Greely wore a full beard to cover the scars from his wound, and as well to hide the reminder of the atrocities he’d witnessed.

He’d worked his way up the army ranks since he was an enlisted teen, eventually being posted out West to construct telegraph lines throughout the hostile Indian frontier. During this duty, through careful observation, he’d become an expert in telegraphy, electricity, and meteorology. Eventually, through his leadership skills and his abilities, he’d convinced the Signal Corps and the highest brass of the U.S. Army—as well as Secretary of War Robert Todd Lincoln (Abraham Lincoln’s son, who signed his orders)—that he had the stuff. He would lead this mission, formally named the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition in honor of Lady Jane Franklin. Her husband, the legendary Sir John Franklin (and his crew of 129), had vanished seeking the Northwest Passage in 1845. Lady Franklin sponsored numerous expeditions to find him.

But everyone knew the current voyage was in fact the Greely Expedition, and A. W. Greely was in charge.

The Proteus—christened and launched new in 1874 out of Dundee, Scotland—was a 467-ton, iron-prowed steamer designed for the sealing trade. It was built to last a half century or longer if well maintained. The ship was commanded by Capt. Richard Pike, one of the most experienced ice navigators in Newfoundland. Pike coursed northward with unusual speed for the season, clipping through the normally ice-choked waters of the Davis Strait. Cutting through dense fog and wave chop, the sturdy steamship made land at the windswept western shores of Greenland at Godhavn (now Qeqertarsuaq), Disko Island. Through lifting fog, Greely and his men saw mountains rising up from the sea some three thousand feet, and along a secure, landlocked harbor and tranquil cove sat a native settlement under Danish control. As the Proteus anchored, Greely heard a cannon fire a salute signaling their arrival, and soon afterward Sophus Krarup-Smith, the Danish royal inspector of North Greenland, came aboard.

Inspector Krarup-Smith had been about to depart for his annual assessment of Upernavik to the north, but out of courtesy he delayed leaving to host Greely and his men and to offer any provisions, intelligence, and assistance that the expedition required. Krarup-Smith welcomed the men into his home, which was surprisingly elaborate given its remoteness: There was a grand piano, a small billiard table, a well-filled book-case, carpets, pictures, and many other evidences of civilization and even elegance. Krarup-Smith and his wife served Greely and two of his lieutenants—Kislingbury and Lockwood—an elaborate welcome dinner that included fresh salmon, larded eider ducks, and delicate Arctic ptarmigan, all served with excellent European wines. They also sampled seal meat, which some of the men found unpalatable because of its coarse, dark, and oily appearance. Greely relished it as juicy and tender, with a slight sweetish taste.

They remained in Godhavn for five days. Greely observed that the Inuit houses were built of stone and turf, lined with wood, so low that he could hardly stand up inside. He was impressed by their ingenuity in using stretched seal intestines for windows. Greely scouted the area, characterizing it as all mountains and sea, the cliffs thrusting a few thousand feet straight up from the water. Though he found breaks in the cliffs that gave way to low, sloping valleys and brooks lined with vegetation, mostly he was awed by the region’s grandeur and desolation.

There was also expedition business to attend to. Greely purchased a team of twelve Greenlandic sled dogs, the pack snarling and vicious. He would need these animals, as well as Greenlandic sled drivers he still had to enlist, for his intended sorties toward the North Pole. Greely also bartered for a large quantity of mattak—the skin of the white whale—which he’d learned from reading previous expedition logs was antiscorbutic²—important in helping to prevent scurvy.

On July 20 a Louisiana-born Frenchman, Dr. Octave Pavy, arrived from nearby Ritenbenck, where he’d spent the preceding year serving as naturalist in an ambitious colonization attempt organized by U.S. Army captain Henry Howgate. But funding for that mission had failed to make it through Congress, and now Greely was free to hire Pavy as a contract surgeon. He was experienced in treating ailments typical of the severe northern region. Greely oversaw his signing of the oath of service that very day. Pavy was also to serve as chief naturalist and taxidermist in charge of preserving and recording all specimens procured.

They sailed north once more, stopping at Upernavik, at the time the most northerly settlement in the world. There Greely purchased ten suits of sealskin clothing fashioned for Arctic expeditionary work. He also hired two sturdy and able Greenlandic sledge drivers from a small nearby coastal settlement. They were said to be skilled hunters and kayakers. One was named Thorlip Frederik Christiansen; his mother was a Greenlandic Inuit,³ his father a Dane. Greely’s men quickly nicknamed him Eskimo Fred. His full-blooded Greenlander friend was named Jens Edward. Though neither of them could speak English, Pavy, who’d been on Greenland for the last year, helped translate at the beginning. They loaded their kayaks and hunting gear and climbed aboard.

Thus provisioned, Greely ordered Captain Pike to steam the Proteus ahead toward the dreaded Melville Bay, a three-hundred-mile-wide body of turbulent water known as a mysterious region of terror. The bay’s churning, swirling currents were much feared by whalers, and Greely had read that in one season alone, nineteen ships were lost there, some blown off course and capsized in the howling, freezing gales, others crushed and splintered between massive bergs. They plowed through thin pancake ice barely an inch thick and marveled at the massive floating icebergs gleaming white and blue-green in the perpetual sunlight. But that year, one of the fairest summers in memory, the waters of Melville Bay remained remarkably open, and on July 31, lookouts sighted Cape York. Captain Pike had navigated the watery graveyard in an unheard-of thirty-six hours, the fastest crossing then on record. Greely was pleased with the speed, but he privately wondered whether such open waters were an anomaly. What if the sound was not as open when the ship to relieve him attempted to pass through?

Just past Cape York, Greely anchored at the Cary Islands, twenty miles off the Greenland coast. Winds gusted, and he clasped his records tightly. They showed that English captain Sir George Strong Nares had cached significant provisions here during his 1875–76 expedition. Greely sent Doctor Pavy and Lieutenant Kislingbury, his second in command, ashore, and sure enough, at a small cove on the southern tip of the island they found a cairn, and nearby 3,600 rations in good condition. They secured and covered these for the future, should they or other explorers need them. Nares had also left behind a sturdy whaleboat that the men wanted to take, as it was in serviceable condition, but Greely ordered them to leave the craft, reckoning it might just save some imperiled whaler’s life one day—or their own lives. They noted the location of the cache in their journals and moved on. Greely, emboldened by the open water, directed Captain Pike to take them past Cape Sabine on the coast of Grinnell Land—the central section of Ellesmere Island—where Nares had recorded having a sledging depot and had cached a few hundred pounds of canned beef.

They pressed on, easing into the Smith Sound narrows as lookouts scanned ahead for ice. They saw polar bears and flipper seals and many walruses. Eider ducks and small black-and-white arctic auks called dovekies winged along the shore. The prevalence of game seemed a good omen to Greely and his men, and they shot some animals and birds en route, increasing their considerable larder. Smith Sound had been discovered by the fabled English navigator William Baffin in 1616 and was thought to be the gateway to the Open Polar Sea, the hypothesized ice-free sea surrounding the North Pole. The narrows linking Baffin Bay to the Kane Basin were aptly referred to as the Northern Pillars of Hercules, and believed to be the most likely route to the North Pole. Where the sound bottlenecked between Littleton Island on western Greenland and Cape Sabine off eastern Grinnell Land, the gap was a mere twenty-three miles. Surveying the craggy shorelines, Greely determined that under the right conditions, it would not take much to completely clog this narrow funnel of a waterway.

The Proteus reached Cape Hawks midmorning on August 3. Dense fog descended, and they crawled forward with great caution at half speed. Greely scribbled in his journal: "We met an impenetrable icefield at 10 P.M. and the Proteus butted against it. We are at the entrance of Lady Franklin Bay." Pike anchored the ship to the ice pack off Cape Baird, a headland of Bellot Island that guards Lady Franklin Bay. But he was forced to disengage when winds and shifting ice began to buffet the Proteus toward the south, away from their destination. For a week they were driven backward a total of about forty miles. Greely was dumbfounded by the power of the wind and the pack, amazed by how helpless they were, even in a powerful, nearly five-hundred-ton steam sealer. They were entirely at the mercy of nature.

As they retreated, Greely watched the ice and the water, mesmerized by schools of white beluga whales being chased by swordfish. The size of the beluga—between twelve and twenty feet—impressed Greely, as did their appearance. They had, he noted, a smooth, unwrinkled hide, which is of a waxy-white color in adults, but of a light grayish brown in the young. The larger of these creatures could yield nearly a thousand pounds each of blubber and meat. Yellowish-white narwhals—the so-called unicorns of the sea, named for their long, straight, up-to-ten-foot-long tusk—also swam past in great numbers.

Finally the winds shifted in Greely’s favor and blew hard to the west, the ice beginning to split and fissure, with leads—lanes of navigable water—opening in the frozen sea. Leads, as noted by Sergeant Brainard, who was learning to study them carefully, were impermanent and tricky affairs. They open and they close without a sign of warning. A lead may remain open for a week, or it may close in an hour. Leads are the Arctic navigator’s map, and often his lifeline, in a frozen sea. Now Captain Pike drove at full steam through the splintery web of leads, snaking and cutting in a northerly direction until, on August 11, 1881, as the morning fog lifted, they entered the western mouth of Lady Franklin Bay, which was for the moment relatively clear of ice.

Greely ordered Pike to make anchor and dispatched Lieutenant Lockwood ashore to ascertain the existence of a deep and productive coal seam reported by Nares in 1875. Lockwood returned from his reconnaissance to report that the coal seam was easily accessible and of excellent quality, and further, that he’d killed three musk-oxen from a large herd. Game seemed plentiful, and the nearby shores of the bay appeared suitable for establishing their station. Beyond the shore in all directions, mountains rose up to three thousand feet, gently curving at their summits like the backs of hogs. Many of the mountaintops—like those of three-mile-long Bellot Island—were covered even in summer with snow drifts. The great harbor there at the foot of the mountains, with more than twenty square miles of enormous ice floes, was named Discovery Harbor for Nares’s ship, HMS Discovery. The harbor was, Greely observed, hemmed in at every point by precipitous walls, which ranged from hundreds to thousands of feet in height.

In order to get close enough to unload their considerable stores—which included all the precut timber needed to build a sixty-five-foot longhouse—Pike began ramming through ice that ranged from two to ten feet thick. He would reverse the ship a few hundred yards, then throttle full steam ahead, bashing the ice with the iron bow, plowing through as far as half—and sometimes even the entire length—of the ship. As the Proteus thrust forward, Pike and Greely urged the men to run fore and then aft, causing a rocking motion to aid in breaking the ice and also to keep the ship from becoming beset or nipped—the Arctic whalers’ expression for getting trapped in the ice.

After seven hours of ramming through rotting harbor ice, the Proteus rested within one hundred yards of the shore. Beyond the ice foot, and within thirty yards of the water’s edge, was a flat, scrubby bluff scoured by wind, ice, and sea. This was the place. Greely dubbed the spot Fort Conger, after Michigan senator Omar Conger, who had supported the expedition from the start. They had made a remarkable seven hundred miles in just six days of actual steaming (discounting the week they were blown south). Here they would build their scientific station and spend the next two years collecting data, venturing forth into the unexplored northern Lincoln Sea, and attempting to reach the North Pole.

Greely stepped onshore and strode up a small hill covered with saxifrage—small, purple-blooming flowers growing in tufts between rocks. Gulls and terns soared and hovered on the wind along the shore. A freshwater brook rushed down a steep slope just past the lichen-covered plateau. The place looked promising, and they would have everything they would need. The air was cold, fresh, salty, and bracing. He paused to look back as the men began unloading the Proteus. Ice was beginning to pack and encroach in Discovery Harbor, as well as beyond, to the west in the Kennedy Channel. From somewhere out in the bunched and knuckled hills came the plaintive howl of a wolf. Adolphus Greely, adjusting his spectacles and gazing at the three tall masts of the Proteus piercing the horizon, had cause for both excitement and trepidation. For as his men lowered the whaleboats, and the twenty-eight-foot steam launch dubbed the Lady Greely, it occurred to him that they were 250 miles north of the last known Eskimo settlement, and more than 1,000 miles north of the Arctic Circle. They were, in fact, now the most northerly colony of human inhabitants in the world. They were being left, quite literally, at the far end of the earth.

Unloading the Proteus at Discovery Harbor. (G. W. Rice, photographer / Library of Congress)

Building Fort Conger. (G. W. Rice, photographer / Library of Congress)

2

Fort Conger

There was no time to waste in disembarking. Some open leads remained that the Proteus could use in its departure, but ice was closing in fast. Greely ordered the men to work around the clock in four-hour shifts, made possible by the summer’s perpetual daylight. He knew that very soon—in just two months, by mid-October—the skies would go dark and the sun would not return again for 130 days, so every day was critical in building the fort and setting up the weather stations.

They had enough food for a three-year stay, should that be necessary, including nearly thirty thousand rations (a ration being one day’s allotment of food for one man) of various meats—including pork and pemmican (a high-calorie mixture of dried meat, melted fat, and often berries), bacon, ham, and mutton—as well as canned salmon, cod, and crabmeat. Greely had brought along some forty thousand rations of beans and rice, plus two thousand pounds of potatoes packed in five-pound cans, and mixed vegetables in two-pound cans, including pickles, onions, and beets. There were preserved peaches, molasses and syrup, canned pork and beef, as well as foods known to thwart scurvy: immense quantities of dried fruits, damsons and other plums, and cranberry sauce. They also brought many casks of rum, whose restorative properties were considered more necessity than luxury.

Greely carefully supervised the unloading of the two hundred scientific instruments, which were of paramount importance. His station would be the northernmost of a network of research stations circumscribing the Arctic. The global effort—which sought to understand everything from brutal weather to the frozen seas to the aurora borealis (northern lights) to magnetic fields—included twelve countries manning fourteen circumpolar stations. The idea had sprung from the revolutionary mind of the Austro-Hungarian Karl Weyprecht, an intrepid explorer and physicist. He had journeyed to the Far East, North America, Mexico, and the West Indies before finally casting his gaze to the Far North, and on a North Pole expedition (1872–74) led by him and fellow Austro-Hungarian officer and explorer Julius von Payer, they’d discovered Franz Joseph Land (named for the Hapsburg emperor Franz Joseph I), a glaciated archipelago of nearly two hundred islands lying off the northern coast of Russia in the Barents Sea.

Weyprecht had died in March 1881 of tuberculosis, and Greely was deeply disappointed that the visionary man would not live to see the outcome of his grand circumpolar idea. But Greely also felt a keen responsibility to carry out his experiments dutifully, so he took interest as Sgt. Edward Israel, the expedition’s astronomer and meteorologist, unpacked and cataloged hygrometers, barometers, galvanometers, anemometers, chronometers, magnetometers, and two sets of Thermometers for Solar Radiation (tested by Yale University), as well as numerous mercury thermometers. One of the heaviest pieces of scientific equipment was the one-hundred-pound brass cylindrical gravity pendulum. Made by Professor Charles Sanders Peirce of the U.S. Coastal Survey (he was also a respected philosopher, mathematician, and logician), it was designed to measure gravitational forces with great precision.

To do their work Greely and his men would need shelter, and for this purpose he’d brought along a double-walled, prefabricated wooden structure, a lengthy, barrack-like longhouse measuring sixty-five feet long, twenty-one feet wide, and fourteen feet tall. It was the first of its kind. No sooner had Greely chosen the site for the fort than the carpenters launched into work, and within only a few twenty-four-hour shifts, they had the rafters raised and were ready for roofing with tar paper. The double walls of half-inch-thick boards (between which was a foot of airspace for insulation) were coated with extra-heavy tar paper to absorb the sun’s rays when there was sun, and to provide further protection against the winter’s bitter cold, which would plunge to –75º or even colder.

Greely helped cart the last of the cargo from the Proteus and supervised Fort Conger’s construction. There would be a number of outbuildings for the storage and use of scientific observation equipment, an astronomical observatory, as well as tarped lean-tos adjoining the fort to house sledges, sledge-building equipment, and supplies for the dog teams. As the tethered dogs yapped, barked, and snarled, Greely listened to the hammering of floorboards and siding, impressed by the carpenters’ skill at framing doors and windows, and by other enlisted men’s ability to fit out a full kitchen with range, stoves, and a boiler, and to fashion bunk beds, shelving, and even a bathroom with a bathtub. When he told them that it would soon be 75º below zero, they hammered double time. By the last week of August—less than two weeks after their arrival—the fort was nearly completed.¹

Some days before, the Proteus had attempted to depart, but heavily bunched wind-blown ice in Lady Franklin Bay stopped it near Dutch Island, in view of Fort Conger and a nearby fifteen-hundred-foot rise called Cairn Hill, so named for the cairn and records left there by Nares during his expedition of 1875. The communication method of leaving notes in cairns had become prevalent and trusted among Arctic explorers. Cairn Hill was a convenient promontory from which to scan in all directions, and on a clear day, one could see all the way across the Hall Basin and Robeson Channel to Greenland, some twenty miles to the east. Knowing the Proteus would depart any day, Greely and all his men scribbled last-minute letters to their loved ones and families for Captain Pike to carry back to the United States.

With the fort now livable, Greely mustered his men to impart general orders for the duties and living conditions at Fort Conger. More than six feet tall, thin but wiry strong, Greely was a stern and commanding presence, his eyes—framed by his spectacles—intelligent and fierce. His voice resounded with firmness of purpose; his words were clear and definite. When pensive, or when balancing on the cusp of a major decision, he’d pull at the tip of his long, bushy, pointed black beard. Though this was his first Arctic exploration, he’d experienced the battlefields of the Civil War and the American Southwest, where in the early to mid-1870s he’d worked in Indian country for the Signal Corps as the country’s top meteorologist, building immense strings of telegraph lines. Once, in the badlands of the Dakota Territory, stuck in a blizzard and almost buried by deep snow, he’d spent three days huddled under a wagon wrapped only in a thin canvas blanket, the howling winds preventing him from starting a fire. He’d survived, and when the storm cleared, he had made his way back to the Powder River and continued inspecting the lines: He got the job done.

Now Greely surveyed his mustered corps. To call them unconventional for such a mission would be a gross understatement. For starters, they were army instead of navy, unusual for nautical duty. But they were under the direction of the U.S. Department of War, and since most of the men were from various branches of the army—either Signal Corps, Cavalry, or Infantry—he was confident in their abilities to follow orders. The problem was that Greely had no nautical experience either. But as with everything he’d ever done, he believed that his preparation and ability to adapt on the fly would be enough. It always had been.

He’d known his second in command, Lt. Frederick Kislingbury, since 1874, when the lieutenant had assisted him building telegraph lines across the southwestern plains. Kislingbury had heard about the Arctic expedition and written Greely a persuasive letter, citing his willingness to learn, his endurance and patience, and his ability to lead troops through hardships. Kislingbury was a deadeye with a rifle, which would be useful. Early on, however, Greely noted that Kislingbury was prone to melancholy, and that he had the annoying habit of preening, combing his mustache constantly, sometimes a half dozen times a day. Such dedicated grooming struck Greely as overly concerned with self-image, which wouldn’t do him a lot of good up here.

Lt. James B. Lockwood was nearly thirty, a well-trained career officer who came from a distinguished military family. His father, Henry Hayes Lockwood, had risen to the rank of general during the Civil War. James Lockwood was tough, ready, able, and possessed a biting humor that was useful for breaking tension during difficult times. He was dutiful, fit, and came highly