Free The Ice Balloon: S. A. Andree and the Heroic Age of Arctic Exploration by Alec Wilkinson

to hierarchical discipline, and the citizens were not accustomed to discipline at all. Greely’s crew had nineteen soldiers, three who had been mustered into service for the purpose, two Greenland natives as hunters and guides, and a civilian doctor, Octave Pavy, who was also the expedition’s naturalist and the last person to join. Pavy had been born in 1844 in New Orleans, but he was sent to France as a child to be educated. He had come back to America in 1872 to undertake “The Pavy Expedition to the North Pole,” but his backer died before he could leave. In 1879, he joined another Arctic expedition, which was given up in Greenland when its ship was judged unfit. The ship went home, but Pavy stayed, learning to speak Eskimo and, according to his wife, Lilla May Pavy, making “himself an adept, so far as a foreigner can become such, in the management of the Eskimo sledge.” (Lilla May Pavy was from St. Louis, but another woman turned up from Paris and said she was also married to Pavy.) In addition, he collected plants, rocks, and animals he stuffed, and studied diseases specific to the region and how to treat them. He was a little prickly and regarded himself as better educated and more knowledgeable about the Arctic than Greely and the others. Greely had command of him, since Pavy was, nominally, for the expedition, a soldier, but he pretty much refused to be bossed or only acceded resentfully.
    The Proteus left them at the northern end of Ellesmere Island, across from Greenland, about eleven hundred miles above the Arctic Circle, then got caught in the ice before it could leave. On flat ground about a hundred yards from the shore, they built Fort Conger. Perhaps two hundred yards from it they also built a small hut as a place to make magnetic observations.
    Before a month had passed Greely had reprimanded his two lieutenants, Lockwood and Kislingbury, for sleeping late. Lockwood, an insomniac, reformed, but not Kislingbury. Kislingbury had strung telegraph lines with Greely in Texas, and Greely had invited him. Three years earlier Kislingbury’s wife had died, and he had married her sister and then she died, too, apparently of scarlet fever at Fort Custer while Kislingbury had been gone several weeks on a scouting mission. By his two wives he had four sons, two of whom also came down with scarlet fever but recovered. He wrote Greely that the expedition would be an opportunity “to wear out my second terrible sorrow.” His sons, he wrote, “will love me better when I return and will be proud of the father who dared to brave the dangers we have read about of a sojourn in the Arctic regions,” then added, “You will find no truer friend or devoted servant.”
    For three days, with the Proteus still in view, Greely held breakfast half an hour for Kislingbury. When reproached, Kislingbury said they should have started without him. Officers should not have to rise with the enlisted men anyway, he added. Greely said that the agreeable compliance with orders was essential to an officer’s usefulness. Kislingbury said nothing and walked away. He wrote Greely a letter saying morosely that he felt that Greely had no confidence in him, and might prefer that he left.
    Greely called the officers to a conference far enough away from the hut that the men couldn’t hear him, and read the letter to Pavy, Lockwood, and Kislingbury. Then he said that he didn’t go in for intimations and if he wanted an officer removed, he would say so. Kislingbury, perhaps from hurt feelings, said that the effect of Greely’s treatment had amounted to as much. Greely asked Kislingbury if he still wished to be relieved, and Kislingbury said yes.
    Carrying his bags, Kislingbury was walking toward the Proteus , half a mile away, when a passage opened in the ice and the ship sailed off. Disbelieving, he watched it for some time. Then he walked back to Fort Conger. Greely wrote orders specifying that Kislingbury was to be treated as someone