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

They had traveled in territory “which had never before met the vision of civilized man.”

    (illustration credit 16.2)
    The first member to crack in the prevalent darkness was Jens Edward, one of the Greenlanders, who wandered from camp and was brought back by men who followed his tracks for ten miles. Not long after Edward’s collapse, the other Greenlander, Thorlip Frederick Christiansen, who was called Eskimo Fred, began waving a cross at the others, whom he believed meant to shoot him. He was eventually pacified. Greely and Pavy indulged their dislike of each other. Pavy wrote in his journal that Greely was full of vanity, and Greely wrote that Pavy was tricky and two-faced, “idle, unfit for any Arctic work except doctoring and sledge travel and not first class in the latter.”
    The ship that was to relieve them, the Neptune , got no closer to Fort Conger than 150 miles when its captain tried to force the ship through a lead and its boiler burst. At Littleton Island and at Cape Sabine, three hundred miles south, he left small caches of food, each sufficient for ten days. He also left a whaleboat at each place. His orders were to return with his provisions if he hadn’t reached Fort Conger. He tried once more to advance, and went home with enough food to sustain a retreat lasting two and a half months, should Greely find it necessary to abandon Fort Conger to reach the next summer’s ship.

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    No one got along any better during the second winter. “Perfect ease of mind cannot come until a ship is seen again,” Greely wrote in the spring. He prepared for the ship’s arrival by, among other tasks, ordering that a catalog be made of all the natural-history specimens collected. Dr. Pavy’s military commission ended on July 20. On the nineteenth Greely asked for his records and his diary. Pavy gave up the records but not the diary, saying that it was a private account and had no place in the expedition’s archive. Greely had him arrested.
    The second relief ship was the Proteus , which had brought them to the Arctic. It was accompanied by the Yantic . The Proteus sailed farther than the Neptune but got caught in the ice and sank slowly. While it was going down, the captain ordered that the ship’s supplies be thrown onto the ice, but most of the crew gave up their posts to save their belongings. About a third of what went overboard went into the water. What remained was left at Cape Sabine for Greely. Then the crew rowed lifeboats south to the Yantic .
    A man named Henry Clay, who was initially a member of the expedition but had quarreled with Dr. Pavy and quit only days before it left, wrote a letter to the Louisville Courier-Journal saying that if a ship did not reach Fort Conger by September, Greely would have to leave for Cape Sabine, more than 250 miles away. If he made 5 miles a day, Clay wrote, it would take him until November to arrive, and by then night would have fallen for the winter. “Their condition will be truly pitiable,” Clay wrote. Likely they would be stranded at Cape Sabine, where they would run out of food. Then they would “lie down on the cold ground, under the quiet stars,” being “past all earthly succor.”
    In August of 1883, enacting the plan to retreat if no one had come for them after two years, and leaving dishes on the table and the beds unmade, collections of lichens and moss and fossils, ten musical instruments, some stuffed birds and some sealskin coats, twenty-three dogs, with enough food to last in case the expedition returned, and nailing the door shut, Greely and his men left Fort Conger in their steam launch, which was named Lady Greely . The launch towed two smaller boats and a dinghy, which were loaded with their diaries and records, their scientific instruments, including chronometers and the pendulum, four rifles, two shotguns, a thousand rounds, and Greely’s dress uniform with his sword. Sergeant William Cross described the flotilla as resembling a “load of