Free Fatal North by Bruce Henderson Page B

he knew had neither heart nor soul in the expedition. Tyson did not wish for Hall or anyone to misinterpret him in any way. He did not want to be seen as seeking a position to which he hadn’t been rightfully appointed.
    Tyson parted from his commander feeling they had gone as far north as they would that year, and his intuition proved correct. The next day
Polaris
was ordered to steam south, nearer inshore to find a safe harbor.
    Tyson was disappointed and surprised that Hall had accepted Buddington’s advice to turn tail. The extent to which Hall was able to overlook insolence and incompetence in those who owed him duty and allegiance was something Tyson had never before seen from a commander at sea. Was it a strength in this good man, he wondered, or a fatal flaw?
    That night, they pushed over to the west shore and got beset by ice and drifted to the south. From the crow’s nest, Tyson saw that the wind had opened up the east side, as he had predicted.Had they headed over there they would have had clear steaming north.
    Before they were clear of ice, they lowered a boat, and Tyson joined Hall in trying to get ashore to find an anchorage. They located a natural harbor but could not get into it, and they gave up after several tries. Hall named the place Repulse Harbor.
    The ice suddenly set them free, and
Polaris
steamed through open waters, this time heading to the east side. From the crow’s nest, Chester hollered excitedly that there was an open channel along the east coast as far north as he could see. But there was no more discussion about heading farther north. The first mate was convinced that had Tyson or someone else been sailing master, things would have been different.
    On the east side, they came across an extensive bay and anchored out. As a winter home, it was by no means a snug anchorage. It was, however, inside the line of the main current, and was somewhat sheltered from sea conditions by a cape four miles to the northwest of the ship’s position. Immediately before them lay a harbor formed by a large iceberg to the south and a little indentation on the coast to the north.
    On September 7,
Polaris
steamed in nearer to shore. The officers held a brief conversation about whether to go over to the other side of the ten-mile-wide bay to look for a better anchorage, but Buddington declared that the ship should not move from where it was, and Hall relented.
    Polaris
was brought around behind the iceberg, aground in thirteen fathoms of water, and secured to it. Four hundred and fifty feet long, three hundred feet broad, and sixty feet high, the great iceberg lay about two hundred and fifty yards from shore and about one hundred yards inside the ebb current of the strong tide that would otherwise have tried to push them southward daily.
    Their latitude was 81 degrees, 38 minutes. They had been, at one point, nearly fifty miles farther north.
    As
Polaris
had approached shore, they almost had a potentially disastrous explosion on board. The fireman on duty had allowedthe water in the steam boilers to get dangerously low. Low water was one of the most serious emergencies that could arise in a boiler room. Safe operation of a fire-tube boiler of the type that powered
Polaris
required that the tubes be submerged in water at all times. If the water level fell below the tops of any of the tubes, they could overheat and rupture. The result would be what old-time steam-plant operators called a “violent rearrangement of the boiler room.” When boilers “blew up,” nobody could say in which direction the red-hot boiler parts would go during an explosion. A vessel’s hull could be ruptured as surely as if hit amidships by deadly cannon fire.
    The problem caused by the inattentive water tender was discovered just in time. With that close call in mind, the crew worked through a blinding snowstorm, unloading stores on shore so that if the vessel were struck by a berg or suddenly lost in any