To the Ends of the Earth by John V. H. Dippel

Author:John V. H. Dippel
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781633884120
Publisher: Prometheus Books

When thirty-two-year-old Lieutenant John C. Colwell of the US Navy reached the partially collapsed tent on rock-strewn Cape Sabine, he took out a knife and slit the canvas so he could peer inside. Probing the darkness, his eyes alighted on a scene from a charnel house. One man lay dead on his back, with glassy eyes staring into eternity. Another, motionless, but still alive, apparently had neither hands nor feet. A third, sprawled forward on his knees, as if caught crawling, stared up in disbelief, a red skullcap plastered on his head, a long, thick beard obscuring his face, his frail body sheathed in a ragged dressing gown. “Greely, is this you?” Colwell blurted out. “Yes,” the man whispered, almost inaudibly. Then, after a pause, he added, in the labored rasp of someone who had not spoken in a long time, “Yes, seven of us left. Here we are, dying—like men. Did what I came to do—beat the best record.”1 Then he collapsed.

In morte, veritas. With death seemingly near, Adolphus Greely wanted to make sure the world knew what his party had managed to do—reach a new Farthest North of 83.23 degrees, besting the British mark set eight years before. This was the goal he had come to achieve, the feat that really mattered, the accomplishment that would earn him the adulation of a world that not heard from his expedition in three years. Colwell must have been taken aback as much by Greely's assertion as by the pitiful condition of these survivors of the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition he had just rescued. For the American government had not sent these soldiers so far into the Arctic barrens—on the first federally funded polar expedition—to strive for some dramatic territorial milestone like reaching the North Pole.2 Instead, as participants in the First International Polar Year, they were supposed to collect data on the weather, magnetic field, and celestial events from their base in far northern Greenland. But Greely had said nothing about that. It was as if he had forgotten what he had come for.

In fact, the Greely party had not stuck to the task it had been assigned. Quietly, and as early as their first winter on Ellesmere Island, the task of accumulating “scientific knowledge instead of expanding mere geography had been largely shelved.”3 Despite Greely's later protestations that scientific study had been the expedition's “main” task, his focus from the outset had been on gaining fame as an explorer and discoverer of new lands. (In an 1882 letter to his mother, Sergeant David Brainard had explained, more candidly, that their purpose was “exploration and observation.”4) The US government had tacitly approved this shift in emphasis, realizing that it needed to sell the Lady Franklin Bay mission to an American public hungry for glorious deeds. Having previously overseen the stringing of military telegraph lines across the West, Greely had set his sights on leading an Arctic expedition after listening to a fellow officer (and his closest friend), William Henry Howgate,

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