Dangerous Crossings

Chapter One

Early Arctic Exploration

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the European age of exploration was winding down. In the four hundred years since Henry the Navigator sent ships south from Portugal, the continents had been fixed in place, the shorelines had been mapped, and all but the most inaccessible interiors and river systems had been "discovered." The latter half of the nineteenth century saw great expeditions mounted mostly by English, German, and Russian explorers who reached the sources of the last great rivers and crossed the few remaining inaccessible mountain ranges, dank jungles, and high deserts of Africa, Asia, and South America. As that century waned, the attention of governments, explorers, and the general public turned to the last and most difficult task: polar exploration. The Arctic was the initial focus of this attention. Finding a useful Northwest Passage, crossing the great Inland Ice of Greenland, exploring the Polar Sea, and, above all, reaching the North Pole, became all-consuming goals for several generations of governments and explorers.

The great Norse sailors at the end of the first millennium were the first Europeans to explore the Arctic. Most authorities date formal exploration as having begun soon after the 1576 publication of A Discourse to Prove a Passage by the North-west to Cathaia and the East Indies by Britain's Sir Henry Gilbert. The great early navigators of the North soon followed: Martin Frobisher (1570s), John Davis (1580s), and Henry Hudson (1610). In 1615 William Baffin explored Hudson Strait and Hudson Bay and returned to England to report that the passage would not be reached by these routes. The first era of Arctic exploration came to a close in 1616 as Baffin's second expedition reached its most northerly point, 78 degrees north latitude, by sailing north through Davis Strait, only to be stopped by solid ice at the entrance to Smith Sound. Baffin returned to report to his sponsors in London that it was useless to continue to search for the passage, and though minor expeditions would continue sporadically, Arctic exploration entered a two-hundred-year hiatus.

The Second Era of Arctic Exploration

The British Admiralty rekindled serious Arctic exploration in 1773 when it sent Royal Navy Capt. Constance Phipps north to counter the continuing thrust of Russia into Siberia and Alaska. Following Phipps's voyage, the first fifty years of the nineteenth century saw a series of polar expeditions, primarily off the west coast of Greenland or north and east of Hudson Bay. These efforts, coupled with the ever increasing whaling in the region, helped to develop a much clearer picture of northern lands and waters.

This knowledge was gathered at considerable cost in money and lives. Two great tragedies of Arctic exploration occurred two generations apart in the 1840s and 1880s. The first began in 1845 when the British Admiralty sent Sir John Franklin's party into Baffin Bay and through Lancaster Sound aboard the Erebus and the aptly named Terror . The Franklin expedition was Britain's attempt to forestall Russian expansion in the Arctic and to find a route to the Bering Sea. The Franklin party was last seen alive by a whaling captain in Lancaster Sound in August 1845. Despite numerous search-and-rescue voyages by scores of ships over the next twenty years, the details of the four-year-long agony and deaths of the 128 men with Franklin were not fully documented until 150 years later.

The second major tragedy involved a U.S. Army expedition led to the northern end of Ellesmere Island in 1881 by then Lt. (later Maj. Gen.) Adolphus W. Greely. The Greely party was the most northerly of numerous expeditions that participated in the International Circumpolar Year (1881-82). In the summer of 1882, a promised supply ship failed to reach the expedition, but its members were able to carry on through the following winter supported by summer hunting and reduced rations. The next summer, the Greely party waited as ordered for rescue at their northern base, Fort Conger, until August 1883. They then retreated down the southeastern coast of Ellesmere to meet an expected rescue party at Cape Sabine. When they reached the area in late August, they found a high rock cairn that contained a note informing them that their rescue vessel, the Proteus , had arrived early and had been crushed in the wind-driven ice pack. The Proteus's crew had raised the cairn just two months previously and then moved south down the Greenland coast to safety in their lifeboats.

The Greely party of twenty-four men had no boats and faced another year in the frozen Arctic with only forty days of rations. That winter, seventeen of the twenty-four men slowly starved to death, huddled with their mates for meager warmth in their one remaining tent. When a rescue party finally reached them in the summer of 1884, the seven survivors were themselves within days of death.

This tragic and much publicized story profoundly affected polar exploration for the next half century. In retrospect, it is easy to speculate that neither of these tragedies would have occurred had either effective radio communication or aircraft useful in polar exploration been available. Unfortunately, neither of these technical marvels would be used in exploration until after World War I. The lesson of the Greely party was doubly reinforced in 1912 when Robert Falcon Scott's party successfully reached the South Pole and then, as they struggled to reach the Antarctic coast on their return trek, all starved or froze to death only eleven miles from their "One Ton" supply depot.

The great Arctic explorer Fridtjof Nansen made a prophetic diary entry in the summer of 1895. He had left his ship Fram frozen in the central Polar Sea and set off on a planned sledge trip to reach the outside world via Franz Joseph Land. His diary (11 June 1895) described the Arctic ice that made surface travel on the Polar Sea so dangerous and so physically demanding:

Our hearts fail us when we see the ice lying before us like an impenetrable maze of ridges, lanes, brash and huge blocks thrown together pell-mell, and one might imagine oneself looking at suddenly congealed breakers. There are moments when it seems impossible that any creature not possessed of wings can get further and one longingly follows the flight of a passing gull.

As the twentieth century dawned, three great challenges remained for Arctic explorers:

1. To discover and sail the Northwest Passage.

2. To reach the geographic North Pole.

3. To discover what land might exist in the millions of square miles of the Polar Sea not yet explored.

The Northwest Passage was first sailed by the great Norwegian polar explorer Roald Amundsen (1872-1928) in his epic three-year voyage aboard the Gjöa . Sailing through Lancaster Sound in August 1903 on his first Arctic expedition, he and his party of five spent most of three years making scientific observations northwest of Hudson Bay. They then sailed west to spend a third long winter north of the Mackenzie River Delta before reaching Nome, Alaska in September 1906. The Northwest Passage had finally been conquered.

Robert E. Peary and Matthew Henson

The assault on the Pole took somewhat longer. Robert E. Peary (1856-1920), an engineering officer in the U.S. Navy, became enamored with Arctic exploration in 1883 when he attempted to cross the Inland Ice of Greenland with a Danish officer. They were unsuccessful and were unable to mount another attempt before Fridtjof Nansen crossed the ice in 1888. Peary then began a number of expeditions to the north coast of Greenland, headquartering in the Cape York area near the modern-day Thule Air Force Base. Peary was joined in each of his journeys by his longtime assistant, African-American Matthew Henson (1866-1955). In 1900, they established a forward supply camp at Greely's Fort Conger, on the northern tip of Ellesmere Island, to serve as a jumping-off point for their first two serious attempts to reach the Pole. Peary and Henson then began an eight-year-long series of attempts for the Pole that would finally reach fruition on 6 April 1909.

Peary learned from each of his failed attempts to reach the Pole. Most importantly, he learned to emulate the hardy Smith Sound Inuhuit hunters who were superb athletes and dog breeders and, above all, highly skilled sledge drivers.

In 1906, Peary used his newly constructed Arctic vessel, the Roosevelt , as a floating base camp north of Smith Sound for a major polar attempt. Despite the active involvement of the Smith Sound Inuhuit on the 1906 dash, it ended in failure 174 miles short of the Pole. Peary, Henson, and their two Inuhuit companions did, however, set a new world's record for the Farthest North at 87 degrees 6 minutes. As they retreated south and then west, paralleling the northwest coast of Ellesmere Island, members of the Peary party saw the tops of what they believed to be high mountains far out in the Polar Sea to the northwest. They saw these peaks for several consecutive days. Although a lack of supplies kept the party from turning back to explore this new land, the peaks were so clear and seemingly real that Peary named the peaks and the land beneath them "Crocker Land" for one of his financial supporters. This seeming discovery of "Crocker Land" would fuel Arctic exploration for the next twenty years.

Peary and Henson returned to New York in the fall of 1906 and were well received. There was some interest in Crocker Land, but financial support for further exploration of either Crocker Land or the Pole proved scarce. It took two years of lecturing and writing to raise the necessary funds for what became Peary's last try for the Pole. He decided on a much larger party of "Arctic Men" and a very much larger team of Inuhuit hunters and sledges. Among Peary's five American companions was Donald B. MacMillan, a young graduate from his own alma mater, Bowdoin College.

After an uneventful voyage north, they paused at Etah, the most northerly of the Inuhuit villages. They soon were off again, the decks swarming with fifty men, women, and children and 250 of the finest sledge dogs in the world. Capt. Robert Bartlett and Commander Peary forced the Roosevelt 250 miles north to Cape Sheridan, where they offloaded almost one hundred thousand pounds of food, sledges, equipment, and supplies. Throughout the long winter nights they prepared equipment and, during periods of the full moon, established forward supply caches on shore.

The final push began on 1 March 1909, when twenty-four men, nineteen sledges, and 133 dogs struck out across the Polar Sea for the Pole itself, four hundred miles distant. As planned, Peary's sledge and team trailed the rest, husbanding their energy. Every four or five days thereafter, one group, made up of an expedition member and two or three Inuhuit, peeled off from the main party. After leaving most of their food with the main group, these smaller parties each returned by double march down the back trail to the south. The last support party broke away 133 miles from the Pole. Peary and his team of Henson and four Inuhuit then had forty days' provisions for men and dogs. They reached the Pole in five long marches, arriving at the ultimate spot on 5-6 April 1909. They camped at the Pole for two days, then swiftly returned south.

When Peary, Henson, MacMillan, and the others reached the most northerly Marconi radio station on the coast of Labrador, Peary's telegram electrified the waiting world: "Have made good at last, I have the Pole."

By the time the party reached the United States, Peary and the entire expedition were embroiled in a series of controversies and accusations, many of which continue to this day. The most newsworthy of these was the announcement by Dr. Frederick A. Cook, a member of one of Peary's earlier expeditions, that he, Cook, had just returned from an expedition that had reached the Pole a full year before Peary. This claim was eventually refuted by two Inuhuit who had accompanied Cook and who testified that their long trip in the area of Axel Heiberg Island never left sight of land. Cook, too, claimed to have seen mountains far out to the northwest in the Polar Sea. He named this landmass "Bradley Land."

With the return of the 1908-9 Peary expedition, only one great goal of Arctic exploration remained: investigating the large portion of the Polar Sea that was still unexplored. At that time, many authorities accepted the existence of a major landmass in the one- to two-million-square-mile unexplored area northeast of Alaska. Whether it was called "Crocker Land," as Peary had named it, or "Bradley Land" as Cook had called it, such a landmass would have great strategic and possibly great economic value to the country that found and claimed it. One of the leaders in this last great effort was Donald B. MacMillan.

Donald B. MacMillan

Donald Baxter MacMillan was born in 1874 in Provincetown, Massachusetts at the tip of Cape Cod, the son of Grand Banks schooner captain Nell MacMillan. His father was lost at sea in 1883, and he was orphaned at age twelve by the death of his mother in 1886. Young MacMillan lived with two different Provincetown families, the MacLeods and the McDonalds, before moving to Freeport, Maine to live with a married sister. There he finished high school. After graduation from nearby Bowdoin College in 1898, he was employed as a teacher and principal in preparatory schools, first at Levi Hall in Maine, then Swarthmore in Pennsylvania, and finally at Worcester Academy in Massachusetts. In the summers, 1903-8, he was employed as the physical director at an island camp in Casco Bay, Maine.

In the late spring of 1905, Robert Peary, the most famous American explorer of his day, was seeking a young, physically strong, unattached, intelligent young man to serve with him on an attempt to reach the North Pole. Peary tried to hire MacMillan, his son's outdoor skills teacher, but MacMillan had already signed a contract for the following school year and regretfully declined the offer. In 1908, Peary again asked MacMillan to accompany him on what was to be his last polar expedition and MacMillan agreed. The eighteen months in the Far North with Peary changed MacMillan's life forever; he fell in love with northern lands, northern flora and fauna, and especially northern peoples.

If remembered at all today by the general public, MacMillan is recalled as the third of America's "polar" admirals. This, despite the fact that between his first trip in 1908 and his last in 1954, he led twenty-six separate expeditions to the Far North. Collectively, these expeditions traveled over two hundred thousand miles by ship and over fifteen thousand miles by polar sledge in the service of the Arctic sciences. An informed insight into MacMillan's character was provided by then Maj. Gen. Adophus W. Greely of Starvation Camp. In his foreword to MacMillan's classic book on his 1913-17 Crocker Land Expedition, Four Years in the White North , Greely remarked: "Modestly told, MacMillan's story is marked by its fidelity to truth, its accuracy of description, its absence of exaggeration, and its freedom from imaginative efforts to increase its popularity." MacMillan retained his well-deserved reputation for modesty, understatement, and veracity throughout his long career. Ironically, these very qualities may be responsible for his relative obscurity today.

The Crocker Land Expedition

After the Peary expedition, MacMillan returned to teaching and spent three summers exploring Labrador. In 1913, he mounted his first major expedition. With sponsorship secured from three scientific institutions, MacMillan set off for the Far North on a chartered sealing schooner with five companions: Ens. Fitzhugh Green, USN, three scientists, and radio operator Jerome Allen. Expedition plans were to survey coastlines, to make scientific observations, and, in the spring of 1914, to find and explore Crocker Land. A second chartered vessel was scheduled to bring the party home in the summer of 1915.

The expedition put ashore at Etah, one of the main residential sites of the nomadic Smith Sound Inuhuit. Here they established their base camp. In March 1914, after a winter of scientific study and equipment preparation, MacMillan, Green, Elmer Ekblaw (the party's geologist/botanist), and a group of Inuhuit set off for Crocker Land. Crossing frozen Smith Sound and the heights of Ellesmere Island, they paused at the north end of Axel Heiburg Island and then struck out over the Polar Sea. After a monumental struggle through rough sea ice and after crossing many treacherous "leads" of open water, they were temporarily trapped by an uncrossable lead. While camped at the edge of the lead, eighty-five miles out on the ice, they clearly saw hills, valleys, and headlands to their northwest, just as Peary had described. This distant landmass appeared to be in the exact position of "Crocker Land." The sledge party eventually fought their way to a point 150 miles out in the Polar Sea trying to reach this land, which by then had disappeared from view. When rough ice made further progress impossible, MacMillan climbed the highest pressure ridge on a day with a perfectly clear atmosphere to the horizon. He could see nothing but ice in every direction. Crocker Land had been an Arctic mirage.

The sledge party returned to Etah after seventy-four days of brutal travel. They rejoined the scientific party and carried out the program of observations throughout the winter and spring of 1914-15. However, the ship that MacMillan had chartered to pick up the expedition in the summer of 1915 did not appear. After another long winter in the north, no ship reached MacMillan's party during the summer of 1916 either. The wireless, operated by Jerome Allen, proved to be useless above the Arctic Circle, just as MacMillan had feared. By the winter of 1916, the expedition had been without any contact with the outside world for three-and-a-half long years. They had no idea, for example, that a world war had been under way for over two years. That winter, a party traveled by sledge from Etah to southern Greenland to seek news of the outside world and to arrange for a relief vessel for the next summer.

In the summer of 1917, a lookout on the hills high above Etah finally spotted smoke from the Neptune as she fought her way north through Smith Sound to retrieve the party. During its four-year sojourn in the Far North, the expedition had many important accomplishments. It had obtained an immense body of scientific observations, surveyed for the first time long runs of shoreline, compiled a three-thousand-word lexicon of the unique Inuhuit language, taken fifty-five hundred photographs, shot ten thousand feet of motion picture film, and traveled ten thousand miles by sledge. The expedition also had proven that neither Peary's "Crocker Land" nor Cook's "Bradley Land" existed. There remained, though, at least a million unexplored square miles out on the Polar Sea to the northwest of Axel Heiburg Island.

Despite the fact that World War I was in progress, MacMillan and his men returned to a hero's welcome in the United States. MacMillan volunteered for the navy and served first as an enlisted man and then as a commissioned officer in naval aviation. After the cessation of hostilities, MacMillan lectured throughout the United States to enthusiastic audiences. His lecture series of 1919 and 1920 had a long-range goal: to raise funds through lecture fees and public subscription for his own Arctic vessel. No longer would the lives of MacMillan or his men be dependent on obsolete sealing or whaling schooners chartered for a season.

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