The Impossible Rescue Read online

  INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER ONE: STRANDED

  CHAPTER TWO: AN AUDACIOUS PLAN

  CHAPTER THREE: THE LONG TREK BEGINS

  CHAPTER FOUR: AN EXTRAORDINARY ENCOUNTER

  CHAPTER FIVE: BLIZZARDS, REINDEER, AND NEAR DISASTER

  CHAPTER SIX: A DESPERATE REQUEST

  CHAPTER SEVEN: ANOTHER AGONIZING DECISION

  CHAPTER EIGHT: BERTHOLF BATTLES THE ODDS

  CHAPTER NINE: A HAZARDOUS CROSSING

  CHAPTER TEN: DIRE NEWS OF THE WHALERS

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: CONTACT

  CHAPTER TWELVE: JARVIS TAKES CHARGE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: VOYAGE AGAINST TIME

  EPILOGUE

  WHAT HAPPENED TO THEM

  TIMELINE

  SOURCE NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  PHOTOGRAPHY CREDITS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This map, based on one drawn about 1887, shows the key places in the Arctic where the story you are about to read took place, from the tiny village of Tununak, in the southwest corner of Alaska, to Point Barrow, the farthest point north. The names indicated in the waters off Point Barrow are those of the whaling ships that, in 1897, became trapped in the ice there.

  The book you are about to read tells the story of one of the world’s most amazing adventures, a saga based on arguably the most daring rescue plan ever devised. It is a story filled with extraordinary courage, unprecedented personal sacrifices, human failings, and continual suspense.

  The people you are about to meet were as remarkable as the story they lived. Called upon to accomplish what most believed to be impossible by no less a person than the president of the United States, they were thrust into the harshest and most dangerous environment in the world, an immense region of ice and snow with temperatures that fell to as low as sixty degrees below zero, a place where a person’s every step might very well be his last. You will also meet an extraordinary ship and its crew. And throughout the book, you will encounter the unique and often misunderstood people who had long made this harsh region their home and will discover the essential role they played as a miracle in the Arctic unfolded.

  In order to do it justice, I have told this story, wherever appropriate, through the words of those who took part in it. This has been made possible by the existence of reports, diaries, journals, letters, and detailed reminiscences written by the principal characters. Researching the illustrations for the book yielded a most welcome and important surprise. Initially, I was delighted to discover photographs that had been taken during the actual adventure. I became even more thrilled when I was later able to determine that many of the pictures were taken by one of the most important characters in the story.

  Adventure, suspense, almost unimaginable heroics — these are just some of the ingredients of a story made even more remarkable because it really happened. But above all, the story is a celebration of the human spirit, one that, in the most dramatic fashion, reveals how brave men and women will risk and sacrifice all to help those in peril.

  The whaleship Alexander approaches ice-filled Point Barrow, Alaska. “Never in all man’s history,” historian Everett S. Allen would write, “has there ever been anything comparable to whaling in terms of what it demanded of those afloat who pursued it, or the vessels in which they sailed.”

  Benjamin Tilton, the captain of the whaleship Alexander from San Francisco, was in the final month of a whaling trip. He and the captains of the Orca, the Belvedere, the Jesse H. Freeman, and the Rosario were convinced that they would have a few more weeks of fair weather to fill their holds before heading south.

  The Alexander and the other vessels were hunting for bowhead whales. The weather had been excellent, enabling them to catch scores of the mammoth creatures, enough to provide tons of the bowheads’ enormous bones, which were turned into profitable, commonly used items such as buggy whips, clothespins, carriage wheels, pie cutters, and, most important of all, the corset stays that helped women throughout the world enhance their figures. It was only the first of September, 1897, yet, without warning, the temperature plunged dramatically and heavy ice came sweeping in from far out at sea. So much ice formed in the north off Point Barrow, Alaska, that the ships were forced to lay anchor to wait for favorable winds to drive the ice away.

  The winds that Captain Tilton had silently prayed for came, but they were hardly favorable. With them they brought a whole new unbroken pack of ice, a mile and a half long and a half a mile wide. Looking out at the ice, which now seemed to stretch on forever, and then over the first mate’s shoulder, Tilton noticed what the officer had entered in his log. “We have to get out[;] the ice [is] bad this year.”

  The weather was not the only thing troubling Tilton. He was outraged at the behavior of the other captains. From the moment they had become icebound, they had taken to gathering aboard the Belvedere for a continuous round of drinking parties. “This went on for several days,” James Allen, one of the engineers aboard the Freeman, would later write. “The captains didn’t pay much attention to the ice, or to anything else during their parties. . . . They didn’t regard the situation as serious. They reckoned that when a nor’easter came it would drive the ice out again. . . . A few days later came the northeast wind, and oh boy, she blew, believe me! But the ice never moved. These partying captains now commenced to realize that their ships were in a dangerous position.”

  The whaler Belvedere was one of the most well-traveled ships of its time. As author Richard Ellis stated, “In their search for [whales] the roving whalers opened the world, much as the explorers of the sixteenth century had done in their quest for the riches of the Indies.”

  As Tilton knew, spending a winter in the ice meant surviving months of almost twenty-four-hour-a-day darkness and temperatures that plummeted to as far as sixty degrees below zero. It meant never knowing when the ice would suddenly move with a force that could splinter a ship beyond recognition. And that was far from all. The whaleships had expected to leave the Arctic by mid-November. None of them carried nearly enough food and other supplies to sustain the men through the winter.

  Captain Tilton was determined to get himself out of this icy trap. Fortunately, his ship was imprisoned in a spot where the ice was not yet quite as thick as that surrounding the other vessels. Like most of the other ships, the Alexander was part of a whole new breed of whaling vessels, powered by steam as well as sail. On September 4, Tilton ordered the men in charge of the engine room to give him as much steam as possible. Then, for the next eighteen hours, he stood watch as the Alexander continually rammed the ice with as much speed as it could gather. “Back and forth we went,” chief engineer Michael McKinnon later recalled, “and every succeeding crash seemed to us down [below] as though it would be our last. It did not seem possible that wood and iron could stand the strain much longer.”

  The ship not only survived the eighteen-hour ordeal but also managed to forge a channel through the ice pack and out to the open sea. “I can tell you,” McKinnon later exclaimed, “when we . . . saw open water before us we were a happy set of men.”

  With four whaleships already stuck fast in the surprisingly early September ice, the Alexander approaches a small strip of open water, hoping to escape from icy entrapment.

  Captain Tilton was, of course, relieved as well. But he hardly felt like celebrating. For he was leaving behind four ships and four full crews that were hopelessly stranded in the most hostile environment possible — not only stranded but also facing starvation. Tilton was aware that three other ships — the Fearless, the Jeannie, and the Newport — had been steaming toward Point Barrow as well. And there was yet another member of the fleet, the Wanderer, that had been whaling some distance apart from the ot
her vessels. Although he couldn’t see these four other ships, he suspected that they were now locked somewhere in the ice as well. He had to get the Alexander back to its home port of San Francisco as quickly as possible to let people know what had taken place at Point Barrow.

  In total there were eight whaleships and about three hundred men stranded in the farthest northern point in America. With the Arctic waters freezing over more solidly every day, no ship could possibly get to Point Barrow to rescue them. And, as every whaler and every explorer knew, no overland rescue expedition had ever been sent to the Arctic in the dead of winter.

  The Jeannie would be just one of eight whaleships hopelessly trapped in the ice, seriously threatening the lives of all those aboard them.

  As the ships had become trapped in the ice, two eyewitnesses onshore had watched the drama unfold. One of them was a man named Charlie Brower, Point Barrow’s most important resident. Brower was the owner of a profitable offshore whaling station and employed almost all the indigenous men who lived at Point Barrow to help him in his operations.

  When Charlie Brower opened his whaling station at Point Barrow, he had no idea that it would become the setting for momentous events that would have little to do with whaling itself.

  Charlie Brower (seated, right) poses with his two assistants, Tom Gordon (left) and Fred Hopson (center). Gordon, an Englishman, and Hopson, a Scot, would be instrumental in bringing scores of the stranded whalers ashore.

  The other person who witnessed the ice-locked whaleships was a twenty-four-year-old man from New Iberia, Louisiana, named Edward Avery McIlhenny, called Ned. McIlhenny’s family manufactured a highly popular food-seasoning product called Tabasco sauce. He had spent time working in the family business, but early on he had discovered that his two biggest loves were collecting biological specimens and seeking adventure.

  McIlhenny had addressed these two passions by obtaining a commission from the University of Pennsylvania’s Natural History Museum to travel to Point Barrow to gather natural and man-made objects for the museum’s collections. Accompanied by two assistants, McIlhenny had arrived at Point Barrow in 1897 and had rented an abandoned building that had previously served as a refuge station for men whose vessels had run into trouble while whaling in the region. When he had left for Point Barrow, McIlhenny had declared that “we expect to obtain some interesting specimens of fossils, fishes, birds, animals, and insects. I intend that science shall receive any and all benefit that may result from our explorations.”

  When, in July 1897, Ned McIlhenny headed toward Point Barrow, he wrote in his diary: “For me the real interest in this trip began . . . when we crossed the [Arctic] Circle, for then we entered a sea that is but little known . . . bordering a land that is absolutely unknown.”

  Just as Brower and McIlhenny were beginning to discuss the probability of having to house shipwrecked whalers, three weary-looking men suddenly appeared at Brower’s whaling station. The second mate of the Belvedere and the fourth and fifth mates of the Freeman had walked sixty-five miles across the ice, a frigid journey that had taken them three nights and two days to complete. During the harrowing trip, the temperatures had dropped as low as thirty degrees below zero, forcing them to spend part of two of the nights camped out on the ice. There they faced the danger of falling into the frigid water as the ice drifted and broke apart.

  The mates had been sent by their captains to report that those aboard the whaleships that had not been seriously damaged were prepared to spend the winter aboard their vessels. There was, however, not enough room aboard these ships to accommodate the more than one hundred men they had taken aboard after their ships had either sunk or been badly damaged.

  The vessels that had taken in the shipwrecked whalers were terribly overcrowded, and all those aboard were already complaining about the lack of sleeping space and room to move about. There was only one solution. The whalers whose ships had been destroyed had to find refuge ashore. The big question on everyone’s mind was, Would there be enough food to sustain the some 125 men who remained on the ships and the more than one hundred others who came ashore through the long winter? There was no hope of outside help reaching them for the better part of a year, if in fact anyone outside of Point Barrow was even aware of what had happened to them.

  Although Brower knew that supplying the stranded whalers with enough food was bound to be an ongoing major problem, he realized that he had a more immediate challenge. Where was he going to house the whalers who would be seeking refuge ashore?

  There were only two possible places. One was another abandoned building, in addition to the refuge station, near Brower’s own whaling station that had been owned by another whaling company. It was in terrible condition and was missing much of its wooden floor and ceiling. But it would have to do.

  Because he did not have enough lumber on hand to repair the building as it stood, Brower had his workmen shorten the sixty-five-foot-long structure by some fifteen feet. Then he had them use the wood they had torn away to construct forty-eight bunks in three tiers along the walls. It was far from enough sleeping space to accommodate all those who would be living there, and it meant that the whalemen would have to sleep in shifts. Brower also had his men install a stove in the building.

  Even with its renovations completed, Brower knew that the old whaling station, which he and his men now began referring to as the “bunkhouse,” was not adequate to house all the stranded sailors. The only other building available was the old refuge building, which, along with being structurally sound, had its own stove. But McIlhenny had interrupted his life and had traveled thousands of miles to take up residence there in order to carry out his scientific project. Would he be willing to share the refuge station with stranded strangers? McIlhenny, as Brower would write, “was here to collect birds and mammals. How, I wondered, would he take to collecting shipwrecked sailors?” To Brower’s great relief, McIlhenny agreed, although, in keeping with his aristocratic background, he stated that he preferred to share the refuge station with officers rather than crewmen.

  With the housing issue solved, Brower then turned his attention to the whalers. He sent one of his assistants along with Ned McIlhenny by dogsled to the ships with men on board to assure them that they would be cared for. Then he sent six dog teams under the direction of another of his assistants and more than twenty native people to the Belvedere to deliver a message telling the men that all were welcome at the whaling station and that he would divide his food with them to the last pound. At this point, forty of the whalemen were brought to Point Barrow in what turned out to be an excruciating sixty-five-mile trip, most of it on foot, through snow at least two feet deep and with the temperatures standing at well below zero.

  Among those who witnessed the whaleship disaster were many of the indigenous people who lived at Point Barrow. In the coming months, a number of them would become involved in trying to help the whalers survive.

  Among those being taken ashore was James Allen, the engineer from the Freeman, who would later write, “A sorry-looking bunch they were. Most of these men were past middle age, and a couple were past 65. They had been cooped up in ships for a long time . . . and the [journey to Point Barrow] was quite a contest for them.

  “Mr. Denny, the chief engineer of the Freeman, had the hardest time of all,” Allen would recall. “He wanted to ride [in one of the sleds] all the time, but we couldn’t let him do that. He had to take his turn with the rest of the men who were in just as bad shape as he was. When it was not his turn to ride, we would make a rope fast around his waist and attach it to the stern of a sled. We would half drag him along. On one of these occasions, I looked around and saw that the rope was undone and he was lying down on the ice about a quarter of a mile behind. I had to go back after him — we couldn’t leave him there. I told him to get up and come along.

  “‘I can’t go any farther,’ he said. ‘Leave me alone. I want to die.’ I tried to coax him to get up, but he refused. ‘If you don’t g
et up right now,’ I told him, ‘I will have to make you!’ I got hold of him by the arm and pulled him up to a sitting position. Then I gave him three or four hard slaps across his face. ‘Come on now! Get up or I’ll give you more!’

  “That man got so mad at me that he actually did get up. ‘Damn you!’ he shouted. ‘Don’t you dare strike me again!’ I told him I would unless he came along right away. I put my arm under his and helped him as much as I could. We got back to the sled, but it was slow work.”

  A week after this first contingent of whalers arrived at the whaling station, a second group came ashore. Their arrival at Point Barrow was observed by Ned McIlhenny: “At nine o’clock this morning we sighted the first sleds about four miles to the south. . . . They came at a snail’s pace and not until eleven-thirty did the first sleds reach the house. Some of the sleds had men stretched on them, and all of them had as many hanging to the side rails as could get a hold. . . . There were sixty-five of the wrecked men in this lot and strung out as they were in a line a mile long, made quite a procession. They finally reached the house and none too soon, for many of them could hardly put one foot before the other, they were so stiff. Several were . . . unable to walk and at least 20 of them were frozen about the face and hands.”

  As horrendous as the two journeys from ship to shore had been, at least all of the men had survived. And to their credit, Brower and McIlhenny did all they could to provide for the stranded sailors. They knew that there was enough coal on the ships that had not been destroyed to keep the men aboard them warm enough even during the frigid months that lay ahead. But feeding the stoves in the bunkhouse and the refuge station was another matter. Almost as soon as the first whalemen had arrived ashore, Brower had begun sending those who were willing and able out along the beaches to collect as much driftwood as they could.