this heroic sergeant. They were many miles from the _Investigator_, the
weather was turning cold with the vanishing fog, and the feeble
twilight--it was now about two o'clock in the afternoon--was giving way
to coming darkness. If he went to the ship for aid, Anderson would
surely perish before it could be obtained. In the hours of travel to and
fro the seaman would either freeze solidly or meet a horrible
alternative fate from the not-far-distant wolves, whose dismal howlings
already seemed a funeral dirge to their helpless prey.
The audacity and strength of these starving, ravenous animals had been a
constant source of anxiety and alarm to all the hunters. Especially had
the forecastle talk run on one gigantic brute, standing nearly four feet
high at the shoulder, leaving a foot-print as big as that of a reindeer,
who was thought to be the recognized leader of a marauding band from
whose ravages no slaughtered game was free.
If the seaman could not be left, neither could he be carried, for
Anderson was one of the largest and heaviest men of the crew, while the
marine was one of the smallest and lightest. At last the thought came to
Woon that he could drag the seaman in to the ship. Not daring, for fear
of the wolves, to quit his gun, he slung both muskets across his
shoulders, and clasping Anderson's arms around his neck started to drag
him in this manner through miles of snow to the ship. Such a task was
of the most herculean and exhausting character. The only relief that he
had was when the trail brought him to the top of a hill or the edge of a
ravine. Stopping and laying Anderson on the snow, he rolled him down the
hill-side to the bottom, in this way giving himself a rest and at the
same time stirring the dormant blood and breaking the lethargic sleep of
the steadily freezing seaman. In fact this rough treatment was the
saving of Anderson, as a fresh wind had sprung up with the temperature
fifty-seven degrees below the freezing-point.
For ten long hours this heroic sergeant struggled on, while the
situation seemed more and more critical. The seaman was growing
stupider, while his own strength was decreasing from hour to hour,
although his courage was unfailing despite cold, darkness, and snow. At
length, when within a mile of the ship, he felt that he could not drag
his man a step farther. While resting and planning what next to do, he
saw a rocket shoot up, leaving its train of welcome blazing light.
Pointing to it, he called on Anderson to stand up and walk on as he was
now safe. Again and again he uttered such words of cheer, with alternate
threats and orders, but alas! without avail. The seaman only asked in
feeble voice "to be left alone to die," having reached that benumbed
state so dangerous to a freezing man.
Seeing that he could get him no farther, Woon laid him down in a drift
of snow, covered him with such of his own clothing as he felt he could
spare, and throwing quite a thick coating of snow over him, so as in a
measure to protect him from the awful cold, went ahead for aid, which
most happily proved to be near at hand.
The precautions that the sergeant had taken on leaving the man saved his
life, as a half-hour's longer exposure to the extreme cold would have
proved fatal. As it was, Anderson was brought to the ship insensible,
with his heart scarcely beating, with clinched, frozen hands, rigid
limbs, glassy eyes, and hard-set jaws. He lost parts of both feet, of
both hands, and of his nose by amputation, but with his robust
constitution recovered his general health and returned safely to
England.
The courage and devotion of Woon was recognized by his promotion to be
color-sergeant, the highest grade to which Captain M'Clure could advance
him. Welcome as was this increase of rank to Woon, it stood second in
his mind to a sense of the high honor and deeper regard with which he
was ever after held by the men of the ship. All felt that to his
strength of will, powers of endurance, and heroic spirit of comradeship
was due the life of the ship's favorite, first from death by exhaustion
and exposure and then from a more horrible fate at the ravenous jaws of
the greatly feared wolves.
In after time when, in the midst of a heated argument as to service
matters, some exultant marine would refer to the story of the big seaman
and the little sergeant, with a modesty equal to his courage and
creditable to his spirit of comradeship Color-Sergeant Woon would at
once interrupt the speaker and change the subject of conversation.
Nor is Woon's heroism an especially unusual episode in the thrilling
history of arctic service. In countless and too-often unrecorded cases
not only the officers, but especially also the rank and file, have
practically and gloriously illustrated by personal heroism those
splendid qualities of uplifted humanity--fortitude, loyalty, patience,
best of all, solidarity and the spirit of self-sacrifice. These
unheralded and humble heroes have at the call of duty, as circumstances
required, done their part each in his own way. Among these the name of
Color-Sergeant Woon stands high, simply because his rising to a noble
occasion is a matter of written record.
We know not his later career in war or in peace, but we feel sure that
as color-sergeant he lived up to the ideal of an American private when,
as others of his caste, for the honor and safety of a nation--
"He shows in a nameless skirmish
How the color-guard can die."
THE ANGEKOK KALUTUNAH AND THE STARVING WHITES
"Every one hears the voice of humanity, under whatever clime he may
be born, through whose breast flows the gushing stream of life,
pure and unrestrained."--GOETHE.
As elsewhere noted, Dr. Elisha Kent Kane, United States Navy, in the
brig _Advance_, while in search of Sir John Franklin, was forced into
winter quarters at Van Rensselaer Harbor, Greenland, in the Autumn of
1853. As the harbor ice did not break up the following summer, the
question arose in August, 1854, as to the proper line of action to be
taken in order to preserve the lives of the crew. The stock of fuel was
practically exhausted, the provisions were so depleted in quantity and
restricted in quality as to threaten starvation, while in the matter of
health Kane describes the crew as "a set of scurvy-riddled, broken-down
men." He believed, nevertheless, and events proved that his judgment was
sound and practicable, that the safety of the party would be best
insured by remaining in the brig during the winter, saying: "In spite of
the uncertainty, a host of expedients are to be resorted to and much
Robinson-Crusoe work ahead. Moss was to be gathered for eking out our
winter fuel; willow-stems, sorrel, and stone-crops collected as
anti-scorbutics and buried in the snow."
The Danish interpreter, Petersen, strongly urged the abandonment of the
ship and an attempt to reach by boats the Danish colony at Upernavik,
thus crossing Baffin Bay. Though his ice experiences were only as a
subordinate with Penny's arctic expedition, his opinion caused a
separation of the party.
With his unfailing quality of courtesy Kane accorded free action to each
individual. He called all hands "and explained to them frankly the
considerations that have determined me to remain. I advised them
strenuously to forego the project, and told them I should freely give my
permission to those desirous of making the attempt." Eight decided to
remain and nine to make the attempt, among whom were Dr. Hayes and
Petersen. The main incidents of their unsuccessful journey and their
relations with the Etah Eskimo, whose material aid saved their lives,
form the principal parts of this narrative.[8]
* * * * *
The boat party, under command of the Dane, J. C. Petersen, started
August 28, 1854, provided with all that they could carry in the way of
food, arms, ammunition, clothing, camp and boat gear. "I gave them [says
Kane] their portion of our resources justly, and even liberally. They
carried with them a written assurance of a brother's welcome should they
be driven back; and this assurance was redeemed when hard trials had
prepared them to share again our fortunes."
It required eight days of heavy and unremitting labor to get the boats
and stores to open water, a start so discouraging that one man deserted
the party and returned to the _Advance_. The ice conditions were most
adverse from the very beginning, entailing sufferings and hazards from
day to day. Among their experiences were besetment in the open pack,
separation of boat and cargo during portages, some of the men adrift on
detached floes, and stormy weather that kept them once for thirty hours
without either warm food or drinking water. With courage, even if
judgment was wanting, they pushed on and improved matters by obtaining
food and another boat from the cache made at Littleton Island by Kane
the preceding year. A gale nearly swamped them in rounding Cape
Alexander, south of which they were forced to shore by the insetting
ice-pack. Ice and weather were too much for them, and they eventually
landed in Whale Sound, twenty miles north of Cape Parry. They had come
to the end, a hundred miles from Kane--scarcely an eighth of their
proposed voyage completed.
Here they were most hospitably received at an Eskimo encampment and
had their first view of native life in its own environment. The
principal man of the band was swarthy-faced Kalutunah, the Angekok, or
medicine-man, of the wandering bands that travel to and fro along the
narrow, ice-free land between Cape York and Etah. He was one of the
Etahs who had visited the _Advance_ the preceding winter and so
recognized them as friends. In a spirit of hospitality the Angekok
invited the voyagers to his encampment, where a feast of walrus blubber
and meat would be given them. It appeared, however, that the natives as
a body did not relish the inroads to be made on their scanty supply of
food, and one old woman especially inveighed against the feast. In the
end the dark-skinned Kalutunah, enforcing his authority and asserting
his dignity as the Angekok of the tribe, tersely and firmly said: "The
white man shall have blubber!" which ended the discussion.
Hayes records: "Our savage friends were kind and generous. They
anticipated every wish. Young women filled our kettles with water.
Kalutunah's wife brought us a steak of seal and a dainty piece of liver.
The hunt had latterly been unproductive, and they had not in the whole
settlement food for three days. The supply of blubber obtained was
sufficient to fill our keg. We distributed to them a few small pieces of
wood, a dozen needles, and a couple of knives. We could not obtain any
food, for the poor creatures had none either to give or to barter."
The architectural skill of these, the most northerly people of the
world, was not without interest to Hayes. "I found the huts to be in
shape much like an old-fashioned clay oven, square in front and sloping
back into the hill. The whole interior was about ten feet in diameter
and five and a half feet high. The walls were made of stones, moss, and
of the bones of whale, narwhal, and other animals. They were not arched,
but drawn in gradually and capped by long slabs of slate-stone
stretching from side to side. The floor was covered with flat stones,
and the rear half of it was elevated a foot. This elevation, called a
_breck_, served both as bed and seat, being covered with dry grass over
which were spread the skins of bears and dogs. Under a small corner
_breck_ lay a litter of pups[9] and under another was stowed a joint of
meat. Above the passageway opened a window, a square sheet of dried
intestines, neatly sewed together. The entrance hole, close to the front
wall, was covered with a piece of seal-skin. The walls were lined with
seal or fox skins stretched to dry. In the cracks between the stones of
the walls were thrust whip-stocks and bone pegs on which hung coils of
harpoon-lines. The lamps were made of soapstone and in shape much
resembled a clam-shell, being about eight inches in diameter. The cavity
was filled with oil and on the straight edge a flame was burning
brilliantly. The wick which supplied fuel to the flame was of moss.
Above the flame hung, suspended from the roof, an oblong, nearly square,
cooking-pot made of soapstone. Over this was a rack, made of bear
rib-bones lashed together crosswise, on which were placed to dry
stockings, mittens, trousers, and other articles of clothing. There were
three lamps, and centring around its own particular lamp were three
families, one represented by three generations."
Petersen's party went into winter quarters sixteen miles south of Cape
Parry, where their equipment was landed, the boats hauled up, and their
tents pitched. As the men suffered frightfully in the thin tents, a hut
was built in a crevice of a neighboring cliff. With the well-known
resourcefulness of the American sailor, they put up quite a comfortable
shelter roofed with the sails of the boat. A canvas-covered wooden frame
served as a door, and an old muslin shirt greased with seal blubber
admitted a feeble light through the hole called a window.
Three weeks had now passed since the party had left Kalutunah, and the
attempt to live on the resources of the country had utterly failed, the
only game killed by the hunter Petersen being eighteen ptarmigan (arctic
grouse). With food for a week only, "to appease the gnawing pains of
hunger we resorted to the expedient of eating the rock-lichen, which our
party called stone-moss. Black externally with a white interior, it is
an inch in diameter and the thickness of a wafer. When boiled it makes a
glutinous and slightly nutritious fluid. Poor as was this plant, it at
least filled the stomach and kept off the horrid sensation of hunger
until we got to sleep."
By the middle of October the situation was impossible, with the cold
forty degrees below the freezing-point, their bedding damp, the
stone-moss disagreeing with some, and one man sick. They talked of a
desperate foot journey to seek aid at Netlik, the native encampment
forty miles to the north, but food and strength seemed equally lacking.
Even if made, would the journey be profitable? Hayes had already noted
that the Eskimos "were poor beyond description. Nature seems to have
supplied them with nothing but life, and they appear to have wrested
from the animal world everything which they possessed. Clothed wholly in
skins, with weapons fashioned of bone, they subsisted exclusively on
animal food. [He adds:] There seems no hope for us save in stone-moss."
During an awful blizzard, when hopes were feeblest, two native hunters
burst into the hut equally to the astonishment and relief of the boat
party. Hayes says: "Invested from head to foot in a coating of ice and
snow, shapeless lumps of whiteness, they reminded me of my boy-made snow
kings. Their long, heavy fox-skin coats, surmounted by head-hoods, their
bear-skin trousers, their seal-skin boots and mittens were saturated
with snow. Their hair, eyelashes, and few chin hairs were sparkling with
white frost. Each carried in his right hand a whip and in his left a
lump of frozen meat and blubber. Throwing the meat on the floor, they
stripped off their outer garments and hung them on the rafters.
Underneath their frosty garments they wore a shirt of bird-skins. One of
these new-comers was the Angekok, the sturdy, good-natured, and voluble
Kalutunah. Soon we were rejoicing in a good substantial meal at the
expense of our guests."
The next morning when the Inuits were leaving the starving sledge dogs
attacked Hayes, who says: "An instant more and I should have been torn
to pieces. I had faced death before, but never had I felt as then; my
blood fairly curdled in my veins. Death down the red throats of a pack
of wolfish dogs was something peculiarly unpleasant.... The poor
animals, howling piteously, had been tied separately for thirty-six
hours and were savagely hungry. Every line or piece of skin or article
of food was out of their reach. One, however, had already eaten the
trace by which he was tied."
Of the critical situation Hayes writes: "We had thirty-six biscuits and
three pints of bread-dust. Each man had a biscuit a day, a quantity
insufficient for our need. The hunt having failed utterly to supply us,
we must get our food of the natives or not at all. Accordingly we made
with the Angekok a treaty by which his people are to furnish as much
food as we might want, and we are to supply them with wood, iron,
knives, and needles at rates to be subsequently fixed upon."
It was a fortnight before the Inuits again appeared, and meanwhile the
whale-boat was broken up for fuel. All of the party had become
frightfully weak and three men were sick. Hayes piteously says: "What
_shall we_ do? Will the Eskimos never come? I never go out without
expecting to find a corpse when I return."
At last, after two weeks, the natives returned, coming from a hunt with
the greater part of three bears. While the starving men "were fattening
on the juicy bear's meat they left us," yet there was a key-note of fear
in the statement that the natives "were very chary of the meat, as we
obtained only enough to suffice us for a few days." Their gratitude for
trifles and the willingness of the natives to give their last bit of
food was shown a few days later by a young Eskimo. "He had nothing on
his sledge but two small pieces of blubber, four birds, about a pound of
bear meat, a bear-skin, and a small lamp. All these he laid at our
feet."
Temporarily saved from death by starvation through food from the
natives, the whites planned for the future. There was much wild talk
about wintering at Cape York, of hiring the natives to take them across
the unknown ice of Baffin Bay to Upernavik. Finally it was agreed that
life depended on their obtaining supplies from or by their return to
Kane and the _Advance_--either of these alternatives a difficult as well
as a bitter resort. The distance along the ice-foot of the winding coast
was estimated to be about three hundred miles, and it was hard to admit
that their departure from the brig against the wishes and advice of
their commander had been a serious mistake. At least they would try
their friend Kalutunah on their various schemes before admitting their
error.
The Angekok came with food, as usual, and at the same time there was a
new visitor, a widow with a load of frozen birds--the little auks killed
the summer before and stored for winter consumption. She declined to eat
the walrus and held fast to her own food. It appeared at last that she
was a patient of the medicine-man, Kalutunah, whose power over his
comrades lay in his virtues as a sorcerer. Hayes says: "The widow
greatly interested me. She ate birds for conscience' sake. Her husband's
soul had passed into the body of a walrus as a temporary habitation, and
Angekok Kalutunah had prescribed that for a certain period she should
not eat the flesh of this animal. As bear and seal were scarce, she was
compelled to fall back on birds. This penance [he adds] was of a kind
which every Eskimo undergoes upon the death of a near relation. The
Angekok announces to the mourners into what animal the soul of the
departed has passed, and henceforth, until the spirit has shifted its
quarters, they are not to partake of the flesh of that animal."
The party, cheered by the food brought by Kalutunah, broached to him
their wishes. He listened gladly to the tales of the delight and charms
of Upernavik sung by Petersen, but declined to attempt the ice journey
across Baffin Bay, which was known to him only as a great, ice-filled
ocean wherein had perished many of his tribe, as had lately the husband
of the bird-eating widow. Neither would he sell his dogs, without whom
he could neither travel nor hunt. To their surprise he consented to take
one of the party north to the _Advance_. The commander of the
boat-party, Petersen, decided to make the journey, and with him a
seaman, Godfrey, was unwisely allowed to go, and the sledge was also
accompanied to the native settlement at Netlik by two other men. The
Netlik visit resulted in feasts for the men who stopped there, but
Petersen and Godfrey turned back a few days later to the boat camp. They
said that they were in fear of their lives from an Eskimo, Sip-su, with
whom they had trouble. Hayes records the despair of the party at this
situation, saying: "We are at the end of our plans and in two days more
shall be at the end of our provisions. We are destitute--helpless. What
_shall_ we do?"
The day that food failed he rejoices thus: "Again the Eskimos appear to
us more as our good angels than as our enemies. Kalutunah and another
hunter came to us to-day and threw at our feet a large piece of walrus
beef and a piece of liver." Doubtless through the friendly influence of
the Angekok other hunters came to the starving whites from time to time
with meat--even the dreaded bully, Sip-su--receiving in payment bits of
wood or of iron.
It was none the less clear that the party, unable to hunt itself, could
not hope to live through the winter on meat from the natives who at
times were themselves on the verge of starvation. It was decided to
obtain a sledge and dogs wherewith to make the journey back to the brig.
To build a sledge Hayes examined those of the Inuits of which he says:
"It was the most ingeniously contrived specimen of the mechanic art that
I have ever seen, made wholly of bone and leather. The runners, square
behind and rounded upward in front, about five feet long, were slabs of
bone; not solid, but composed of pieces of various shapes and sizes
cunningly fitted and tightly lashed together. Near their margins were
rows of little holes, through which were run strings of seal-skin, by
which the blocks were fastened together, making a slab almost as firm as
a board. These bones were flattened and ground--a work of months for a
single runner--into the required shape with stones.
"The runners were shod with ivory from the tusk of the walrus, ground
flat and its corners squared with stones; it was fastened to the runner
by a seal-skin string which was looped through two counter-sunk holes.
This sole, though composed of a number of pieces, was uniform and as
smooth as glass.
"The runners, fourteen inches apart, were fastened together by bones
tightly lashed. These cross-bars were the femur of the bear, the antlers
of the reindeer, and the ribs of the narwhal. Two walrus ribs were
lashed, one to the after-end of each runner, for upstanders, and were
braced by a piece of reindeer antler secured across the top."
Quite hopeless of building anything that should be as good as this, they
succeeded in making an indifferent sled from the remains of their boats,
which had been broken up and largely used for fuel. Four dogs were
bought, but a single day's journey showed how impossible it was to hope
to reach Kane with such a wretched field outfit. They must resort to the
natives, and especially to Kalutunah the Angekok.
After endless efforts the boat party succeeded in obtaining dog teams
sufficient to enable them to make the return journey to the _Advance_.
As Petersen had gone ahead with one man, it left Hayes to conduct to the
ship the other men, one being too sick to travel. It was a journey full
of suffering from the extreme cold, of danger especially in rounding the
precipitous cliffs of Cape Alexander, where the strong sea current from
the north and the tides from the south cause danger spots that often
bring death to the midwinter sledgemen.
Of their treatment while travelling up the coast one instance is given
by Hayes: "We received all manner of kind attentions from our hosts. The
women pulled off our boots, mittens, coats, and stockings and hung them
up to dry. My beard was frozen fast to the fur of my coat, and it was
the warm hand of Kalutunah's wife that thawed away the ice. Meats of
different kinds were brought in and offered to us."