The Greely Expedition — resupply failed twice, and nineteen of twenty-five starved

Summary

In 1881 the United States Army Signal Corps sent twenty-five men under First Lieutenant Adolphus Greely to Lady Franklin Bay, on Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic, to run a scientific station for the First International Polar Year. The expedition's research went well; its logistics did not. The relief ships that were meant to resupply the party failed two summers running, leaving the men to retreat south and then to slowly starve. Of the twenty-five, only six were rescued alive in June 1884. Nineteen died. The toll included one man shot on Greely's order for repeated food theft, and several of the dead were later found with flesh cut from their bodies — cannibalism of the dead by the starving, which the forensic record supports and which the survivors never publicly admitted.

The scientific phase, from 1881 to 1883 at Fort Conger, was a success. The party gathered two years of meteorological, magnetic and astronomical data, and a sledging team reached a new Farthest North of 83°24′N. The disaster lay entirely in the supply chain. Under the plan, a ship would bring fresh provisions in 1882 and, if needed, again in 1883; if no ship came, the party was to retreat south by boat to meet relief near Smith Sound. Both ships failed — the first turned back by ice, the second crushed by it — and the contingency that should have saved the men instead delivered them to a barren shore with almost nothing to eat.

What followed was a winter of deliberate, documented dying. From a hut of stone and overturned boat at Cape Sabine the men starved through the dark, rationing scraps, boiling sealskin and lichen, and dying one after another from late 1883 into the summer of 1884. When the relief squadron finally reached them on 22 June 1884, it found seven men barely alive in a collapsed tent; one of those died days later. The survivors came home to honour and then to scandal, as the manner of the deaths — the execution, and the cannibalism — became public.

Timeline

Two good years, then a broken supply line

The Lady Franklin Bay Expedition was conceived as science, not conquest. As the American contribution to the First International Polar Year, it was to operate a fixed station at high latitude, recording weather, magnetism and tides in coordination with other nations. Greely, a Civil War veteran and Signal Corps officer, ran the station phase competently. Fort Conger, built in 1881, sheltered the party through two winters; the observational programme was carried out in full; and in May 1882 Lockwood and Brainard's sledge journey set a Farthest North that stood as an American record for years. By the measure it was sent to achieve, the expedition was a success.

The fatal weakness was the resupply plan, which depended entirely on ships reaching one of the most ice-choked channels in the Arctic on schedule. The arrangement called for a relief vessel in the summer of 1882, and another in 1883. Crucially, the orders also specified that if no ship arrived, Greely was not to wait but to abandon the station in 1883 and retreat south by boat toward Smith Sound, where relief would be cached and waiting. The whole survival plan therefore rested on two assumptions: that the ships would get through, and that if they did not, supplies would be reliably positioned to the south. Neither held.

In 1882 the relief ship Neptune was turned back by ice and could not approach the station; it left some stores far to the south but never reached the men. In 1883 the Proteus, the same ship that had carried the party north, was caught and crushed in the pack of Smith Sound on 22 July. Its loss did more than fail to deliver food — it scattered and sank much of the supply that was supposed to be cached for the retreating party to find. When Greely, following orders, abandoned Fort Conger that August and brought his men south, they arrived near Cape Sabine to discover that the depots meant to sustain them barely existed.

The starving winter at Cape Sabine

The party that gathered near Cape Sabine in the autumn of 1883 had escaped the worst of the ice only to be marooned on a barren shore with a few weeks' food and a winter ahead. They built a low hut of stones and an upturned boat, banked with snow, and rationed what little they had. As the polar night closed in, the diet shrank to starvation fare: thin stews stretched with sealskin lashings and boot leather, scraps of lichen, and the occasional small game or shrimp. Scurvy and cold compounded the hunger. By January 1884 the men had begun to die, and through the spring they died steadily, the survivors growing too weak to bury the dead properly.

Discipline frayed under starvation. Food became the only currency, and its theft a capital matter. Private Charles B. Henry — a man already known to have enlisted under a false name and a record of dishonesty — was repeatedly caught stealing from the party's common stores, including, by the survivors' account, sealskin lashings and shrimp taken from the shared pot. Greely, judging that Henry's thefts threatened everyone's survival, issued a written order for his execution. On 6 June 1884 Henry was shot by men acting on that order. The killing was later defended by Greely and the survivors as a necessary act against a man stealing the food on which all their lives depended; it remains the one reported execution in the history of American polar exploration.

By the time relief came, the camp was a place of corpses and the barely living. On 22 June 1884 Commander Winfield Scott Schley's relief squadron, pushing hard after the failures of the previous summers, reached Cape Sabine and found a collapsed tent with seven survivors inside — Greely among them — emaciated, frostbitten and close to death. One of the seven, Sergeant Joseph Elison, died on 8 July after amputations, reducing the survivors to six. Eighteen men had died at or near the camp, and with Elison the toll reached nineteen of the original twenty-five.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

The disaster forced a reckoning within the U.S. Army and the broader Arctic enterprise over how badly the relief effort had been managed: two seasons of failure, a relief ship lost, and nineteen men dead on a shore where supplies should have been waiting. Greely himself was largely exonerated and went on to a long and distinguished army career, eventually rising to brigadier general and receiving the Medal of Honor late in life for his lifetime of service. Schley, who led the successful relief, became a noted naval officer. The scandal over the cannibalism and the execution faded, but it left a lasting caution about the limits of resupply-dependent stations at extreme latitude.

The expedition's scientific results outlived the controversy. The two years of meteorological, magnetic and tidal observations from Fort Conger, gathered as part of the First International Polar Year, entered the international record and are still consulted by climate researchers studying the long history of the high Arctic. The men who died are remembered less for the science than for the manner of their dying, and the honest account credits both: a competent scientific party destroyed not by the cold alone but by a supply system that failed it twice and a contingency that was never really in place.

Lessons

References

• Lady Franklin Bay Expedition WIKIPEDIA
• The Greely Expedition PBS AMERICAN EXPERIENCE
• A Mysterious Fork Leads to the Story of the Infamous Greely Expedition SMITHSONIAN NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AMERICAN HISTORY
• Greely Expedition to Lady Franklin Bay U.S. ARMY