A Hard Winter

ABANDONED (323 pp.)--A. L Todd--McGraw-Hill ($5.95).

In the 19th century, the Far North held for adventurous men almost the fascination that outer space holds today. As part of the first international effort to probe the mysteries of the Far North, U.S. Lieut. Adolphus Greely in 1881 led a well-equipped, 24-man team to establish a base camp on Ellesmere Island, more than 1,000 miles north of the Arctic Circle. A tall, spade-bearded Yankee from Newburyport, Mass., Greely was not alarmed when the first supply ship failed to reach them. But in the second summer, a supply ship failed again: it was trapped and sunk in the grinding ice floes above Baffin Bay.

According to an emergency plan, Greely, a veteran officer of the U.S. Signal Corps who had proved his endurance and skill during service in the American West, headed south in a steam launch and three smaller boats. The launch got wedged in the ice, two of the boats were abandoned, and the desperate men barely made it across the ice pack to Cape Sabine as winter and the polar night descended. In the minds of all were the fates of two previous expeditions--those of U.S. Lieut. Commander George De Long and Britain's Sir John Franklin, which ended with the loss of both leaders and more than 130 men.

Lost Fingers. By the spring of 1884, the men of Cape Sabine were reduced to eating lichens, sealskin thongs and their own boots. The first to go were the very weak and the very strong. The weak simply gave up; the strong overtaxed themselves in trying to save all. One man was brought back from a hunt with his eyelids frozen tight; he was so badly frostbitten that his fingers and feet fell off. Dependable Canadian-born Sergeant George Rice died of exhaustion in a three-day blizzard.

Astronomer Edward Israel, fresh out of the University of Michigan, babbled of home and mother's cooking, then collapsed. The first twelve men to die were dragged to a barren hillock and covered with gravel. After that, the weakened survivors could do no more than push the emaciated corpses into a tidal crack in the ice.

In Washington, Congress haggled for a month about sending a third rescue party. The Senator from Maine wanted the ships to be U.S.-built. The Senator from Delaware insisted that only volunteers serve in the crews. The Senator from Kansas questioned the "vast expenditure." On April 24, 1884, a rescue flotilla finally set out under Commander Winfield Scott Schley, who, 14 years later, was to destroy the Spanish fleet at the Battle of Santiago. After a two-month voyage and a search of the coves and inlets of Baffin Bay, Schley reached Cape Sabine. Only Greely and six others, out of 25, remained alive. In memorable understatement, an emaciated survivor said: "A hard winter, sir--a very hard winter."

Secret Man-Eating. They came home in triumph, but it did not last. The muckraking New York Times of the 1880s soon splashed headlines charging cannibalism. The brothers of Lieut. Frederick Kislingbury demanded that his body be exhumed. "Large pieces of tissue" were found to have been cut from the thighs and trunk. Awkwardly for the brothers, traces of human flesh were also found in Kisling-bury's digestive tract. Greely and the other survivors angrily denied being cannibals. "Any man-eating was done in secrecy and entirely without my knowledge," said Greely. He added, anticlimactically, that cannibalism was "contrary to discipline."

Abandoned is vastly readable when the doomed and desperate men are speaking for themselves in their letters, diaries and memoirs, which evoke the Victorian flourishes of "manliness" and "nobility" rather than the blood-and-guts flavor of contemporary Army speech. Despite the disapproving chorus--President Chester A. Arthur thought that "the geographical and scientific information secured could not compensate for the loss of human life"--the assault on the Far North went on, and other brave men died beneath the frosty stars. In 1909 Commander Robert E. Peary planted the U.S. flag at the North Pole. Adolphus Greely, retired from the Army with the rank of major general, lived until 1935, when plane flights over the polar icecap prepared the way for the airline routes of today.

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