“A storm prevents hunting.... It is surprising with what calmness we view death, which, strongly as we may hope, seems now inevitable.”
DEATH FROM STARVATION
As the gaunt and ghostly form of Death laid its fatal touch upon the weakest one by one, a strong man stole food from comrades, and stole again, and justly forfeited his right to live. Then one by one they died, the Eskimo, Christiansen, from exhaustion, and Lynn. “He asked for water just before dying; and we had none to give.”
Then Rice sacrificed his life for others, dying in the arms of his comrade, Frederick, near Baird Inlet, where he had gone in search of a hundred pounds of English beef abandoned in November, that Elison might be brought to camp alive. Then Lockwood died and Jewell failed—and soon joined his sleeping comrades, and yet in face of horror crowding upon horror, there is an entry:—
“On Easter Sunday we heard on our roof a snow-bird chirping loudly—the first harbinger of spring.”
In the meantime, the chief dependence of this rapidly diminishing party was derived from the gathering of shrimps—or sea-lice; the small crustacea were from one-eighth to one-half of an inch in length, consisting of about four-fifths shell and one-fifth meat, and about seven hundred of them were required to weigh an ounce.
“Dr. Pavy says,” writes Brainard in his journal, May 20, 1884, “that our food must be something more substantial than these shrimps, or none of us can live long. I caught twelve pounds of these animals to-day, and one pound of marine vegetation. Returned very much exhausted from this trip. Cannot last much longer.”
“Caterpillars are now quite numerous on the bare spots of Cemetery Bridge,” he writes a day or two later. “Yesterday Bender saw one of these animals crawling over a rock near the tent, and after watching it intently for a moment he hastily transferred it to his mouth, remarking as he did so, ‘This is too much meat to lose.’”
On May 29 there was a southeast gale and drifting snow. Brainard and Long returned from their day’s hunting with a few pounds of shrimps and a dovekie. “On returning to the tent,” writes Brainard, “Dr. Pavy and Lalor refused to admit me to their sleeping-bag, in which I occupied a place. Physically I could not enforce my rights in this matter, my condition bordering on extreme exhaustion, and wishing to avoid any unpleasantness, I crawled into one of the abandoned bags lying outside, as the only alternative. This bag was frozen and filled with snow. Can my sufferings be imagined? They certainly cannot be described.
“Suffering with rheumatism, and smarting under the sense of wrong done me by my sleeping-bag companions, mental agony was added to physical torture.