Great fiction, we all know, has the uncanny ability to imitate the unpredictability and emotion of real life. So it’s a testament to the Civil War’s otherworldliness that real life imitated great fiction in the remarkable story of Isaac Israel Hayes, one of America’s most famous early Arctic explorers.
It’s unclear if Hayes ever read Washington Irving’s classic short story “Rip Van Winkle,” or if he even knew the plot, in which the main character inadvertently sleeps through the American Revolution. But by the spring of 1862, Hayes would have easily identified with Irving’s famously henpecked hero. Like Rip, Hayes had one day ventured off into the unknown, missed some of the most defining moments of his generation (in this case everything from Lincoln’s election to the Battle of Balls Bluff) and returned to a country he barely understood.
Hayes didn’t sleep through the opening of the Civil War, but he might as well have. The Pennsylvania native had instead spent 15 of the most important months in American history — from July 1860 to October 1861 — looking for the North Pole between and above Greenland and Canada.
Because telegraphs and mail didn’t run
that far north, Hayes had no idea that the United States had been torn
in two during his absence. He heard rumors of the conflict on his way
home, but it wasn’t until he finally anchored in Boston Harbor in late
October 1861 that the war’s terrible realness stopped him cold. Within
moments of stepping ashore, Hayes realized that “the country which I had
known before could be the same no more.” Quoting the Book of Exodus but
also presaging the title of Robert A. Heinlein’s sci-fi classic, he
wrote, “I felt like a stranger in a strange land, and yet every object
which I passed was familiar.”
Hayes
hadn’t always longed for something so familiar. Born in 1832 and raised
in a Quaker family in Chester County, Pa., he was a medical doctor by
training, but rather unexcited about the predictable rhythms of private
practice. Instead, he was drawn to the barrens of the Arctic, an
unforgiving and mysterious world where a young man could prove himself,
and even achieve renown. If nothing else, the northernmost frontier
would give Hayes the opportunity to lead what he would soon call “a
novel sort of life.”
Equal parts
science and adventure — with undertones of national ambition— Arctic
exploration during the mid-19th century captivated the world much like
the space race would do a century later. The top of the planet was
impossibly cold, dark and often fatal. But Victorian explorers kept
going back: first, in a renewed search by the British and others for the
Northwest Passage; then, in typically hopeless rescue missions for the
crews that never returned; and finally, after much of the North American
Arctic had been mapped, they began a dangerous, often obsessive race
“to reach the north pole of the earth,” as Hayes first proposed in early
1860, that would last into the 20th century.
Few
American or European scientists had ever made it above 80 degrees north
latitude, but Hayes believed, like other explorers, that an “open polar
sea” blanketed the very top of the world: a navigable ocean, kept
ice-free by a mixture of warm Gulf Stream waters, strong undersea
currents and prevailing surface winds. He had been a member of an
earlier Arctic team led by Elisha Kent Kane between 1853 and 1855 that
claimed to have found evidence of the sea’s existence, and now he
desperately wanted confirmation. Anxious to go back, Hayes organized a
follow-up expedition.
The small
crew left Boston in early July 1860, vowing to cross the ice belt in the
lower latitudes, reach the open sea and sail straight to the North
Pole. Hayes’s ship was “snug, jaunty looking,” he said, but whether it
would survive the dangerous and unchartered waters in its future
remained to be seen. Hayes named his ship the United States.
After
tacking up Greenland’s west coast, dense pack ice forced them to make
winter camp near Smith Sound above Baffin Bay. Hayes traded for sled
dogs and provisions with the Arctic’s native peoples; were it not for
their guidance — they did, after all, live in the very place Hayes had
come to discover — his expedition would have ended much differently.
After a long and dark winter in which temperatures dropped to 68 degrees
below Fahrenheit, Hayes and most of his crew survived into the spring.
Just days before the Confederacy
opened fire on Fort Sumter, Hayes pushed northward in search of the open
polar sea. Traveling by dogsled, he struggled across the Arctic’s
broken terrain and its fields of ice hummocks. In mid-May, at a latitude
Hayes recorded as 81 degrees 35 minutes north, he observed veins of
open water fanning out like a “delta” across what he believed was the
polar basin. He took a few measurements, enjoyed the view, planted a
flag and turned around. Severe damage to his ship prevented him from
attempting to sail to the Pole, as he had originally intended.
Hayes
later said that he “led a strange weird sort of life” in the Arctic.
The irony, of course, is that it would only get stranger and weirder
when he went back home. In 1860, Hayes had embarked as a celebrity; he
returned over a year later a mere afterthought, ridiculed in print.
“Surely,” wrote the Detroit Free Press a short while after Hayes docked
at Boston,
enough of treasure and valuable life have been spent in search of facts to substantiate somebody’s theory about the polar regions, which, whether it is this way or that way, is of no practical importance to anybody in the wide world. Suppose the continent of land does run up to the north pole, or suppose it don’t. Suppose there is an open sea there or suppose there isn’t. What does it amount to? Who will go there on a pleasure voyage or a trout fishing?
But
if the country had no time for Hayes, the explorer found the war an
all-consuming horror. He felt out of place in an America that now seemed
more alien than the Arctic north, leaving him “sad and dejected,” he
said. Confident that he had found the open sea but disappointed at not
having reached the Pole, Hayes’s existential anxiety came rushing back.
In the spring of 1862, despite his Quaker beliefs, he accepted a
commission as a surgeon in the Union Army and was quickly appointed
director of the massive Satterlee Hospital, outside Philadelphia.
After
Hayes died in 1881, follow-up expeditions challenged his findings and
overturned his claim about the existence of the open polar sea. He
largely faded out of memory. But recent studies, including a 2009
biography by Douglas W. Wamsley, have begun resuscitating his legacy.
Not only had Hayes pioneered the use of photography in the Arctic,
Wamsley and others note, but he had also helped establish the route that
later explorers — including his better-known rival, Charles Francis
Hall — would follow in subsequent expeditions to locate the Pole.
Hayes
once wondered if his time in the Arctic had been “set down in a dream.”
In a sense, he was right — and more like Rip Van Winkle than anyone
had ever realized, if they realized it at all. Coming back to the States
in 1861 had indeed been a rude awakening.
Sources:
Detroit Free Press, Nov. 1, 1861; New York Times, Nov. 15, 1861 and
Dec. 18, 1881; “The Polar Exploring Expedition: A Special Meeting of the
American Geographical & Statistical Society,” (March 22, 1860);
Isaac Israel Hayes, “The Open Polar Sea: A Narrative of a Voyage of
Discovery Towards the North Pole, in the Schooner ‘United States’”;
Pierre Berton, “The Arctic Grail: The Quest for the North West Passage
and the North Pole, 1818–1909’; John Edwards Caswell, “Arctic Frontiers:
United States Explorations in the Far North”; Clive Holland, ed.,
“Farthest North: Endurance and Adventure in the Quest for the North
Pole”; Trevor H. Levere, “Science and the Canadian Arctic: A Century of
Exploration, 1818–1909”; Michael F. Robinson, “The Coldest Crucible:
Arctic Exploration and American Culture”; W. Gillies Ross,
“Nineteenth-Century Exploration of the Arctic,” in “A Continent
Comprehended: North American Exploration,” vol. III, John Logan Allen,
ed.; Douglas W. Wamsley, “Polar Hayes: The Life and Contributions of
Isaac Israel Hayes, M.D.”; Nathaniel West, “History of the Satterlee
U.S.A. General Hospital at West Philadelphia, From October 8, 1862 to
October 8, 1863.”
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