Ex Post Facto: One Precious Packet From the First International Polar Year
BY CLARE FLEMMING, MS,CA
So carefully bundled, the thick packet of papers was collated, tied with linen tape, and secured by a heavy paper wrapper. Thin but strong sisal was tied around the bundle and knotted with a delicate bow. At this point, the expeditioner labeled the contents neatly with his fountain pen:
Record Sheets – Wind
Noon July 31st 1882 to
Noon July 24th 1883
The careful expeditioner was one of 25 men on the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition (aka, the Greely Arctic Expedition of 1881–1884), an expedition that served to represent the United States in the first International Polar Year (IPY) of 1882–1883. The IPY was conceived to bypass the usual nationalistic races and competitions in the largely unknown Arctic, in favor of an international yearlong effort to study and document Arctic fauna, flora, and phenomena. First Lt. Adolphus W. Greely was assigned to command the expeditionary force, and “to establish an Arctic station north of the 81st degree of north latitude at or near Lady Franklin Bay for the purposes of scientific observations, etc.,” according to government instructions. The men of the expedition spent their year in servitude, constantly and carefully recording meteorological events by the hour, keeping the records in exceedingly neat handwritten columns, rows, plots, and graphs, and eventually bundling up the lot for transportation back to Washington. These handwritten spreadsheets contain such data as thickness of ice; absence or presence of lunar halos and auroras; wind velocity; sound velocity; temperature of air and water; tides; barometric pressure; amount of rainfall; cloud composition; and some very specific, if peculiar, measurements, including “weight of a cube of ice of seven inches,”“magnetic horizontal intensity and oscillation,”“solar and gemstone thermometers,” “Washington mean time of moon transit,” and “observations of deflection of pendulum pins.”
Significant exploratory work was conducted as well: geography, geology, cartography, and the collecting of animal and plant specimens. Survey parties would identify, map, and name new lands and features. One such party reached the “Farthest North”—the most northerly point on the globe then reached by human beings. Despite the successes of the expedition, it was doomed to tragic failure: 19 of the 25 men perished on the expedition, owing to starvation, scurvy, drowning, exposure, exhaustion, and even one execution.
Eventually, in 1899, the records of the expedition were recovered and restored to the United States, with a small collection ending up in The Explorers Club’s Research Collections, where they are routinely studied by scholars to this day. The hands of the careful expeditioner were the last to touch the pages within the bundle, and the contents on its estimated 400 sheets of paper have not been revealed since the day they were wrapped.