Harnessed to the Pole: Sledge Dogs in Service to American Explorers of the Arctic, 1853-1909
By Sheila Nickerson, University of Alaska Press, 328 pages, 2014, $24.95
As long as the Inuit have lived in the Arctic, they have used dogs for work, travel and survival, but it wasn't until the mid-19th century that polar explorers of European extraction finally grasped their utility. Even then it was primarily American adventurers who employed them. It's this little- told story that Sheila Nickerson -- one of Alaska's finest authors -- explores in "Harnessed to the Pole," an engrossing account of the Heroic Age of Arctic journeys and the vital role dogs played in some key expeditions of the time.
It's a story of humanitarianism and abuse, and of dependence and abandonment. Dogs, as we learn from Nickerson's telling, were vital companions to many who traveled into the Arctic over the course of the late 19th and early 20th centuries but it was a complex relationship.
Dogs were, of course, the beasts of burden that pulled men and sledges over frozen landscapes and swaths of sea ice during the long winters when ships were icebound. Exploring the surroundings was far easier in winter than during the brief, unpredictable summers when maritime travel was at best a questionable option.
They were far more than sledge pullers, however. With their keen senses, dogs served as both protectors and hunters for men caught in a dangerous environment where little food could be had. Dog teams camped on the ice alongside wintered-over ships would dependably detect an approaching polar bear long before humans knew of its presence. They would also go after it, surrounding and attacking and aiding the men who would shoot it. Dogs even sometimes killed the bears themselves. This would provide both men and dogs with much-needed calories. Many dogs went beyond, locating seals, walruses and even caribou and musk oxen for hunting teams. Without their dogs' assistance, many Arctic explorers would have starved to death.
Perhaps most important, dogs provided companionship, something repeatedly noted by the explorers whose stories Nickerson vividly recounts.
Yet for all their efforts, dogs remained expendable. With food short, they were always the first to be put on starvation rations, even as exhausting work was demanded of them. They were beaten and whipped in an era when animal welfare was of little concern. In the worst cases, they could be shot and eaten by hungry men, who would quickly shift their view of dogs from cohorts to meat on the hoof, or get left behind when members of an expedition retreated south.
The dogs could be no less cruel to each other, sometimes fighting relentlessly, and not infrequently killing weaker dogs or newborn puppies and devouring them. They also had no qualms about robbing food from the humans, sometimes stealthily, other times aggressively.
Dogs made discoveries possible
Nickerson lays all of this out through a series of chapters recounting many of the more notable American expeditions to the Arctic. Drawing heavily from journals and memoirs of the men who ventured north and endured its privations, she zeroes in on their accounts of their interactions with the dogs that accompanied them. It was dogs that made many of their discoveries possible, and it was dogs that carried Frederick Cook and Robert Peary to their separate -- and now both widely disputed - claims on the North Pole.
What is known about these dogs is heavily dependent on the varying attitudes of expedition leaders toward them, as well as the severity of conditions they faced (as things worsened, concern for dogs usually evaporated). Elisha Kent Kane and George Washington De Long thus emerge here as the most compassionate explorers regarding their dogs.
Kane captained an 1853-55 effort at locating the lost expedition of Sir John Franklin, which had sailed from England in 1845 in search of the Northwest Passage and vanished, prompting decades of nearly fruitless searches. Kane is also famous for his obsession with finding the Polar Sea, a fabled open ocean then thought to lie over the North Pole. His close observations of the dogs he brought along, however, have received far less attention, and Nickerson corrects that imbalance here.
Similarly, in one of the book's longest chapters, she quotes at length from De Long's journals of an 1979-81 attempt at reaching Greenland from over the north of Siberia, a journey that ended in disaster. The doomed De Long's entries about the crew's escape offer harrowing insight into what Franklin's men must have endured. Prior to abandoning their ship, however, the ship's company experienced two reasonably successful winters and one summer lodged in the ice. During this time, De Long wrote exhaustively of the dogs' work and activities. The entries reprinted here lend readers a vivid picture of how the trapped explorers coped with the Arctic.
Enchanting storyteller
As with her previous books, Nickerson again proves herself an enchanting storyteller. She covers an era when American attention shifted from finding the Franklin Expedition to Arctic discoveries and attaining the North Pole. The accounts of hardship and survival are fascinating, and those of disaster are spellbinding. Readers unfamiliar with Arctic history will be mesmerized by the death march of De Long's men into Siberia. Even more astonishing is the narrative of the crew members of the Polaris who were marooned the entire winter of 1872-73 on an ice floe. Miraculously, all survived. Even those familiar with these tales will be gripped anew by Nickerson's retelling.
In the end, however, this book belongs to the dogs, which Nickerson calls "the Sherpas of the Arctic . . . a team pulling a sledge overladen with hope and ego, each dog named and known to its driver, each a distinct personality, all hauling toward an uncertain and often fatal destination." Theirs is a story worth learning.
David A. James is a Fairbanks-based writer and critic.