CHAPTER XXVI. 



Greely's Arctic Winter of Starvation 



AMONG the many disasters to which Arctic expeditions have 

 been exposed, there have been three instances of extraordi- 

 nary misfortune and suffering, three cases in which starva- 

 tion and death claimed victims in numbers, the three most terrible 

 visitations of calamity in all Arctic history. With two of these, the 

 frightful misfortunes of the Franklin and the De Long expeditions, 

 we have dealt. The third remains to be described, that of the heroic 

 Greely, in its way one of the worst of the three, since its record of 

 starvation extended through a whole winter, to close with death for 

 most of the party in the end and a sensational rescue of the few 

 survivors when they had gone through all the horrors of death. 

 The narration of this record of disaster and suffering is given in 

 the present chapter. 



The origin of the Greely expedition was the following: An 

 international conference had decided on a plan to establish a chain 

 of stations around the border of the Arctic Circle for the purpose 

 of exploring, of collecting specimens in natural history, and of 

 taking meteorological, magnetic and other observations for the 

 benefit of science. Of these stations the United States established 

 two, one in Alaska and one in Grinnell Land. It is the latter with 

 which we are concerned. 



Lieutenant Adolphus W. Greely, of the United States Army, 

 was chosen as the leader of the Grinnell Land expedition, which 

 consisted of four officers and twenty-one men, and left New York 

 in the early summer of 1881 in the "Proteus," a steamer chartered 

 for the purpose. Congress had voted $25,000 for the expenses of 



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