How to starve in the arctic...

Being relatively new to the sport, I'm still not sure exactly what qualifies as good blog fodder. I think I'm trying to tackle a little much per post... Last post: the relevance of the human genome... this one: starvation in the arctic... These require books, or shelves of books, to adequately treat... but no, I'm chiming in… my two cents cannot be held back... don’t even try… For this post, I'm afraid, I’m about to embark on a 3,500 word essay of sorts into a topic of which I have only a tad bit of experience-born empathy... but hey, I can say that about almost anything, so here goes…

So last night Trystan and I attended a talk by one of Fairbanks' beloved Cole brothers, Terrence Cole. He's a Professor of History and the Director of the Office of Public History at UAF. He’s not to be confused (unless you’re new to town) with his twin brother Dermot, of Fairbanks Daily NewsMiner fame... Terrence did parenthetically mention that most of Dermot’s good ideas are actually his own though... (to no audible objection from the audience, so either Dermot was not in attendance or tacitly agrees). Well the title of Cole’s talk, and thus the size of the crowd, was “Murder, Mutiny, and Cannibalism.” Apparently there had been recent Easter dinner familial discourse over whether the words “Mayhem” and “Beastiality” were warranted; they weren’t, which is good, because I don’t think the Fire Marshall would have been pleased with the turnout coming from all cracks and crannies of Fairbanks and hilly environs had those words made the cut… but it was an amazing turnout nonetheless. People are fascinated by this stuff… and Cole spins an engaging, if quintessentially tangential tale. People hate chronological history anyway. He’s perfect, unless I had to figure out what to do to get an A on a midterm of his or something. In any case, in thispost, I’m just going to add a couple of my own tangents to the tale he told.

The talk was basically on the ill-fated arctic expedition of A.W. Greely. I suppose ill-fated arctic expedition is cliché. Oh well. And that’s Army Lt. Adolphus Washington Greely to you... Um… The point of the expedition, like many-to-most ill-fated arctic expeditions, was scientific. I’d argue that this one was more than just nominally “scientific” though. It was conducted under the aegis of the First International Polar Year (not sure if it was called the “First” at the time…) of 1881-1884. Don’t trip up on the obvious singular/plural issues… suffice it to say that sometimes scientific research goes into planned overtime… (e.g. I’ve been doing a two-and-a-half year Master’s degree for well on four years now)… Cole’s talk was given because we’re currently in the very middle of the Third International Polar Year, which is March 2007-March 2009. Yep, after one year, we, as a world, are halfway through the Year. OK, I can only beat that horse for so long… Anyway, the science conducted way back then actually resulted in some incredibly valuable (and beautiful) products. Check out http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/aro/ipy-1/. Incidentally, I’m being paid on IPY 2007-2009 grant funds as I write this… (not to write this, but as I write this… shhh… my adviser is in Washington DC right now…).

So, our hero: A.W. Greely. Hero? Well, yeah and nah. Unfortunately, though his other accomplishments through life were many and notable, his singular arctic expedition is certainly the outstanding, catastrophic low point. When 16 of your 22 men die, some with bellies full of the last guy to go… well, that’s not considered successful. In seriously sh%$ty times, a certain kind of person is really, really needed. One with “emotional intelligence deficit” (Cole’s words I presume) isn’t the kind of leader to roust the spirits of starving survivors. And though I’m not real acquainted with his biography, I’ve seen the bulleted points. As a kid he was uber-patriotic, and on his third try they let him join the ranks and he thence saw some serious Civil War action; well after the arctic affair he laid thousands of miles of telegraph line as a Signal Officer, including all over the American empire (Puerto Rico, Philippines, etc) and notably 4,000 miles into Alaska (beginning in 1904, news arrived to Nome in hours not months,); he was the military governor of San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake; and, I’m told, was commander during the “Ute Indian Rebellion.” You know, Ute as in Utah. Apparently the rebellion was ‘bloodless.’ Wow, now that’s different. Kudos Adolphus. For these and other accomplishments, he got the Medal of Honor late in life. Not sure what was mentioned at the awards ceremony mentioned about the arctic trip…

Yes, so back to those miserable stretch of months during the early 1880’s. Basically the mission was going well until a series, yes series, of resupply ships didn’t show. The fault did not lie with the men in the arctic. The fault lay with dudes behind desks and, one can relatively safely assume, weather (I’m assuming that was at least an excuse, as it can always be). The ship that finally picked up the sorry mess of remaining men only came at the persistent behest of Henrietta Greely, the lieutenant’s wife (this seems like another theme in arctic exploration tales…). These men we’re principally concerned with one thing for an ungodly long time: food. Before things got desperate and they struck out on foot across the sea ice retreating south, they stationed at a place called Fort Conger on Lady Franklin Bay, Ellesmere Island. (Go ahead Google Earth it). In Cole’s talk, he said they were certainly well supplied… that is, before they weren’t resupplied. Cole showed a neat picture of a very orderly looking “game rack” bedecked with provisions… One thing he didn’t emphasize (mention?) was that even during those good times, they were seriously living off the land. Over two years Greely’s 24 men ate a lot of wild game. (Notice something? Earlier I said 22 men, now I’m saying 24… the numbers puzzled me for a bit today… It was only a one hour talk, but I think Cole could have mentioned the 2 “Esquimaux” that swelled the mens ranks and perished with them – or at least one did from the primary source I’m looking at contained in Polar Journeys, the role of food and nutrition in early exploration by Robert E. Freeney - which come to find out, I actually have owned since last August… bought during a FMNB store frenzy). So, what kind of game is aplentiful in those parts up there? Well, apparently muskoxen are. Those couple dozen men consumed a whopping 17,500 pounds of muskoxen. Which equates to a ration of 16 ounces per day, per man. With “other game” adding a measely 0.8 oz a day, 60% of their protein came from muskox (the remainder was from food they brought). In all, they shot 103 muskox. Derived from Greely’s meticulous, scientifically minded records, the average yield per ‘ox was 77kg (169.7 lbs). This yield is lower than other estimates for muskox (e.g. 118kg average of 5 animals from another arctic expedition, or 114kg in another ). Peter Lent (in Muskoxen and Their Hunters, from which I’m getting these numbers) says perhaps the low average is due to waste or feeding dogs. I’d think that the latter would be noted by Greely, and I just can’t fathom or forgive the former. Perhaps they were getting some little ‘uns in there, bringing the average down… It’s absolutely amazing to me, but I actually have the ability to weigh-in (pun intended) on this issue from recent personal experience. My very own Nunivak muskoxen, which is now lying in neat saran-wrapped bricks in my and my brother’s chest freezer, weighed 182 pounds (82.6kg). Alaska Airlines made me, and Bank-of-America, very aware of that… So, 182 pounds is the weight after field dressing, but before de-boning. Basically it’s the weight of all the meat plus scapula, humerus, femur, tib-fib, radius-ulna, and canon bones. I’m not a vertebrate anatomist. Some of those names ain’t technically right I’m afraid… Anyway… point is, I know I didn’t waste an ounce of meat during processing, and so far haven’t fed any to dogs. (Though I do have a ziploc of scraps earmarked for a particular furry friend of mine). So, I really don’t know. My muskox was a young bull, probably 3 or 4 years. Although my sample size is 1, I think he might be “average.” However, the taste, oh, the exquisite taste. Let me digress. Muskox, I discovered on March 14, 2008, is my favorite red meat. My good friend Travis (I’m trying to think of a better word than hunting “mentor”…), has eaten wild game meat, and eaten widely, all his life. He has had muskox before, in Greenland actually (prbably closely related to those Greely’s guys ate), and he agrees that this muskox which the gods bestowed upon me, is some of the best meat… ever. Some Sandhill Crane rivals it, Travis says. I don’t know, I can’t vouch, I haven’t had. But muskox is delicious. Especially mine. I kind of regret not eating some of my muskox while still on Nunivak. My first bite of it was back in Fairbanks, all alone one evening, and still in a sort of adventure post-partem depression. I wish I could have had shared some with my Alaska Native host. Granted, I paid James Whitman, a Mekoryuk village Cupik eskimo, the big bucks to transport me into the field. It’s not exactly the communion that I wanted to share, but the perspective. When I shot the muskox I made a mistake. It was the wrong one, or rather not the one I intended to shoot. This meaning it didn’t have the largest horns in the group (OK, it had the smallest). The first thing James said when he walked over after the kill was “That’s going to be good table fare Ian. Don’t worry, you’re young. You can get the big one next time.” I really don’t know if there will be a next time, but I think he was being not merely conciliatory... Though he also, when introduced to Cliff Bar’s that day, deemed them delicious. Who knows... In any case, I wonder how Greely’s men would have ranked my muskox, (or even Cliff Bars for that matter)? I’d heard mixed reviews on muskox. I think it can in some circumstances, season, or to some palates be atrocious... the Greely men had no choice if a particularly musky one was shot one week… Often, for a few days or weeks after a big-game hunt I’ll eat a pretty highly protein rich diet… I’m not sure I’m ready to adhere to a Vilhjalmur Stefansson all meat (plus eggs/dairy) diet for a year, but I’m probably a decent candidate…though not prime… actually I'll confess that after eating quite a little bit of muskox for lunch and dinner for just a few days straight last week, a friend’s all-veggie spicy soup concoction was an extremely satiating change. I’ll bet the Greely guys would have agreed. Anyway, bottom line after all that… the Greely guys’ diet for a good while was definitely OK, since muskox was a big component… However… after those resupply ship(s!) were no-shows… the crew tragically decided to retreat south…

So Greely’s crew left Fort Conger and the muskox herds. And they started taking two steps forward for every one (or two) back on the perniciously (northward) shifting sea-ice. They did end up back on land, farther south, but not quite at anything like a final destination (except in the morbid sense of that phrase). They began consuming, for months aparently, quantities of tripe de roche (a dry lichen that grows on rock for those of you that don’t parle vous France) and their own sealskin garments and gear… At some point, at some really really bad bad point, another, grimmer item appeared on the menu… for some at least… I don’t know the who’s, or when’s, but for some there was something new on the menu... for others, yep, they were what was on the new menu… you know, there are very few things a human being can do, even depraved sexual things, that can result in as much stigma as eating from another human, no matter what role one played in that human's death. When the rescue party unearthed the shallowly buried soldiers to take them back for quote-unquote civilized, Christian burial, some grisly observations, were, well, obvious. “Some of the men had been little more than skin and bones when they died, but the little flesh they had was gone in some places, as on the calves of the legs, on the hips, thighs, and arms” wrote Naval Officer Winfield Scott Schley in his unambiguously titled report, The Bodies Were Mutilated. Interestingly, he mentions that “the body of the Esquimaux was not mutilated to any extent.” It’s not clear to me, with the scant research I’m putting into this post today, what happened to the other Eskimo… but the really, truly disgusting-on-so-many-levels, question begs, why not eat the native? I won’t even suggest my own ideas, since I don’t have any good ones, really. Though racial biases, and/or actual differenes in palatability would be among the totally dismal possibilities.

A couple other interesting things can be said about the ordeal. Afterwards, some serious rationalization ensued in attempt to thwart as best possible the paralyzing stigma “the six” endured. Interestingly, since this was an army affair, the stigma bled over onto the US government, no doubt exponentially multiplied by the bureaucratic blunderings responsible for the need that resulted in enlisted men eating each other. One chief bureaucrat was the guy who ran the War Department, and thus funded the army. This guy, historians say, apparently couldn’t care less about the arctic while the expedition was underway, but seriously needed to concoct rationalizations to sanitize the national guilt aftwerward. This guy was Robert Lincoln. Yes, Robert Todd Lincoln, son of Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd Lincoln. This poor fellow. He has to be one of the most pathetic, jinxed figures in all of American History. After the Greely debacle, as Sarah Vowell says, he “had frozen blood on his hands.” It actually strains credulity to know that this guy was at (as in eyewitness at) his own father’s assassination, AND the assassination of president James Garfield in 1881. ASTOUNDINGLY, he was also at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, NY when president William McKinley was assassinated (though this time he didn’t witness it directly). As someone who doesn’t believe in luck, I would have to say this poor guy was the most unlucky figure in American history to be in any way whatsoever associated with. Considering he was the son of his mother, who held séances in the White House for his dead brothers, I would say Bob Lincoln probably felt some kind of real curse on his life. I digress some, but I’d like to say parenthetically that if you happen to know of a good history of the post-Abraham, Lincoln family, I’d like to read it… Wikipedia says that Robert’s firstborn was Abraham Lincoln II, aka “Jack,” and that the last direct descendant of the greatest leader of the greatest nation in the entire history of humanity (my own brazen claim there, hehe) died in 1985. Geeze. Is that as horribly depressing for you as it is for me?

OK, back to the arctic and cannibalism. One of the more ridiculous attempted sanitizations that Robert Lincoln and his counterpart, the secretary of the navy, again as Sarah Vowell puts it, was “announcing that the reason the bones of the dead had been mangled by knives was that the survivors cut up their comrades’ flesh to use as ‘shrimp bait.’ That’s how ugly the scandal was – that turning human flesh into shrimp bait was the positive spin.” W.S. Schley in his report apparently rebutted his boss (through a little forensic logic that I won’t get into) that “there seems, from the condition of the bodies, that there was no concerted action on the part of those remaining to sustain life in this way [fishing for shrimp with them]…[instead] is seems that the perishing men went to the bodies when hunger became unbearable and supplied themselves as best they could… terrible scenes must have been enacted by the famishing men in the Greely camp…” No S&%t. But did that “suppl[ing] as best they could” help? A particularly interesting concept, from a nutrition standpoint, is what’s known as “rabbit starvation.” This is kind of like the conundrum where you’re stuck on a raft adrift in the ocean and have no water except the limitless ocean all around. You’re screwed because it’s salt water, and it will do your body more harm than good. The idea of “rabbit starvation” as outlined by Stefansson, was that some kinds of game that are particularly lean, like rabbit (and definitely not like muskox), and are not going to offer adequate energy to sustain life. Lean meat is mostly protein, which has to be broken down to it’s constituent amino acids, which then have to be converted to glucose via gluconeogenesis and only then used as energy. I have no idea what the energy balance-sheet looks like for all that breaking down and converting (though I can think of at least two people I know who I could consult on this). Basically, one needs fat and carbs, molecules rich in carbon bonds to ready to crack for their energy. Still it’s not clear to me whether this lean meat situation is exactly analogous to drinking sea water, where the net benefit is definitely in the red. Steffansson said “some think a man will die sooner if he eats continually of fat-free meat than if he eats nothing, but this is a belief on which sufficient evidence for a decision has not been gathered in the North.” That was well over half a century ago. I should really consult a modern Nutrition text, or my friend Susan, a registered dietician, or my cousin Merra, studying nutrition as an undergrad at UW Laramie… anyway, it is also possible that we don’t know for sure… it’s not the easiest thing in the world to do scientific studies that involve starving people to death. Some Nazi quack-science was certainly performed, to the disgrace of the entire human race… but we may truly only know theoretically or based on lab rats (which we may someday determine are not identical to little humans), about “rabbit starvation”… Basically though, the idea at the time of Greely’s rescue was that perhaps the survivors could be exonerated of the stain of cannibalism, if perhaps those who did not eat their emaciated and nearly fat-free companions were thereby healthier and thus lived to beccme the stalwart, surviving group of "the six." (I have no idea what they had to say for themselves later in life). It is a nice idea, certainly. There would be some cosmic justice in that scenario, but who knows what the physiological basis for such a claim may or may not be. Oh, another aside: well over a century before Stefansson’s time, and half a century before Greely’s, another world traveler was making similar observations about meat. “Yet the Gaucho on the Pampas, for months together, touches nothing but beef. But they eat, I observe, a very large proportion of fat, which is of a less animalized nature; and they particularly dislike dry [i.e. lean, I’m guessing] meat, such as that of the Agouti. Dr. Richardson, also, has remarked, ‘that when people have fed for a long time solely upon lean animal food, the desire for fat becomes so insatiable, that they can consume a large quantity of unmixed and even oily fat without nausea.’” The observant twenty-something explorer who made those remarks was an english guy named Charles Darwin. The Dr. Richardson he references is Sir John Richardson, who himself had some arctic exploration experiences to write home about… and, which I think I’ll do a future post on… again, amazingly, a story that will allows me to weave a thin fibre of my own experience into it… but not now…

So, wrapping up… the title of this post is “How to starve in the arctic…” Yes, it’s irreverently sarcastic. I mean no insult to Greely or his men, I just wanted to catch your attention, duh… nevertheless, I’ve presented some clear answers to the question. One, put yourself WAY out there, farther North than any prior humans, and simultaneously trust really unlucky and distracted bureaucrats with your resupplies (i.e. your life)… And there are some less clear answers… e.g. eat human flesh… which may or may not help you... which perhaps nobody knows…

PostScript: I can remember one particular day (though the date eludes me) on one of my longer excursions from humanity… it was about midway on a 440 mile Noatak River float trip. It was a few days or a week or so since my brother and I had seen another human. What were we doing that day? Why, what we did every day. Rowing. Rowing. Rowing. Rowing… Rowing… Rowing… And, lord have mercy, eating lunch. Savory, delicious, precious lunch… Smoked gouda cheese, dry Italian salami, Sailor Boy pilot bread. Rationed out, in almost religious reverence by Trystan and myself to each other while we quietly floated past no-one. Then me, chewing, silently masticating that last bite, way longer than necessary, almost melancholic at the thought of its presence leaving my forlorn taste buds… then swallowing… then thinking for the next five or so hours, to the near exclusion of all the beauty, all the river, all the sun, all the tundra… of dinner. Hot, life sustaining, dinner. While I don’t think I lost that many pounds really during those few short weeks, the trip, once really underway, was really just the time between meals… I begrudged that. Why such an animal? Yet, despite my disproportionate flipped-focus, never…ever… even once, did Trystan look even vaguely appetizing. For that utter lack of ability to empathize with Greely’s men, I am infinitely grateful.