And then the Arctic night closed down upon them:  and with it the certainty that they were prisoners in that desolate freezing darkness until the sun should come again and set them free.

XI

Nerves go to pieces in the Arctic.  Captain Back, who commanded the “Terror” on her first northern voyage (1836), has told how there comes, as the icy night drags on, “a weariness of heart, a blank feeling, which gets the better of the whole man”; and Colonel Brainard, of the Greely expedition, wrote:  “Take any set of men, however carefully selected, and let them be thrown as intimately together as are the members of an exploring expedition—­hearing the same voices, seeing the same faces, day after day—­and they will soon become weary of one another’s society and impatient of one another’s faults.”

The Greely expedition—­composed of twenty-five men, of whom only seven were found alive by the rescue party—­in many ways parallels, and pointedly illustrates, the Hudson expedition.  There was dissension in Greely’s command almost from the start.  Surgeon Pavy’s angry protests compelled the sending back in the “Proteus”—­paralleling the sending back of Coleburne in the pink—­of one member of the company; and Lieutenant Kislingbury—­paralleling Juet’s insubordination—­objected so strongly to Greely’s regulations that he gave in his resignation and tried, unsuccessfully, to overtake the “Proteus” and go home in her.  Being returned to Fort Conger, he was not restored to his rank, and remained—­as Juet remained after being superseded—­a malcontent.

One of the commentators on the expedition thus has summarized the conditions of that dreadful winter of 1883-84:  “It was now October, and the situation of the explorers was becoming desperate, but the bickerings seem to have increased with their peril.  As the weary days of starvation and death wore on, nearly every member of the party developed a grievance.  Israel was reprimanded by Greely for falsely accusing Brainard of unfairness in the distribution of articles.  Bender annoyed the whole camp by his complaints regarding his bed-clothes; Pavy and Henry accused Fredericks, the cook, of not giving them their fair share of food; and Pavy and Kislingbury had a quarrel that barely stopped short of blows.  Then Jewell was accused of selecting the heaviest dishes of those issued....  Bender and Schneider had a fist fight in their sleeping bag; and on one occasion Bender was so violent that a general mutiny was imminent, and Greely says in his written record: 

‘If I could have got Long’s gun I would have killed him.’  Bender brutally treated Ellison, who was very weak; and Schneider abused Whistler as he was dying—­the second occurrence of the kind....  The thefts of food by Henry, and his execution, formed a culmination to the dissensions, though it did not entirely stop them.  Never was there a more terrible example of the demoralizing effects of the conditions of Arctic life and privations upon men who in other circumstances were able to dwell at peace with their fellows.”