Seacoast History Blog # 105
February 1, 2011  

I’m a regional history writer, so when the producers of the PBS series American Experience send me a free DVD, I’m looking for the seacoast connection. Portsmouth has a pretty thin claim on polar explorer Adolphus Greely, but we take what we can get. When the six surviving members of the Greely Party out of 25 were rescued after three nightmarish years in the Arctic, they were delivered to the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard to recover their health. There is a single picture of them by local photographer Lafayette V. Newell from 1884. I waited all the way to the end of the hour-long documentary to see it. It flashed on the screen for a couple of seconds, but the narrator didn’t mention Portsmouth. (Continued below)

SEE Greely Team here in 1874

Greely was born in nearby Newburyport. The documentary didn’t mention that either, noting only that the young explorer was brought up in a mill town. But then, the American Experience production of The Greely Expedition isn’t a biography. It’s an agonizingly straightforward telling of the three year expedition.  

VISIT: American Experience Web site

The documentary is as stark and focused as a shard of ice. No frills, just chills. We get a quick backstory as to why these men, many of whom had never been on a ship and none of whom had been to the North Pole, were headed to the North Pole in a tall ship. We see how a half-hearted effort by the government led to the disaster that left the men stranded with no supply ship and no rescue party for three years. 

Greely comes off badly at first. His harsh disciplinary approach almost leads to a mutiny. The scientific expedition does manage to best the British claim as closest humans to the North Pole by four miles. They do gather a lot of scientific weather data, data that went unused until recently when it became part of the valuable baseline for the trend toward global warming.  

After two years without supplies, Greely makes the risky decision to leave their outpost and take a small boat onto ice-choked waters in an attempt to reach civilization. The depiction of the men, frostbitten and starving and crammed into a tiny shelter for the next winter, is beyond imagining. It’s slightly beyond cinematography too. Rescuers find a pitiful encampment littered with bodies and graves and seven emaciated men. One of the men dies aboard ship. They all would have been dead, an eyewitness reports, within 48 hours.  

Of course it is the topic of cannibalism more than global warming that tends to draw us to the story today. Greely denied knowing about it, but the evidence was clear that strips of flesh had been cut away from the dead bodies. Who are we to judge? The PBS documentary does an excellent job of playing the issue down, mentioning it only in passing at the end.  

Most of the hour-long film is shot as re-enactment with tight dark detailed shots of hands and blankets and the few objects the survivors carried. This raises the problem of ho to show a cluster of unwashed, freezing, starving, desperate, men in their sleeping bags during an entirely dark season. The occasional forays outdoors are equally difficult to depict – dark men against a jagged white background.  

My copy of the DVD did not have titles added, so I couldn’t indentify the talking heads without consulting my accompanying scorecard. They were all great story tellers, all men except for one woman. There is one woman re-enactor who plays Greely’s wife back home. It is only through her constant intervention that the government rescue party finally succeeds after previous supply ships either sank, or turned back.  

There may have been other titles I missed. I hope so, because a few of the scenes were so bleak and so fuzzy, I didn’t know what I was looking at. And maybe that was the point. The filmmakers wanted to put us into a sort of polar coma as we imagine how awful it must have been. 

These tight well-researched productions are always great TV. This one depends almost entirely on the gripping narrative and the agonizing experience of the six survivors. We have their stories largely from journals and it is the personal details and the affection and animosity between the dying men that pushes the bleak visuals along. 

David Shedd, the great-grandson of Adolphus Greely briefly joins the commentary. He is a carpenter and woodcutter living in the White Mountains of NH.  

MORE ABOUT Abandoned in the Arctic

There is, as we know locally, another Greely documentary. Abandoned in the Arctic by Portsmouth native Geoffrey Clark offers an entirely different approach to telling the same story. While the PBS film is tightly focused, slickly done, and retains a dramatic distance, the Clark film is highly personal and expansive. Clark’s group travels to the actual Greely site and shows us the abandoned remains still there. The group takes their own perilous journey through the Arctic as James Shedd, another Greely grandson, accompanies the filmmakers.  

There is no need to pick a winner here, but the Clark film is a true feature-length documentary. Both tell the story in their own powerful way, but it is good to know that the Clark film is every bit as good as the PBS retelling. (I‘d be curious to know whether the creation of the independent film influenced the making of the American Experience show. There’s little doubt which one will be seen by millions of school kids, but that educational experience would be greatly enhanced by teachers who go the extra mile and show both films. Together they lift an important story out of the footnotes of American history and back into the limelight. 

Copyright 2011 by ©J. Dennis Robinson. All rights reserved.