American Experience

The Greely Expedition (31x4)

Air date: Feb 05, 2019

On August 1, 1884, a rescue vessel pulled into the harbor of Portsmouth, New Hampshire carrying First Lieutenant Adolphus Greely and the five other remaining survivors of the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition. Three years earlier, 25 men had set sail for the far North, where they planned to collect a wealth of scientific data about the Arctic — a vast area of the world's surface that had been described as a "sheer blank." Greely and his men completed that task, only to be abandoned in one of the harshest environments on Earth. The Greely Expedition reveals how poor planning, personality clashes, questionable decisions and pure bad luck conspired to turn a noble scientific mission into a human tragedy. Adolphus Greely joined the United States Army in 1861. After fighting for the Union in the American Civil War, Greely became involved in the campaign to build a nationwide telegraph system for the Signal Corps. There, he learned about technology and weather systems. In the 1870s, Greely developed an interest in the Arctic region; he also heard of a potential exploratory mission to the far North. The purpose of the expedition was to collect scientific data as part of the first International Polar Year, the effort to gather concurrent geophysical measurements at various sites around the Arctic region. "This was not simply some new Arctic expedition. This is really an attempt at a new science of the world," says historian Michael Frederick Robinson in the film. The Lady Franklin Bay Expedition, however, had another motive: the United States wanted to beat the longstanding "Farthest North" record claimed by the British for decades. Greely, with no prior experience or knowledge of Arctic weather and condition, was given command of the mission, which launched in the summer of 1881. Five weeks after departing from St. John's, Newfoundland aboard the U.S.S. Proteus, Greely and his team reached Ellesmere Island in the Arctic Circle and prepared for their unprecedented missi