A question I’ve been asked since I began work on Starvation Shore was: Why did you write it as a novel? You’re known as a nonfiction writer.
From the beginning, I knew this tale of 25 men against the Arctic that began with such promise and concluded in hunger, fear and insanity demanded to be told as fiction. At least if I was going to write it. I had read three excellent books on the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition of 1881-1884. I had nothing to add to the scholarship of Lt. A.W. Greely’s Arctic efforts. Yet, there was everything to be said – on the emotional level – about an expedition that was plagued by questionable leadership, incompatible personalities and secret agendas, as well as selfless acts of heroism, all set in the hostility of ice and gelid temperatures, pounding winds, 24-hour darkness and then unceasing light.
In the 1990s I’d had some success writing short stories. How much harder could a novel be? A lot harder, or a different kind of hard. I knew that. Yet, what I wanted to write cried out for fiction. I wanted to set living scenes in real time and create believable dialogue. I wanted to take the reader into this alien inhuman place to feel, see and smell what it was like for these men. They were dependent on each other for their very survival. What were the emotions provoked by their isolation in the midst of this cheek-by-jowl companionship? What happened to you, not just physically, but mentally, to exist on a semi-starvation diet for months? What was it like to share a buffalo hide sleeping bag with a man you’ve grown to hate just because of how he wipes his nose?
How would I have performed, I asked myself, when the starvation began? Would I have been like Pvt. Long, out with my gun looking for foxes? Or like Sgt. Brainard, pacing the shoreline in a forlorn search for tiny crustaceans? Would I have gotten myself shot for stealing food, like Pvt. Charlie Henry?
How did the cannibalism start? The survivors never talked about it. It’s in none of the men’s diaries. Lt. Greely claimed to know nothing about it. As a novelist I was free to conjecture about the unanswerable and debated questions.
It was important to me to stick close to the facts of those three years. I would not cut out any of these men or add new characters. What happened in the Arctic carried its own arc and moved inexorably in its own chronology along a path strewn with human errors, incompetence, self-interest and neglect, making the heroic acts of ordinary men more notably compelling, even awe inspiring.
It took many drafts to enter their world. My discoveries – gradual and intuitive – came as I got to know these men as individuals. This was a U.S. Army expedition. Most of these men came directly from the Plains and the Indian Wars. They were young. They had been issued diaries and told to write in them. Sgt. David Brainard’s diary – the part he wrote at their starvation camp called Camp Clay – was in the Dartmouth College Library. I made my first trip to Hanover – 30 miles down the road – in August 2008. Librarian Jay Satterfield made me a copy. I read Brainard’s entries with admiration for the force of mind it took for this man, lying in his buffalo hide sleeping bag, to make daily entries with freezing fingers in the shadowy light of the blubber lamp.
I started off my day by reading one or two entries and typing up a transcription. In this way I entered into their daily life of flaring tempers, apathy, boredom, constant discomfort, along with surprising acts of courage, kindness and love.
Sgt. Brainard was frank about the men, his commanding officer, and his own feelings. The more I got to know him the more Brainard, as a character, took a central place in the story. My agent, Craig Kayser, suggested that we have Sgt. Brainard become what writers call a “close third,” that is, the reader would see the story through Brainard’s point of view – not first person – but as if looking over the sergeant’s shoulder. This is when things really took off for me. Craig and I dug up more background on Brainard, and Craig encouraged me to use my imagination.
Brainard grew up on a dairy farm in New York state. How did rising in the dark to milk cows every day shape his actions when the men were starving? How about the camping trip with General Tecsumseh Sherman? Brainard was a part of that small group of officers and enlisted men who traveled into Yellowstone in 1872, right after Yellowstone became our first national park. His inclusion with this distinguished group says something about this kind of man young David Brainard was. How did the hardships he endured during the Indian War translate to the outcome of the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition? Greely acknowledged that there would have been no survivors without Brainard.
Not all the men kept diaries, but the entries we have told me what preoccupied the writers. They let me hear individual voices that led me to conjecture character and personality. This was key if I was to successfully create living scenes and convincing dialogue.
My own experiences with cold and wind are as a winter climber in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, where on frigid days above treeline, when the wind blows hard enough to knock you down, you can feel, despite the layers of fleece and wind gear, that you have nothing on at all, and even a short stop for water and a quick snack numbs your fingers in seconds. I drew on all my knowledge of cold, of wind-driven ice and snow, of the breathtaking, often frightening beauty to be found there to make the experiences of these men become real for me. Though in truth, their story is impossible to duplicate.
I was given a window into how it felt to starve with Ancel Keys’s The Biology of Human Starvation. Published in 1950, it concerns research carried out as men and women emerged from the concentration camps, in an effort to understand the effects of slow starvation.
Writing this book was a very personal experience. I wanted to place myself beside these men – this broad sweep of human nature. I was surprised how easily I could slide my sleeping bag in next to theirs.
The learning curve demanded of how to turn my natural inclinations as a nonfiction writer to fiction was itself a journey. While not as perilous as my men found life at their starvation camp, to have “survived” the journey amazes me, as it must have the six of Greely’s men who, in the end, came through.
(Laura Waterman, a climber, conservationist and author, lives in East Corinth, Vt.)