Two days later the boat was within sight of Isfjord (Isfjorden), the waterway jutting into Spitzbergen’s western coast and running eastward from the Denmark Sea to Barentsburg. But before they reached the fjord, there was a second casualty. As Peyer put it, ‘The (34-year-old) Donkeyman (John Suttie) walked over the side of the boat, and had to be fished out of the water.’12 Such behaviour was one of the first signs that delirium was setting in, a state from which some men never recovered.13 Before they had travelled much further, Suttie had also passed away.14

  Even more significantly, Williams had himself become delirious on 10 November, leaving David Clark, the 22-year-old 3rd Mate in charge. That was not very popular, especially when he insisted they must ration the drinking water.15 In the end the extremely weak occupants of the boat were saved by the tide and waves which on 11 November swept them to the shore, a short distance north-east of Kapp Linné, which constituted Isfjord’s entrance’s southern lip (see Note 16 for location).16

  Led by their revived captain, they then staggered over the snow to a group of three wooden huts they spied, inside which they were able to take shelter from the biting wind.17

  After a long sleep, most of the men assembled in the largest of the huts. It ‘was roughly ten feet wide by fifteen feet long,’ wrote Peyer, ‘and contained three bunks, a small table… [as well as a] stove.’

  At first their prospects looked rosy, at least relative to what they had been before they landed. In one of the huts, they had found a small supply of coal which could be used when making a fire inside the stove. They also had access to matches to light the fire, two primus stoves with a small amount of oil that could be lit, and some food: tins of corned beef and biscuits.18

  Unfortunately ‘some of the men helped themselves to a large proportion of the rations we had discovered’, wrote Peyer. ‘These fellows were nearly all mentally unbalanced owing to the exposure and cold.’

  They could perhaps be forgiven for at this stage believing that now they had landed, they could eat whatever they wanted because they were home as well as dry. It was only the day after Peyer and the 3rd Mate (Clark) had walked two miles to the west to a nearby lighthouse, only to find it deserted, that everyone understood the danger they were still in.

  ‘The following day the Chief Engineer (Richard Colvin, aged 47) died,’ Peyer reported later, ‘and on taking a “census”, we discovered that only the following were fit for… work: Gunners (Reginald) Whiteside, (James) Burnett, Swainston and myself.’

  By the time they had been in the hut for two more days, making their stay there going on a week, there was also the sobering realization that now they had eaten up much of what they had found in the huts, and were having to rely on what they had brought with them, the clock regulating how long they could survive without starving if they were not rescued had started ticking (see Note 19 for analysis of dates specified).19

  Nevertheless, there were still survivors who wanted more than the rationing permitted, and some of the provisions were stolen the first night they were retrieved from the lifeboat.

  ‘I was able to stop this happening again by sleeping on top of the food supplies,’ Peyer would write later. His action highlighted a change that had come into force without anyone expressly authorizing it. In an existential crisis such as that prevailing in the huts, the young gunners’ fitness and vigour put them into pole position, enabling them to lord it over the others who, as Peyer confirmed, ‘had become incapable of movement… It was necessary to feed and look after them in every way.’ The main problem, according to Williams, were the older men’s ‘swollen feet and hands’ from frostbite.20

  The young turks now in charge believed the circumstances justified some extraordinary measures. None was more radical than the punishment meted out to those who threatened the group’s common welfare. ‘We were forced to remove (the 44-year-old Greaser Alfred) R[ei]d… to the other hut owing to his developing homicidal tendencies,’ Peyer admitted, explaining action taken just over a week into their stay in the huts.21

  This might not sound like a very severe sanction, until it is remembered that the other huts appear to have been colder inside than the main hut, if not completely unheated, and it is likely that coercion would have been required to ensure that Reid did not try to return from the icy cold ‘prison’ to which he had been banished. It is no surprise to read a confirmation in a subsequent entry in Peyer’s account that Reid died a few days later. He had it seems been the victim of what amounted to a summary execution.

  His death as well as the passing away of others before and after him also required some thinking outside the box. According to Robert Paterson, the 25-year-old Scottish Radio Officer: ‘We buried each of our companions as they died. The only burial place we could get for them were clefts in the rocks. We laid their bodies in these clefts, and covered them with snow. The Captain conducted the burial services.’22

  It seems likely that the predicament concerning what do about Reid served as a catalyst. Shortly after Reid’s removal from the main hut, Peyer and Clark made a second attempt to seek help, this time aiming to reach the settlement at Barentsburg. But this attempt, around ten days after their landing in Spitzbergen (the attempt was made ca. 21 November) was no more successful than the first: ‘We came across a huge ravine with its sides coated with ice, making descent impossible,’ Peyer reported. ‘On the way back we sat down to eat some food and have a drink of coffee which we had in a bottle, and we very nearly fell asleep, which is the great danger in these extremely cold climates. We returned to the hut roughly four hours… [after setting out] to find the ship’s cook had died.’

  Their disappointment at not being able to obtain assistance must have been tempered by the following event also recorded in Peyer’s account: ‘The next day (ca. 22 November) Reginald Whiteside discovered some flour in a hut about a mile away. It was a complete sack and was an invaluable discovery. Those of us who were fit enough set out to bring back as much as possible to our own hut.’

  However, the discovery was counterbalanced by yet another fatality. Peyer’s diary reported: ‘One of the apprentices died during this day.’

  The discovery of the flour was also followed by another ominous development. ‘The following day (ca. 23 November)… Whiteside and I were the only two fit enough to carry on,’ wrote Peyer. Peyer’s account reveals however that even he was really walking wounded: ‘I was unable to walk around [a lot] because of frostbite in my knee which made it extremely painful,’ he reported. His write-up of the next day shows that, to add to his woes, he was suffering from what he described as ‘severe pains in the stomach caused probably by the lack of food’.

  But it was the rapid lowering of the air temperature which seems to have transformed the onset of disability into a fully-fledged cull. At one stage there was another person succumbing to the cold every other day. On what appears to have been 26 November, it was the mess boy. Two days later ‘we met with [another] tragedy,’ wrote Peyer. ‘The Third Engineer (34-year-old James Wood) kicked our dinner all over the floor. The poor chap had lost his senses, and we were compelled to move him to the other hut’ – which, as already explained, was tantamount to giving him a death sentence.

  Equally upsetting was the fate of William Pounder, who at 16 years old was one of the two youngest sailors in Chulmleigh’s crew. Like his fellow apprentice, who had died a few days earlier, Pounder had never recovered from the strain the extreme cold imposed on his immature frame while in the lifeboat, and he passed away that same day.

  At the time, there were so many men dying that William Pounder’s death barely took up half a line in Peyer’s account. Doubtless he was buried out in the snow along with all the other luckless seamen who could not last the course. However, perhaps because he was one of the youngest, the gravestone which would eventually be erected in his honour in a Tromso cemetery after his corpse was moved there subsequently, had the following touching tribute engraved on it:

  ‘The only life he saw was school

  One trip and just sixteen

  The rest must be in heaven.’23

  Pounder’s passing was followed by such cold weather, that the next morning, as Peyer noted, ‘We awoke to find the fjord entirely frozen over. It was so cold we had very great difficulty in lighting the fire and keeping ourselves warm during the day.’

  The plummeting temperature may explain why two more men died before the next day dawned. ‘We were now reduced to only twelve men and our food was getting very short,’ Peyer wrote in his chronicle. The twelve survivors were swiftly reduced to eleven when that same evening, the 3rd Engineer James Wood, still shut away in the nearby unheated hut, succumbed to the cold.

  The great freeze certainly was a killer. But it might have been slightly more palatable had it been accompanied by blue skies and sunshine, however watery. Sadly for those in the huts, even the daily Arctic twilight shortened as each day passed, until it finally petered out. The survivors’ only respite then was the glow from the stove, while there was still wood to burn, and from the home-made lamps they made by punching a hole in the lids of flattish tins which they had filled with oil so that a protruding wick made of cloth could be slowly burned.24

  The survivors’ restricted access to any kind of light explains why when a natural phenomenon unexpectedly cut through the gloom, towards the end of the month, Peyer gave it the following rave review:

  ‘After an extremely cold night with a very strong wind and snow falling, we awoke to find a glorious “morning” (ca. 30 November). The moon was shining brightly, and in the south, the sky was a little red. We had no daylight, but just a reddening in the south about midday. [However] the moon was nearly as good as sunlight on the snow and ice around us…’

  The extra light, and the slightly warmer weather, albeit only for a day or two, appears to have inspired a reckoning. Peyer’s account continues:

  ‘We [now] had roughly enough [food] for fourteen days on our ration which was:… 1 tin [of] pemmican, 4 pieces [of] chocolate, 2 biscuits, and one packet [of] Horlicks tablets per man per day…

  ‘Our main subject of discussion was food, our thoughts were about food all day, and during the “night”, our dreams were likewise on the subject of food. Many a time one of us would wake up just at the critical moment when the food was being put into his mouth to find it was only a dream.’

  In view of this, one can well understand why Peyer referred to the discovery of more food in yet another hut about a mile away during an attempt by the three other gunners to walk to Barentsburg as ‘a wonderful find’. This led to one day (ca. 5 December) of ‘fine meals’ wrote Peyer. Afterwards he would recall with relish what was served up: ‘Bacon and beans for breakfast, pemmican, biscuits and marmalade for lunch, corn beef and potatoes for tea, pemmican and biscuits for supper’, although as he pointed out, ‘the quantity of each of these was very small’.

  But this was to be their last bonanza. They entered a kind of downward spiral as the middle of the month of December approached, from which it seemed almost inevitable the remaining ten men would be unable to escape (one more had died shortly beforehand). First ‘we finished the last of the pemmican,’ wrote Peyer, which he hailed as ‘the most nourishing of all the foods we had had’. Then his account marked the day ‘our tobacco supply was finished’, a psychological blow since ‘it provided something for us to do, and had taken our minds off the situation’.

  Even more serious were the obstacles to their gathering sufficient wood to keep the fire in the stove burning. Their ability to collect enough wood from the ground around the hut had ended at the end of November as the supply of driftwood dwindled to zero. This had meant their only reliable means of finding wood was to extract it from the walls of one of the nearby huts, and then to cut it up.

  Referring to another downturn in their situation during the lead up to Christmas, Peyer’s account records how ‘conditions became very much worse, and a gale started blowing with the snow drifting fairly thick. It began to pile up outside our hut, and we were afraid we would be unable to go out because of the drifts… The snow drifted to a depth of between two and three feet.’

  Fortunately, the next day ‘conditions were perfect’, Peyer stated. ‘The sky was clear, and the snow was frozen hard [so]… we were able to walk on it. We collected a large store of wood as we were afraid that we might get snowed up.’ One suspects they were all the more relieved to be able to go outside of the hut during the following days because, as Peyer recalled, one of the firemen, ‘who had been ill for a long time, had become much worse and was raving all the time’. The fireman’s death shortly before Christmas meant there were now only nine Chulmleigh men who were still alive.

  Striving to understand why these men had lasted so long might make for an interesting case study. However, as so often in such matters, one reason for their longevity was luck. In such frigid conditions, it was all the more ironic that if one ignores the ever-present risk of their perishing because of the cold and starvation, the nearest the survivors in the hut had come to extinction was when one man knocked over a petrol tank taken from the boat, and the petrol that ran out immediately caught fire. ‘The whole hut was a mass of flames, and all thought it would be burned down,’ Peyer reported. Only a panic-stricken stamping out of the flames saved the day and the fire was quickly extinguished. ‘Fortunately the tank itself did not catch fire, or we should all have been blown up,’ Peyer observed later.

  But after the fire, they all had to face up to a slower, more insidious threat to life. As Christmas approached, in another reversal of the norm, at a time when there is usually food and good cheer a-plenty, their rations were remorselessly reduced. The edible provisions would have run out had it not been for the contribution made by Chulmleigh’s 27-year-old able seaman Andrew Hardy. During the first half of the month he had recommended that they should use the flour found by Whiteside to cook what his mother, like him a Shetland Islander, referred to as ‘floorie bannocks’, a kind of pancake, made out of flour and water. ‘Fortunately I was able to make the bannocks without moving,’ Peyer noted, presumably recalling how he had endured the pain in his knee through gritted teeth.

  These pancakes were very welcome but they did not provide much sustenance for a grown man. They ‘were roughly the size of a digestive biscuit’, Peyer recalled.

  ‘Towards the end of December, the situation was becoming desperate,’ Williams would later acknowledge in his report. ‘Mr Clark (3rd Mate) and Able Seaman Hardy were both in a very bad condition; they were suffering from gangrene, as were several of the others, their feet and hands were discharging, and the smell was awful.’

  Notwithstanding the bannocks, the food situation was also dire; each man was by this time only being given four bannocks per day, half the initial ration. ‘I therefore decided to make a final attempt to get help, or die in the effort,’ Williams wrote.

  ‘The following morning the Captain, Whiteside and myself set out in the direction we had seen [some] lights from the lifeboat in our last attempt to obtain rescue,’ Peyer recalled later. But it was too much for them in their weakened state.

  ‘We covered about half the distance,’ Williams reported ‘when Whiteside for the first time broke down, and refused to go any further. Peyer was not very keen either, so I turned back with them, and it was as much as we could do to reach the hut. We collapsed on arrival.’

  No-one could blame them. ‘During the whole day we only had two bannocks each,’ Peyer recalled.

  When there was no more flour, ‘we raked about to find something [else] to eat,’ Radio Officer Robert Paterson remembered later. ‘In a tin about the size of a biscuit tin, from which we had taken oil, there was a putrid piece of meat we believed was seal meat (blubber). It smelled vile.

  ‘We cut it up into hunks, and hung these up outside the hut where they froze hard. This kept the meat from getting any worse. Once a day we had a cube of this stuff. It tasted wicked, but we had to eat it because it was the only thing to save us from death.’25

  Williams has described how on 2 January 1943, Whiteside as usual ‘went out to collect [the] firewood, as he was still in a comparatively good condition. But [he] soon came rushing back into the hut.’ He left the door open, and was evidently ‘absolutely terrified’. ‘I could get nothing out of him,’ Williams reported. ‘We thought we were about to be attacked by bears.’

  Had they looked out of the door, they might well have seen evidence to back up this supposition. Two creatures covered in white were creeping towards them. But rather than finding themselves being hunted by ravenous carnivores which wanted to devour them, they would soon discover that they had been stalked by two Norwegian soldiers dressed in white camouflage suits who would end up rescuing them. They had walked and skied all the way from Barentsburg on a trapping expedition.

  The Norwegian soldiers were at first as alarmed as Whiteside when they heard voices emanating from the hut they were approaching. One of the Norwegians crept forward to investigate, while the second man positioned himself on what he took to be a frozen sand dune to protect with his gun the man moving towards the hut, only to discover that the ‘dune’ was in fact a frozen corpse dressed in a British uniform partially concealed under some snow.26

  He advanced so as to join his friend outside the hut. When they opened the door, they were overwhelmed by the terrible smell. Their next impression was stunned amazement, the result of coming across so many men in a hut which until minutes before they had believed was deserted. Some of the men inside the hut were staring at them, while others at first sight appeared to be dead. In fact they were informed that all nine inside the hut were alive, although it took a while for both rescuers and rescued to make known their respective nationalities, and how best to communicate. Only after that had been sorted out, could plans be formulated and appropriate measures taken.