Background
George Emory Tyson was born at Red Bank, N. J. , son of Peter and Clarica Tyson.
(The Polaris expedition to the North Pole, the first such ...)
The Polaris expedition to the North Pole, the first such journey led by Americans, mixed groundbreaking achievements with harrowing disasters. Veteran sailor of the North Seas George Tyson joined the expedition when it set out in 1871, and kept a detailed record of the remarkable events that occurred on board the ship. Tyson's journal relates the mysterious death of the expedition's leader, Captain Charles Francis Hall, and the ship's entrapment in arctic ice. The bulk of Tyson's book concerns the months he spent with nineteen fellow crew-members stuck on a broad chunk of ice that broke away from the Polaris and drifted out into the sea. Tyson tells of his life with Eskimos and his daily struggle to survive in subzero temperatures, each day wondering if he would make it back to America.
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George Emory Tyson was born at Red Bank, N. J. , son of Peter and Clarica Tyson.
In his infancy his parents moved to New York City, where he attended the public schools and afterwards worked in an iron foundry.
An early interest in Arctic adventure led him in February 1850 to ship from New London in the whaler M'Clellan, and he was one of twelve volunteers from the ship who wintered in 1851-52 in Cumberland Sound.
He rose to mate and master, and in 1860-70 was steadily engaged in command of Arctic whalers, taking the Antelope in 1864 to Repulse Bay, furthest north for whaleships of the time.
He had frequently met the explorer Charles Francis Hall, and in 1870 was invited by Hall to be sailingmaster and ice pilot in his projected Arctic expedition in the Polaris. Though at first prevented by other engagements, he finally joined in a specially created post as assistant navigator.
With seven officers, three scientists, and fifteen seamen, the Polaris left Brooklyn, June 29, 1871, and after making a furthest north record
wintered in Hall Basin, North Greenland. Hall died in November. In the ensuing period, marked by much friction and indiscipline, Tyson, now second in command, was apparently a neutral and stabilizing influence.
In the autumn of 1872, on Oct. 15, the Polaris, endeavoring to work southward and leaking badly, was nearly crushed by ice. Having built a storehouse on the ice, Tyson and others were shifting supplies to it when the ship broke loose in the darkness, leaving nineteen of them--Tyson, the meteorologist Meyers, eight seamen, and two Eskimos with their wives and five children-adrift on the floe.
Their ensuing experience is among the most extraordinary in Arctic annals. For six and a half months they drifted southward through winter darkness, dependent for food chiefly on the desperate efforts of the Eskimo hunters, and forced toward the last to shift from floe to floe and cling to their boat to prevent its being washed away by stormy seas. Without a life lost, they were picked up, April 30, 1873, by the sealer Tigress off Labrador.
Later that year Tyson was made temporary lieutenant and ice-master in the Tigress, purchased by the United States Navy, and sent north to seek the remaining Polaris party, who, it was learned later, had left her and been rescued by a whaler.
In 1877-78 he also commanded the Florence, sent to the Arctic to establish a preliminary base for the Howgate expedition, subsequently abandoned. During his later years he lived in Washington, D. C. , where he had a position as captain of the guard in the Navy Department.
He died on October 18, 1906
(The Polaris expedition to the North Pole, the first such ...)
(Lang:- English, Pages 197. Reprinted in 2015 with the hel...)
In investigations his honesty and modesty were recognized, as well as his stamina and temperamental fitness for Arctic hardships. Capt. Edwin White, a fellow whaler, described him as "the best man to consult with that I have ever met his power of endurance ahead of anyone I ever traveled with".
He was married, probably about 1870, to Helen (McElroy) Myers, a widow with three sons.
