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kAl ’Teddy’-p napparutaani nasiffimmiit takuneqarsinnaavoq,
sikutaq ’akunnittarfigisaat’ arfineq marlunngorluni qulloorsimasoq.
Castaways found on
drifting ice floe
The sinking of M/S Teddy in East Greenland in 1923
could have ended in disaster – for two months, the ship’s
21-man crew battled the merciless, Arctic nature
By Jens Brønden
It had been days since any of them had slept. The fight to
survive the storm and the pack ice in a sinking schooner
left no time for rest. It was obvious that M/S Teddy had taken
so much punishment from the drifting ice in the Greenland Sea
that it would not take much, to make it sink. However, if they
succeeded in finding their way out to open sea, the ship might
be able to stay afloat long enough to reach Iceland, with the assistance
of the pumps.
However, not many among the 21 men on board dared to hope
for salvation. As far as the eye could see from the crow’s nest on
the mainmast, there was nothing but an endless ice wilderness.
With the passing of the year, it got colder and colder and whenever
there was time for a few hours of rest, it was so cold and
damp that nobody got a wink of sleep.
The voyage home with Teddy had gone wrong and there were
many reasons for this, but for the moment, all that mattered,
was preparing for the worst. A few days earlier, the ship had
been shaken by the pack ice so everyone jumped overboard
onto the ice with their most precious possessions.
thE liEutEnant takEs ChargE
Captain Bistrup, who had been next in command on the Denmark
Expedition in 1906-1908, had lost perspective and initiative
and made one wrong decision after the other. Nobody
thought to save the ship’s cargo and provisions, so they at the
very least could survive for a time on the ice floe. The crew ran
around in hopeless confusion. On this day, the 24-year old lieutenant,
Louis Rostock-Jensen, took charge and got the men to
unload the ship, thereby safeguarding skins and provisions.
Dk Fra udsigtstønden i ’Teddy’s stormast ser man, hvordan
isflagen under ’hotellet’ var revnet i syv stykker.
GB From the crow’s nest on Teddy’s mainmast, you could
see how the ice floe under the ‘hotel’ had broken into
seven pieces.
The work with Teddy’s cargo and building a survival camp
on the ice floe took place at the beginning of October 1923.
The expedition had been away from home for three and a half
months and was now on its return voyage from northernmost
East Greenland, where the East Greenlandic trading company’s
representatives had seen to the company’s trading stations.
Here, at the beginning of October, the weather was constantly
changing. Good weather nourished the faint hope of getting out
to sea, bad weather the opposite. The ship was therefore alternately
loaded and unloaded. When the weather was good, the
cargo was brought aboard Teddy, and when there was a storm
and the ice creaked, the cargo was again brought out onto the
ice. The men froze in minus 15 degrees centigrade. They were
wet and deadly tired – several of them were starting to give
up. The impassable weather, the violent forces of the ice and
the fear of not getting home alive marked the 21 men in different
ways. Some of them were afraid, others were apathetic,
while others again took up the challenge to save the ship and its
crewmembers.
thE arCtiC as mEntor
The 24-year old lieutenant Louis Rostock-Jensen meticulously
describes the loss of M/S Teddy in his journal of the dramatic
voyage. Here, he wrote a day-by-day record of the events that
led up to the wreck and what happened to the crew afterwards.
The journal, with Rostock-Jensen’s own photographs was published
by Gyldendal a couple of years ago, word for word and
authentic.
Teddy left the quay in Nyhavn on June 17th, 1923 under festivi-
Suluk #03 Air Greenland Inflight Magazine 2012 57