From Pole to Pole

by Garth James Cameron

  His next go at the Pole was from Cape Flora on Hall Island in the Seven Islands archipelago. He overwintered in 1898–1899 and started the attempt when the weather improved in the New Year. Andrée, Strindberg, and Fraenkel had disappeared after taking off from Danes Island on July 11, 1898 (the only information was the carrier pigeon message sent early in the flight), and Wellman had a theory that he might find and rescue them in the general area of the Seven Islands. If he did it would be a coup equal to Henry Morton Stanley finding Dr. Livingstone. He was right about where the missing balloonists might be found, but he did not find them. What he did do was to travel 75 nm toward the Pole, declare that conditions were not favorable, and give up the attempt.

  By 1905 airships were being built and flown in small numbers, and Wellman decided that an airship was an ideal vehicle. It was no coincidence that there was great public interest in aviation, and that every stage of the planning and execution of an airship flight to the Pole would generate much copy for his newspaper. He must have been persuasive (in spite of his record to date) and got his paper, the Chicago Record-Herald, to put up $75,000 for the project, which became the ‘Wellman-Chicago Record-Herald Polar Expedition’. He also got backing from various other organizations including the National Geographic Society, Theodore Roosevelt, and Alexander Graham Bell. The total raised was $250,000 and he needed every penny of it. His airship was designed and built in France in 1905–06 by Louis Goddard. It had twin engines; a 55 hp Clement forward, driving a tractor propeller, and a 25 hp Ford aft, driving a pusher propeller. A 5 hp motor was fitted to pump air into the ballonets as required. The gondola was open, and equipment included two motor sleds for use if the machine was forced down on the ice. Directional control was with a rudder. Wellman avoided the expense of building an airship base in Europe by shipping the airship (named America) to his base in a dissembled condition.

  Walter Wellman (1858–1934) (second from the left) was a leading journalist who believed in creating his own stories. He was also the least successful Arctic explorer of all time. After two failed attempts at sledging to the North Pole he turned to airships. In 1906 he established an airship base at Virgo Harbor on Danes Island in the northwest of the Svalbard Archipelago. In that year he returned to America without flying his airship. He returned in 1907 and 1909 with his airship the America. On each occasion the airship made a brief flight before weather (in 1907) and mechanical failure (in 1909) brought it down.

  One of the members of Wellman’s expedition was a polymath called Chester Melvin Vaniman (1866–1912). Growing up on an Illinois farm gave him both a life-long love of agriculture and much experience with machines. Vaniman studied music, and started life as a musician, singer, and music teacher. He then trained as an electrician and worked in that field for some time. He taught himself photography, and went to New Zealand in 1902 to spend a year taking photographs of tourist sites for the Oceanic Steamship Company and for the New Zealand Government. He specialised in panoramas and built himself a camera for that purpose. Moving on to Australia in February 1903, Vaniman developed his techniques for taking photographs from above. If no building or mast was available he used a specially built 98 ft. tall ladder/mast, stayed with cables pegged to the ground that could be dismantled for transport. While in Australia, Vaniman constructed an improved camera to take panoramas, and ordered a balloon (inflated with hydrogen) to be used for taking panoramic photographs from the air. After some months of experiments with both balloon and camera he took a panorama of Sydney on March 27, 1904, that is famous to this day. Moving to Europe he gave up photography for aviation, met Wellman in France, and was recruited as a mechanic and engineer for the 1906 expedition.

  Wellman’s airship station was built within sight of the Andrée memorial and the ruins of the balloon shed built to house Andrée’s balloon in 1896–97. A site for the hangar was blasted out of the rock a few meters from the shoreline of Virgo Harbor, and timber from the balloon house was used to make the floor of the hangar, which consisted of five wooden arches braced by external cables and was covered with sail cloth. It was 85 ft. tall, 82 ft. wide, and 190 ft. long. There was also a plant for generating hydrogen gas, a machine shop, and a building to house the members of the expedition. The hydrogen plant required 125 tons of sulphuric acid, 75 tons of scrap iron filings, and 30 tons of other chemicals and apparatus. Machinists, over twenty mechanics, and a doctor were hired and had to be housed. The De Forest Wireless Telegraph Company equipped the America, the Frithjof (the expedition ship), and a station in Hammerfest, Norway for wireless telegraphy (radio using morse code). A steel life boat, tons of food, malted milk, and other items too numerous to list were shipped to Virgo Harbor. Ships visited Virgo Harbor in hope of seeing the airship fly. No sooner had the hangar been completed than the flight had to be abandoned. As soon as the motor, drive train, and propellers were tested, they self-destructed. Wellman returned to Europe without even inflating the envelope of the America. The open basket-work gondola was left at the site and its remains were still visible in 1993.

  Over the winter of 1906–07 he had the airship completely redesigned by Melvin Vaniman with an enlarged envelope, a completely new gondola, a new engine, a Lorraine-Dietrich of 70–80 hp driving two propellers, mounted on outriggers, one on each side of the gondola, and stabilizers at the rear of the new enclosed gondola. In 1907 he returned to Dane’s Island. The hangar had survived the winter, but collapsed in a storm on July 4, 1907. He repaired the hangar and inflated the America. The new airship was 184 ft. long, 52.5 ft. in diameter, and 65 ft. high. It had a volume of 274,712 ft3. The ship had a cruising speed of 15 kt., fuel for 120 hrs. and a novel means of maintaining its cruising altitude of about 250 ft. Long before Andrée’s expedition, balloonists had sometimes used a trail rope to maintain height when flying low over water or obstacle-free surfaces. If the balloon became light the balloon would rise until the extra weight of the trail rope equaled the increase in lift. If the balloon got heavy it would sink until the weight of extra trail rope on the surface equaled the reduction in lift. Used carefully, the trail rope enabled the balloonist to save gas and ballast and prolong the flight. Wellman planned to use an equilibrator which was a long tube with extra fuel and provisions in it. It was armored with leather and steel plates so that it would slip smoothly over the pack ice of the Polar Sea, and it was intended to function in the same way as a balloon’s trail rope. It would work if the ice was as smooth as a billiard table, but it was not. The pack ice in the Arctic Ocean is stressed by the currents beneath it and the winds above. They create pressure ridges, and the surface resembles a plain strewn with rocks of all shapes and sizes, constantly growing and vanishing. Wellman must have known this from his reading and from early expeditions. There was no chance that the ice would be smooth all the way to the Pole and back. The airship was also equipped with another novel device which could not work; a retardeur. A device like a trail rope, it was a steel cable fitted with hooks or rings that Wellman hoped would dig into the ice and hold the airship stationary if the wind was strong enough to push the airship backwards. When the wind dropped the airship would proceed on its journey. The airship carried sledge dogs, sledges, a boat and supplies for 10 months, all for use if it was forced to land on the pack. On September 2, 1907, the America was towed out of its hangar and over the harbor by the steamer Express. It slipped its tow and set course for the North Pole. The airship had never been test flown, its engines had probably never run for more than a few hours at a time, and none of the three men aboard had ever flown an airship (although Wellman and Vaniman had ballooning experience). The America had many novel and untested features. It was likely that the engines would fail long before reaching the Pole; the equilibrator was untested and would probably be ripped off by the pressure ridges that would be encountered on the pack ice between the base and the Pole. The retardeur was unlikely to work as planned. Even if the engines did not fail and the equilibrator was not ripped off, the airship was likely to enco
unter winds that would cause it to run out of fuel before returning. A 10 kt. headwind from the north would reduce its ground speed to 5 kt., and it would run out of fuel about the time it reached the Pole. A 10 kt. wind from the west or east would also result in the fuel being used up long before completing the journey. If the airship encountered freezing fog, as was likely to happen, it would ice up and the extra weight would force it down onto the ice. If it encountered bad weather it did not have the ability to fly over or around it. What did happen was that a fresh breeze blew up from the northwest. Wellman could not control the airship, and it came down on a glacier about 10 nm from the hangar. Gas was valved to bring the America down, and then the rip lines were pulled to open the envelope and spill the gas so that the envelope did not act like a sail and cause the airship to thrash around and damage itself.

  In 1908 Wellman was committed to reporting on the American presidential election and had to postpone his next flight attempt to 1909. In that year Wellman returned to his Danes Island base in the Arctic with a slightly improved America. The hangar was still standing, but collapsed soon afterward and was rebuilt with the nine arches originally planned for it. On August 15, 1909 he set out again. The airship reached the edge of the pack ice, and then the equilibrator lashed left and right as it was dragged over the pressure ridges. After about an hour it was torn off and the airship, relieved of its weight, climbed to several thousand feet. Gas was valved to stop the airship bursting as the gas expanded and to bring it down. Without the valved gas and the equilibrator, the journey was abandoned and America was towed back to its base by the ship Farm (not to be confused with the famous Fram). As the petrol tanks were being emptied on the shore, the airship rose into the air (almost taking one of the crew with it), to about 6,000 ft. and burst, showering the harbor with debris. Lightening the airship before deflating the envelope was an error so fundamental as to boggle the mind.

  Wellman’s fellow journalists had a field day:

  “Walter Wellman ought to reach the North Pole on air if anyone can.”

  South Bend Tribune

  “Walter Wellman may not find the North Pole, but if he fails he can tell a longer story about it than anyone can.”

  Toledo Blade

  “In this [expedition] there evidently is more desire to advertise a newspaper and increase circulation than to achieve a scientific victory.”

  Denver Republican

  On the voyage back to civilization, Wellman heard that both Dr. Frederick Cook and Robert Peary had (independently of each other) claimed to have reached the Pole by surface travel. Cook’s claim was soon proven to be fraudulent. Some doubted Peary’s claim, but he was awarded the honors due to the first man to reach the North Pole and a place in the history books. It is now generally agreed that Peary did not reach the Pole. In any case, Wellman announced that he would not try again. In 1910 Wellman set off in a new America to try and fly the Atlantic from west to east. The airship was airborne for over 60 hours, and covered about 1,000 miles, most of it drifting with the wind back toward the American coast after multiple engine failures. If they had been blown ashore in Florida they would have been a laughing stock, but they were rescued by the steamship Trent and were briefly famous. Wellman wrote a book about his aeronautical adventures and the future of aviation. It was readable and persuasive, and got almost every prediction completely wrong. Although he lived until 1934, he never flew again.

  Did Wellman really think he could reach the Pole by airship? His arctic journeys of 1894 and 1898–99 exposed him to the realities of the pack ice, its freezing fogs, gales, pressure ridges, and leads that opened and closed and froze over. He must have realized that the airships of the 1906–1909 were immature technology, and that their engines were highly unreliable. The airships of the time had a high accident rate when flown short distances in fine weather. The famous Norwegian explorer Nansen described him as a “humbug” and that is probably a fair assessment.

  Reviewing Wellman’s expeditions, the modern reader is left with the impression that their primary goal was to generate copy for a flamboyant journalist rather than make a serious attempt to travel to the North Pole and back.

  Vaniman stayed in aeronautics and designed airship hangars with a wooden frame and canvas covering. He claimed they could be rigged, de-rigged, and transported quickly, and several were purchased and put into service. He designed and built the airship Akron, and attempted a transatlantic flight in 1912. The airship took off with a large crowd watching, and exploded a few minutes into the flight. Vaniman and his crew of four were all killed.

  Chapter Four

  A Sailor Struck by Lightning

  Kristiania—San Francisco, 1909–1914

  In 1909, Roald Amundsen flew in (or under) a quaint and almost forgotten type of flying machine, the man-lifting kite. A photograph shows Amundsen suspended below a train of kites at about 30 ft. above the ground. He is dressed neatly in a suit and tie, with his usual bowler hat on his head. Always dapper when in the civilized world, he turned 37 on July 16, that year.

  He had completed the first ever continuous voyage through the Northwest Passage from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean (across the northern coasts of Canada and the United States) in 1907, and had thereby established himself as an Arctic explorer of note. He was already planning an expedition to the North Pole that would evolve into a successful journey to the South Pole. 1909 was also the year he first considered aviation as a tool in his explorations.

  A grainy but unique photograph of Roald Amundsen airborne under a train of man-lifting kites in mid-1909. The kites were designed for him by Einar Sem-Jacobsen (1878–1936) who was a pioneer of Norwegian military aviation. Amundsen intended to use them to raise an observer high enough to see ice conditions in the distance. Photographs of the kites show that they bore a striking resemblance to those designed by Anglo-American S. F. Cody in Britain. All types of man-lifting kites had a pilot kite and a number of lifter kites. In the Norwegian system the seat, canvas sack, or basket for the passenger(s) was attached to the cable below the lifter kites and the ground crew reeled the cable out and in. Altitudes of 2000 ft. or more could be attained, depending on the conditions.

  Aeroplanes had been evolving since the first flights of 1903, but the event that caught his attention was Louis Bleriot’s flight across the English Channel on April 25, 1909. The flight from France to England covered only 27 miles and lasted 37 minutes, but it captured the imagination of the world as the most significant flight to date. The British saw it as ending their geographical isolation, and thoughtful observers realised that aviation had somehow started to come of age. Up to that moment aviation had seemed to be more of a stunt than a practical enterprise. The Channel flight suggested that there might be civil and military applications. Amundsen thought that aeroplanes might now provide the means to reconnoitre proposed routes for his future explorations. In 1925 Amundsen wrote:

  “As I learned of Bleriot’s flight, I knew at once that the time had come to think of using the air to help the Polar expeditions. Certainly human power and skill had overcome and conquered vast tracts of this mighty unknown whiteness, but enormous tracts remained unexplored, tracts that now could be reached from the air. My thoughts turned especially to the enormous area in the arctic which until now had withstood every attempt [to explore]. . . . When I, in the year 1909, equipped Fram for a trip to the Arctic; I had a conference with one of the most esteemed aviators of the day. He declared himself ready as willing to go with me. But it never came off.”

  This discussion was just the most recent example of his openness to new ideas. The Gjøa expedition through the Northwest Passage was an earlier example. He decided to use a small vessel with a small crew, rather than the large ships and large crews used by the earlier unsuccessful expeditions. The Gjøa was the first motor ship used in such an expedition. The paraffin fueled internal combustion engine enabled the ship to shift from sail to power at a moment’s notice. This ability saved the ship
from being wrecked on more than one occasion and saved fuel because (unlike a steam engine) it did not have to be kept running on the off chance that it might be needed. The discussions about aeroplanes came to nothing, probably because aeroplanes were then unreliable and clearly too fragile and low-performing to successfully operate in the harsh environment to be expected in high latitudes.

  A photograph showing the lifter kites and a pilot kite of the man-lifting system designed by Einar Sem-Jacobsen for Amundsen. In a strong wind the passenger/pilot could be marooned in the air until the wind dropped or the ground crew winched him in.

  Amundsen needed some way of extending his vision from his ship so that he could navigate the Arctic pack ice with more certainty and safety. An observer at 1,000 ft. altitude can see 27 nm in clear conditions, far further than from the masthead of a ship. An airborne observer could be expected to be able to observe ice conditions and help the ship navigate around impassable areas to shorten journeys through pack ice and make them safer.