Limits of the Known

by David Roberts

  When I first became aware, as a teenager, of the panorama of Arctic questing that unfolded between 1819 and 1909, I needed no persuading that the goal of reaching the abstract but precisely defined point at the top of the world was worth all the struggle, suffering, and even death that had been expended on it. And later, when I first read Farthest North, I drifted in my imagination along with the thirteen men aboard the Fram in a reverie of vicarious adventure.

  Equally compelling to me was the quest for the South Pole, which spanned a much more concentrated era, from 1897 to 1912. In fact, Robert Falcon Scott, Ernest Shackleton, and Roald Amundsen became paragons for me before Nansen (or for that matter Robert E. Peary) did. For all the dire predicaments those pioneers plunged into on the Antarctic continent, the landscape across which their expeditions unfurled seemed somehow congenial: a steadily rising glacial plateau, fringed by dark mountains, seamed with dangerous crevasses.

  The Arctic north of the shores of Greenland and Ellesmere Island, in contrast, figured in my imagination as an arena of unrelieved nightmare. There was nothing but ice, torn and twisted into chaotic pressure ridges by the winds and currents, hemmed by deadly open-water leads that could gape or close without warning. The flat surfaces of the floes, where unsuspecting men pitched their camps, could split into pieces with the booming reports of exploding shells. To travel across such a wilderness, one account after another revealed, was to wrestle monstrous sledge loads across boulder piles of ice, with constant terror as a ground bass.

  By the age of five, I was already a veteran of snow. Three years before I was born, in 1940, my parents moved from the East to Climax, Colorado—at 11,300 feet the highest town in the United States—where my father operated the first sun-eclipsing telescope deployed in the Western Hemisphere. On the ridges and basins surrounding Fremont Pass, the snows came in September and lingered past May. Dad turned dynamite boxes into sleds for me and my brother Alan, one year younger. To go out and play, we donned boots and mittens and woolen caps.

  One day in May 1948, just before my fifth birthday, Alan and I set out to explore the gulf behind our house and adjoining observatory on Ceresco Ridge. That hollow was reputed to be a dump for old autos abandoned by the workers in the molybdenum mine that was Climax’s raison d’être. In the warm sun, plowing our way across the saturated drifts, Alan and I discovered no rusty Model Ts, only a depthless sandbox of snow.

  As we started to climb the slope back to our house, we blundered into the wettest drift of all. Thrashing to stay upright, we sank to our waists, then to our chests, in the slop. After half an hour of flailing, I realized with glum certainty that this was how I was going to die—the first time that the shadow of doom had darkened my otherwise charmed childhood.

  Somehow Alan got loose, managed to struggle up the hill, and summoned the rescue squad of our mother. After yanking me out of my chilly trap, she warned both of us that the old car dump was not a safe place to play. We took heed, and thereafter confined our excursions to the toxic tailings piles surrounding the mine and the glory hole it had gouged out of the south face of Mount Bartlett.

  I first felt the itch of exploration in my bones about three years later, after our family moved to Boulder. One bright spring day, provisioned with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches Mom had made for us, Alan and I set out to hike up Gregory Canyon, on the trail that rose between Flagstaff and Green Mountain. The mouth of the canyon opened where Baseline Road ended, after completing its traverse in a virtually uninterrupted straight line smack on top of the 40th parallel of latitude all the way from the Kansas border.

  There, nestled in a small grove of apple trees, a sign informed us that the canyon was named after John H. Gregory, who in 1859 had pioneered the mountain route all the way to the future mining camp of Black Hawk. This scrap of history electrified me. Dad had mentioned Black Hawk, but the legendary settlement seemed to me impossibly remote. What a man Gregory must have been to find his way there alone, fighting off bears and Indians!

  Alan and I made it about a mile up the canyon before fatigue and hunger (we’d polished off our sandwiches) brought us to a halt. My shoulders were already sore from the ten-pound pack I hefted. A forty-foot cliff of red sandstone stared over us on the south; in the shade at its base an old snowbank clung to the gravelly soil. How much more daunting must the snaking canyon ahead of us be!

  Gregory Canyon did not turn me into an explorer. A few years later, I made it to the top of Green Mountain, which at an elevation of 8,150 feet towered half a mile above our house on Bluebell Avenue. But the trail to the summit was easy to follow and banked with runoff ditches, and on top there was a scrolled-up register housed in a cemented cairn whose brass plaque sported a sighting guide to all the much higher crests of the Indian Peaks to the west. This cozy nook among the pines was hardly terra incognita.

  Rather than venture into the wilder outback above timberline—without a car and driver I was landlocked, and Dad was too busy with his scientific work to share any alpine rambles with his son—I turned Green Mountain into a fetish, hiking (usually solo) up it some fifty times over three or four years by every known trail from all the points of the compass. For the antisocial misfit I became in early adolescence, Green Mountain was a spiritual sanctum, not a world of discovery.

  Because my father was an astronomer, at an age when other kids were learning the Ten Commandments in Sunday school I was absorbing the expanding universe. Even at eight or nine, I spent sleepless nights trying to fathom the concept of infinity. There has to be a wall at the end, I would tell myself, staring up at the darkness of my bedroom ceiling. A trim, mortared barrier of stones would pop into my brain. But there has to be something beyond the wall—and there I was, hopping over the border and gliding off into the limitless void.

  By adolescence, outer space was more real to me than the Indian Peaks. But within a few years, I had turned to the sagas of polar discovery around the turn of the twentieth century—Scott and Shackleton at first, Nansen a little later. At the same time I had begun to read books about Himalayan expeditions—Maurice Herzog’s Annapurna, Sir John Hunt’s The Ascent of Everest, Paul Bauer’s The Siege of Nanga Parbat. At last the exploratory itch that had lain dormant since Gregory Canyon stirred my blood again. At sixteen, liberated by a driver’s permit, I reached Brainard Lake at dawn and hiked to the top of my first 13,000-foot peak. Mount Audubon, I would soon learn, was one of the easiest high “walk-ups” in Colorado, but on that June day the whole alpine panorama—conies whistling beside their lairs, elephantella and Parry’s primrose peeping into bloom, winter snowbanks leaking crystalline trickles—enchanted me.

  Scott and Shackleton were mythic heroes, but their portraits had a sepia tone. Hillary and Tenzing came in bright Kodachrome. From my vantage point in Boulder, the Arctic seas lay impossibly far away—more than 2,000 miles straight north, beyond the curve of the globe. The mountains began just beyond our front door on Bluebell Avenue.

  By the late 1950s, moreover, Arctic and Antarctic discovery had stalled in a creative limbo. The South and North Poles had “been done”—by Amundsen in 1911, by Peary (or so we all thought) in 1909. But nearly all the hardest peaks in the Himalaya and the Karakoram were still unclimbed, and when I read Gaston Rébuffat’s Starlight and Storm, I learned that even in the Alps, where the cavalcade of major first ascents had ended in 1865 with Edward Whymper’s triumph on the Matterhorn, the best climbers alive, some of them less than a decade older than I was, were setting their sights on new routes the likes of which the previous generation had dismissed as impossible.

  The played-out character of Arctic discovery would seem to me (and to my climbing buddies) confirmed in 1968, when a Minnesotan named Ralph Plaisted led a bunch of amateurs on a snowmobile expedition to the North Pole. The style of Plaisted’s expedition struck us as deplorable, as his team was regularly resupplied by airplane, depended on navigational help from overflying pilots, and—worst of all—got picked up by plane at 90˚ N rather tha
n return the way they had come. That denouement seemed to trivialize the pole itself. It was as if you could land a plane or a helicopter on the top of Everest. As Annapurna made gruesomely clear, the descent of a formidable mountain was often more perilous than the ascent.

  I was ten years old when Everest was first climbed, in 1953. It was no wonder, then, that when I edged toward becoming an explorer myself in my early twenties, it was the great ranges that I chose as my undiscovered country—and in particular, Alaska, where all the most challenging mountains had yet to be climbed, or even attempted. The riches lay there for the taking.

  Six weeks into the drift of the Fram, Nansen had grave doubts about the theory on which the whole expedition was premised. An observation on November 7 gave a latitude of 77˚ 43' N, which was actually south of the ship’s position when she had first been frozen in. In despair, Nansen wrote in his diary, “My plan has come to nothing. That palace of theory which I reared, in pride and self-confidence, high above all silly objections has fallen like a house of cards at the first breath of wind.”

  The pressure of the ice, of which none of the thirteen men had any previous experience, could produce terror. On December 8, Nansen noted, “The ice creaked and roared so along the ship’s side close by us that it was not possible to carry on any connected conversation; we had to scream.” Yet the prevailing ambiance was one of darkness, silence, and monotony. To relieve the boredom, the men played the mechanical organ in the saloon, or read books from the well-stocked expedition library, or played cards, or composed verses about their plight, or drafted elaborate menus for each evening’s dinner as if they were advertising a posh restaurant. In a tradition dating back to Parry’s men on the Hecla and Griper in 1819–20, the team published an onboard newspaper.

  Chores filled many of the men’s waking hours: tending to the sails and rigging, retrieving foodstuffs from the hold, gathering salt-free ice to melt for drinking water, taking daily meteorological observations. Each man was charged with crafting his own pair of canvas boots. Feeding the dogs and keeping them from tearing one another apart in fights were especially onerous tasks. The keeping of a strict daily routine was deemed crucial to preserving the men’s sanity. The round of activities gradually instilled a cozy sense of the ship as a safe haven in the limitless frozen sea, even though Nansen was so parsimonious of coal that the temperature in the saloon often hovered in the 40s Fahrenheit. Not all of the regimen was devoted to chores. The galley served as both kitchen and smoking room. “Out there [the men] had a good smoke and chat; many a story was told, and not seldom some warm dispute arose,” wrote Nansen. “Afterwards came, for most of us, a short siesta.”

  The rare dramatic event punctured the tedium. On December 13, in penumbral darkness, a polar bear crawled on board, seized two dogs, and carried them back onto the ice. There the bear killed and partially ate the dogs before the men, carrying lanterns, were able to track it down and shoot it.

  Slowly, the current asserted the fitful force that had carried the Jeannette relics across the top of the world. On February 1, the Fram at last passed 80˚ N. Yet for the perpetually impatient Nansen, the zigzag course was maddening. “We are going at the miserable pace of a snail,” he wrote on February 25, “but not so surely as it goes. We carry our house with us; but what we do one day is undone the next.” He calculated that at the current rate, it would take eight years for the Fram to complete its traverse and escape into North Atlantic waters.

  Yet almost from the start, the ship had borne out the theory behind the experimental design of her hull. Less than two weeks after freezing fast, the Fram faced her first test by ice: “the ship trembles and shakes,” Nansen recorded, “and rises by fits and starts, or is sometimes gently lifted. There is a pleasant comfortable feeling in sitting listening to all this uproar and knowing the strength of our ship. Many a one would have been crushed long ago.”

  At first the Fram, once an assault by the pressure ridges subsided, would settle back into her original berth in the pack. But as the winter wore on, the lifting persisted. With nothing for the ice to grasp, the round-bottomed hull was steadily squeezed upward. By February 1894 all the men were won over to the radical hypothesis by which Nansen had schemed the ship’s survival. The only question was when and if the polar pack would finally deliver her into open waters.

  On April 6 the men witnessed a solar eclipse. The event was vital for the team’s navigation, as the onset of the moon’s shadow, which had been predicted to the minute, allowed them to correct the ship’s chronometers, without which they could not accurately reckon longitude.

  The men greeted the spring, with rising temperatures and the return of the sun, with joy. But as the weeks wore on, their spirits wilted. Midsummer’s Day, for most Arctic expeditions a halcyon occasion, gave them little cheer. “A dismal, dispiriting landscape—nothing but white and gray,” noted Nansen. “No shadows—merely half-obliterated forms melting into the fog and slush.” June 24 marked the passage of a year aboard the Fram. There was no ignoring the fact that the drift had accomplished far less northward progress than Nansen had predicted.

  Between May 1 and June 18 the ice-bound ship hovered around 81˚ N, gaining a paltry 6’ of latitude during seven weeks of aimless to-and-fro. Then, between June 18 and September 5, the Fram actually retreated southward by 38’, or some 44 miles.

  Throughout the spring and summer, the men practiced all the means of travel across the pack at their disposal, slowly attaining at least beginners’ proficiency on snowshoes and skis. The ship was equipped with boats and sledges, and the men practiced hauling these as well. In addition, starting in July, Nansen supervised the construction of light two-man kayaks, made of wooden frames covered with sealskin and sailcloth.

  No matter how confident the men grew in the Fram’s capacity to survive the gripping ice, they had to rehearse the grim course to which they would resort if the ship sank. Nansen pondered again and again the paradox at the heart of the voyage. All other crews frozen into the Arctic ice had prayed each summer for release, while the men on the Fram hoped instead for more solid entombment and a current to ride north.

  Should the ship sink, the team would have to set off across the ice with sledges and boats in a desperate bid for escape. By June the nearest land was 70 air miles from the Fram; the nearest inhabited land was much farther. All the previous expeditions whose ships the ice had doomed had attempted such retreats, with catastrophic results. The precedent lodged in all the men’s minds was the denouement of the Franklin expedition after 1845, when all 129 men had died either on or near the Erebus and Terror or on the hopeless march south after the ships had gone to the bottom.

  Although the team kept up its rehearsals of their last-ditch scenario, Nansen confided to his diary the conviction that in the event of a retreat, there would be “little doubt as to our fate.” Only thirteen of the thirty-three men from the Jeannette expedition had survived, and the American ship had sunk at 77˚ N, not 81˚. Such musings only reinforced Nansen’s faith in the perfect plan and the indomitable ship: “But the Fram will not be crushed . . .”

  From the start of the journey Nansen had plotted a logistical gambit that he kept up his sleeve as the crowning tour de force of the expedition. Why he felt it had to be kept secret is unclear. He hinted at the scheme to Sverdrup, but kept his silence with the rest of the team. (They guessed the outlines of the plan anyway.) There was, of course, little chance that the drift of the pack would carry the Fram straight to the North Pole. At some point, no matter how well the hypothesized course of the frozen ship conformed to Nansen’s predictions, the Fram would reach a highest latitude before gliding south and west. That apogee would have to be seized. From that point, Nansen and one or more partners would leave the ship, setting off with skis and kayaks and dogs and sledges on a determined jaunt to the pole.

  As always, Nansen’s ambivalence about his goals left him of two minds. As he wrote in his diary on September 25, as if the expedition sponsors wer
e looking over his shoulder, “Our aim, as I have so often tried to make clear, is not so much to reach the point in which the earth’s axis terminates, as to traverse and explore the unknown Polar Sea; and yet I should like to get to the Pole, too . . .”

  In Nansen’s mind, the ideal time for the departure would be February or March, to take advantage of the waxing daylight yet complete the trek before summer turned the ice to slush and melted fiendish open-water leads between the floes. He considered setting off in March 1894, after a drift of only five months, but the poor progress of the Fram to that date dictated delay. Another year’s zigzag in the ice ought to gain several degrees of latitude. Privately Nansen dreamed of 87.5˚ N, but he hoped realistically for 85˚, and would settle for even less.

  Throughout 1894, the tedium of passive life aboard the ship drove Nansen into frenzies of impatience. The lure of the grueling dash toward the pole tugged constantly at his feelings. As he wrote on March 26, “this inactive, lifeless monotony, without any change, wrings one’s very soul. No struggle, no possibility of struggle! All is so still and dead, so stiff and shrunken, under the mantle of ice. . . . What would I not give for a single day of struggle—for even a moment of danger!”

  For the men under Nansen’s command, the prospect of their leader abandoning them was fraught with dismay. But they also fully appreciated what a bold gamble the men skiing off to the north would be undertaking. Once more than a few days away from the ship, the party aimed at the pole would have no chance at returning to that tiny island of safety and comfort in the vast sea of ice, because the course of its drift was utterly unpredictable. The Fram would be harder to find than the proverbial needle in a haystack.

  Instead, the returning polar party would have to head south until it reached terra firma. Nansen hoped for Franz Josef Land, lying between the longitudes of 50˚ and 60˚ E, and for the seemingly remote chance that some passing whaler or explorer might come upon the men and pick them up, or if not, that they might hunt and scavenge and live off the land indefinitely. The difference between those skiers and the refugees from the Jeannette and other stricken ships would be, Nansen judged, the fact that they would be fit and healthy, as opposed to starving and demoralized. Still, even Nansen recognized what an audacious program, the likes of which the Arctic had never seen, he was proposing.