But Nansen recognized the Englishman as Frederick Jackson, who had been commissioned by Alfred Harmsworth, the future Lord Northcliffe, to seek a land route to the North Pole by way of Franz Josef Land. During the brief conversation that followed Nansen took it for granted that Jackson knew who he was and was quite taken aback when the Englishman finally asked, “Aren’t you Nansen?”
Nansen acknowledged that he was, whereupon Jackson cried out, “By Jove, I am glad to see you!”
This unexpected and miraculous meeting was not without its ironies. For Nansen, in proving that the North Pole was surrounded by frozen ocean, had dashed all his rescuer’s hopes for a land expedition. The two Norwegians returned to Norway on Jackson’s ship to a hero’s welcome. The Fram arrived a week later in almost perfect condition. By drifting from Siberia to Spitzbergen she had proved Nansen right and his detractors dead wrong. En route home, Sverdrup in the Fram had stopped at Spitzbergen, where Salomon Andrée, the Swedish balloonist, was making his first attempt to reach the Pole by air. That winter, Nansen, who now knew more about ice conditions in the polar sea than any living man, tried to dissuade him from that mad project. But like so many others before him, Andrée had gone too far on his personal quest to be deterred by cold reason.
2 Andrée’s folly
On July 29, 1895, while Nansen and Johansen were paddling desperately toward land, a solemn-looking man with a vast walrus moustache rose to his feet in the Great Hall of the Royal Colonial Institute in London to propose to the Sixth International Geographical Congress his audacious scheme to reach the North Pole by air.
Salomon Andrée’s audience, which included some of the most distinguished geographers and Arctic experts of the day, was mesmerized by his contagious enthusiasm, his mastery of scientific facts, and his bluntness. When a French scientist asked what Andrée would do if his balloon collapsed in the water before he had time to assemble his boat, Andrée replied with one word: “Drown.” But there was considerable scepticism. A.H. Markham, the veteran of the Nares expedition, now an admiral, opened the discussion on Andrée’s paper to point out that in a balloon nobody knew exactly where he was or what was under him. Even if he returned safely and said he had reached the Pole, he wouldn’t be able to say exactly where he’d been travelling. And what would happen if the balloon came down? How would he survive?
The Polar ice cap
Adolphus Greely, now a general, engaged in a spirited debate with “our ballooning friend,” as he called him (just the slightest hint of condescension there), and tried to appeal to Andrée’s common sense, urging him to explore something more important. Greely was sceptical of the ability of any balloon to reach the Pole. He pointed out that the escaping gas – a perennial problem with all balloons at that time – would cause the canopy to lose half its carrying power before the voyage was over.
Andrée listened carefully to his critics and, when they were finished, met them head on. Staring down at the old Arctic hands, he asked, “When something happened to your ships, how did you get back? I risk three lives in what you call a foolhardy attempt and you risked how many? A shipload?”
Having thus twisted the knife in General Greely, Andrée now proceeded to extract, like a rabbit from a hat, his answer to a patronizing hint from Greely that he would have trouble raising funds for such a venture.
“He hopes I may succeed in trying to raise the money and at least make the attempt.”
He paused and gestured triumphantly with a swing of his arm.
“Well I haf got the money!”
This dramatic statement brought cheers from the assembly. Foolhardy or not, Andrée had convinced them that he would carry his scheme to completion.
Salomon Andrée was forty-one years old; he had been obsessed by aeronautics for most of his life. As a boy of ten he built a paper airship, which he set off by means of a percussion cap from a hill above his home town of Grenna. That was a mixed success. The balloon soared beautifully over the community, but when it landed it almost set fire to a neighbour’s house.
A prize-winning scholar with a degree from the Royal Institute in Stockholm and two years’ experience as a draughtsman, the prodigy, aged twenty-two, “bold, proud and just a little cocky,” went off to North America to the great Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. In his spare hours he learned aeronautics from John E. Wise, an experienced aeronaut with four hundred balloon ascents to his credit.
Andrée was very much a child of his time – a dedicated believer in the scientific method, an optimist who had a burning faith in the future of science as the saviour of mankind, which, he wrote, “is still only half awake.” He wanted no truck with the supernatural; science, he was convinced, could explain everything. Back in Sweden, he was appointed to help staff his country’s polar station at Spitzbergen during the International Polar Year of 1882 – the year that saw Adolphus Greely stationed at Lady Franklin Bay.
Here the industrious young Swede investigated everything from the mysteries of electromagnetism to the properties of whirling snow. The tiniest problems fascinated him; nothing would do but that he try to solve them empirically. Was it, for instance, the polar darkness that affected the colour of the face after a long winter cooped up in a sunless realm? Or was the yellow tint that seemed to suffuse the features due simply to the fact that the investigators themselves were dazzled by the light? To prove his point, after the sun emerged, Andrée shut himself up indoors during the daylight hours for an entire month. “Dangerous? Perhaps; but what am I worth?” he asked. At the end of the period he came out to discover that his face really was a yellowish green, while those of his companions had begun to take on their normal hue.
On another occasion he decided to see how many eggs he could eat at a sitting. He ordered twoscore, boiled, along with bread, butter, and milk. “And now,” the waitress asked, deadpan, as she served this monstrous repast, “would you like something else to eat?”
This restless curiosity, this determination to demonstrate the truth or falsity of a theory by personal experimentation, lay behind Andrée’s obsession with a balloon voyage to the North Pole. One suspects that unlike his fellow explorers, he wasn’t driven so much by the dream of reaching the Pole as by his own curiosity. He wanted to find out if such a trip was possible.
He was a supreme optimist – anybody who thought a balloon would soar over the North Pole would have to have been – but there wasn’t a sentimental bone in his body. A cool rationalist, he was also a social reformer, not because his heart bled for the less fortunate but because he believed that technology would make the world a better and more efficient place. He lost his brief appointment to the municipal council of Stockholm because he advocated a reduction of the twelve-hour day to ten hours for men and eight for women. He was convinced that the new technology could and would eventually reduce the length of the work week, and he was right.
A rationalist, he was anti-war, anti-conservative, anti-organized religion. He was also strong willed, ruthlessly self-critical, and a thorough individualist who spoke of egoism as a principle of life and wrote that “to be one’s self is, according to my experience, one of the chief conditions for a relatively happy life.”
He was both energetic and imaginative, if humourless, but he was never impulsive. Everything must be carefully investigated, each step meticulously worked out. His drives were never sexual. He had a horror of romantic entanglement, ruthlessly stifling the smallest twinges of affection. He abhorred the idea of marriage because it involved “factors which cannot be arranged according to plan.” When he felt a “few heart leaves sprouting,” he said, “I resolutely pull them up by the roots.… I know that if I once let such a feeling live, it would become so strong that I dare not give in to it.” He channelled his affections toward his mother, who had been widowed when he was ten. A queer fish indeed – but then only a queer fish of Andrée’s boundless curiosity, self-confidence, iron will, and single-minded drive would have mounted such an expedition as took off fr
om Spitzbergen in August of 1897.
In hindsight, Andrée’s balloon trip seems the most romantic and madcap of all Arctic adventures – romantic, because balloons were about to become all but obsolete and so are seen today as part of the nostalgia of a vanished era; madcap, because the expedition was clearly doomed from the start. Greely and Markham were right; but as the months wore on and Andrée prevailed, enthusiasm mounted and the world began to think them wrong. In the nineties, Andrée’s voyage was not seen as romantic but as futuristic. Then, the balloon represented the cutting edge of technological advance, along with the automobile, the wireless, the X-ray machine, and the bicycle. Sailing ships were already outmoded in this age of steam. But the balloon! Soaring majestically above the crowd, its canopy bulging with hydrogen gas, it heralded the dawn of a new age of flight. Ships had failed to reach the Pole; now science would take over.
Andrée spent three years between 1893 and 1896 testing himself by making nine balloon ascents. His craft, which he bought through a grant from a Swedish foundation, was named Svea for his native land. In it, he rose as high as three miles and, on a record trip, travelled for 240 miles. None of this, for Andrée, was sport. While other balloonists floated about, swilling champagne and enjoying the view, Salomon Andrée was taking observations – four hundred in all – on weather, air currents, humidity, and temperature while applying himself to the problem of steering. If he was to seek the Pole, he must learn to direct his vessel, a feat he solved in part through experiments with sails and trailing guide lines.
His polar project was born in March 1894, following a discussion with the great polar explorer Baron Nordenskiöld. The following year, he broached it to the Swedish Academy. The balloon, he announced confidently, would replace the sledge as the main method of Arctic travel. He followed that statement with a formidable set of statistics. He had worked out the principle of dirigibility; he knew exactly how his balloon should be made and what its volume should be (212,000 cubic feet), its construction (varnished double silk), the point of departure (Spitzbergen), the month (July), the exact route to the Pole, and the time required for the balloon to stay in the sky (thirty days). Andrée also had a careful budget: the journey could be made, he reckoned, for $34,500 – and that included the cost of his scientific instruments.
He pooh-poohed critics who were concerned that the weight of the snow or rain that would fall on the canopy would force the balloon to land. He had studied these conditions with his usual thoroughness and was convinced that they presented no problem. The weather was relatively warm in July; the precipitation was light; snow, if it fell at all, would quickly melt; rain would evaporate in the high altitudes.
Andrée finished his speech by appealing to the national honour of his audience – a device that so many previous explorers had used with effect. “Who, I ask, are better qualified to make such an attempt than we Swedes?” The world, he said, expected it of his country, which “must maintain the best traditions in the field of natural science in general, and, not least, in that of polar research in particular.”
He did not yet have the money, but he had the backing of Nordenskiöld and other scientists. Soon there appeared at his door an unexpected but welcome visitor in the person of Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, who contributed half the cost – an example that soon promoted the rest of the sum, including a handsome personal gift of eight thousand dollars from King Oscar himself. Thus Andrée was able to inform the sceptical General Greely the following year, “I haf the money!”
He reached Spitzbergen in the summer of 1896. The canopy of the great balloon, named the Eagle, was spread out on June 23. It took four days to inflate it with hydrogen gas, produced on the spot from sulphuric acid and zinc. Now it towered seventy-five feet above the heads of the small group of men who had come to help. When the observation platform and wicker gondola were added, the total height was just under one hundred feet.
Andrée and his two companions were ready to leave. But the wind was wrong, and as the days went by gales sprang up. He began to despair of taking off. Suddenly, on August 14, to the astonishment of all, a strange ship arrived out of the fog. This was the Fram. From Otto Sverdrup, Andrée learned that Nansen was somewhere to the north, heading for the Pole by dogteam. It was clearly too late, at this point, to attempt the journey by balloon. The Eagle was deflated and the party returned to Stockholm, later to learn that Nansen had been unsuccessful. The prize still remained to be gained.
That winter Andrée sought out Nansen for meteorological advice. Nansen told him bluntly that the prevailing winds were not favourable nor were the weather conditions. He wrote a subtle letter to his fellow explorer, praising him for his courage in abandoning the project and suggesting that he display the same courage again “to await the favorable moment and not start until you are sure it has come.”
Nansen, in fact, thought the project foolhardy and was trying to tell Andrée that he should have the guts to quit, but Andrée was now trapped in the momentum of his own enthusiasm. He told Nansen that he would not be able to show the same courage a second time; people were calling him a coward for abandoning the flight in 1896 – or at least he thought they were. Now he was determined to press on. Ballooning was very much in vogue, as the stampede to the new Klondike gold fields would soon demonstrate. All sorts of imaginative schemes would be hatched in 1897 to reach the gold fields by air. In New York, one Leo Stevens, Jr. (who called himself Don Carlos Stevens), was planning to build the largest balloon in the world. In Kalamazoo, another entrepreneur would announce a regular fortnightly balloon route to Dawson City. In Dublin, an Irish gold seeker claimed to be building a balloon big enough to take fifty passengers to the Klondike. In the long run nothing came of any of these schemes – but ballooning, as a practical method of travel, was very much in the public mind. How could Andrée call it quits?
He arrived in Spitzbergen in May 1897, much earlier than the previous year. It did not help that one of his crew from the year before – Nils Ekholm, his former boss on the International Polar Year Expedition – had declined to sign on again. Ekholm didn’t think the Eagle would retain enough of its gas to complete the journey; recently married, he was also reluctant to leave his wife. But Nils Strindberg, a twenty-five-year-old physicist from an old Stockholm family, stayed with the expedition even though he too was engaged to be married immediately on his return. Ekholm’s place was taken by Knut Frankel, a twenty-seven-year-old sportsman, gymnast, and civil engineer.
The Eagle was inflated early in July. Forty tons of iron filings, thirty-nine tons of sulphuric acid, and seventy-five tons of water were required to produce enough hydrogen to inflate the canopy. By July 11, everything was ready. A stiff wind from the east was rattling the slats of the wooden structure in which the balloon was held captive. Andrée and his two associates were eager to be off. When the wind changed direction at last, Andrée gave the word to prepare for takeoff.
The balloon was ready in a few hours. Thirty-two carrier pigeons, which would relay messages to civilization, were taken on board. Twelve cork buoys with Swedish flags that could be dropped into the sea were also loaded. The scientific instruments hung from a wooden ring three feet above the observation platform. Three hundred canvas pockets in the netting held enough provisions for four months as well as a collapsible boat, a sled, and a cookstove that could be lowered into the gondola.
In the words of his French assistant, Alexis Machuron, Andrée remained, as always, “calm, cold, and impassible, not a trace of emotion … visible on his countenance, nothing but an expression of firm resolution and an indomitable will.” Andrée’s enthusiastic young companions could not know that for some time the explorer had been assailed by doubts and forebodings. He had prepared his will, the preamble to which was uncharacteristically gloomy. “I have a premonition,” he wrote, “that this terrible journey will lead to my death.” Otto Sverdrup, who was on hand that day, was one of the few who sensed Andrée’s uncertainty. It seemed to Sver
drup that the balloonist had little faith in the success of the expedition.
But the die was cast. Andrée was the prisoner of his own publicity. As Sverdrup put it, “he felt he ought to start as he and his companions had made all preparations.” He could not in honour turn back. The absolute certainty with which he had planned and expounded on his aerial Odyssey had convinced the lay world, if not the scientists, that he could bring it off. “The departure is decided upon,” he said, and that was that.
There were a few last farewells. Strindberg was suddenly overcome with emotion as he consigned to a friend his last letter to his fiancée, whose photograph he carried next to his heart. Andrée dispatched some hasty telegrams. Then he tore himself away from the embraces of his comrades, took his position on the wicker bridge of the gondola, and shouted, “Let’s go.”
The group on the ground watched as the three men cut away the ballast bags. A few minutes later, all ties were severed and the great vessel soared into the sky. Dragged by the wind a mere hundred metres above the sea, it suddenly dipped in the onslaught of the air currents pouring down from the mountains behind. The onlookers watched with horror as the gondola touched the water; then, to their relief, the balloon slowly began to rise. There was one unfortunate portent: the guidelines that had been designed to help the vessel tack in the wind caught on some rocks and were torn away. But to this the ground party paid little attention as they waved handkerchiefs at the disappearing sphere, travelling straight north. Machuron, the balloon expert, was sure that if the balloon kept that direction it would reach the Pole in two days.
The Arctic Grail Page 58