The Eagle travelled on, its size diminishing to that of an egg in the eyes of the onlookers, until it cleared a low ridge of hills where it stood out clearly for several minutes against the frost blue of the northern sky. Then it was gone, never to be seen again.
Andrée and his two companions were swallowed by the Arctic. Apart from a single pigeon, which returned with a brief message of his position on July 13, no hint of their fate was revealed for another thirty-three years, in spite of a series of relief expeditions. Then, in the summer of 1930, a whaling ship discovered a trio of skeletons on an ice-sheathed rock known as White Island, just off the main island of the Spitzbergen archipelago. From Andrée’s diary and other records, members of the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography were able to piece together and publish most of the story of what happened to Salomon August Andrée and his two companions.
Balloon travel is one of the most peaceful of all pursuits. When the three explorers set off from Spitzbergen they must have felt the sense of elation that comes over every balloonist as he slides silently through the skies. Because the balloon is moving with the wind, there is no wind, not even the sound of the wind. Andrée once remarked that from the distance of a mile in the sky he could easily hear the barking of a dog on the ground below.
Andrée’s ill-fated balloon expedition, 1897
But he had not reckoned on the sensitivity of the Eagle – indeed of all balloons – to changes in temperature and to the moisture content of the surrounding air. In the sunlight, when the inflating gas heated and expanded, the balloon rose half a mile. But when the Eagle entered clouds and mist began to gather on the canopy, the weight of the water and the change in the temperature caused it to drop to a point where the broken guidelines touched the sea – a circumstance that would doom the expedition within three days.
By early morning on July 12, the Eagle had taken on a character of its own. It dropped; it rose; it stood still; it gathered speed, slowed down, moved on, changed direction. The lack of guidelines made it difficult to steer. The only real control that Andrée and his comrades had was when they jettisoned some ballast to cause a temporary rise. Before the flight ended, they had thrown out 680 pounds.
At one point when they were caught in the dead centre of a cyclonic disturbance (the so-called “eye” of the cyclone) the balloon didn’t move at all. When it dropped and the shortened guidelines touched the ground, the weight was automatically decreased by that portion of the lines dragging on the ice. That caused the balloon to rise again briefly. It also meant that the period of free flight was over. From this point on the Eagle was bumping along above the ice, dragging the lines below it.
As the journey progressed through fog and cloud, both water and snow began to weigh down the canopy. By the afternoon of July 12, the gondola was also being dragged along the ice. By dinnertime, Andrée was recording eight touches in thirty minutes. Soon the wicker gondola was leaving its mark on the ice every five hundred feet. At ten that evening, the heavily weighted-down Eagle came to a dead stop, with everything dripping wet. At midnight her three exhausted passengers decided to grab some blessed rest.
Now Andrée allowed himself a few rare philosophical musings. “Is it not a little strange,” he wrote, “to be floating here above the Polar Sea. To be the first that have floated here in a balloon. How soon, I wonder, shall we have successors? Shall we be thought mad or will our example be followed? I cannot deny that all three of us are dominated by a feeling of pride. We think we can well face death, having done what we have done. Isn’t it all, perhaps, the expression of an extremely strong sense of individuality which cannot bear the thought of living and dying like a man in the ranks, forgotten by coming generations? Is this ambition?”
For thirteen hours, the balloon hung motionless, anchored by a guide rope hooked under a block of ice. Here was irony. The wind had changed direction during the night. Had the guide rope not been caught, the Eagle would almost certainly have been blown back to northern Spitzbergen. But at 10:55 on the morning of July 13, the wind reversed again; the balloon loosed itself with a jerk and resumed its northerly flight. The latitude at that moment was 82° N.
The fog increased. Heavy with hoarfrost, the balloon dragged its car along the ice hummocks. The concussions were so frequent that Strindberg became seasick. More ballast went over the side, and the balloon rose. With the fog growing thicker, the car was again pounded violently against an endless expanse of ice, veined by dark channels and pocked by pools of melt water.
Andrée realized that this desperate journey could not continue. He began to search about for a place to land, but it was past seven on the morning of the fourteenth before he found one. His diary entries, which were becoming increasingly brief, simply reported: “We jumped out of the balloon.”
Exhausted, they could not afford to rest for another seven hours. There was packing to be done; a camp must be set up; careful scientific records had to be kept. They had reached latitude 82° 56′ N. Two hundred miles from the nearest land, they were precariously camped on a sea filled with drifting ice. From the roof of the car of the fallen Eagle, Andrée looked out on a fearful expanse of white. Peering through the mist, in all directions he could see only a chaos of twisting, moving, shifting ice blocks, connected into vast fields, each one honeycombed with dark channels and small lakes. The balloon would have to be abandoned.
By evening, the fog had closed in so tightly they were marooned for a week. They had packed each of the three sledges with four hundred pounds of provisions and equipment, and there was also the collapsible boat. When the fog lifted on July 22, 1897, they set off, hoping to reach Cape Flora on the Franz Josef Land archipelago, some two hundred and ten miles to the southeast. There, where Nansen had wintered successfully, was a large supply depot. On July 25, the birthday of his fiancée, Anna, Strindberg wrote an optimistic letter. His only worry, he told her, was that they would not reach home by autumn and then she would worry. “You can imagine how I am tortured by the thought of it, too, but not for my own sake, for now I do not mind if I have hardships, as long as I can come home at last.”
The going was dreadful, the fog sometimes so thick they could scarcely spot the dark leads that blocked their passage. On July 31, in one six-hour period they were forced to ferry the sledges over ten such channels. Even on solid ice they were often floundering through snow up to their knees. By that time they had jettisoned part of their load. Five days later they realized that the intervening sea current made it impossible to continue eastward toward Cape Flora. The ice drift was taking them west faster than they had been able to march toward the east. On August 4, Andrée decided to abandon the attempt to reach Franz Josef Land and change direction in hopes of reaching Seven Island off the north coast of Spitzbergen, where, he knew, a smaller depot was available. The journey westward, he figured, would take six or seven weeks.
Their meals were spartan, even when they shot an occasional gull and, on one memorable day, a fat bear cub. Before them, the frozen world stretched endlessly to the blurred line of the horizon. Here were mile-wide leads that took four hours to cross. Here were vast jungles of ice hillocks, separated by frozen pools, stretching for miles. And then, by contrast, a webbing of melt-water ponds, so shallow that the boat could not be launched. The travellers, suffering now from dysentery, hunger, and lameness, were forced to splash their way through.
The early August days had been so warm that Andrée wished he could remove his jumper. But as the month dragged on the temperature dropped. Frankel injured his left foot and couldn’t haul his sledge; the others took turns shuttling it forward. Worst of all, the sea currents refused to co-operate. By September 9 the drift had again taken them eighteen miles in the wrong direction. They had lost all hope of reaching their goal.
Worn out and ill, their sledges broken down, their inadequate clothing in tatters, they decided to seek out a level floe, make camp, and let the drift take them south. Strindberg found a hollowed-out piece of ice,
which he converted into a hut by building a ramp of ice blocks. There, fortified at last by fresh seal and bear meat, some of which they devoured raw, they rested.
On September 17, they spotted land – a low, whalebacked island, almost completely smothered by a vast glacier. As the weather grew worse and the Fahrenheit thermometer registered eighteen degrees of frost, the drifting floe took them round to the island’s south side. On the night of October 4, in the bitter cold, their precarious raft broke into splinters not far from shore.
From the fragmentary and almost illegible notes left by Andrée and Strindberg, the investigators pieced together a brief account of the expedition’s last days. Somehow they made it to shore. They put up a tent on a rocky hill above the beach and crouched in it, half protected from the howling wind, snow, and sleet that whirled about them. They tried to build a snow house and managed to pull some driftwood up near the tent. But after October 7 there was only silence.
In 1930, when the skeletons of the missing men were discovered on White Island, it was clear that none had had the strength to build a proper shelter or to unload the boat, which was found, with one of the sledges, drawn up on the beach. Cold and exhaustion had done for all three. Strindberg had apparently died first; his body was found, buried by his surviving comrades in Arctic fashion between two rocks. The other skeletons were found not far from the beached boat. The investigators guessed that Andrée had been the last to die. He had, apparently, sat down quietly in the snow, leaned back against a rocky projection, and, impassive and unemotional to the end, quietly and perhaps gratefully awaited death.
3 Peary’s obsession
Early in October the following year – 1898 – Otto Sverdrup, still the captain of the Fram, had a chilly and oddly revealing encounter on the shores of a fiord in the east coast of Ellesmere Island.
Sverdrup was a dedicated explorer. The race to reach the North Pole was growing in intensity, but to Sverdrup it was little more than an international sporting event. He had a more positive program in mind. With Nansen’s blessing, he had set off in the Fram to chart the maze of unknown islands west of Ellesmere – an undertaking that would occupy four years, unlock the secrets of 100,000 square miles of unexplored territory, enshrine his name on the map of the High Arctic, and make his reputation as one of the greatest explorers of his era.
On this cold, clear October day, Sverdrup and his companions were preparing a meal in a tent pitched on the bank of the fiord. The Fram was nearby, not far from the entrance to the frozen waters of Kane Basin. Suddenly, in the distance, somebody spotted two fur-clad figures seated on an Eskimo sledge drawn by eight dogs. Who could they be? No natives lived on this inhospitable island. Sverdrup guessed at once that this must be Robert Peary, the American explorer, whose name was already becoming a legend in the North.
A few moments later Peary and his native companion drew up. It was not a propitious encounter.
“Are you Sverdrup?” Peary asked, curtly.
Sverdrup acknowledged that he was.
“My ship is frozen in at Cape Hawks,” said Peary. “There is no way of getting through Robeson Channel. It has frozen fast.” Peary, who was obsessively jealous and secretive, volunteered no further information. He was planning to go north to Fort Conger, Greely’s old headquarters, to use it as a base for an assault on the North Pole, but he had no intention of telling anything to Sverdrup. Peary wrote to his wife that the meeting between the two was short “but not effusive.” The lack of cordiality was all on Peary’s part. The genial Sverdrup would have been astonished to know that the American considered him a rival in his drive to the Pole. He offered Peary a cup of coffee. One of his own men was already grinding the beans. Peary refused, and a moment later he was off. The meeting was so short that Sverdrup later said he’d hardly had time to take off his mittens.
Later, aboard his ship, the Windward, pacing angrily up and down his cabin, Peary turned to his black servant, Matthew Henson, and cried, “Sverdrup may at this minute be planning to beat me to Fort Conger! … I can’t let him do it! I’ll get to Conger before Sverdrup if it kills me!” It almost did.
No other explorer in Arctic history was ever as single-minded in the pursuit of his goal as Robert Edwin Peary, no other as paranoid in his suspicion and even hatred of those he considered rivals and interlopers, no other as ruthless, as arrogant, as insensitive, or as self-serving. Of all the bizarre and eccentric human creatures who sought the Arctic Grail, Peary is the least lovable. He toadied to his superiors and rode roughshod over those beneath him, some of whom – as even an admiring biographer has admitted – reached the finish of an expedition with murder in their hearts. Yet it may be that these very qualities were the key to Peary’s success. Relentless ambition drove him on where others might have faltered. Even aside from the North Pole, he must be given his due as one of the greatest explorers of the period.
But it was the Pole that had obsessed him since early manhood and perhaps even before that. He was not really concerned about scientific discoveries or in charting the unknown. He had little interest in flora and fauna. His prime purpose was to reach this single goal before anybody could “forestall” him – a much-used Peary word that, with its suggestion of underhanded tactics, hints at his paranoia. And even the conquest of the Pole was not, in Peary’s view, an end in itself but only a means to an end. Peary hungered for fame and fortune; he made no bones about that. The Pole, he knew, would give him both.
When Sverdrup encountered him in October 1898, Peary was far from attaining his life’s ambition. At forty-two he was a formidable figure, six feet tall, erect and strapping, big chested and hard muscled. There was an animal fierceness about him – the shaggy red beard, the tangled mat of hair, the steely grey eyes, the flared nostrils and strong, almost wolfish teeth – enhanced by the furs that enveloped him. He loved to be photographed in those furs, glowering fiercely into the camera, the quintessential Arctic explorer. These were studio portraits, carefully posed often in the heat of summer; but there was nothing phony about them, for they caught the real Peary – implacable, relentless, savagely ambitious.
As a child he had been inspired by Elisha Kane and the tales of the polar regions in Kane’s “wonderful book.” In those early years he had spoken with a lisp; he fought hard to rid himself of this seemingly effeminate affliction and almost succeeded, so that in his manhood he was able to conceal it by speaking slowly and distinctly. Only in his rages did the impediment betray him. It was one of many examples of his drive toward self-improvement.
He joined the U.S. Navy as a civil engineer. In spite of the fact that he would later be called “Commander Peary,” and finally “Rear Admiral Peary,” he was never a line officer. His proper title was always “Civil Engineer Peary,” but he didn’t care for that.
From the beginning of his career he knew what he wanted. At twenty-four, he wrote: “I would like to acquire a name which could be an open sesame to circles of culture and refinement.” At twenty-five he told his mother, “I must be the peer or superior of those about me to be comfortable.…” Peary was not a team player; he, and he alone, must always get the credit.
In 1886, after a stint in Nicaragua, Peary the civil engineer obtained a summer’s leave from the Navy and some funds from his mother, set aside his plans for an advantageous marriage, and attempted the first crossing of the Greenland ice cap at its widest point.
It was a failure. After twenty-six days he had managed to travel less than one hundred nautical miles and was forced to return. But it was not in his nature to countenance failure. In all of Peary’s Arctic adventures, he always managed to emerge with some trophy, real or imagined, that would carry with it the aura of success. He was later to downplay this first effort by calling it merely a “reconnaissance.” But he also claimed that he had penetrated the ice cap “a greater distance than any white man previously.” That was a shaky boast and a mean-spirited one. Baron Adolph Erik Nordenskiöld had attempted the crossing three years before
Peary. Two of his Laplanders had gone farther than the American. Peary, who hated giving credit to anyone else, no doubt felt they were not “white men.”
When he returned, Peary boasted in a letter to his mother that the trip had “brought my name before the world.” He explained: “I will next winter be one of the foremost in the highest circles in the capital, and make powerful friends with whom I can shape my future.” And then he added the phrase so often quoted by admirers and detractors alike: “Remember, Mother, I must have fame.”
He would have it at anyone’s expense. In 1889, when he learned that Nansen had made the Greenland crossing at a narrower point farther south, he minimized the Norwegian’s achievement and tried to claim publicly that Nansen had, in effect, stolen his plan, which he had published in 1886. Nansen, however, had published his own theories about the crossing as early as 1882 and in more detail in 1883. Nansen’s achievement, Peary wrote to a friend, “in forestalling my work was a serious blow to me.” As for Nansen’s book, Peary dismissed it as a pretentious affair. The original material it contained, he said, “was hardly greater than I obtained … Nansen profited much by my experience.”
Peary married his fiancée, Josephine Diebitsch, the daughter of a Smithsonian savant, and immediately set about planning a more ambitious expedition. He would cross northwest Greenland over the ice cap and continue into unknown territory to the north. It was not known for certain at that time that Greenland was an island. For all anybody knew, that mysterious realm might extend all the way to the Pole. Peary meant to find out and in the process scout a possible polar route.
He had immersed himself in Arctic lore. He had read all the journals of the explorers and was prepared to learn from them. He had already concluded that the time had arrived for an organizational change in polar exploration. “The old method of large parties and several ships has been run into the ground.… The English, with true John Bull obstinacy, still stick to the old plan.” Peary was more struck by the example of Frederick Schwatka of the U.S. Cavalry, who in 1878 had found further Franklin relics on King William Island and had adopted the idea of a small party depending largely on native techniques. (One of those natives was Ebierbing, Charles Hall’s old companion Joe.) That, Peary wrote, “deserves to be recorded as the American plan.” It was, of course, not new. Rae, Kennedy, and Hall, among others, had helped to pioneer it. But Peary, with his meticulous preparation and his use of hand-picked and personally trained natives, took it several steps farther.
The Arctic Grail Page 59