The Ice Balloon

by Alec Wilkinson

  9

  Historically the Arctic was congenial to opposites. For some of the ancients, it was both holy and infernal. The devil lived there in a house of fire, a supposition based on a reading of Isaiah 14, which says that Lucifer will “sit on the mount of assembly in the far north.” A northerly wind was believed to transmit evil. “The Victorine monk Garnerius says that the ‘malign spirit’ was called Aquilo, the north wind,” Jung wrote in Aion. “Its coldness meant the ‘frigidity of sinners.’ ” Jung also wrote that Adam Scotus, a theologian of the twelfth century, believed that “there was a frightful dragon’s head in the north from which all evil comes.” The smoke that came from the dragon’s nose and mouth “was the smoke which the prophet Ezekiel, in his vision of God, saw coming from the north,” Scotus wrote.

  The anthology of myths and deities and peculiar people assembled about the Arctic by the ancients includes the Arabs in the ninth century who knew about the Arctic from an Arabian traveler named Ahmad ibn Fadhlan. The king of the Bulgarians told Fadhlan that a tribe named the Wisu lived three months north of his country. Their summer nights were not even one hour long. The thirteenth-century Persian geographer Zakariya al-Qazwini says that the Wisu were not allowed to visit the Bulgarians’ territory, because wherever they went the air turned cold, even in summer, which killed the Bulgarians’ crops. To trade with the Wisu, from whom they mainly got furs, the Bulgarians would go to the border in a cart that was drawn by a dog. It had to be a dog, and not a horse or an ox, because dogs could get a purchase on the ground with their claws—in Wisu there were no trees or dirt or rocks, only ice. The traders would leave their goods on the frontier. When they came back, they would find an item beside their own, and if they liked the trade they would take it. Otherwise they withdrew their item, so they never saw the Wisu or knew what they looked like.

  The cold in the north made a fantastic impression on al-Qazwini. Fridtjof Nansen, the Norwegian explorer, in his book In Northern Mists: Arctic Exploration in Early Times, quotes his opinion that the northern winter was “an affliction, a punishment and a plague; during it the air becomes condensed and the ground petrified, it makes faces to fade, eyes to weep, noses to run and change color, it causes the skin to crack and kills many beasts. Its earth is like flashing bottles, its air like stinging wasps; its night rids the dog of his whimpering, the lion of his roar, the birds of their twittering and the water of its murmur, and the biting cold makes people long for the fires of Hell.” Hell is a complicated notion for people in cold climates. When the Presbyterians went to Alaska in the nineteenth century they told the Indians about the fires of hell that burned perpetually, and the Indians thought it sounded pretty good, so the missionaries had to change hell to a place where it was always cold.

  An Arab writer named Shams ad-din Abû Abdallâh Muhammad ad-Dimashqi (1256–1327) described the Far North as a desert with no people in it. It had no animals, either, only great amounts of snow and darkness, and “around it the vault of heaven turns like a stone in a mill.”

  The Greeks believed that a people named the Hyperboreans lived at the top of the world, beyond the Boreas, the harsh northern wind that issued from a cave. Their territory was a paradise that could not be reached. The Hyperboreans were peaceful and just, they lived in the woods instead of living in houses, they never had wars, and they grew to be a thousand without becoming ill. When a Hyperborean had become tired of life, he or she would put on garlands of flowers, walk to the edge of a particular cliff, and fall into the sea. They cherished Apollo, who could transport to Hyperborea mortals who had lived especially pious lives. To worship him they had a sphere-shaped temple, which hovered on wings. Three brothers who were twelve feet tall were the priests. Every nine years Apollo visited, possibly in a chariot drawn through the air by swans. He played a kind of lyre, called the kithara, and danced for months without resting. When the priests offered their sacrifice and played music, immense herds of swans flew down from the mountains and landed on the temple.

  Other ancients thought that a miscellany of oddities and monsters lived in the North. A lost poem from the seventh century BC, called the Arimaspeia, was said to have been written by a figure, perhaps mythical, named Aristeas of Proconnesus. Aristeas said that he had traveled to the region of the northernmost people, called the Issedonians. The Issedonians told him that north of them lived the Arimaspians, who had long hair and one eye. North of them were Griffins, which looked like lions and had wings and beaks like eagles. The Griffins guarded the earth’s gold and often fought with the Arismaspians, who tried to steal it.

  Elsewhere in the North were the Meropians, whose territory shared a border with a country called Anostos, which means “No Return.” Anostos had no dark or light, only a reddish fog. There were two streams—the Hedone, which was the stream of gladness, and the Lype, which was the stream of sorrow. Each stream had trees on its banks. If you ate the fruit from the trees by the stream of sorrow, you shed tears until you died. If you ate the fruit by the stream of gladness, your desires were slaked and you got younger, but you lived life backwards and died as an infant.

  As for the Romans, Pliny in his Natural History described a territory in the north where the snow fell almost constantly and was like feathers. This region had no light, it produced nothing but frost, it was where the north wind lived, and it was cursed. The existence of the Hyperboreans should be accepted, “since so many authors tell us about them,” he wrote. Tacitus wrote that the sea in the North was still and sluggish and that the sun in rising from it made a sound that could be heard.

  By the fourteenth century, sailors believed that seas in the North had whirlpools so big that traveling into them was like falling into an abyss. In them lived plenty of fantastic creatures. The unknown writer of a thirteenth-century book called The King’s Mirror, a scientific treatise in the form of a dialogue between a man and his son, said that “the waters of Greenland are infested with monsters.” The merman was “tall and of great size and rises straight out of the water.” It had a head and shoulders and eyes and a mouth, “but above the eyes and the eyebrows it looks more like a man with a peaked helmet on his head.” Its form “looked much like an icicle,” in that it narrowed toward its lower half, “but no one has ever seen how the lower end is shaped, whether it terminates in a fin like a fish or is pointed like a pole.” The mermaid rarely appeared except before violent storms and was ugly to look at, with a “large and terrifying face.”

  Instead of whirlpools the author mentions “sea hedges,” which are three-sided, “higher than lofty mountains,” and box in the sea. “We have to speak cautiously about this matter, for of late we have met but very few who have escaped this peril and are able to give us tidings about it.”

  Among the region’s other attributes were the ice fields on the ocean, which he said were sometimes “as flat as if they were frozen on the sea itself,” and icebergs, “which never mingle with other ice, but stand by themselves.”

  To read these accounts is to feel that the world the explorers were to step into hadn’t yet been completely created.

  10

  Soon after Andrée got to Philadelphia, he “looked up the balloonist John Wise, an elderly man who had begun his career as a piano polisher,” he wrote. Actually Wise had started as a cabinetmaker and had then built pianos. At fourteen, from an article in a German-language newspaper, he got interested in balloons. In his twenties he built one from muslin and varnished it with linseed oil and birdlime, a sticky substance made from tree bark, that was used to trap birds. The mixture, Wise noted, was prone to combust spontaneously.

  Wise was also an innovator. He was among the first aeronauts to use draglines as a means for a balloon to maintain a stable height. He also invented the rip panel, which allowed a balloon to deflate quickly and safely for landing. Beforehand a balloonist had to climb through the rigging to the top of the balloon, and with his knees grasp the valve that released the gas. From his weight, the balloon would often turn upside
down, which, depending on how hard it hit the ground, might not be so good for the balloonist.

  Wise had made roughly four hundred flights “and had had all manner of thrilling adventures,” Andrée wrote. “He had flown with them in sunshine, rain, snow, thunder showers and hurricanes. He had been stuck on chimneys, smoke stacks, lightning rods and church spires, and he had been dragged through rivers, lakes, and over garden plots and forests primeval. His balloons had whirled like tops, caught fire, exploded and fallen to the ground like stones. The old man himself, however, had always escaped unhurt and counted his experiences as proof of how safe the art of flying really was.

  “In order to convince a few fellow citizens who had been inconsiderate enough to doubt his thesis, Mr. Wise once made an ascent in Philadelphia, and while in mid-air he deliberately exploded his balloon. Then using the remains of the bag as a parachute he landed right in the midst of the doubters. What effect this had on them I do not know, but the old man himself felt better.”

  Wise believed that the wind blew predominantly from west to east, and with sufficient force and steadiness to transport a balloon carrying people and freight not only across America but also to Europe. Building a balloon to cross the Atlantic was, he wrote, “the dream of my lifetime.” The balloon he imagined had a basket shaped like a boat, in case he came down in the water. On the gunwales it had oars and hand-turned propellers. In 1859 Wise started the Trans Atlantic Balloon Corporation with two partners. The balloon they built they flew from Missouri to New York in twenty hours and forty minutes, a record. Two months later, the partners, flying from New York to Canada, crashed in the Canadian woods, and the balloon was destroyed.

  In 1873, Wise raised money for a second transatlantic balloon from the Daily Graphic, a New York newspaper. This balloon was accompanied by two smaller ones that carried extra gas and could also support someone making repairs to the balloon itself. Wise thought that a crossing to Ireland would take sixty hours and be almost absurdly perilous. “The discovery of the North Pole, which had recently caused Captain Hall’s death,” he wrote, meaning Charles Hall, who died in 1871 trying to reach the pole, “not to mention the journey of the vessel Polaris”—Hall’s ship—“which has just disappeared and probably been lost, is nothing but a pleasure trip compared to this journey through airspace, win or lose.” Wise eventually decided that the balloon wasn’t substantial enough, and he withdrew. While being filled, the balloon tore and collapsed. A smaller version left for Europe and after three hours crashed in a storm near New Haven, Connecticut.

  Wise took Andrée to his shop and showed him “how balloons were cut, sewed together and varnished.” When Andrée asked if he might go up in a balloon, Wise “acquiesced immediately, and a short time afterwards informed me that I might accompany his niece, who was to make an ascension a few days later. It was to take place at the city of Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, where the authorities had decided to celebrate the Day of Independence with a balloon ascension.”

  The evening before, Andrée, Wise, and the niece rode west on a train, with the balloon. When they arrived in the morning Wise said that he needed to rest and gave Andrée the task of filling the balloon, “which I naturally accepted with alacrity.” The gas was drawn from a main in the city square, and by five the balloon was full. As Andrée and the niece, dressed as the goddess of liberty, were about to get into the basket, a high wind rose and “the bag collapsed like a rag.” The balloon had been torn, and there was not sufficient time to mend it and fill it again. “Thus ended my first attempt to get up into the air.”

  A few weeks later Andrée heard of a balloon in Philadelphia that would be taking five passengers, and he reserved a place. The ticket, however, cost seventy-five dollars, and he had only fifty, which the owner wouldn’t accept. (“To be sure, I had more money,” he wrote, “but at the moment it had been lent to a fellow student, who just then was out in the country, painting picket fences at fifty cents a day and board, and thus was in no position to pay me back.”)

  Not long after that Andrée fell sick with an intestinal complaint that he believed was caused by drinking ice water, but may have been from his living mostly on cake, candy, and ice cream, according to his journals. Having stayed five months in Philadelphia, he went back to Sweden.

  Three years later, in May of 1879, Wise wrote a letter to the New York Times to say that someone should make a trip to the pole in a balloon. “In the polar summer there is an inflowing current of air that will carry a balloon into the polar basin, if it be kept near the earth, with balance ropes for compensation, to avoid the balloon’s rising up into the outflowing current,” he wrote.

  “It is utterly futile to attempt an ingress by landcraft or watercraft with a handful of men,” he continued. “With a well-organized party of a thousand men, moved and stationed at intervals of five miles—say ten men at each station, it may be accomplished.… Air-craft is the most feasible—the least expensive, the fewest number of men required, and the shortest time necessary to make the ingress and egress. It is possible to solve the problem within a hundred hours from the time the aerostat is made available. If you deem my suggestions of any value, give the scheme a push, as I am more than convinced that it can be pushed to ultimate consummation through the upper highway.”

  If Andrée ever saw the letter, he didn’t mention it in his writings.

  He never saw Wise again either. In September, five months after Wise had written to the Times, Andrée “read in the papers that my old friend had gone off on a balloon trip, had been caught in a storm and had never since been heard of.” Wise was lost on September 29, in the Pathfinder, over Lake Michigan. “For his sake I like to believe that he landed unhurt and that he thereafter encountered obstacles which prevented him from coming home,” Andrée wrote.

  11

  Andrée exemplified a conceit that outlived him—the belief, then nascent, that science, in the form of technology, could subdue the last obstacles to possession of the world’s territories, if not also its mysteries. More or less as psychologists were beginning to regard the deeper orders of the mind, this view saw nature as a shadowy chamber of secrets, a vault, that could be illuminated by the new instruments of science. Its banal applications were typified by devices for the home and the factory—the gramophone, the vacuum cleaner, the arc welding machine—that made life easier, and its sinister ones were the innovations in weapons—the machine gun, the torpedo—and their influence on the tactics of war. For all its worldliness it was also an innocent notion, a response to Romanticism, which had influenced earlier ideas about the Arctic.

  Andrée might also be said to have believed in a sort of new dismissiveness that held that anything modern was more desirable than a lived-in idea or artifact. The balloon was superior to the sledge and the ship. The encumbrances of the ocean and the land were absent from the air. The sledge and the ship had failed, the balloon and the air were all possibility. He was the first explorer to head toward the pole unaccompanied by Romantic references.

  A hallmark of the Romantic tradition was the notion of the “sublime,” described by Edmund Burke, in A Philosophical Enquiry, which was published in 1757. The sublime was characterized by an astonishment that drove from the mind all other feelings but terror and awe, Burke wrote. This stupefying dread was “the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.”

  The terror, which was encompassing and prevented reasoning or reflection, was provoked partly by an apprehension of the infinite, and also of the holy. The sublime aroused the deepest feelings the soul could embody, while simultaneously making someone aware that the object which inspired them was a component of a universe that was perhaps largely indifferent, if not unsympathetic, to his well-being both as an individual and a type. Man responded to the sublime because it was glorious—to feel the sublime was to scent the sacred—and because being fitted to feel powerfully, to be profoundly stirred, meant that something of the sublime reverberated within him, otherwise how could he re
cognize it.

  The objects that inspired the sublime were “vast in their dimensions” and “solid, even massive,” Burke wrote. Mountains are what he had in mind, the type of towering, pointy, snow-covered peaks that northern Europeans never have to travel very far to stand beneath. When more became known of the immense and remorseless ground of the Arctic, however, with its darkness, its ship-crushing ice, and terrible cold—a place that was both sanctified and antagonistic—it lent itself even more handsomely to the case.

  In one of the enduring Romantic novels, Frankenstein, a young Englishman named Walton is traveling to the Arctic, as a hobby scientist and discoverer—he hopes to find the Northwest Passage and “the secret of the magnet.” He is writing letters to his sister, Margaret, in London. In Russia he writes that a cold wind, which he imagines as coming from the Arctic, has stirred him. “Inspirited by this wind of promise, my day dreams become more fervent and vivid,” he says. “I try in vain to be persuaded that the pole is the seat of frost and desolation; it ever presents itself to my imagination as the region of beauty and delight.” He pictures it as “a land surpassing in wonders and beauty every region hitherto discovered on the habitable globe,” as being “a part of the world never before visited” and “never before imprinted by the foot of man.”