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The Ice Balloon

Page 6

by Alec Wilkinson


  The balloon was to go up on July 28, a Sunday, after Mass. The Laplanders, “the most timid among the human race,” Clarke wrote, were frightened by the balloon, “perhaps attributing the whole to some magical art.” The wind was blowing hard, and Clarke thought it would ruin his launch, but so many Laplanders had showed up he “did not dare to disappoint them.” The Laplanders grabbed the side of the balloon as it was filling, and tore it. They agreed to remain in town, with their reindeer, while it was mended. Meanwhile “they became riotous and clamorous for brandy.” One of them crawled on his knees to the priest to beg for it.

  When the balloon was released that evening, the Lapps’ reindeer took off in all directions, with the Lapps running after them. It landed in a lake, took off again, then crashed. The Lapps crept back into town.

  Hydrogen balloons are absurdly sensitive to air pressure, temperature, the density of their gas, and the weight they have aboard. Pouring a glass of water over the side of a balloon, or a handful of sand, will make it rise. A shadow falling on it will cause it to descend. A balloon has an ideal (and theoretical) equilibrium, at which it would float indefinitely, assuming it didn’t lose gas through the envelope, but that point is impossible to sustain because the balloon’s circumstances keep changing. A rising balloon doesn’t slow as it approaches equilibrium; from momentum, it continues. Having passed the point of stability, it sheds hydrogen, because the gas has expanded as the pressure of the air has lessened, and the balloon sinks, passing the point on its fall. Shedding the perfect amount of ballast at the ideal rate might settle the balloon exquisitely, but shedding weight also causes the balloon to rise. If it rises too quickly the only corrective might be to release hydrogen, which the pilot would rather retain. Part of the skill of flight, particularly of a flight that is to last a long time, is to manage the altitude with sufficient temperance that little gas or ballast is lost. Enough ballast must be kept to land the balloon properly. Theoretically a balloon might be operated more stably at night, since the temperature does not change as clouds intersect the sun.

  Someone traveling in a balloon never feels the wind, or hears it, because he is advancing at the same speed. Early aeronauts, enclosed in silence, used to feel not so much that they were moving as that the land below them was approaching.

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  While Andrée was in Spitsbergen at the Swedish station, making measurements and shut in darkness, the American delegation to the International Polar Year was on Ellesmere Island, opposite the northern end of Greenland, on Lady Franklin Bay. Their camp was about six hundred miles from the pole, and the northernmost of all the nations’ camps. The twenty-five members lived in a hut which was sixty feet long and seventeen feet wide and which they had built and called Fort Conger, after a Michigan senator named Omar Conger, who had supported Arctic research. The officers—there were four of them—slept at one end, and the enlisted men at the other. The expedition was to make scientific observations and also to search for the Jeannette, which had left to discover the pole in 1879, and disappeared.

  The delegation’s leader was Adolphus Greely, who had asserted at Andrée’s talk in London in 1895 that although Andrée might reach the pole, the Arctic winds, which at that elevation blew only north, would strand him, and then said that the congress ought not to support such a plan.

  (illustration credit 16.1)

  In Three Years of Arctic Service, a fantastically understated title, Greely described some of his comrades at Fort Conger, all of whom had volunteered. Lieutenant Frederick Kislingbury, “in a service of over fifteen years, had a fine reputation for field duty,” Greely wrote. James Lockwood “had served eight years, almost always on the frontier, and was highly recommended as an officer of sterling merit and varied attainments.

  “Edward Israel and George W. Rice, in order to accompany the expedition, cheerfully accepted service as enlisted men. The former, a graduate of Ann Arbor University, went in his chosen profession as astronomer, while the latter, a professional photographer, hoped to add to his reputation in that art by service with the expedition. Sergeants Jewell and Ralston had served long and faithfully as meteorological observers; while Gardiner, though of younger service, was most promising. Long and hazardous duty on the Western frontier had inured the greater part of the men to dangers, hardships, and exposure.”

  “Long and hazardous duty on the Western frontier” meant fighting Indians.

  In August of 1881, Greely and his men, intending to stay two years, had been left in the Arctic by the Proteus. A ship was to visit the following summer to replace anyone who was sick and to leave food and supplies. If ice kept it from reaching the camp, a ship the following year was to stay in Grinnell Sound, about two hundred miles south of Fort Conger, “until there is danger of its closing by ice,” the orders said. If the ship had to depart, it was to leave men and food on Littleton Island in Greenland, about 260 miles south. The men were to sledge north through a part of Ellesmere Island called Grinnell Land, after a New York shipowner who had paid for two expeditions to find Franklin, and meet Greely, who had been ordered to abandon his camp no later than September of 1883 if no one had reached him. Greely was to travel by boat along the coast of Grinnell Land in the hope of meeting the sledgers or else of making it to Littleton Island.

  Greely was thirty-eight when he left for the Arctic. He was born in Massachusetts in 1844. His father was a shoemaker. Greely was not an especially good student, and in 1861 he enlisted in the Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. He was at the Battle of Yorktown, and was wounded twice at Antietam, the most fatal battle of the Civil War, where 23,000 men died in twelve hours. After he recovered he was made second lieutenant in the Ninth Regiment, Corps d’Afrique, which was stationed in Louisiana. To try to recover wages owed to his troops, he wrote to his superiors in Washington that “colored soldiers deserve as much as white soldiers, as they are fighting for the same cause.” After the war the army sent him west, and by 1873 he was a member of the Signal Corps, the branch that supports the troops with information, and was mostly involved in sending weather bulletins to Washington. The following year he went to Texas to string telegraph lines through bandit and Indian territory.

  Greely was tall and wiry and wore glasses, and he had never been to the Arctic but had read a lot about it. As close as he had come was to live through a three-day blizzard on the plains. He liked discipline, he didn’t like gambling, and he forbade his men to curse—he appeared, in other words, to be something of a prig. Three years before leaving, he had gotten married, and he and his wife had two children. When he left the Proteus, he wrote her, “I think of you always and most continually. I wonder what you and the darling babes are doing. I desire continually you and your society, our home and its comforts. I am content at being here only that I hope from and through it the future may be made brighter and happier for you and the children. Will it? We will so hope and trust. There seems so little outside of you and the babes that is of any real and true value to me.”

  Motley parties of servicemen and civilians didn’t usually do well in the Arctic. The servicemen were accustomed to hierarchical discipline, and the citizens were not accustomed to discipline at all. Greely’s crew had nineteen soldiers, three who had been mustered into service for the purpose, two Greenland natives as hunters and guides, and a civilian doctor, Octave Pavy, who was also the expedition’s naturalist and the last person to join. Pavy had been born in 1844 in New Orleans, but he was sent to France as a child to be educated. He had come back to America in 1872 to undertake “The Pavy Expedition to the North Pole,” but his backer died before he could leave. In 1879, he joined another Arctic expedition, which was given up in Greenland when its ship was judged unfit. The ship went home, but Pavy stayed, learning to speak Eskimo and, according to his wife, Lilla May Pavy, making “himself an adept, so far as a foreigner can become such, in the management of the Eskimo sledge.” (Lilla May Pavy was from St. Louis, but another woman turned up from Paris and said she was also marrie
d to Pavy.) In addition, he collected plants, rocks, and animals he stuffed, and studied diseases specific to the region and how to treat them. He was a little prickly and regarded himself as better educated and more knowledgeable about the Arctic than Greely and the others. Greely had command of him, since Pavy was, nominally, for the expedition, a soldier, but he pretty much refused to be bossed or only acceded resentfully.

  The Proteus left them at the northern end of Ellesmere Island, across from Greenland, about eleven hundred miles above the Arctic Circle, then got caught in the ice before it could leave. On flat ground about a hundred yards from the shore, they built Fort Conger. Perhaps two hundred yards from it they also built a small hut as a place to make magnetic observations.

  Before a month had passed Greely had reprimanded his two lieutenants, Lockwood and Kislingbury, for sleeping late. Lockwood, an insomniac, reformed, but not Kislingbury. Kislingbury had strung telegraph lines with Greely in Texas, and Greely had invited him. Three years earlier Kislingbury’s wife had died, and he had married her sister and then she died, too, apparently of scarlet fever at Fort Custer while Kislingbury had been gone several weeks on a scouting mission. By his two wives he had four sons, two of whom also came down with scarlet fever but recovered. He wrote Greely that the expedition would be an opportunity “to wear out my second terrible sorrow.” His sons, he wrote, “will love me better when I return and will be proud of the father who dared to brave the dangers we have read about of a sojourn in the Arctic regions,” then added, “You will find no truer friend or devoted servant.”

  For three days, with the Proteus still in view, Greely held breakfast half an hour for Kislingbury. When reproached, Kislingbury said they should have started without him. Officers should not have to rise with the enlisted men anyway, he added. Greely said that the agreeable compliance with orders was essential to an officer’s usefulness. Kislingbury said nothing and walked away. He wrote Greely a letter saying morosely that he felt that Greely had no confidence in him, and might prefer that he left.

  Greely called the officers to a conference far enough away from the hut that the men couldn’t hear him, and read the letter to Pavy, Lockwood, and Kislingbury. Then he said that he didn’t go in for intimations and if he wanted an officer removed, he would say so. Kislingbury, perhaps from hurt feelings, said that the effect of Greely’s treatment had amounted to as much. Greely asked Kislingbury if he still wished to be relieved, and Kislingbury said yes.

  Carrying his bags, Kislingbury was walking toward the Proteus, half a mile away, when a passage opened in the ice and the ship sailed off. Disbelieving, he watched it for some time. Then he walked back to Fort Conger. Greely wrote orders specifying that Kislingbury was to be treated as someone “temporarily at this station awaiting transportation”—as a citizen, in other words, someone unable to ask a soldier to do the simplest thing for him.

  The Proteus’s leaving signified the start of their term. With the ship, Greely wrote, went “my intense longing to get back to my wife and children.” He announced that on the Sabbath no games could be played, and that even those among the crew who were not religious would have to listen to him read from Psalms. The first one he chose was 133, which begins, “Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity.”

  In October, Greely climbed a hill to watch the sun disappear. During the Arctic night the North Star seemed to hang overhead like a distant lantern. The Great Bear and Orion’s Belt were the brightest constellations. The dark was so thick at times that they couldn’t read a wristwatch, and on occasion they saw the moon for days at a time.

  Commander Winfield Schley, the officer who eventually rescued them, wrote in his report, “Over everything was dead silence, so horribly oppressive that a man alone is almost tempted to kill himself, so lonely does he feel.”

  They hunted musk ox and drew coal from a mine that was three miles away. Despite their intimate terms, they knew only so much about one another. Sergeant David Ralston’s birthday they celebrated with a meal of oyster soup, roast beef, vegetables, jelly cake, peach pie, cherry pie, and coffee, unaware that Ralston’s wife had been a widow who said that Ralston had married her for her late husband’s money, and had left her destitute. Dr. Pavy embarked on a sledge trip to establish depots for other sledge trips and returned early, going only half as far as he had been expected to, but had been stopped by ice, he said, which annoyed Greely, who thought Pavy at least ought to have waited for the tide to turn to see if the ice moved.

  In the darkness resentments accumulated between Greely and Pavy, but sometimes also with and among the men. Greely announced that the soldiers would have to do the officers’ laundry, asked for volunteers, and got none. He told a sergeant named David Brainard to assign someone. When the men’s response was to feel aggrieved, Greely, according to Brainard’s journal, said that “he was not a man to be trifled with and in case of mutiny he would not stop at the loss of human lives to restore order.”

  To invoke routines from regular life, they ate with silver-plated knives and forks on linen that they changed twice a week. Each day they made five hundred notations from their instruments, including a pendulum. They made observations of the northern lights, which Greely described as resembling “a beautiful and brilliant arch formed of convoluted bends of lights similar to twisted ribbons,” and another time as “lances of white light, perhaps tinged with gold or citrine.” To keep the men outdoors for an hour a day, Greely had Brainard invent projects. Around the hut, for example, three feet from the walls, they built a barrier of ice six feet tall, so that falling snow would fill in the interval and insulate the place. They spread gravel and sand on the floor to make it smooth enough to sleep on. Against boredom Greely began teaching math, grammar, geography, and the weather science he had learned in the Signal Corps. He also spoke twice a month about other polar expeditions and the Civil War. Lieutenant Lockwood edited “Arctic Moon,” a broadsheet with news and commentary contributed by “the finest minds of the country.” They established depots and mapped parts of the interior. Their triumph was Lieutenant Lockwood’s traveling nearly a thousand miles by sledge, reaching eighty-three degrees twenty-five minutes north, by four miles the farthest north ever—about halfway to the pole, and three hundred miles north of Fort Conger. “Before them all was new,” the naval report said of Lockwood and the men in his party. They had traveled in territory “which had never before met the vision of civilized man.”

  (illustration credit 16.2)

  The first member to crack in the prevalent darkness was Jens Edward, one of the Greenlanders, who wandered from camp and was brought back by men who followed his tracks for ten miles. Not long after Edward’s collapse, the other Greenlander, Thorlip Frederick Christiansen, who was called Eskimo Fred, began waving a cross at the others, whom he believed meant to shoot him. He was eventually pacified. Greely and Pavy indulged their dislike of each other. Pavy wrote in his journal that Greely was full of vanity, and Greely wrote that Pavy was tricky and two-faced, “idle, unfit for any Arctic work except doctoring and sledge travel and not first class in the latter.”

  The ship that was to relieve them, the Neptune, got no closer to Fort Conger than 150 miles when its captain tried to force the ship through a lead and its boiler burst. At Littleton Island and at Cape Sabine, three hundred miles south, he left small caches of food, each sufficient for ten days. He also left a whaleboat at each place. His orders were to return with his provisions if he hadn’t reached Fort Conger. He tried once more to advance, and went home with enough food to sustain a retreat lasting two and a half months, should Greely find it necessary to abandon Fort Conger to reach the next summer’s ship.

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  No one got along any better during the second winter. “Perfect ease of mind cannot come until a ship is seen again,” Greely wrote in the spring. He prepared for the ship’s arrival by, among other tasks, ordering that a catalog be made of all the natural-history specimens collected. Dr.
Pavy’s military commission ended on July 20. On the nineteenth Greely asked for his records and his diary. Pavy gave up the records but not the diary, saying that it was a private account and had no place in the expedition’s archive. Greely had him arrested.

  The second relief ship was the Proteus, which had brought them to the Arctic. It was accompanied by the Yantic. The Proteus sailed farther than the Neptune but got caught in the ice and sank slowly. While it was going down, the captain ordered that the ship’s supplies be thrown onto the ice, but most of the crew gave up their posts to save their belongings. About a third of what went overboard went into the water. What remained was left at Cape Sabine for Greely. Then the crew rowed lifeboats south to the Yantic.

  A man named Henry Clay, who was initially a member of the expedition but had quarreled with Dr. Pavy and quit only days before it left, wrote a letter to the Louisville Courier-Journal saying that if a ship did not reach Fort Conger by September, Greely would have to leave for Cape Sabine, more than 250 miles away. If he made 5 miles a day, Clay wrote, it would take him until November to arrive, and by then night would have fallen for the winter. “Their condition will be truly pitiable,” Clay wrote. Likely they would be stranded at Cape Sabine, where they would run out of food. Then they would “lie down on the cold ground, under the quiet stars,” being “past all earthly succor.”

  In August of 1883, enacting the plan to retreat if no one had come for them after two years, and leaving dishes on the table and the beds unmade, collections of lichens and moss and fossils, ten musical instruments, some stuffed birds and some sealskin coats, twenty-three dogs, with enough food to last in case the expedition returned, and nailing the door shut, Greely and his men left Fort Conger in their steam launch, which was named Lady Greely. The launch towed two smaller boats and a dinghy, which were loaded with their diaries and records, their scientific instruments, including chronometers and the pendulum, four rifles, two shotguns, a thousand rounds, and Greely’s dress uniform with his sword. Sergeant William Cross described the flotilla as resembling a “load of trash.” They had occupied Fort Conger for 721 days, 268 of them in darkness. The dogs barked as the expedition departed.

 

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