The Ice Balloon
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The Jeannette, the ship that Greely had been supposed to search for traces of while at Fort Conger, had belonged to James Gordon Bennett, Jr., the New York newspaper publisher who in 1871 had sent Henry Morton Stanley into Africa to find David Livingstone. In 1879 Bennett had sent George de Long in the Jeannette to find the pole. The Jeannette became stuck in the ice, drifted for nearly two years, was eventually crushed in a hurricane off the Siberian islands, and abandoned while it slowly sank. Twenty of its crew of thirty-three, including de Long, died in the retreat. Some of them drowned when their lifeboat capsized, and the others starved or froze trying to reach native towns in Siberia. In 1884 relics from the Jeannette washed up on the southwest coast of Greenland—on the other side of the world, that is. The Danish Geographical Journal published a partial inventory:
1. A list of provisions, signed by De Long, the commander of the Jeannette.
2. A MS. list of the Jeannette’s boats.
3. A pair of oilskin breeches marked “Louis Noros,” the name of one of the Jeannette’s crew, who was saved.
4. The peak of a cap on which, according to Lytzen’s statement, was written F. C. Lindemann [a misprint, since the crewman, who was saved, was F. C. Nindemann].
In 1884 a professor named Henrik Mohn gave a talk at the Scientific Society of Christiania, in Norway, in which he said that he believed that the relics had drifted on a current that crossed the pole. From Mohn’s observations the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen, who had been the first to cross Greenland, conceived the idea that he could strand in the ice a specially made ship—one that would be “small and strong as possible—just big enough to contain supplies of coals and provision for twelve men for five years,” he wrote—and be carried in it to the pole.
The ships that had gone to the Arctic had all been conventional ones. They had been reinforced with timbers and iron, but many were still crushed once the ice pinched them. They were too long and narrow, and their sides were too steep for the assault. Nansen’s ship would have smooth, gently sloping sides, so that when gripped, the ice could not take hold; instead of being crushed the ship would rise. “The whole craft should be able to slip like an eel out of the embraces of the ice,” Nansen wrote.
August or early September would be the time to sail as far as one could into the pack by the New Siberian Islands and moor between floes. The ship would be a sort of floating boardinghouse, a barracks, from which the crew could go out on the ice to make scientific studies and notes. If the ice did manage to damage the ship fatally, its demise would happen slowly, leaving time to move all its supplies onto a floe he would have chosen earlier. Those people who thought Nansen’s plan had a flaw tended to think that there were islands around the pole that had bays into which his boat would drift and never get out. Nansen believed that the pole was surrounded by water.
Nansen called his ship the Fram, which translates as forward. It looked like a bathtub toy—Nansen said it resembled half a coconut. It was 138 feet long and 36 feet wide, with three masts, the tallest of which was a little more than 100 feet. The hold was so intricately reinforced that it looked “like a cobweb of balks, stanchions, and braces.” To keep the ship from heeling too much, the bottom was flat. Nansen knew the Fram was too wide to sail well—and it didn’t. The first heavy sea poured over the decks while the Fram rolled on its beam and all the cargo on the deck washed around, and some of it went overboard.
One of Nansen’s emphatic critics was Adolphus Greely, whom Nansen referred to as “the leader of the ill-fated expedition generally known by his name.” In a piece in The Forum magazine, Greely wrote that it struck him as “almost incredible” that Nansen’s plan “should receive encouragement or support. It seems to me to be based on fallacious ideas as to physical conditions within the polar regions, and to foreshadow, if attempted, barren results, apart from the suffering and death among its members.” Nansen, he went on, “has had no Arctic service; his crossing of Greenland, however difficult, is no more polar work than the scaling of Mt. St. Elias”—a mountain on a boundary between Canada and the United States. Greely doubted that any hydrographer would take seriously Nansen’s theory of the polar currents, or any Arctic specialist endorse his plan. He said that Nansen would not be able to build a ship that could sustain the pressure of the ice, mocking him—as he mocked Andrée—by saying essentially that sharp minds had spent a great deal of money trying and would have succeeded if the task were possible. Arctic exploration was “sufficiently credited with rashness and danger in its legitimate and sanctioned methods, without bearing the burden of Dr. Nansen’s illogical scheme of self-destruction,” Greely wrote.
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The Fram left Norway with thirteen men in June of 1893. Wherever it stopped, people stared at it and then at the crew. In Farthest North, Nansen’s account of the trip, he wrote: “We were looked on somewhat as wild animals in a menagerie. For they peeped unceremoniously at us in our berths as if we had been bears and lions in a den, and we could hear them loudly disputing among themselves as to who was who, and whether those nearest and dearest to us whose portraits hung on the walls could be called pretty or not.” As Norway fell behind, the last figure Nansen saw was a man fishing in the light of the early morning, an image he regarded as emblematic.
The Fram entered the ice at the end of September and was not always carried north. Sometimes it went south and even east, the way it had come. At one point Nansen calculated that the pace it was traveling would have them home in eight years. Sometimes the grinding and shifting of the ice was so loud that they had to shout to be heard above it.
In case they had to abandon the ship and make their way home on the ice, they brought sled dogs, which were nearly wild and killed one another if not watched. “ ‘Job’ is dead, torn in pieces by the other dogs,” Nansen wrote in October. “He was found a good way from the ship, ‘Old Suggen’ lying watching the corpse, so that no other dog could get to it. They are wretches, these dogs; no day passes without a fight. In the day-time one of us is generally at hand to stop it, but at night they seldom fail to tear and bite one of their comrades. Poor ‘Barabbas’ is almost frightened out of his wits. He stays on board now, and dares not venture on the ice, because he knows the other monsters would set on him. There is not a trace of chivalry about these curs. When there is a fight, the whole pack rush like wild beasts on the loser.”
After the sun disappeared for the winter—“a flattened body with a dull red glow, but no heat”—they had the company of the moon, “which goes round the sky night and day.” Every now and then the ice parted briefly, and they floated in open water. They lowered pails to the bottom and pulled up mud and emptied out the creatures it held, “chiefly starfish, waving starfish, medusæ (Astrophyton), sea-slugs, coral insects (Alcyonaria), worms, sponges, shell-fish, and crustaceans,” which they preserved in spirits.
Ships in the Arctic became a species of dungeon once the winter arrived. Having been built for waters where the climate was moderate, they weren’t well insulated. Vapors from cooking and the men’s breathing turned to ice on the walls once the warmth from the cooking had dissipated. When the interior warmed again, the ice melted. Water seaped into the crews’ beds and their clothes, then froze once it got cold again. Since the ships had no portholes and a candle might start a fire, the crews lived mostly in darkness. The cold caused them to withdraw into the holds and their beds for weeks, which made everything worse.
Nansen planned for all these circumstances. Heavily insulated, the Fram was always warm, and well lit. More than a typical Arctic ship it was a men’s club. No one had ever sailed to the Arctic in comfort before.
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Nansen and Andrée were inspired by visionary theories they were willing to risk their lives to test. Nansen’s method involved refining hundreds of years of efforts by thousands of men. He had read all his predecessors’ accounts and from everyone’s failures he had culled the flaws and corrected them. Nothing could happen to his
ship that he wasn’t prepared for. He had practically engineered the risk out of his voyage. Furthermore, having crossed Greenland, he knew how to live outdoors in the Arctic, and not simply in a house with other researchers and plenty of fuel and food.
Different from Nansen, Andrée was a pioneer, a futurist. Men had not been sailing balloons to the Arctic for centuries. Almost nothing of what others had accomplished was helpful to him, unless he came down on the ice. Both men desired acclaim, but the pole figured differently to each of them. Nansen hoped to own a contemporary feat, the discovery of the pole, the permanent farthest north. His attempt had a backward-looking cast, a retinue, a history, annals, and an archive. By better preparation and a brilliant intuition, he hoped to surpass the caravans of sledges and fleets of ships that had tried the same thing he was trying. If the others had only known what I know, he might have thought. Years had to pass before other aviators could look back at Andrée’s attempt and say, If only he had known. Andrée was the first to try a novel task. For Nansen the pole was primary, and for Andrée too, but he also wanted to prove that men could travel long distances in the air. Andrée never wrote down what had moved him so profoundly to hazard his life. His manner was terse and reserved—“He was a typical Swede,” is a remark one often hears about him—and he was not given to confession. He seemed to feel that he had no need to explain himself, or perhaps that confession was undignified. However, Nansen, who had a touch of the extrovert, the buttonholer, and was a natural-born, if slightly fancy, writer, unburdened himself while unsettled one night by the Fram’s capricious progress.
“Here I sit in the still winter night on the drifting ice-floe, and see only stars above me,” he wrote. “Far off I see the threads of life twisting themselves into the intricate web which stretches unbroken from life’s sweet morning dawn to the eternal death-stillness of the ice. Thought follows thought—you pick the whole to pieces, and it seems so small—but high above all towers one form.… Why did you take this voyage? … Could I do otherwise? Can the river arrest its course and run up hill? 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. Build up the most ingenious theories and you may be sure of one thing—that fact will defy them all. Was I so very sure? Yes, at times; but that was self-deception, intoxication. A secret doubt lurked behind all the reasoning. It seemed as though the longer I defended my theory, the nearer I came to doubting it. But no, there is no getting over the evidence of that Siberian drift-wood.”
(illustration credit 29.1)
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The days passed half-idly with tasks and diversions. One night a member of the crew came down to report a more than usually glorious appearance of the aurora borealis, and the rest of them went up to observe it. “No words can depict the glory that met our eyes,” Nansen wrote. “The glowing fire-masses had divided into glistening, many-colored bands, which were writhing and twisting across the sky both in the south and north. The rays sparkled with the purest, most crystalline rainbow colors, chiefly violet-red or carmine and the clearest green.”
On the Christmas of 1893, Nansen thought of the families who would be worrying over his and the crew’s well-being. “I am afraid their compassion would cool if they could look in upon us, hear the merriment that goes on, and see all our comforts and good cheer,” he wrote, and then he reported the day’s menu:
1. Ox-tail soup;
2. Fish-pudding, with potatoes and melted butter;
3. Roast of reindeer, with peas, French beans, potatoes, and cranberry jam;
4. Cloudberries with cream;
5. Cake and marchpane (a welcome present from the baker to the expedition; we blessed that man).
In January he wrote of a plan that he had brooded on for some time and that was now beginning to possess him: to depart from the ship with a companion and on sledges try to reach the pole. “It might almost be called an easy expedition for two men,” he wrote. The plan kept him awake, so that a day later he wrote, “Perhaps my brain is over-tired; day and night my thoughts have turned on the one point, the possibility of reaching the Pole and getting home. Perhaps it is rest I need—to sleep, sleep! Am I afraid of venturing my life? No, it cannot be that. But what else, then, can be keeping me back? Perhaps a secret doubt of the practicability of the plan. My mind is confused; the whole thing has got into a tangle; I am a riddle to myself. I am worn out, and yet I do not feel any special tiredness. Is it perhaps because I sat up reading last night? Everything around is emptiness, and my brain is a blank. I look at the home pictures and am moved by them in a curious, dull way; I look into the future, and feel as if it does not much matter to me whether I get home in the autumn of this year or next. So long as I get home in the end, a year or two seem almost nothing. I have never thought this before.”
Two days later he dreamed that he had reached the pole but had seen only ice, and when people asked what it was like, “I had no answer to give,” he wrote. “I had forgotten to take accurate observations.”
As the new year bore on, he found his thoughts interrupted by images of home. Sometimes when he was absorbed in work, he would hear the dogs bark, then think, Who is coming? before he remembered where he was, “drifting out in the middle of the frozen Polar Sea, at the commencement of the second long Arctic night.”
The sybaritic life of the crew led Nansen to wonder what would happen if they actually had to retreat. He began having every man snowshoe for two hours, then one day they tried hauling a sledge weighing 250 pounds. When one of the men pulled it, “he thought it was nothing at all; but when he had gone on for a time he fell into a fit of deep and evidently sad thought, and went silently home. When he got on board he confided to the others that if a man had to draw a load like that he might just as well lie down at once—it would come to the same thing in the end.”
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In November of 1894, on a walk in the evening on snowshoes with Otto Sverdrup, the second in command, Nansen confided his desire to leave the ship for the pole, or as close as he might come to it. Sverdrup, he wrote, “entirely coincided.” Nansen and a companion would leave with twenty-eight dogs and a ton of provisions and equipment. The pole was 483 miles away. Without knowing exactly how the dogs would do, Nansen hoped he could reach it in fifty days. For years he had studied other expeditions and felt “enabled to face any vicissitude of fate.”
Not long after talking with Sverdrup, though, Nansen read again an account of a sledge journey by Payer and felt sobered. “The very land he describes as the realm of Death, where he thinks he and his companions would inevitably have perished had they not recovered the vessel, is the place to which we look for salvation.”
Three tries were necessary for Nansen and Hjalmer Johansen to get away from the Fram. The first time the bracing broke on the sledges. The second time Nansen decided that the loads were too heavy. To the degree that the loads included food, they would diminish, but they might also wear the dogs out first. Nansen brought sufficient food for the dogs to last thirty days. After that he planned to feed the dogs on each other, which he calculated would allow fifty more days of travel, “and in that time it seems to me we should have arrived somewhere.”
(illustration credit 31.1)
The false starts allowed them to refine their wardrobe. They began in wolfskin, but it made them sweat, which made the clothes heavier. When they took them off, the garments froze and were difficult to get back on. They decided to wear layers of wool, through which their sweat could evaporate. To protect themselves from wind and “fine-driven snow, which, being of the nature of dust, forces itself into every pore of a woolen fabric,” they wore canvas overalls and a canvas pullover with a hood, “Eskimo fashion.” Their boots they stuffed with sennegrass, which absorbs moisture. At night the sennegrass had to be pulled apart and dried against their bodies. Underneath wolfskin mittens they wore wool ones, which also had to be dried against the s
kin, and felt hats under hoods. They slept in a double sleeping bag, which was lighter than two single ones and let their bodies share their heat.
“Something which, in my opinion, ought not to be omitted from a sledge journey is a tent,” Nansen wrote. His were made from silk and had canvas floors, and he banked them with snow against the wind. In a medicine kit he carried chloroform for an amputation; and cocaine for snowblindness. He also had drops for toothache; needles and silk for stitching cuts; a scalpel; splints and plaster-of-Paris bandages for a broken bone; and “laudanum for derangements of the stomach.”
With three sledges and twenty-eight dogs, he and Johansen got away for good on March 14, 1895, when it was forty-five below zero. For more than a week they made about fourteen miles a day; on their best day they did twenty-one. It never got much warmer. They killed their first dog on March 24. Skinning him was difficult. When the parts were given to the other dogs, many of them refused to eat, but they got over it. “They learned to appreciate dog’s flesh, and later we were not even so considerate as to skin the butchered animal, but served it hair and all,” Nansen wrote.
Even with dogs, sledging was so hard that sometimes they fell asleep as they traveled. They woke when they fell over. Their coats when they sweated froze hard, so that wearing them became like wearing armor, and the coats made a cracking sound when they moved. An arm of Nansen’s coat chafed one of his wrists nearly to the bone. Someone under grave stress often has dreams that continue the text of the day. Nansen would sometimes be awakened by Johansen calling in his sleep to the dogs, “Get on, you devil, you! Go on, you brutes!”