The Ice Balloon

by Alec Wilkinson

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  In October men sent to look for Andrée in Alaska were reported by the Boston Globe to have given up their search and staked twenty-five gold claims instead. That same month the Manchester Guardian printed parts of a letter forwarded to them by “Rear Admiral Campion, C.B.,” which he had received from his nephew, “Commander Alston, R.N., who is in charge of Fort Churchill, the most northern trading post of the Hudson’s Bay Company, where he had been about five years and talks Esquimaux.” In the spring an Eskimo named Stockley had told Alston that the summer before he and his brother had come across a party of white men shooting deer. Some Eskimos approaching them didn’t see the deer and thought the white men were shooting at them. Or, another paper wrote, perhaps they objected to the white men, who had arrived in a balloon, hunting on their ground. The New York Tribune writer said that the Eskimos, “who are adepts with bow and arrow, immediately discharged a flight of bone darts on their aerial visitors, killing all three.” From the balloon the Eskimos took rifles and ammunition and various utensils. In some versions Andrée had arrived in a large white house with ropes hanging from it. In another he had been riding in a bubble that fell from the heavens. When the Eskimos realized that they had killed human beings, they ran away and were unwilling to talk about it. Several of the people who reported hearing the story said that a characteristic of the Eskimos who told it were that they never lied and they never made anything up.

  The natives were using the balloon and its ropes to pad their canoes and repair their tents. Since the account had been brought to Winnipeg by a Church of England clergyman, it was for a long time regarded as authentic.

  In March of 1900 Nansen said that he had given up hope of seeing Andrée again. “All that can be looked for now,” he said, “is the recovery of his body.” Even so, in May, one of Andrée’s brothers said that he believed that Andrée had probably landed somewhere where it would take him two or three years to reach civilization. The balloon had been “as safe as a railway train,” he said. He added, however, that he would give up hope if Andrée hadn’t appeared by the end of the summer.

  Under the headline “Andrée’s Will Made Public,” which appeared in the Atlanta Constitution in January of 1901, a reporter wrote that the will was accompanied by letters “from prominent scientists encouraging him in the dangerous enterprise,” along with one “warning him against it.” Andrée had written in pencil on it, “It is possible that he may be right but now it is too late. I have made all my preparations and cannot draw back.”

  The will contained the sentences, “I write on the eve of a journey full of dangers such as history has yet never been able to show. My presentment tells me that this terrible journey will signify my death.”

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  What else? Two of Andrée’s sisters, interviewed in Gränna, said that they believed that Andrée went to look for the pole on a mission from God. “And the Lord has never forsaken one of his servants,” they said.

  The claim that Andrée had been killed by Indians returned in 1910, brought by a missionary. In Chicago a man interviewed at length by a newspaper said that the poles of the earth were entrances to an interior world that was exactly like the outer world and that Andrée had gone over the lip of the boundary and was now at the center of the earth. The man was building a flying machine to rescue him.

  Also in 1910 a reporter noted that if the balloon had fallen on the ice or into the water, relics of the sledge or the boat or something stamped with Andrée’s brand would have drifted into the path of a ship, as items from the Jeannette had.

  In 1914 a report that Andrée’s balloon had been found in Siberia went round the world. The Pittsburgh Post ran a piece that said, “The other alternative is most interesting. He may be away and living in the beautiful region which is said to exist around the pole. If so, he must be in a tropical country, for scientists agree that there is an open Polar sea.”

  Some people thought that after sending the third message, Andrée had been taken to Greenland by the wind and had come down and hadn’t had enough food to make it back. “Starvation would have been their one reward for their sacrifice to science,” one writer said. “The probability is that the aeronauts and the records of their achievement will remain fast in their ice sarcophagus for eternity.

  “No memorial can be raised above the grave of Andrée and his comrades. And the spot where it should be raised will, perhaps, remain forever unknown.”

  In a journal Oscar Strindberg wrote his brother a letter he never sent. “When I awake in the morning, and when I fall asleep at night—during walks, at meals, during work, at the theater, constantly I see the image of my beloved son and my fantasy depicts him in various ways; I see him struggling across the unbelievable expanses of ice, drawing his sledge, I see him huddled in a hole built of stone and ice in cold and darkness trying to hold onto the warmth of life, I see him struggling against hunger and hardship, and I see him stretched out and covered in snow, defeated, sleeping the eternal sleep, soiled, tattered and unshaven, but with a calm visage, as if he had fallen asleep knowing that he had done everything humanly possible to save his young life.”

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  The experience that Andrée might be having on the ice had been made plain to the American imagination through the case of George Tyson. Few people had as grievous an encounter with the ice fields as he and his party. Tyson was an assistant navigator on the Polaris expedition of 1871, which was led by Charles Hall, who was from Cincinnati. Hall had got money from Congress for a voyage to find the pole. This was his third Arctic voyage. Beforehand he had owned a printing business and published a small newspaper. He had also been a blacksmith, and he looked like one. He was about five foot nine inches tall and about two hundred pounds, “muscular rather than stout,” Tyson wrote. He had curly brown hair and a thick beard. “Life and vigor seemed inseparable from the thought of him.”

  Hall liked to read anything he could find about the Arctic. “Everything relating to the arctic zone is deeply interesting to me,” he wrote in a journal—“I love the snows, the ices, the icebergs, the fauna, and the flora of the North!” In 1861, when he was thirty-nine, he went there, thinking he would find survivors of Franklin’s expedition. To prepare himself he spent a few nights in a tent in Ohio. His urge to go had been a calling, he said. In his journal he wrote, “I am on a mission of love.”

  Hall was a species of rapturist. Having seen his first iceberg, which he described as “a mountain of alabaster resting calmly on the bosom of the dark blue sea,” he wrote, “I stood in the presence of God’s work. Its fashioning was that of the Great Architect! He who hath builded such monuments, and cast them forth upon the waters of the sea is God, and there can be none other!”

  The Polaris was frozen into the ice off northern Greenland in September of 1871. In October, Hall and a companion left on a sledding trip north and came back in two weeks. Tyson met him as he approached the ship and thought that he looked “very well.” Hall, he said, seemed “to have enjoyed his journey amazingly. He said he was going again and that he wanted me to go with him.” Aboard the ship, Hall drank a cup of coffee, which he said tasted sweet, and almost immediately he fell sick. In his cabin that evening he told Tyson that he hoped he would be better in the morning.

  Instead, Tyson wrote that “Captain Hall is certainly delirious. I don’t know what to make of what he says.” After several days Hall was out of bed, “but he don’t act like himself,” Tyson wrote. “He begins a thing and don’t finish it.” Hall lost feeling on his left side. When his hand was lifted, it fell, and he didn’t feel a needle that was stuck in it. The ship’s doctor said that he had had a stroke, but Hall told Tyson that he believed someone was trying to poison him.

  On November 8 Hall died. Three days later, at eleven-thirty in the morning, he was buried about half a mile from the ship, in a grave that was “necessarily very shallow,” Tyson wrote. Despite the hour it was dark, and the stars were out. Tyson held a lantern so that the pray
ers could be read.

  In 1968 Hall’s corpse was dug up, and it was determined that he had received large doses of arsenic during the last two weeks of his life. The symptoms of arsenic poisoning are consistent with the ones he suffered. In addition, arsenic tastes sweet. The supposition was that at least three prominent members of Hall’s crew—the doctor, the meteorologist, and the sailing master—thought they would die trying to reach the pole, and decided to kill Hall and turn back once the ice freed the ship.

  Without Hall the ship’s discipline deteriorated. An attempt, which didn’t get far, was made to reach the pole. By the fall of 1872 the ship had turned south. In early October it began to leak. By the fifteenth, it was aground on an iceberg. During the night it rose and fell and leaned sideways. The chief engineer, named Schumann, announced that a new leak had sprung. The sailing master, named Budington, gave the order to “throw everything on the ice,” Tyson wrote. “Instantly everything was confusion, the men seizing everything indiscriminately and throwing it overboard.” While crates and bundles and instruments rained down on them, Tyson and several others stood on the ice trying to keep things from going into the water or landing beneath the ship and being crushed. Tyson went back onboard and discovered that the new leak was a false alarm. When the ship had turned to one side, the water it contained had rushed along with it, and the engineer had supposed a fresh leak. Tyson went back on the ice to try to retrieve the food and equipment.

  “Very shortly after, the ice exploded under our feet, and broke in many places, and the ship broke away in the darkness, and we lost sight of her for a moment,” Tyson wrote. It was snowing and dark, and the wind was blowing so hard that he couldn’t look into it. He didn’t know who was on the ice with him, but he knew that there were children because the last thing he had pulled from under the ship, where it might be crushed, was a bundle of ox skins in which two or three children belonging to the expedition’s Eskimo hunter had been wrapped. “A slight motion of the ice, and in a moment more they would either have been in the water and drowned in the darkness, or crushed between the ice.”

  They had begun working at six in the evening, and the ship had broken away at ten. There were men standing on small floes, and Tyson rowed to them in a scow, which got swamped, so he switched to a whaleboat; these were the only boats he had. After everyone was brought together they didn’t move much, since in the storm they couldn’t tell the extent of the floe they were on. The crew and the women and children huddled in musk-ox skins, while Tyson walked the floe all night. The others had taken all the skins, and he didn’t think it was right to disturb them to ask for one.

  By the morning the storm had quieted. Tyson scanned the horizon for the Polaris and couldn’t see it. Why it did not come to rescue them he couldn’t understand. He had eighteen people with him—nine crewmen, most of them Germans, and nine Eskimos—the two hunters and their wives and children. The floe was about four miles around, with hills of ice and freshwater pools. Tyson saw a lead that would take them to land, where they might find the Polaris or at least Eskimos to help them. He gave orders for the boat to be made ready, but the crew “seemed very inert, and in no hurry.” They said they were tired and wet and hungry and needed something to eat before they moved. Tyson knew he could get himself to safety, but if something had happened to the Polaris and it couldn’t come back, he thought the others would perish, so he waited. After the crew ate, they needed to change clothes. By the time they were ready, the lead was closing and the wind was turning against them, bringing ice with it. They shoved off, but the ice blocked them, and they had to turn back. Soon after, however, Tyson saw the Polaris eight or ten miles away, rounding a point of land and “was rejoiced indeed.” It was under steam and sail, but through his spyglass he could see no one on the deck. With a piece of India rubber cloth, Tyson set up a distress banner that showed dark against the ice. The Polaris did not come toward them but rounded the land and disappeared. “I do not know what to make of this,” Tyson wrote.

  He sent some men to collect poles from a house he had built for provisions while the ship was moored to the floe. They came back saying the Polaris was moored behind the island. From a vantage point and through his spyglass, Tyson saw it with its sails furled.

  “I did not feel right about the vessel not coming for us,” he wrote. “I began to think she did not mean to.” Tyson urged everyone to prepare to make for the island in hopes of reaching the Polaris. The men filled the boats with their possessions, which they insisted on bringing. “They seemed to think more of saving their clothes than their lives,” Tyson wrote. When they finally reached the water, it turned out they had brought only three oars and no rudder. Tyson set out anyway, in a gale, but with no rudder the wind threw them back against the floe. They were too tired to haul the boat to their camp, so they left it where it was.

  During the night the floe separated, and the part with their boat drifted off, along with some of their provisions, and they had to chase after it. Meanwhile the floe they occupied drifted, apparently to the southwest; Tyson couldn’t be sure, because he had no instruments. Along with the maps, they were aboard the Polaris.

  So that there would be no jealousies, they built a small scale and used lead shot to weigh out the increments of food they allowed themselves, “just enough to keep body and soul together,” Tyson wrote. Some of the crew were stealing from the storehouse, but the cold was too severe for someone to stand guard. The hunters went out every day after seals but found none. “It is not easy to find seals in the winter,” Tyson wrote. “They live principally under the ice, and can only be seen when the ice cracks; an inexperienced person would never catch one.” The holes the seals made at the surface to breathe were so small—about two and a half inches across—“that they are not easily distinguished, especially in the dim and uncertain light.” Tyson thought also that they were very shy and seemed to know when they were being watched. “A native will sometimes remain watching a seal-hole thirty-six or forty-eight hours before getting a chance to strike, and if the first stroke is not accurate the game is gone forever.”

  As November wore on there was less to eat. “Some tremble with weakness when they try to walk,” Tyson wrote. The Eskimos oversaw the building of a small compound of igloos, connected by passages to one another and to the storehouse. The crew withdrew into their own, in which, although most of them knew English, they spoke German, so Tyson never knew what they were discussing. He prayed a prayer from the Arctic traveler’s prayerbook, “May the great and good God have mercy upon us, and send us seals, or I fear we must perish.” Wishing they didn’t have to, they killed five dogs—they had nine—and ate them. They cut up the smaller boat for fuel. By then they had given up hope that the Polaris would rescue them.

  Tyson held the highest rank, but the Germans hardly listened to him. “I can scarcely get an order obeyed if I give one,” he wrote. To avoid unpleasantness, he tried to do anything that needed to be done by himself. The men stole when they could. They “seize hold of any thing they can lay hands on and secrete it,” he wrote. Aboard the Polaris, while Tyson was engaged in other matters, each man had been given a gun. Now Tyson was the only man on the floe without one. He shared quarters with one of the Eskimos and his wife and child. These particular Eskimos had been to England and had lived in Connecticut, so he could speak to them.

  The hungrier Tyson grew, the colder he got, and the more he thought about food. For Thanksgiving he had two biscuits, dried apples from a can, seal entrails, and some blubber. “I am thankful for what I do get,” he wrote. “Thankful that it is no worse.” For all but two hours of the day they lived in complete darkness. The rest of the time they had “glimmering light, so that we can just make out to walk over the uneven ice.”

  As much as he could, Tyson lay still in his hut. “The stiller we keep and the warmer, the less we can live on,” he wrote. His clothes were too thin for the cold. Having been working on the floe when the Polaris broke away, he hadn’t had a c
hance to get his warmer ones. By December they were living in total darkness, which made it impossible to hunt seals, which they relied on not only for food, but also to burn in their lamps. “Bears only come where seals are to be caught so we need not look for them,” Tyson wrote. One of the men shot a scrawny fox, “all hair and tail,” and they ate every part of it.

  One of the Eskimos, who had two guns, gave Tyson one. “He says he don’t like the look out of the men’s eyes,” Tyson wrote. “Setting aside the crime of cannibalism—for if it is God’s will that we should die by starvation, why, let us die like men, not like brutes, tearing each other to pieces—it would be the worst possible policy to kill the poor natives. They are our best, and I may say only, hunters.” The Germans swaggered around with their weapons, and conveyed to Tyson the impression that the Eskimos were a burden.

  “I see the necessity of being very careful,” Tyson wrote, “though I shall protect the natives at any cost.” Above all, he thought, a quarrel must be avoided, for “that would be fatal.”

  Toward the third week of December, Tyson wrote, “The fear of death has long ago been starved and frozen out of me.”

  In January, one of the Eskimos finally killed a seal. Tyson ordered that it be taken to the Eskimos’ hut to be dressed, but the crew took it and “kept an undue proportion for themselves.”

  Through February they lay in their huts, sometimes bickering. The wind blew continuously. During the first week of March, while they were subsisting on only a few ounces a day—“a well kept dog receives more”—one of the Eskimos shot the largest seal Tyson had ever seen. It weighed between six and seven hundred pounds, and “took all hands to drag him to the huts,” he wrote. “It was, indeed, a great deliverance.” They had been, he wrote, “just on the verge of absolute destitution.” Some of the crew ate until they were sick.